Purpose feels elusive to many. Can the Buddhist Nobel Eightfold Path’s notion of ‘Right Livelihood’ help you find your purpose?

Finding Purpose

I have a cheeky theory that everyone already knows their purpose. Whenever I mention at a party that I’m an Alignment Coach who helps clients reconnect to their purpose, people very frequently tell me they don’t know their purpose. And then promptly proceed to blurt out what sounds an awful lot like a purpose, before listing all the reasons why they can’t do it.

So it’s not that people don’t know their purpose per se. But often, finding your purpose is more about allowing the self to see what’s already there and then changing the mindsets that make it seem impossible.

That’s got me curious. Could a thoughtful exploration of ‘Right Livelihood’ allow some to see their purpose with more clarity?

A Pathway to Purpose?

In Buddhism, The Nobel Eightfold Path is a guide for living a life that reduces suffering and increases wisdom and compassion. It consists of eight pillars —Right Understanding, Right Intention, Right Speech, Right Action, Right Livelihood, Right Effort, Right Mindfulness, and Right Concentration.

If you’re not religious, don’t worry; it is not necessary to become a Buddhist to learn from these practices!

If you can let them simply be ideas to kick around in your brain, it is possible to use this wisdom as a signpost on your pathway to purpose. And ‘Right Livelihood’ in particular has some juicy stuff that can help you get clearer on your purpose.

What is Right Livelihood?

As writer and Zen Buddhist practitioner Maia Zenyu Duerr notes, Right Livelihood in the time of the Buddha was simply about not causing harm to the self or others. The world is now more complicated. And many Buddhist scholars have expanded this teaching to reflect modern times. The late Thich Nhat Hahn, was one such teacher. Consider his insight here:

Right Livelihood becomes about helping us avoid creating suffering for ourselves, and for the people around us. That could also extend to the world itself. Here, Nhat Hahn calls us to consider the possibility that our work can be a deep expression of ourselves. He sets up a dichotomy here: our work is either an expression of our deepest self, OR a source of suffering. In another dichotomy, our work can nourish qualities like compassion, or erode them.

In awakening to the consequences of our work, let us zero in on the consequences most near to us. We might ask ourselves, does my work harm me in any way? Does it pull me away from my values? Does it cause me stress or sleepless nights? Does it require me to do things that harm other people? If the answer to any of those questions is yes, we can then ask ourselves, do I believe that my purpose cause me to suffer?

When set against the backdrop of Western corporate work ideals, these are radical questions.

The notion of Right Livelihood isn’t a call to become martyrs and live lives of asceticism in the name of saving the world. But it does lay out an imperative: to create Right Livelihood, our work should not cause us to suffer. We can of course go further to consider whether or not our work causes suffering to others. But for the sake of this blog, let us rest here.

Work Without Suffering

If we can agree for a moment that you do not deserve to suffer at work, can we also agree that work that causes suffering is not likely to be the right work for you? Can we consider for a moment, too, that work that causes tremendous suffering to self and others is probably not your purpose? That is not to say that working in alignment with your purpose won’t be difficult.

If your purpose is to build an app that helps people gain more access to health care, for example, that will be difficult. It will take lots of skill, discipline, material resources like computers and perhaps even venture funding. You will have to lead or collaborate with others, and people can be very difficult. :)

But suffering is very different than difficulty.

If we can first begin by becoming aware of whether we’re suffering at work or not, we open up the pathway to purpose. When we notice suffering in our vocation that is sustained and unchanging, we can begin by moving into work that, at the very least, does not cause us to suffer in this way.

Purpose on the Inside or Outside?

Once we reduce our suffering at work, we can clear up spaciousness to ask a practical question. Should the place I earn the money to support myself be my purpose or should it create the possibility of living my purpose?

Every human has needs for housing, food, medical care, and clothing. Unfortunately in most cases, this means we must trade our labor or ideas for money.

Our jobs might be the place we live out our purpose. But, I think it can be enough to earn a living without suffering if that living also allows us the resources (like money or free time) to live our purpose outside of the workplace.

I started this blog by talking about the tendency I observe at parties for folks to have a sense of their purpose, yet list the laundry list of reasons they cannot live it in the same breath. When those reasons include not having enough resources (think: time, autonomy, financial security) to bring our purpose to live in the world, this form of suffering is a signpost.

That signpost can call us to move into greater alignment with either the work that is itself our purpose or with works that allow us to conditions we need to purpose our purpose without suffering.