Photo by Ian Schneider on Unsplash
If you’re afraid to tap into your passion, you’ll never tap into your genius. And if you’re expressing passion from a place of anger and fear, you’ll never tap into your genius.
So how do you use passion to tap into your genius?
It helps to understand the true connection between passion and anger. Anger is a sign post; it points at our passion. But we must not allow the expression of our passion to get tainted by anger. We need to detangle them. Our anger tells us what we care about. It tells us about the things that have hurt us in the past that we never want anyone else to be hurt by.
This is important information. But true passion is grounded in being fully aligned with what we want to see and express in the world–the opposite of whatever hurts us, or felt like an injustice to us. When we allow anger to taint our passion, we risk hurting people in the same way we ourselves have been hurt. We risk becoming what we hate.
Pure (untainted) passion is love expressed, and it is deeply tied to feeling. It is either about you feeling something, or you helping someone else feel something, or both–but always from a place of love, not fear or anger.
Passion can arise when someone creates something, or engages in an activity that generates a certain feeling. For me, dancing creates feelings of freedom, connection and adventure that are so beautiful I struggle to explain it. For someone else, it may be different.
Passion can also be your love for someone. But be careful, because if it’s all about how it makes you feel at the expense of how it makes them feel, that’s addiction, not love. True passion for another human being includes caring deeply about their experience too.
Your Purpose + Higher Calling
When it comes to your purpose and calling in life, that thing everyone is searching for…well I’m going to demystify it for you now. Here’s how to find it.
It will be tied to your love of making people feel the exact opposite of whatever has caused you the most pain in life. Your pain creates your purpose and your passion. So in my case, the feelings I experienced that hurt the most were aloneness/not enoughness, so I feel passionate about making people feel seen and valued as they are. I’ve built my life and work on that foundation. That’s my passion as it relates to my life purpose
For my client this morning, who is a master facilitator, her passion as it relates to her life purpose is creating spaces where people feel safe, at one with the world, and connected with each other. This is because her deepest pain was feeling the opposite of that.
She could have chosen to get angry about the pain she felt, and share that anger with the world (the mistake most people make when calling themselves “passionate”). But instead she chose to get passionate about becoming the opposite of that and radiating it out into this world. That’s the pure form that comes from love, and that is the path that leads to expressing your genius in this world.
So don’t fear your passion. Just remember to detangle it from your anger. Use your anger to learn and understand what you’re passionate about and why, then express that from a place of love.
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On my personal Facebook thread about this someone asked me:
Q: “Can anger sometimes be a positive motivator in terms of one finding and acting on their passion?”
A: Anger is an energy that can move people. So if someone is stuck in apathy or is paralyzed by fear, anger can kick them up to a place of action. So it’s valuable in that sense. The problem is it feels empowering. It makes us feel righteous but when we are flooded with anger our neocortex part of our brain is not fully functional. It’s like we are stoned on emotion. So we don’t fully act from a place of purity/clarity.
Shawn xo
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