How to Find Your Dharma — Perhaps You’re Looking for the Wrong Thing
For a long time, I thought finding your purpose meant finding the right profession.
A title.
A place.
Something you could finally point to and say: This is what I am supposed to do.
I tried different versions of it.
Graphic designer.
Artist.
Landscape designer.
Writer.
And strangely, many of them felt right — but none of them felt entirely right.
It took me years to understand why.
Perhaps our dharma is not necessarily what we do.
Perhaps it is what keeps happening through us, whatever we do.
What is dharma?
The Sanskrit word dharma carries meanings that are much broader than the modern idea of a "life purpose."
Depending on the philosophical or religious tradition, it can refer to right conduct, responsibility, truth, duty, or the principles that sustain life and order.
So perhaps asking:
"What is my purpose?"
is already slightly misleading.
Perhaps a better question is:
"What is mine to contribute?"
Not everything.
Not saving everyone.
Not carrying the world.
Just our part within it.
And because human beings are themselves a kind of biodiversity, perhaps it makes sense that this contribution looks completely different for each of us.
Some people build.
Some protect.
Some organise.
Some heal.
Some grow food.
Some calculate.
Some teach.
Some invent.
Some care.
Some question.
Some create beauty.
Some connect people.
Some translate what others cannot yet understand.
We don't need everyone to perform the same function.
An ecosystem works precisely because they don't.
Perhaps your profession isn't your dharma
This was the part I wish someone had explained to me earlier.
Your profession may simply be one of the vehicles through which your deeper function expresses itself.
A teacher's dharma may not simply be "teaching."
Perhaps their deeper function is awakening curiosity.
A doctor's may be restoring safety.
An architect's may be creating belonging.
An entrepreneur's may be making possibilities real.
A gardener's may be nurturing life.
A journalist's may be revealing what remains unseen.
And two people doing exactly the same profession may therefore be living completely different purposes.
That means changing careers isn't necessarily changing your dharma either.
Sometimes we spend our entire lives doing the same thing through different forms.
Look backwards before looking forwards
Instead of asking yourself what you should become, try looking at what has already been following you.
Take a piece of paper and forget your job title.
Write down the moments in your life when you felt:
alive,
useful,
absorbed,
moved,
needed,
curious,
or deeply yourself.
Don't judge them by importance.
A conversation counts.
Helping someone counts.
Making something counts.
Solving a strange problem counts.
Standing in a forest and suddenly understanding something counts.
Then ask:
What was I actually doing in those moments?
Not the activity.
The function underneath it.
Were you:
connecting?
protecting?
explaining?
organising?
revealing?
comforting?
challenging?
beautifying?
healing?
inventing?
translating?
teaching?
building?
nurturing?
Look for the verb that keeps returning.
Follow what you cannot stop noticing
There is another clue.
What bothers you?
Not the small irritations of everyday life.
What do you repeatedly encounter in the world and think:
"How can people not see this?"
Sometimes our deepest contribution hides remarkably close to our deepest frustration.
Perhaps you cannot stand unnecessary suffering.
Perhaps disorder drives you crazy.
Perhaps you notice injustice.
Perhaps you see wasted resources everywhere.
Perhaps you notice lonely people.
Perhaps you see beauty where everybody else walks past it.
Perhaps you understand complicated systems and cannot bear watching them being explained badly.
Pay attention.
Because sometimes what we are compelled to repair, reveal or protect tells us something about our place within the whole.
Follow energy, not only talent
Being good at something doesn't necessarily mean it is your path.
You can be exceptionally competent at something that slowly empties you.
So another question matters:
What gives energy back while I am giving it?
Not every minute needs to feel wonderful.
Purpose still contains deadlines, administration, failure and repetition.
But underneath that, something feels different.
There is a strange satisfaction of:
"Yes. This matters to me."
That's worth listening to.
Separate the function from the form
Now try completing this sentence:
I use ______ to ______.
The first blank contains your tools.
The second may contain something much closer to your dharma.
For example:
I use photography to make people notice what they normally overlook.
I use science to reduce unnecessary suffering.
I use food to create belonging.
I use business to make ideas possible.
I use teaching to awaken curiosity.
And perhaps, in my own case:
I use research, words, images and landscape to reveal connections that have become difficult to see — and bring them back to the surface so they can be transmitted.
Suddenly the question of whether I am a designer, writer, artist or landscape designer becomes less important.
Those are the tools.
The thread underneath them is transmission.
And then ask the most important question
Not:
"What am I supposed to become?"
But:
What does the world around me need that I genuinely have the capacity and desire to give?
Because purpose cannot only be about ourselves.
There is me.
There is the world.
And somewhere between the two there may be a meeting point:
What moves me.
What I understand.
What I can do.
What gives me energy.
What is needed.
Maybe alignment happens somewhere in that intersection.
You don't need to save the world
I think this matters particularly now.
We live surrounded by enormous problems: ecological degradation, climate disruption, loneliness, inequality, technological upheaval, political division.
It is very easy to feel either responsible for everything or capable of nothing.
Neither is useful.
An ecosystem doesn't ask one organism to perform every function.
Perhaps society shouldn't either.
Your contribution might be tiny.
0.01%.
Wonderful.
Someone else's 0.01% will be different.
And another person's different again.
Maybe that is precisely how complex living systems survive:
through distributed contribution rather than individual heroism.
A small dharma exercise
Tonight, take an empty page and answer five questions:
When have I felt most useful and alive?
What do I keep noticing that others seem to overlook?
What problem in the world repeatedly moves or disturbs me?
What do I naturally transmit, create, protect, repair or connect?
If my profession disappeared tomorrow, what function would I probably find another way to perform?
Then forget about finding the perfect answer.
Look for repetition.
Look for the verb.
Look for the thread that has quietly been travelling through your life all along.
Because perhaps we don't invent our dharma.
Perhaps, little by little, we recognise it.
And perhaps being aligned doesn't mean finally having everything figured out.
It means that what we value, what we do and what we contribute are beginning to point in the same direction.
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