Are you, like so many others out there, searching for your life’s purpose, thinking it is one specific something you’re destined to do and that once you figure it out you’ll be flooded with relief, happiness, and fulfillment? Here’s a tip: Purpose is a state of being, not a state of doing. Your Soul Purpose is bigger than your life purpose, which we’ve mistakenly learned to associate with vocation, and your Soul is whispering it to you in the course of your everyday activities through the feelings you experience. Joseph Campbell, the great mythologist, summarized everything you need to know about your purpose in one simple and beautiful phrase: Follow your Bliss. Find out what moves you to a state of joy and follow that thing unswervingly. What moves you will always be changing--as you are an ever-expanding, ever-evolving being. Which is why, if you are searching for your "certain destiny" you just won’t find it. You need only find, and claim, your joy.

Joy is the code that your Soul and you agreed to before you incarnated into physical form. The feeling of joy is your Soul telling you that you’re "on track." Your Soul communicates with you through emotions. That’s the language you agreed to use before being born. They allow you to communicate with the nonphysical part of you while you’re out here in physical space and time. Isn’t that fabulous? You have an inner guide with you always, telling you if you’re off course or on course by the way that you feel. When you feel good in all its forms--from contentment to appreciation to bliss--that’s your Soul telling you, "Yes! You’re on purpose." When you feel bad in all its forms--from insecurity to rage to boredom--that’s your Soul telling you, "You are way off-track here."

Most of us don’t use our emotions as they were meant to be used, as messages from Soul designed to keep us on track before we end up creating something we don’t want. Instead, we use our emotions as after-the-fact indicators to tell us whether what we’ve just experienced is pleasing to us or not. Emotions aren’t meant to be used to react to experience, they’re meant to create our experience. Knowing this truth can change your life. If you’ll pay attention to the way you feel, and choose to focus only on what causes you to feel good, you’ll always create what you want in your life. It’s that simple.

Your life isn’t meant to happen willy-nilly and it’s not meant to be beyond your control. You have the power to create whatever experiences you want through the power of your emotions. You are here as an emissary of your Soul, endowed with all the qualities and creative powers that it possesses. While you are here, you’re always in communication with your nonphysical Self via your emotions. In your pursuit of joy, you will naturally and effortlessly fulfill your mission.

Here’s the rub, however: In order to fulfill your purpose you first have to know what brings you joy. Not what you think should bring you joy; not acceptable, sanctioned joy. I’m talking real, true, authentic Soul-level joy! How can you tell the difference? It’s a journey of claiming the power that is in you instead of seeking your power externally. The way to an authentically joyful life is choice. You’ve been given feelings in order to communicate with your Soul and to know if you are on purpose or off purpose: but you must choose to honor those feelings, to listen to them and to act on what they are telling you. You’ve been given a mind that allows you to create thoughts, beliefs, and assumptions: but you must choose the thoughts, beliefs, and assumptions that serve your highest good and discard those that limit you.

These inner feelings and higher thoughts will often conflict with the wants of your personality, your ego. Your personality is concerned with being, doing, and having what society tells it to be, to do, and to have. Choosing to listen to and trust your own inner voice above all the racketing, demanding, power hungry, well intentioned, we-know-what’s-best-for-you, we-know-what’s-right-and-what’s-wrong voices of others--your family, your friends, your partners, your culture, your religion, and your society…is what it means to live authentically. It’s not easy, but the reward is this: when you’ve cleared away the rubble, you’ll find a treasure box. The box contains clarity, it contains commitment, it contains empowerment; it contains healing balms for old pains, and it contains cures for outdated habits; it contains excitement, it contains passion, and it contains confidence; it contains the phone numbers of your guides and teachers, it contains the addresses of your next adventures, and it contains a compass to your life purpose. The box is located in your heart and the key that opens it is choice.

Are you willing to give up the reality of the world around you and create your own? That is the path to delicious, free, blissful authenticity. Authenticity is a path that starts out rough but it flows downhill. The more you align yourself with your Soul’s purpose by allowing yourself to follow your bliss no matter what it is and no matter how often it changes, the more you’ll attract others, and impact others, to do the same. You’ll quickly find yourself delighting in this life of yours, for it will be rich with joy, harmony, health, abundance, freedom, and fulfillment.

Fellow joy traveler, I look forward to meeting you on the road!

Excerpted and adapted from the author’s latest book, Delighting the Soul: Lessons on Life Purpose, Authenticity and the Law of Attraction