The "centerpiece" of our life plan; the most important thing we want to accomplish in a given lifetime. We can have more than one.

Before each lifetime, your essence, or soul, usually makes a detailed life plan, which includes a statement of your task and how you intend to achieve it. Ample guidance is available to assist you in setting things up in a way that is likely to work. You can access the records of your plan intuitively or through a channel or psychic. However, they are not in English or in any human language. You do not generally operate in human language on the astral plane; you communicate telepathically at a level of thought beyond human language. Therefore, everything accessed must be translated. As with literature, two translations of your life task may look different but add up to roughly the same thing. Also, if your life task has many parts or if you have more than one life task, it may not be possible to do more than give you a few pertinent highlights.

You probably really know what you came to do, at least to some degree and on some level. You may think that you do not, because you are not able to find a career that feels like your life task. However, many people do not do their life tasks in their places of employment. Often life tasks do not require it, or even permit it. If your task is primarily centered on relationships, for example, you will be in relationships wherever you are, so you may not require a specific career to complete your task. Work as a marriage counselor, for instance, might fit with your task, and it might not.

Few people achieve everything they set out to do in a lifetime. That is not bad, just as it is not bad if you do not get everything done on a particular day that you intended to. You do the best you can, and put off some things until another day.

Most people can work on an aspect of their life task in some way each day, at least for a short time. If you are spending all your time just trying to survive, and that is not your life task, you will feel frustrated.

These terms are sometimes used interchangeably, but we could differentiate between them. The life plan is the collection of all that the essence wants to achieve in the lifetime. It includes life tasks, as well as agreements, karmic repayments, and so on, and the arrangements it has made to carry them out. Life task is the spiritual accomplishment that the essence seeks, its overall reason for coming. There might be several life tasks or several aspects of a life task, but usually one is primary. Life work is a little more narrow than life task; it is the part of the primary life task that is focused on a specific endeavor. Everyone has a life task, but not everyone needs a specific project through which to do it. Life purpose is the motivation to do the life task.

An example of a life task is fostering among others an awareness of the importance of world peace. That particular task might impel a project such as writing a book or making a movie that inspires others to value world peace more highly. You could call that project the life work, the way the life task is achieved; it is a part of that life task. There can be more than one life work. The life purpose, or motivation for the life task, might simply be to help bring world peace. A person with that task might also have others, such as releasing a tendency toward playing the role of victim, but not necessarily through his life work. He may achieve them through his life's general circumstances or through specific projects other than his primary life work. He may also have as part of his life plan the intention to pay back a karmic debt to his mother, which is not a life task. It might relate to the life task and will certainly provide valuable lessons. However, it is more a "necessary evil" or an item on his "to do" list.

Suppose that your life task is about building bridges between people of different backgrounds. One possible life work to achieve it would be to establish an organization that would help people in your multi-ethnic neighborhood get along better. If at one point you had the opportunity to do this but passed it up, for whatever reason, another feasible way to achieve your task may arise. Often there are many possibilities. If you follow any path you find fulfilling and are true to yourself, you are likely to end up achieving important parts of your life task. On the other hand, if you are full of sensings that you should do certain things, yet make choices that negate those sensings, you will probably not do your life task. For example, someone who longs to become a dancer but forces himself to become a doctor because his parents want him to has a sense of loss. Perhaps learning to be true to himself is actually his primary life task. In any case, if you clarify and follow your longings the best you can, you are likely to move in the direction of your life tasks. Generally, your essence does a pretty good job of getting you at least in the vicinity of accomplishing them anyway, unless you resist a lot. But you are more effective when you consciously cooperate with the process.

Let's say that you have had several lives dealing with the issues of conflict resolution and war, from many different standpoints. In this life, you want to integrate and apply what you learned from having been a soldier, a civilian victim, a political leader, and so forth. If you are not conscious that this is your primary life task, you might simply experience a vague inner longing pushing you in that general direction. You might know that you feel strongly that there are better ways to resolve conflicts than what most people use, but it may not go beyond that. If you are conscious of your task, you are more likely to choose one or more ways of responding to your inner impulse. They might include becoming a negotiator or mediator, running for political office, working for the UN, writing a book, or volunteering for an organization that promotes citizen diplomacy. You might choose a lower profile, dedicating yourself to demonstrating appropriate conflict resolution in all your interactions with others. Whatever you decide, when you hit on a workable way to carry out your life task, your essence immediately sends energy through it, and it feels right. You become excited about it. You start having more energy with which to live your life, because you now have a lens that focuses your inner impulses in a specific direction. It is not that it is the only possible way you could achieve your life task, but it works.

If you choose a direction that is not in alignment with your life task but not too far off either, your essence exerts a magnetic pull, so to speak, drawing you into greater alignment with your task to help you get on course. Being in movement near your task is the key. In fact, any movement is preferable to none at all where the life task is concerned. We often urge people who are stuck to choose anything. There is much power in making a decision. Someone moving in the wrong direction, in the sense of doing something that goes against the grain, is more likely to turn around and move in a more satisfying direction than someone who is stuck he has momentum. Fundamentally, all he needs to do is start listening to himself and adjust the "steering wheel" accordingly.

Sometimes you have a head-on collision that clearly lets you know that you are going the wrong way down a one-way street, so to speak. This should not discourage you from movement. It should only encourage you to turn around. After a while, your discernment grows. The direction that is the most harmonious with your life task usually feels the best. If it does not feel comfortable, you might still have a sense that you are accomplishing something you need to do, such as completing a painful relationship. Sometimes you do not validate the rightness of such a direction until later. However, if it is painful and not yielding a sense of accomplishment, it is probably not your direction.

We suggest that you ask yourself often, "How does this feel to me?" If you are feeling happy in what you are doing, you are probably completing at least part of your life task. However, being honest with yourself is essential. There is no greater detriment to happiness than telling yourself you are content with things as they are when you are not. How do you really feel? You may not get the true answer when you first ask yourself, and may have to keep asking.

As long as you feel that energy is moving well in your life, that you are taking steps that strengthen you and others, keep going in that direction. After a while, you simply choose a direction, know that it is right, and move with assurance toward its conclusion; then you pick another. It becomes as natural to you as breathing. Being a creative person, you choose something to create. You draw necessary tools toward you without too much trouble, find ways around obstacles, and every day move closer to completing it. Your focus is not on the completion per se, but on the joy of creating.

Some people have rigid ideas about their life work. If they cannot do a particular thing, they become frustrated and think that they cannot do their life work. We suggest that you be flexible and do what is available for you to do.

Yes, but usually your life plan is not so specific as to be limiting. Let's say that your primary life task is to learn how to work with your hands and be of service to others through them. Being a television repairman might be the life work you choose to carry out your task, but there are many other means you could use. You usually set up your life to give you the opportunity to carry out your task in a variety of ways. Perhaps you choose a parent who is gifted with his hands and who teaches you many skills, giving you several options. If one does not work, then you try another. Maybe you do not pass the exam for television repair school, so you do something else that accomplishes the same thing. You do not generally predetermine on the astral plane the specific physical tasks to which you will devote your life, such as becoming a television repairman. You usually have some ideas in mind, and may favor one more than others, but life is unpredictable and flexibility is necessary. For this reason, if you have a specific life work, you probably settled on it during this lifetime.

Let's say that at age eighteen you become fascinated with philosophy and decide to get a doctorate in it. You teach it for the rest of your life, which facilitates your secondary life tasks quite well, but not your primary one. If you do not get around to doing too much with your hands in that life, you may put it off to another life. However, that is likely to leave you feeling somewhat unfulfilled. Alternatively, you may find that you love whittling or making ceramics and do it as a hobby. You might give away your creations to people who are poor, in a nursing home, or whatever, as a form of service to others.

There are sometimes good reasons for changing your life plan. Let's say that you were too ambitious when you were making it and set it up to pay back several major karmas. During your life, you found that you were not as strong as you had thought. Therefore, you might have made a decision to put some of the karmas off until another lifetime.

Refusing to repay karmic debts out of false personality in other words, out of avoidance and fear rather than a valid recognition that you took on too much is a different matter. That is likely to leave you feeling frustrated and unbalanced. Often karma is so compelling that you complete it despite your resistance.