For anyone who has ever wondered about their higher purpose in life, spiritual teacher Tanis Helliwell may not have the answer, but she definitely can help people find out for themselves. Manifesting Your Soul’s Purpose is Helliwell’s sixth book and what she calls her most practical.
“The book is for people who want to look at their life and ask themselves, ‘Do my values still fit with where I’m working and how I’m living?’” said Helliwell.
This book revisits some familiar territory for the local author. Her best-selling book published by Random House Canada in 1999 called Take Your Soul to Work looked at transforming the workplace to make it align more with personal values. Her new book focuses on personal transformation. She said that she’s tried to dig out the key nuggets of her teaching and strip it down to the simplest form. There are even exercises to do.
“I’ve been teaching this material for 30 years,” said Helliwell. “There have been so many people all over the world who have wanted this course. You can’t be everywhere.”
She wrote the book to be a textbook for her first attempt at online teaching. She has already organized groups in Canada to work through the first part of the book which deals with personal transformation. She thinks that before a person can find out what her purpose in life is, she has to do some personal work.
“There’s your personality purpose, which is how are we living on a day-to-day level basis paying the bills and raising children?” said Helliwell. “But there’s also a soul’s or higher self’s purpose and that is, are we feeling as if we’re really contributing what we want to be contributing in the world?”
Helliwell thinks that there’s no reason that people can’t have both purposes working together.
“I’m a both-and-kind-of girl,” she said. “I believe I live my life like that and I believe it’s possible for people to do that.”
She said that it is not just what people are doing in their jobs, but how they are doing it.
“There’s the high road and low road in work,” she said. “The low road is we just do our job, but the high road is in some way, no matter what we do, we are increasing the betterment of the world.”
At the heart of this book is what Helliwell calls SQ or spiritual intelligence.
“It’s to become more conscious of our motivations,” she said. “It’s not the same as being religious. There may be people who are religious who also have spiritual intelligence, but it’s not a one-to-one ratio.”
Helliwell will be launching and giving a reading from her new book, Manifest Your Soul’s Purpose, from 7:30 to 8 pm on Thursday, October 4 at Breakwater Books and Coffee.
