This course invites students into one of life’s most important questions: What is uniquely asking to be lived through me? Rather than focusing on careers, majors, or external expectations, this course helps students discover the deeper patterns of meaning, fascination, and purpose that call them towards their destiny. The goal is not to choose a profession, but to cultivate an inner compass that can guide a lifetime of meaningful decisions.
Students explore:
- The ancient and modern idea of a personal calling
- How dreams and synchronicities can communicate through mythic language
- Practices for uncovering the deeper patterns that make us come alive
- How to orient one’s life around meaning, vitality, and authentic purpose
Through reflective practices, creative exercises, journaling, time in nature, and rich conversation, students learn to notice the subtle signals that point toward a life of greater aliveness. Alongside these experiential explorations, we examine enduring ideas about vocation and purpose drawn from psychology, mythology, philosophy, and spirituality. Together, these perspectives help students recognize that purpose is often revealed gradually and even circuitously.
Students leave this course with a deeper understanding of themselves and a greater trust in their own unfolding path. Rather than feeling pressured to have every answer, they develop the capacity to recognize the experiences, relationships, and opportunities that call forth their deepest curiosity and vitality.
A Deeper Dive
Much of modern education begins with society’s needs. It asks what careers exist, what skills employers require, and how students can prepare themselves to fill those roles. While these questions are important, they often overlook an equally essential one: What kind of life is each particular student uniquely called to live?
This course begins from a different premise. Across cultures and throughout history, many traditions have suggested that every person carries within them a unique pattern of possibility—a calling that cannot simply be invented or imposed from the outside. The ancient Greeks spoke of a daimon, an inner guide that accompanies each life. More recently, psychologist James Hillman has argued that each person arrives in the world carrying an intrinsic pattern that seeks expression over the course of a lifetime. Whether understood psychologically, spiritually, or poetically, these perspectives invite students to consider that purpose may be something we gradually uncover rather than something we simply choose.
If this is true, how do we learn to listen? Throughout the course, students explore the many ways a calling can make itself known: recurring fascinations, persistent longings, meaningful coincidences, dreams, powerful emotional responses, unexpected encounters, and the often inexplicable things that leave us feeling most alive. They also learn to engage the symbolic language through which the unconscious often communicates, developing greater fluency in the images, metaphors, and stories that emerge through dreams, imagination, and creative practice.
Ultimately, this course is not about arriving at a single career plan or life script. It is about developing an ongoing relationship with the deeper allurements that can shape a life – if we let them. Students leave with practical tools for listening more carefully to themselves, greater confidence in following what genuinely calls to them, and the understanding that a meaningful life is not built by conforming to someone else’s blueprint, but by remaining faithful to the unique seed of possibility that is unfolding within them.
Course Includes
- 1 Class
