Rhys Thomas answers the question:

 
Welcome, Rhys.

Hey, Phil. It's great to be here.

 
Great to see you again. Allow me to introduce you. Rhys Thomas is a visionary author, speaker, and trainer in the field of energy medicine. He founded the Rhys Thomas Institute of Energy Medicine to help people awaken to their deepest sense of purpose and become a transformational healing force in the world.

Rhys, what road does life purpose play in spirituality?

Well, in my work, and actually in the book I wrote that we used in the last Shift course I did, Discover Your Purpose, I feel that life purpose is really the foundation of understanding all of energy medicine. We've sort of gone backward in time about how to understand what's going on inside of us. We find out that there's a body, and it functions a certain way. And we really have analyzed that out to the Nth degree, and then we have evolved to the Eastern thought that this body has an energy field, and by becoming more aware of the energy field, we become more aware of who we are in the world, and how we take care of ourselves and how we heal ourselves. And then that has led to recognizing that there are even higher level of consciousness, soul levels of consciousness.

What I find is that... and for years, I was a tennis pro, 25 years as a tennis professional working with competitive players, national professional players, as well as country club players, and what I found was that if I could give them and help them understand their purpose in what they were doing out there, rather than just hitting a better backhand, rather than taking a pill to fix your body, or going and getting a massage or a healing for your energy field, or meditating and becoming one with the universe to understand your soul... when I was able to link maybe all of those things together in one reason... so if you are a really creative person, you love to play tennis with lots of trick shots and fun things, and never play the same way twice, and winning wasn't even a big deal for them. And then I found that there's much softer people that play because it's a nice group that they're in, and they love hanging out with them and playing with them. And then there's the competitors, who are just like, have to win. And it's all about the most efficient way to get from here to there.

Doing that for many, many years, and also studying spirituality and energy and chakras... now I'm almost 20 years into energy medicine, running the Rhys Thomas Institute, and what I'm finding is that the foundational element that is our character, that quality that I was looking for in people that would help them understand the why... why are you out here with me wanting to improve your tennis game. Why do you come to me? And then later on when I started the healing practice, and I run a large energy medicine school... in energy healing we teach, as well as transformation and soul purpose and all of this, the why became the only thing that mattered, because if you're coming in for the what, I'm going to be able to be more psychic, and I'll be able to do healing work, and I'll be able to have more skills in this or that area, what ends up happening is it becomes something that doesn't fully motivate you at the deepest level, whereas there's a quality within each one of us, and I call it your core soul quality, and it's the quality within you that if your grandmother were here right now, she would say, "You know, you haven't changed one little bit."

And the truth is that we haven't. There's this soul quality within us, this purpose within us, just to exist. That purpose... and I have little sheets that help understand this... that purpose looks like this. It's the soul quality. It's the radiating star of energy, that whenever anybody's around us, they will sense that. Whenever we're in our core, they'll feel like, "Oh my God, yeah. That's a Rhys, for sure. This is what a Rhys is." And when they meet you, Phil, they're like, "Oh, yeah, that's totally Phil." And there's a quality within us. One quality. One purpose. One character. One depth of knowing within us that we all need to have.

Now, the problem is that most of us learn our purpose through behavior. A lot of the behavioral types of things, Enneagram and DISC and Myers-Briggs, they're all behavioral. And if you look at how you behave in your life, you can kind of say, "Well, yeah, I must be that kind of person, because I've always done that." But a lot of times when we were little, and we were this totally our character, and we were just wild animals at two and three years old, we learned, our parents made us realize, “No, no, no, no, that's not what you're going to be; a good person is this.” And we've then behaved like that good person our whole lives, until we believed that's who we were. But the real truth is that until we... and really that's what the midlife crisis is, right? The midlife crisis is the realization that I'm pretending I'm a real person. And that's when people tend to step into their realization that the soul is more important, these deeper qualities within them are more important. And that desire to connect deeper to their spirituality is really a realization that I've created myself really in the likeness of my parents, or of my culture, or of my religion, or whatever it is that I've let in. And it's not really who I am.

Spirituality by its nature is we get called to it when we've moved away from it. Our spirituality wasn't... we didn't have to be spiritual, we didn't have to meditate, we didn't have to do anything when we were three or four years old. We just were that quality, that character, that exuberance for life, right? That is the essence of what purpose is.

Now I have found that there are five basic soul purposes. And let me get my glasses on here. This is a little chart that I use that goes along with this one here, and this is, just so you understand, this is that soul quality I was talking about, that exuberance for life. This is what the martial artists train. This is called the Hara Line, or the Life Purpose Line, and this is where the contracts... that's like the gravity that holds us together, and gives us our actual purpose. This is actually, this is your purpose right here. If you haven't trained in martial arts, or haven't learned about this, you definitely want to do some work in some of the courses I have coming up, because this is the life purpose. This is what it is. It's not a thought. It's not something down here in your chakras. And you can see each one is your lower levels of energy. There's nothing in your chakras. Your brain can't say, "Well, I think I'll be good at this because I'll make some good money at that, and I'll do this and that's why, and I'll be a good person." That's not your life purpose. Your life purpose is something that you can't stop being.

Ultimately, then, when this energy of the soul comes through, the contracts… Caroline Myss talks about contracts here, and then you've got Anodea Judith on The Shift Network who talks all about the chakras. This energy coming through then lands in your body here. This body is its purpose, right? The soul is never forgetting what your purpose is. The chakras do. The mind does, because the mind is totally focused outside of you. Spirituality is to focus inside and feel your purpose. You can't figure out your purpose by looking around what's happening around you. I mean yes, everything around you is reminding you what your purpose is, but you can't understand it until you feel it from deep within you. When you are... this is another chart that I use in my programs at the Rhys Thomas Institute... and there are five soul qualities... soul qualities, not human qualities, five soul qualities. And of course, they're human words, so they'll have human connotation, but basically there's creative, there's artistic and mystical. Those three are one quality. There's one soul that comes to earth and takes into body form, and those people, the creative, artistic, and mystical, we call those creative idealists.

Then there are the people that are sensitive, loving, and intuitive. That's one soul quality. That's a quality that you've had since you were born, or you haven't had it, right? And it's sensitive, loving, and intuitive. We call those people emotional intelligence specialists.

Then there are people that have service, compassion, and sacrifice. Those are the big ones. Service, compassion, and sacrifice. This is what they’re here for. It's their soul quality. Every lifetime, that soul carries that beautiful quality... it's like the color of its light.

And then we have another one, which is wisdom, achievement, and mastery, right? And that's a soul. That soul creates at that level, and manifests at that level, and comes into a body, and has that kind of wisdom, achievement, mastery. So very, very important. They're the achievers. And we call them the knowledgeable achievers. Oh, and I didn't tell you — the service, compassion, and sacrifice people, those are the team players. Those are the ones that are always helping people in service.

Finally, there's the leadership, courage, and inspiration. There's people that are just, they’re souls, not people. And this is the difference between me and everybody else on life purpose. Life purpose is energetic. Life purpose has nothing to do with whatever you think it does and your behaviors. All of these processes that teach you how to figure out who you are will just agree with who you already think you are, rather than the soul quality which is often what we rejected the most as a child because our true self didn't get us the most love. And so we said, well, that's bad and it's too painful to show that and not get love for it. Now what I'm going to do is I'm going to be this other person, which then leads us through a lifetime of trying to be that other person, and then getting to that midlife crisis where we realize, I can't. Your soul's literally crying “uncle.” It's like, You can't go without me. You can't live your soul purpose, your mission in life without me, without listening to me, listing to the feeling of who you are.

Which of those soul qualities does your soul have? That's so important to understand. And then which one of those... because that leadership, courage, and inspiration, those we call the charismatic leaders or the charmers. They're the people in the world that have big energy, and they can inspire us in many ways. When you lump this all together, Phil, my idea here is that without...

You can't talk about chakras without talking about purpose, because you have a very specific set of chakras. We've found that everybody on planet earth has seven chakras. Okay? Everybody's got seven chakras. But why are yours linked up so differently that the law of attraction attracts something totally different to your heart chakra or your fifth chakra — how you communicate and who communicates with you, and how you speak and how you get spoken to, all these things — why are yours so different?

Each of your chakras are so completely different than everybody else's chakras because they're related to your purpose, not to what chakras ought to be doing. You can learn, and I've learned just about everything you could possibly learn about chakras, but it wasn't until I started using what I use in the school literature, crystal bowls, and started listening to people talk from those chakras, I realized, oh, the chakras don't speak some separate chakra language. They are dimensions of your consciousness which are well mapped out in all of the chakra trainings, but the most important part of it is when the chakra speaks, it's not speaking chakra. It's speaking soul purpose.

Your purpose, that what I call the Life Purpose Line, which is what the Qigong and the martial artists… I did 25 years of martial arts training, and I thought I was going to be a tough guy. But really, I was training that line to be wider and wider, so I could become a healer, because a healer is someone who accesses their purpose first, and then fills their chakras and sees through their chakras into the world to find that purpose.

The answer to your question, “How important is life purpose to spirituality,” it's all of it. If you don't know your purpose, your soul's purposes, that's soul's feeling inside of you that creates this Life Purpose Line, this column of light that goes through you that the martial artists train... and it’s why they do forms and kata and all these things… that line has in it the electromagnetic connection. And it is literally the bridge between the non-form of the soul and the spirit world, and the physical forms that the chakras are forming literally. And it's the energy... that line is the energy. That's why when martial artists train that, they can actually widen it in a fight so they're literally unmovable. It's like one person can stand and 10 can hit them, and they'll just all fall away, because energetically, that person is so aligned with this moment of time, whereas all the other fighters are trying to get over with the fight. They're not in the present moment. they're not in it. And that ability to know your purpose in this moment is what gives you the conscious awareness and the epiphany and the awakening and literally the true awakening that says, I am living my purpose. This is my spiritual practice.

 
Wow, Rhys. You have enough energy for the two of us, I think. Awesome. Thank you for sharing your depth of wisdom and experience with us today. This has been very illuminating.

Rhys Thomas is a visionary author, speaker, and trainer in the field of energy medicine. He founded the Rhys Thomas Institute of Energy Medicine to help people awaken to their deepest sense of purpose and become a transformational healing force in the world.

He created the Rhys Method®, a powerful system of self-discovery, transformation, and healing that’s improved the lives of thousands, and is the author of the bestseller, Discover Your Purpose: How to Use the 5 Life Purpose Profiles to Unlock Your Hidden Potential and Live the Life You Were Meant to Live.

Rhys is a graduate and former teacher at the Institute of Healing Arts and Sciences and the founder of Solstice Healing Arts Center. Rhys has 15 years experience in energy medicine practice, which includes full-spectrum healing, crystal bowl sound healing, energy reading, and soul reading. He’s a certified Energy Medicine practitioner, Reiki Master, and 2nd Degree Black Belt with 25 years of training in martial arts.

Throughout his career as a coach, business owner, author, public speaker, martial artist, healer, and soul reader, Rhys discovered what people who change the world have in common. They are not planning and thinking about who they should be, they are living and being called to their highest mission from a fearlessness to grow and become more than they ever imagined.