Sankalpas come from various sources. They may arise through an inward longing or an encounter with something in the outer world. They may announce themselves through a dream, a trauma, or a sudden refusal. Their language varies too. Some are expressed in direct and concrete words. Others reveal themselves more metaphorically, as poems do.
Here is a glimpse of several sankalpas across a single life—mine.
My love of the esoteric and all things of the spirit began very young. At seventeen, I met the teacher with whom I would study Daoism, Chinese therapies, and martial arts for more than a decade.
I never had to make a conscious decision to remain with those studies. This was a different kind of sankalpa: one that came for me. I didn’t yet know the word sankalpa, but something had taken hold of me and seemed to whisper: You belong in magic. Stay, and be true. My teacher called this a life purpose; the spiritual trajectory that lasts across a lifetime, perhaps a few.
I also had an intense love of the creative arts and needed a skill to support myself. I became a graphic designer and filmmaker. My teacher called this the living purpose: the work that sustains our material and social life.
My first job
My first job was with an international advertising agency, where I helped create visual pitches and copy for advertising campaigns. Between its techniques of manipulation and seduction, the perfectly airbrushed images, and the people who seemed content to remain on the superficial side of life, I did not warm to the advertising world.
Still, I made a simple practical sankalpa: I will stick with this for two years.
I wanted to develop my skills, but I was also fascinated by this alien environment and its inhabitants—my co-workers.
Everything was fine until, near the end of my first year, I arrived at the doors of the glamorous office building and suddenly felt nauseous. By the time I reached my desk, I was genuinely unwell. When I left the building, the nausea disappeared. The next morning, on my return to work, it returned.
My teacher's wisdom
I told my teacher what was happening.
Yes, he said, unworried. That is what happens when you work with unreal things. They make you sick.
My boyfriend, who also worked in advertising, had developed a persistent rash. My teacher was treating him for what he believed was the same underlying problem: too much time spent among unreal things.
What are you going to do, my teacher asked.
Leave, I said, looking for his approval, which he characteristically never gave (like the true Daoist he was).
The following week, I resigned. I broke my sankalpa before the two years were complete, and it was a wise thing to do.
This is one of the difficulties rarely discussed when people speak about resolve. A sankalpa requires commitment, but commitment alone is not wisdom. There are times when we must distinguish between resistance to something valuable and the deeper knowledge that something is wrong for us. Perseverance and self-betrayal can resemble one another from the outside.
Love of filmmaking
After I left, I returned to the world I loved. I spent time with creative friends and began making films. Over the next decade, several of my short films screened at festivals and on television networks around the globe. I also worked as a freelance graphic designer and set dresser and wrote feature-film scripts with a writing partner. Producers and investors showed interest, but we spent years waiting for the right combination of money, cast, and timing.
I loved the friendships, the ideas, and the sense that something could be made from almost nothing. But the creative life was also unstable, financially precarious, and increasingly exhausting. Even with the support of my spiritual practices, I began to feel the strain of living with so much uncertainty.
Then one night, at the Australian Film Institute Awards, I saw something that produced an immediate and uncompromising resolve.
I was there because one of my own films had received a nomination. During the ceremony, I watched a director win an award for a film he had waited ten years to make. Onstage, he was full of pride, joy, and tears, a little vindication, and an enormous sense of relief. It was a triumphant moment for him.
But later, at the afterparty, I met him and saw him up close. I could see what that decade of struggle cost him: the stress, the self-neglect, the poor vitality, and sense of self. He looked much older than he was.
As we turned away from one another, a sankalpa rose before my eyes seemingly from his ashes.
I will not become him. I will not sacrifice my health. I will not spend my life waiting. I will not remain in the financial stress of freelance work. I am finished with this way of living.
Some of my clearest sankalpas have arrived in the form of negating language; declarative refusals. And while conventional wisdom on sankalpa advises that sankalps shoud be positively framed, the Upanishads offer the expression neti neti: 'not this, not this.' It is a way of approaching truth by recognizing what truth is not. At times, a sankalpa begins in this way. Before we can say Yes to the life that belongs to us, we may need to say an unequivocal No to the life that does not.
Back to the advertising world - but different
Less than a week later, I met a woman who had established a fledgling ambient-media company. Eighteen months into the business, she was in tears and considering giving up. She had a valuable service but could not communicate it clearly to prospective clients, many of whom worked in advertising agencies.
Because I had worked in advertising, I could immediately see how to help: rewrite her promotional material, contact people from my former industry, and then be on my way. But beneath that practical certainty was a deeper recognition. Although she was only a friend of a friend, I felt an immediate karmic link with her, as though I owed her something and had been brought into her life to help.
“I’ll help you,” I told her. “The business will work.”
I imagined I would help for a little while, discharge the karma, and return to my own life. I did not yet realize that, in speaking those words, I had made another sankalpa.
Within six months, the company was gaining traction. Not all my doing; she was highly talented in her own right. But somehow, I was back in advertising. This time, however, it was different. This company had an ethical foundation. It refused valueless products and rejected the more insidious forms of seductive selling. I remained there for eleven years.
That connection also helped me. It gave me stability, financial security, and enough space to protect my health, continue my spiritual studies, and pay off a karmic debt.
Throughout these many changes, I never left my esoteric training. I studied with other remarkable teachers in dreamwork, Jungian psychology, yoga, and Western magic. The first sankalpa—the spiritual calling that had never needed to be consciously made—remained quietly underneath everything.
Co-creating Big Shakti
Three years into my relationship with my partner, Swami Shankardev, that lifelong purpose came fully to the fore. Together, we made a collaborative sankalpa to create Big Shakti: a home for spiritual seekers.
My first teacher used to say:
For most people, life purpose and living purpose remain separate for a lifetime. When, if ever, they eventually become one, we are very fortunate.
I am very fortunate.
None of this happened within predictability or convenience. One sankalpa arrived before I had words for it or knew the word sankalpa. Another had to be broken through wisdom. Another emerged as an emphatic refusal and was fulfilled through karmic atonement.
This is what I have come to understand: sankalpa is not only a heartfelt sentence we repeat in quiet private spaces. It is a living relationship between desire, discernment, language, action, time, free will, and fate. Its fulfillment may require perseverance, but it may also require revision, refusal, or the humility to recognize it in an unexpected form.
In my upcoming Sankalpa Workshop Series, I will explore these distinctions in depth: how to recognize a desire that is ready to become a true resolve; how to find words that strengthen rather than divide you; how to work with doubt, resistance, and changing circumstances; and how to know when you are being asked to persevere and when a deeper wisdom is asking you to change direction.
Sankalpa is often presented as a simple formula for achieving what we want. But across a lifetime, a real lifetime, it is always doing its work, weaving our life together. When we work consciously with that thread, listening, steering when we can, life goes a little more our way.
I would be honored if you were to join the workshops.
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