Life can often feel like a series of things you’re supposed to be doing: Go to college. Get a corporate job. Buy pumps and blazers. Work your way up the corporate ladder. Earn regular-yet-adequately-spaced-out promotions and raises. Get married and have babies. Eventually conquer the corporate world. Die.

Even when you step off that path and do something idiotic like become a freelance writer, there are things that are…well…expected of you. Mostly, they involve building the giant Jenga tower that is your platform, eventually becoming so cool that publishers pay you to write books on the regular, and then—I don’t know—ascending to a higher plane of coolness that involves a lot of literary readings and a-line dresses?

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Last month, I traveled up to the Kripalu Center for Yoga & Health to take a workshop on dharma (in this instance, defined as “life purpose”). The workshop was an offshoot of the presenter’s most recent book, which I had read and loved because I can never resist a good excuse to examine my life choices under a microscope and draw up endless to-do lists’ worth of course corrections.

I spent the weekend taking sunrise yoga classes, eating silent breakfasts, meditating, listening to lectures on dharma, and putting together lists (a thing we’ve already established is a hobby of mine).

Lists of the things that light me up.

Lists of the things to which I feel duty-bound.

Lists of the things that are often seemingly in opposition to each other.

In drawing up all of these lists, what I discovered is that I was already following my dharma.

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