I Chose My Purpose Over Comfort - And Then Everything Collapsed

A graduation reflection from the SHINE Program for Life, on breaking apart to become whole.

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My journey in SHINE Program for Life actually started in 2019, when I first did the program as one of the team members of Victor Manickam Knowledge Group. But as I began this journey again as a learner, a couple of weeks before 22nd February 2026, my entire view, reality, and everything had shifted.

On November 6th, 2025, I returned from the UK to India, following my purpose. Leaving a job there that I enjoyed and was doing well at, because I truly felt that I could not leave what I wanted to do and build here in India, and I could not sustain two lives either. I had to make a choice, and I did. I chose the life where I chose my purpose, my family, and my relationships, and I moved back.

"But when you make such a choice, it takes courage. So you feel that because you've shown so much courage, you're strong and confident, and that everything will work out just the way you want... That is when the entire reality collapses and breaks this arrogance."

A couple of days into moving to India, my entire sense of self, relationships, family, purpose, and what I actually wanted to do after coming back to India, everything collapsed. One incident opened my eyes to myself and my reality, which I had turned a blind eye to for years. I really didn't know what was real, what was true, what was mine anymore, what was good, what was bad, nothing.

I had become a walking corpse, I feel. Just doing what I felt I needed to do, smiling, meeting people, reconnecting with friends after moving back, doing the work that I knew how to do. Just breathing and smiling and surviving. Of course, there were moments of me, but they were fewer and fewer as every single day passed.

"I felt lost, and I felt the heights of being lost just before the program. With failing at so many things at work, failing at maintaining and sustaining relationships, failing at so many other things which were just so mine, I just couldn't stay that way anymore."

What the program did for me was, first and foremost, give me a purpose to get through the week, to enter the classroom every Sunday with the same bunch of people and with the hope that it's going to unlock something. With the hope that finally, I'm going to get out of whatever this is. And it did.

This program is not a cakewalk. Like any other product or program would promote and pride itself in making things comfortable, not this one. It made us who we are now, but before that, it broke us into a million fragments. It made us see ourselves in the most divine and the most evil manner possible.

"We learnt to be human, to accept the evil in us and the evil in others, while also looking at the divine in us and the divine in others. To live in that duality where, in one second, we are the most evil person, and in the other, the most divine person on earth."

Living through that duality, moment by moment, is what the program made us do.

While it is the most challenging thing that we have done, for all of us sitting there, it is also the most liberating thing we did. The seven ornaments that we discovered felt like certificates that we received at different points in the program. Something where we broke ourselves and, at the end of it, someone came and told us, "Well done, beta, here's your reward for it."

We got seven of those! Seven different things that, put together, helped us become one. I'm going to share those seven ornaments, and I'm pretty sure you will be able to experience me as me by the end of them.

Who Am I	Innocence and Joy
World I Am In	Love
Legacy	Inclusion
Purpose	Empowering Self-Expression
Reason I Exist	Creating Oneness
My Contribution	Responsibility
I Am	Space

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These aren't just blogs. They're lived experiences of hiding, returning, forgiving, and beginning again. If you found yourself in someone else's words, there's a place for your story too. Book a free call with a Human Design Educator to know more today!

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