How Empaths and INFJs Find Their Purpose
Your essence is not your job title, your resume, or your role in society. It’s deeper than that. It’s the energetic fingerprint of your soul—the archetypal role you came here to embody. It’s not about what you do to survive. It’s about how you naturally move, love, express, and transform the world just by being fully you.
Essence vs. Occupation
This isn’t about your career path or what you list on LinkedIn. Your essence is an archetypal job—an intuitive, spiritual, or creative role woven into your being. And most people walk right past it, because your greatest gifts often come so naturally that you don’t recognize them as gifts at all.
That’s why personality tools like Myers-Briggs (MBTI) can be so powerful. They reveal the talents you take for granted. When you understand your type—especially if you’re a highly sensitive person, empath, or intuitive—it becomes easier to spot the strengths you’ve always had but never named.
Anchoring in Your Values
Your moral compass—what you value more than what you feel—also helps you uncover your essence. Essence is clarified through the things you refuse to compromise. It lives in your boundaries, in your yes’s and your sacred no’s. The clearer you are about what matters to you, the easier it is to see how you’re meant to show up in the world.
Belong First, Then Differentiate
The first step to remembering who you are is to find your kin—the people who share your gifts. And then, once you’re among them, ask yourself: What makes me different here?
That’s your magic.
That’s your essence.
Belonging gives you safety. Difference gives you purpose.
Archetypes of Essence
These are some of the most common essences seen in highly empathic, intuitive, and spiritually attuned people. They’re not rigid boxes—just invitations:
The Storytellers, Comedians, Performers
The Counselors, Energy Workers, Psychic Healers
The Alchemists, Seers, Magicians, Shape-shifters
The Body Workers, Herbalists, Medicine People
The Stewards of Land, Nature, and Animals
The Artists, Writers, Musicians, and Poets
The Warriors, Rebels, Outlaws, and Advocates
The Teachers, Scholars, and Knowledge Keepers
You may be adjacent to several of these. That’s normal. Essence is layered and multifaceted. You’re not here to be easy to define.
The Wounded Healer: Alchemy Through Pain
A profound and often misunderstood essence is that of the Wounded Healer.
These are the ones who’ve endured deep suffering—emotional, spiritual, psychological—that most people can’t even imagine. Their qualifications don’t come from textbooks. They come from surviving. From crawling out of their own personal hell and choosing to turn pain into power.
Their journey is brutal. Their training is unfair. But their ability to help others walk through darkness? Unmatched.
The Wounded Healer doesn’t find purpose by following bliss—they find it when they stop avoiding pain and learn to alchemize it.
Avoidance leads to emptiness. But presence—even with pain—creates meaning.
The Wounded Healer’s mantra becomes:
“If I can survive this, I can guide others through it too.”
Teaching as Transmission
The Teacher archetype often wrestles with imposter syndrome. But teaching isn’t arrogance—it’s service. If you’ve survived something, learned something, mastered something—you are being called to share it.
And no, you don’t need a degree or a perfect track record. You just need to be one step ahead of someone else.
Teaching isn’t linear. You don’t graduate from “student” and become a “teacher.” You are always both. And in the process of articulating what you know, you become what you teach.
You don’t reach embodiment by skipping the teaching phase. Teaching is how you get there.
The Artist: Sacred Transmission of Truth
The Artist carries a different medicine. Art isn’t a conversation. It’s a transmission. A way to express the inexpressible and be witnessed without being questioned or corrected.
If you’re worried about originality, stop. Every idea comes from the collective unconscious—the great shared pool of inspiration. It doesn’t belong to anyone. Art is created when you draw from many sources and mix them through the unique lens of you.
“Steal from one source, and it’s theft. Steal from many, and it’s art.”
Artists often carry healing for others who don’t have the words or tools to express what they feel. Art makes people feel seen. And for empaths, who are so often invalidated, that’s a powerful reclamation.
Your Homework: Turn Wounds Into Wisdom
Ask yourself:
What challenges have I faced in my life so far?
What have I learned from those challenges that could be useful to others?
If you can find the lessons in your struggles and be vulnerable enough to share them, then your story becomes medicine.
Heal Yourself, Heal the World
We don’t change the world by yelling at it. We change the world by healing ourselves. That inner change ripples outward.
So don’t worry about how to save the world. Start by saving yourself. The rest follows.
You already know how to heal.
You just need to remember.
