On Spiritual Alignment

Tags

alignment, awareness, gratitude, spirituality, turbulence

It was a somewhat unusual week of ups and downs, of great calm and turbulence in the inner world for me. It began particularly well in that I used the Monday holiday to read a new book from cover to cover – something I hadn’t done on a long, long time. It felt really good to get back to ‘deep reading’, and prompted me to make a summer reading list of spiritual biographies. That was the high-point of the week, and I was only the first day in.

The next couple of days was where the outer world started seeping in, and it turned into a bit of a flood by Thursday morning. The morning meditation practice was unable to restore calm and stillness, because the mind was highly perturbed and the usual heart-focusing techniques weren’t working. Something was surely out of alignment. I looked in my ‘toolbox’ to see – what was I to do next to reset my alignment?

The first step to realignment was to return to the weekly walk in the reservation, which I did Thursday evening after work. The forest immersion worked really well to do an inner reset, as the familiar trails, the waters of the river and lagoon, the clear blue skies — all submerged me in their warm embrace. The exclamation point was the blue heron that I observed sitting in perfect stillness across the river, for the entire final ten minutes of my walk. Typically, a heron will take off as soon as it sees humans, but today was different. The realignment was going well.

Friday morning meditation was a bit of a test of how well the realignment was going. Things were better, but not quite fully restored yet. It wasn’t till late Friday evening, after seeing my daughter again after a week, overlapping with a long dinner meeting with a very good friend’s mother, Carol, whom we hadn’t seen in almost three years, that the realignment felt almost complete. It must have been Carol’s beautiful, pure, in the moment, loving energy, deep hugs, and childhood stories of living and growing up in the small town of Longport on the Atlantic shore, that helped clear away a large part of the dust of the week.

As I write this post, I find myself asking some questions. How do we know that we are in alignment, and out of alignment in our inner world? What are the happenings in our outer world that shift us out of inner alignment? How often do we lose alignment, and how quickly is it restored? What tools do we have for restoration, and how well do they really work?

I was tested this week in a way that was perhaps not so unique to me. Hence, I shared my experiences with you. The alignment testing helped me identify some weaknesses in my spiritual practices. One result of the week’s testing is that I am grateful for the opportunity to learn, adjust and develop greater awareness on the journey towards answering — Who am I? What am I truly aligned to, and why?

Kumud

P.S. Join us for our weekly gathering and twitter chat with the #SpiritChat community, Sunday June 26 at 9amET / 1pmGMT / 630pm India. I will bring some alignment gauges in the form of questions, and a pot of tea. You bring the cookies! Namaste – AjmaniK

The hydrangeas finally bloom in the garden… helping to restore alignment!

Align and Shine

Tags

alignment, compassion, spiritual practice

Align and Shine – by Dr. Christy Johnson

During #SpiritChat on the topic of Loyalty earlier this year, I tweeted “Still not a fan of the word #loyalty, I vote for alignment – aligning to self, others, and the highest good of all“ as my answer to one of the questions. After that tweet, Kumud challenged me to host a chat about alignment, which led me here.

I believe a driving force behind each of our earthly incarnations is to embrace our authentic selves. The idea is to accept our messy, imperfect humanness despite the contrast with our soul-level perfection. Via self-alignment, we can shine more brilliantly and vibrantly as whatever may block our light gets removed. Self-alignment also illuminates the evolutionary path for those who can see and hear us, those who are aligned to us.

As part of my own explorations, I took three different extensive Mindful Self-Compassion courses starting in late 2017. I tried and tried Mindful Self-Compassion practices, believing if I just stuck with them, something would shift but finally after a year and a half I realized it isn’t something I align to deeply. Aha! So Mindful Self-Compassion joins other powerful but not aligned to me approaches like acupuncture, Ayurveda, and Transcendental Meditation.

Giving myself permission to release Mindful Self-Compassion from my daily practices relieves me from unconsciously pushing to make it “work” and frees time and energy for what does align. Now I feel lighter and freer and have found ways to apply my healing modalities to the issues at hand. Through this evolution, I’ve become more self-aligned, which is precisely the point of Mindful Self-Compassion!

As your evolution deepens and strengthens, you also align to the highest good of all. Self-aligning more fully frees energy that gets reabsorbed in the world and also models the power of alignment.

How do we find what aligns? What are the clues? How do we know what either doesn’t align or has passed its expiration date? Ever notice how effortless life becomes when you’re aligned to what you want to be doing? Alignment leads to flow and flow, in turn, supports alignment. What resonates also energizes us. When we align, we shine.

Please come to share and shine on Sunday, March 24th at 9 A.M. EDT on Twitter with hashtag #SpiritChat.

Host Bio: Dr. Christy Johnson quit her decades-long engineering career in 2010 to open her own integrative energy healing practice. She helps clients overcome life challenges and also align with themselves, others, and their highest good via soul level information, energy healing, and empowering self-help tools. You can connect with her via her website www.intuitiveheal.com , on Twitter @IntuitiveHeal and on her YouTube channel.

Editor’s Note: Thank you, Christy, for taking up the ‘alignment’ challenge and stepping up to host the weekly chat on Sunday. I am sure that it is going to be a wonderful opportunity for many to ‘Align and Shine’! Namaste. – Kumud

Our Spiritual Alignment

Tags

alignment, priorities, spirit, spiritchat

“So, what’s new Doc?” – I asked her casually on twitter. “Doing my best to stay aligned…” – came the reply from a long time #SpiritChat veteran (and past host), @EmeliaSam.

This brief conversation got me thinking about #alignment and it’s importance in our lives. How many of us think about the state of our physical, emotional, financial, and spiritual alignment? And how often? We know when our cars are out of alignment, for we start drifting off the road, and have to constantly correct to “stay in our lanes”. Sometimes, we even grip the steering wheel more tightly, thinking that it may help us stay “aligned”. Perhaps, what we really need to do is to check that air-pressure in the tires, rotate those wheels, and get an all-wheel alignment. Then, when we get back on the road, we won’t have to constantly course correct, and we can loosen the grip on the steering wheel of life a little…

Yes. I could not help but use an automotive analogy in reference to alignment. I could have used any number of analogies – say, that of a rocket being launched or an airplane taking off or…. I think you get the idea. But alignment means more than simply being “in a straight line”. For when our alignment is “off”, we feel an uneasiness in our bodies, in our minds, in our hearts, and in our spirits. This dis-ease, when neglected for a long time, eventually leads to disease, and may even manifest as chronic pain, or addiction, in some of us.

As they say, “a stitch in time saves nine” – so, perhaps we need to pay attention to this sense of mis-alignment when we first become aware of it. Physical mis-alignment is easy to detect, because it manifests quickly as pain. Emotional mis-alignment can reflect in our frequent “mood swings” and we may tend to fluctuate between highs and lows in response to minimal external input. Financial mis-alignment may show up in our struggle to make ends meet, or, for some, in our struggle to decide how to cope with our state of great financial prosperity.

So, what does “alignment” mean in the context of our practice of spirituality? How does spiritual mis-alignment manifest? What are some signs that we may not be in alignment with our beliefs? Once we detect spiritual mis-alignment, how do we correct it? In the September 1st #SpiritChat, we had discussed the topic of devotion – can an evaluation of “what are we devoted to” help us re-establish our alignment? For that matter, why is spiritual alignment important anyway? Can it lead to rigidity of beliefs, and rigidity of actions?

So, let us look into this subject of alignment a bit deeper. I invite you to join me and the #SpiritChat community as we examine some of these questions in our weekly chat on twitter – Sunday, September 8th at 9am ET. Namaste!

Kumud

P.S. If you cannot join us in the live hour of the chat, I invite you to share your thoughts, your questions, your answers in the comments below. Thank you!

Update: Here are the questions asked during the chat. Feel free to answer in the comments… The full transcript and statistics are available at http://bit.ly/sc-tr-0908 . Enjoy!

Q1. “Alignment”. What it does it mean to you in your current life-context? #SpiritChat

Q2. What are some “reference points” against which you gauge your sense of alignment? #SpiritChat

Q3. How does mis-alignment manifest in our lives? How do we correct it? #SpiritChat

Q4. Is a Guide/Master necessary to restore our spiritual alignment? Or can we self-align? #SpiritChat

Q5. What role do our beliefs, our values play in our feeling “well-aligned”? #SpiritChat

Q6. Do you believe that a global spiritual re-alignment is happening? Why or why not? #SpiritChat

Q7. How does our well-aligned being impact our friends, families, communities? #SpiritChat

Final Q8. What action steps will we take, to practice better spiritual alignment? #SpiritChat