Alignment

Have you ever driven a car with bad alignment on the freeway? If you have, you know the wobbly, bouncy experience it offers. If you haven’t, just picture driving a bumper car on the open road, not going quite the way you wanted and swerving around. When you feel this in your car, you know something is wrong.

Life is similar. We know within us what we should be doing. I’m not talking about “right or wrong,” but rather our actions. Intuitively, we know what our purpose is on Earth, sometimes it just takes a little longer for our conscious mind to understand it. So, how can we better align with that purpose, especially if we don’t know what it is? 

One tactic I’ve found helpful is alignment. When I’m doing something and get the feeling that it’s not right anymore, I stop. It’s important to separate the feeling of something being hard or difficult with not being right. Our brains can make us think that new, hard things aren’t right because our brains don’t like anything new. But that doesn’t mean it’s not right. 

If you find a house that on paper is perfect, but there’s just something feeling off about it, you wouldn’t buy it, would you? If you go somewhere and get a feeling that you should leave, you do, right? I often do this when I meet people. Even if they’re everyone’s favorite person, if I sense something is not aligned with my own energy, I will politely excuse myself. 

We live in a state of being where not only is the world itself busy, but our minds are busy. There are so many everyday things to do (chores, work, life maintenance, etc.) and so many fun things to do and look at. Unless you make a conscious effort, chances are good that you don’t spend a lot of time tuning into your intuition to seek the decision that’s right for you in each of these moments. 

Food is the best example I can give for this because what each of our bodies need is unique. I am a vegetarian and my body truly feels ill if I eat meat, but I have friends who conversely feel sick without eating red meat every now and then. We all need different things at different times. If I don't workout, I often don’t feel super hungry during the day. So when I get the feeling to eat a little snack while I stare into the fridge trying to figure out what my real snack will be, I have to stop and ask myself, “Am I actually hungry or does my brain just think I need to eat food right now?” Once I started approaching snacking like that, it changed my relationship with food, aligning it to a path that was effortlessly more healthy for my body.

Think about what you do during the day. Have you felt those little mental tugs saying, “I should go on a quick walk,” “I need to stretch,” “I’m not enjoying this show that everyone else loves.” Pay attention to those and start heeding the cues. 

I made a conscious effort to do this last week and saw a huge and almost immediate improvement in my mental health. I always tell myself to go outside in the afternoon and make it productive by walking. But I don’t actually like walking. I think a lot of runners can relate to this, but walking just feels so… slow. So, I decided to start doing what I actually wanted to do, which was go to the beach and just sit for a while. The days I heeded that call, I felt so happy, chill, and inspired for the rest of the day, things I almost never feel after going on a walk. When I’m working on a writing project, if it just isn’t feeling right, I step away from it for a bit instead of powering through with my original plan. I have yet to find a time when this wasn’t the right decision. 

Learning to seek alignment in our lives can actually be a fun little experiment that also helps you stay grounded in the present. We make 33,000-35,000 decisions every day. That’s about one decision every 2.5 seconds. What if you stopped and thought through some of those decisions from the framework of alignment? Remember, it’s not always your initial conscious thought that is your intuition.

This week, make 1% more of your decisions by choosing alignment. When you are sitting on the couch and think, “I should go outside but I also really should relax,” let your intuition guide you to the decision that is aligned with your ideal version of yourself. When you think about how you’d like your life to be, ask yourself if the decision you're making will help you get closer, further, or neutral? Neutral is also fine, but try to avoid choosing the option that will get you further. You have at least 33,000 opportunities every day to align with your ideal self, whatever that means to you. 

With gratitude,

Natalie 

Resources

Puff, Robert. “How to Become Aligned with Life.” Psychology Today, Sussex Publishers, 15 Aug. 2021, www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/meditation-modern-life/202108/how-become-aligned-life.

Reill, Amanda. “A Simple Way to Make Better Decisions.” Harvard Business Review, 6 Dec. 2023, hbr.org/2023/12/a-simple-way-to-make-better-decisions.