Tag: alignment

Crooked Spine?

I had my eyebrows waxed the other day at a shop I had never been to before. The aesthetician who worked on me, I later found out was in her late forties, and she had only been an aesthetician for less than a year, but she did a great job and she clearly had a passion for the work. I asked her what she had done before this job and she said that for years she had been a server at high-end restaurants in Miami. She made a lot of money doing this, but the physical and mental stress was a lot, so during this time, she started taking credits for obtaining a nursing degree. About three quarters into schooling, the aesthetician realized that she did not want to be a nurse at all, so instead she went to school to become an aesthetician. The aesthetician was really personable and easy to talk to (she said that she honed this skill while waiting tables all of these years) and she answered all of my questions about skincare with obvious deep knowledge. For instance, she said that most skincare such as exfoliation or dermabrasion or laser treatments, are really about alerting/tricking/stimulating your own skin (the largest organ we humans possess) to “heal itself”. She excitedly told me about a vast array of products and what works and what doesn’t and the science behind it all. The aesthetician said that her classmates in beauty school were in awe of everything that she already knew about muscular structures, and skin, and nerves – things that they were just learning about. (She said that the Anatomy and Physiology courses that she took in nursing school finally paid off for her.) While conversing with her, it was clearly evident to me, that this woman was in her element. She had finally found her true calling.

At one point, the aesthetician said that she knew that she would lose all of her credits if she didn’t go back to nursing school and finish. She said that she felt like she had wasted a lot of time and money.

“But you found out that you don’t want to become a nurse, right?” I said. “I can see where it would be good to have something to fall back on, but you clearly love what you do. And from what you’ve shared, everything that you did before in your professional life, has brought you to this point, and enhanced your ability to be great at what you do and love, now.”

She smiled and nodded.

Nothing in our lives is in vain if we learn from it. I’ve been reading a lot lately about the importance of being in alignment with yourself and your OWN values – not your family’s values, nor your friends’ values, not society’s values, but to be in true alignment, you must be true to thine self.

Being out of alignment does not feel good. (That’s why there are chiropractors on every corner.) When you are out of alignment, nothing goes smoothly and easily. You always feel a little bit “off.” You feel your intuition pinging you constantly to get back on course, to be with your own true calling and nature. Alignment goes deeper than ego. When your ego is satisfied, it’s often a fleeting thing, that constantly needs another stroke from outside sources, in order to feel good. When you are in alignment with your values and your calling, you are in a state of peace, so that even when that peace sometimes gets rocked by things out of your control, it easily gets back to its familiar state of equilibrium and equanimity.

Are you in your alignment with your true self? If you are living “the shoulds”, or if you are living for “applause”, or if you are looking for things like money and beauty and material items and even relationships to fulfill you and fill all of your holes, then chances are you need an adjustment to get back in alignment with your one true self, in order to feel your best, and to be your best, and to give the rest of the world the best version of you, that only YOU can offer it.

“Just as your car runs more smoothly and requires less energy to go faster and farther when the wheels are in perfect alignment, you perform better when your thoughts, feelings, emotions, goals, and values are in balance. “ – BrianTracy

Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.

Towards Alignment

” . . .stop sugarcoating our patterns and start lovingly confronting them – especially ones we’ve been romanticizing as coping mechanisms. What are you chasing out of comfort rather than alignment?” – Dosse’ – Via Trenou (Refinery 29)

When a ship gets completely off course in one direction or another, it is human nature for the hypercritical captain to charge out, screaming at the crew, bringing them to their knees, for the loss of direction. And it’s also human nature for the crew to get really defensive with the hypercritical voice of the captain. After all, there are a lot of reasons for getting off course, and a lot of them are not in anyone’s control. Unforeseen storms and squalls appear out of nowhere, and have to be dealt with before being able to navigate back to the journey towards the destiny.

So, it’s also human nature, when it finally becomes obvious to us, as individuals, that we have gotten a little or sometimes even “way off course” in our own lives, in one way or another, whether it be with our health, or our relationships, or in our careers, or our finances etc., or even a combination of areas, to have the captain of our own ships (our high strung demanding inner critic) start barking at us. “How could you let this happen? What is wrong with you? Look at this mess! You’ll never get to where you want to go!”

And then, appropriate to our human nature, our defensive inner crew of voices starts justifying our problems. We had unforeseen storms in our lives, pop up. Of course we gained weight, or lost money, or had a heart attack, or didn’t have time to nurture our relationships. We had fires on the deck to put out. These storms were scary. We needed coping mechanisms to deal with it. We were treading water. We are only human, after all.

And this is where our ships tend to get stuck in the water, circling in the same exact spot, over and over, where the inner critic captain is taking us down to dust at the bottom of the boot, and the defensive crew is justifying what had to be done to cope with life on the unpredictable waves of the sea.

Now, the challenge becomes to skillfully change captains. If we pick a healthy, compassionate leader who understands that life on the high seas can be difficult and unpredictable and we kick our irate Captain Nightmare Inner Critic to the curb, we can focus on getting back on course. No one has to be defensive and explanatory. We got to this point of the journey for many reasons, but the main thing is, we need to get back on track. It’s a waste of time to go back and forth berating ourselves, and then defending ourselves for things that have happened in the past. This keeps us stuck, right where we are, in a situation that we want to, or we need to change in our lives, in order to go in the direction of our dreams. We need a captain who steers us back to the journey towards our true north, with no more wasting time, lamenting on the hows and the whys of what got us off-course (other than to learn from our wrong turns, and mark them on the map, so we don’t repeat them).

Are you in alignment with where you want to go in your life? Or are you staying stuck in delusion, or in the unhealthy pattern of berating and defending yourself? Even if you start moving again, and you end up being a little off course, if you are a good steward to yourself, you will make course corrections as you move along, and eventually, you will get to exactly where you want to be.

Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.