“Live In Your Strength”

Lao Tzu

People suffer in jobs they hate? Relationships fail because they don’t work through discontent? Poor posture develops into chronic musculoskeletal disorders? It’s easy for people to believe they don’t have the time or the right or the permission to act as they would if they could? These are a few examples of misalignment—deviating from your true nature—and it interferes with your ability to stand in your strength.

The result of misalignment is physical tension, emotional disinterest, and mental exhaustion. And when unchanged, perpetuates fear based beliefs and causes reactive behavior. It cripples your instinct to live in your strength! Misalignment is a mind, body, Spirit breakdown; just as, strength is a mind, body, Spirit aligning.

The act of aligning is the act of loving. Loving yourself enough to align within your physical body; loving yourself and another enough to align with the shared emotional needs of intimate relationships; or, loving your purpose enough to align with the mental demands of a workforce, ask for sensitivity and strength between mind and body, and self and other. The penalty of misalignment is the deterioration of one’s will.

In other words, the Will to Align is the devotion to invest your self to uphold the integrity of someone or something. The Will to Align is the courage to make love a verb.

Being devoted to a sound mind and body is exercising the confidence to make choices and craft a life simply because it contributes to its very nature—your nature–and not because it adheres to any external pressure to be or do anything else. Giving yourself permission to care for yourself connects you to your life purpose. Devoting yourself to personal integrity positions you to be in service to that purpose.

To develop self-devotion, recognize the importance of posture. How you stand on your feet, where your shoulder blades rest, how your spine adapts to sitting—physical subtleties, when aligned mindfully, are deliberately crafting the details of your life. This is ultimately how you place yourself in a life you want. Because how you do the smallest things are how you do the biggest things. Insist on integrity. Change your posture—change your life!

Enduring misalignment, no matter how small, in mind or body, becomes a way of surviving. And if you’re not careful, the accrued tension embodied from these compromises become preferable to the strength found in alignment. The unaddressed tension in the body keeps you in familiar patterns of poor posture that undermine the will’s devotion. Integrity is lost. The essence of you becomes buried under layers of disassociating.

• Aligning does not mean connecting to things that feel secure; it means connecting to things that feel meaningful.
• Aligning means establishing the path of least resistance, so that emotional truth is unveiled, physical strength is upheld, and mental poise is transparent. Misalignment is anything that interferes with this.

Lao Tzu guides us by saying, “Give attention to the smallest things to simplify the complicated.” Let tension be your guide to recognize and reconcile the small misalignments and you will take ownership of your life and its condition. Any physical discomfort, mental confusion, or emotional anxiety, are signals that something is misaligned. Trust your senses, your thoughts can convince you it’s nothing!

Misaligning holding patterns are invisible to us until they cause some kind of rigid reaction, but they are not rock solid—the mind and body do let go when your response to tension is one of curiosity rather than dismissiveness. Curiosity meaning: to witness conditions and explore changes that unravel tension. Don’t wait till the elephant is the room is so big the condition is un-reconcilable.