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Finding Alignment and Resonance
"When a person is aligned in speech, energy, and emotion, we can understand, no matter what the language. We soak in the presence." --The Dalai Lama
When we align our energy, we are reorganizing, adjusting, and lining it up. Alignment helps us feel more flow, resonance, attunement, and connectedness in our internal sense of the world as well as our relations with others. Just as we get our car tires aligned for better performance and wear, and our bones aligned so our muscles have to do less work, we can align our energy so our interactions are fluid.
Why Align Ourselves Energetically?
We all know what it feels like to be aligned and centered, or not, within ourselves. When we are aligned energetically, we experience fluidity, ease, receptivity, and connection. Smoothness and respect underlie our interactions. We don't feel conflicts between our power, our heart, and our vision.
When we are not aligned, we experience dissonance and feel stuck. We may experience power struggles with others, or our guts may feel one thing and our hearts another. Conversations push our buttons; we may misunderstand or feel misunderstood. This means that our energetic centers of power are not in alignment.
We all experience these effects in in our significant relationships. When we are in alignment with partner, child, or dear friend, things flow, even when we are not doing or wanting the same things. When we are in a state of non-alignment, our differences with another feel huge, and may get magnified out of proportion to their importance.
Energetic alignment is not limited to our internal states and other humans. We can really align ourselves with any living being or energy field in the cosmos! We might want to align with a tree, a sacred place, a work group, an ecosystem, our family, a church group, an intent, a group energy field, or an animal. Horse whisperers, for example, are in alignment with the animals they speak with. In all energetic alignment, our experiences of resonance, presence, receptivity, and flow are essential.
Learning to come into energetic alignment teaches us how to step out of heavy energy, conflict, and mental concepts like, "The news is bad." "I have too much to do." "I am so worried." It's a tool for bringing ourselves back into full presence in the moment and awareness of all that is.
Breathing Into Alignment
A simple, wonderful way of energetic alignment involves breathing together. It's especially useful when we feel out of sorts with a loved one, whether child or partner. It's a quick and easy way to shift together so that whatever project we're doing-conversation, lovemaking, problem solving-flows seamlessly. The focus of truly paying attention to the other's breathing takes us out of our mental constructs and into the arising and passing of breath, like waves.
It is best done together, yet we can do our breathing part without the other person even noticing. When centering, calming ourselves down, and coming into internal alignment is what's needed, this breath practice works well.
Try this:
When the other person breathes out, you breathe in. When the other person breathes in, you breathe out, matching your rhythms.
Continue breathing together until your heart slows, your belly calms, your vision expands, and you feel again the deep resonance you have together.
Aligning With the Living Energy Around Us
Sitting outside, in silence, is a way of perceiving known the world over. Coming into alignment with everything around us is what westerners might call "Gaia consciousness." It is what my indigenous Inca/Q'ero teachers call "kawsay," the living energy of the universe. It is what systems theorists and Buddhists call "dependent co-arising." It can lead us to unity consciousness, where subject and object become one.
Try this:
Find a place outside to sit quietly and comfortably. Settle into your internal silence, listening and watching with awareness. As you notice and sense the trees, plants, birds, and whatever else surrounds, let yourself rest in this awareness. Let yourself breathe into this world around you. Breathe out the worries and monkey-mind. Breathe in the energies of all these other beings. Fill yourself.
When you play with alignment, notice how breathing shifts the energy in your belly; in your heart; in your third eye. Does your perception shift? Simply watch, and see...
Meg Beeler/Earth Caretakers
Copyright � 2013
 | | Gratitude Despacho, in process, summer solstice |
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