What does alignment feel like?

This time of year asks us to settle down and come back home for a bit after a summer out and about. How does it feel to begin to slow down? Does it feel comfortable, like you are in the right place to head into the winter months, or does it feel a bit uneasy? How do you know if you are doing the right thing? Can you feel it in your body?

There is something about slowing down that makes it harder to avoid ourselves. With less distractions and demands pulling us out into the world, we begin to turn towards ourselves.

Sometimes what we find there feels good. A sense of having landed in our own lives. Not that everything is perfect, or even particularly easy, but that somewhere beneath the noise there is an assuredness. We recognise ourselves in the way we are living. We have a sense that the life on the outside and the person on the inside are matching. There is a feeling of being where we are supposed to be.

Maybe that is what alignment feels like.

Different traditions have used different language for this. Yogic traditions speak of living in accordance with our dharma, Taoism teaches of moving with the Way rather than against it. Today we might call it alignment, resonance, flow. Different words for that sense of being in the right relationship with ourselves and the life we are living.

And perhaps we don’t need to understand it intellectually, because we know the feeling.
That little surge of energy in our heart. The lightness, the vibration, the rush that happens when something, or someone, feels right. When we find ourselves somewhere and feel completely present. When we are with people around whom we somehow become more ourselves.

We were recently chatting with one of our incredible facilitators, Nick Cruz Velleman, who is obsessed with this topic, and he coined it:
The “shimmer.”

At first it might be nothing more than a flicker. A little more energy around one thing than another. You light up as you talk about a topic or an idea keeps coming back to you. There’s a person you feel drawn towards or a place where you notice your breathing settle.

Unfortunately, we are not taught to notice these cues from our body. We look outside ourselves for answers, weighing up what is sensible, what we should do, while overlooking this quieter intelligence that has been there all along.

What if we trusted it a little more? What if we allowed that feeling to become a compass? If we moved towards it, rather than away. Because we all know what it feels like to not be moving in the right direction. The heaviness and resistance, a sense of being drained, instead of fueled.

It’s subtle, but the more you notice it, and keep moving towards what lights you up, the less subtle it becomes. This season, as life quietens, perhaps we can too, enough to notice what is shimmering, and follow it.