Alignment first

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🎵🎶 “Follow the sun” – Xavier Rudd

By now a fixed mantra, a word that, until recently, wasn’t even part of my vocabulary.

To live in alignment is to live in accordance with who you truly are.

I picture it as an imaginary circle I keep trying to step back into.

In words: do what makes you glad, your natural state of being. Make sure your thinking, feeling, and acting sit on one line, without inner contradiction.

Simple, you’d think.

But I say it so often precisely because I forget it so easily.

I’ve simply always been better at attuning to others. A quality with a dark shadow side.

Because you can get so good at it that you let go of yourself, and eventually lose yourself.

Not all at once. But quietly.

And then suddenly realizing you’ve been missing yourself for a while now, without ever noticing you’d gone.

I knew, because all at once I could only recall rationally what once made my heart skip, without feeling much of it anymore now.

It would be easy to hold others responsible for that. But I was there myself, the whole time, too.

And yet that way of attuning didn’t begin the moment I was grown enough to choose it consciously, but long before.

And whatever you practice for years, you become very good at.

But does what becomes your second nature also mean it’s your true one?

Keeping harmony, and wanting to be seen, these came to define my sense of worth, so that attuning to others became more important than to myself.

And that is anything but alignment.

My relationships were the clearest mirror of that.

During my brief EMDR process, one sentence struck me hard:

“You choose familiarity over safety.”

Bam!

So I wasn’t choosing what felt good. I was choosing what felt known.

Love that feels like work,

in my search for coming home.

So if I say, today, fifty times a day:

“Alignment first”…

there’s a very good reason for that.

Alignment, by the way, isn’t only about your relationship with yourself or a partner.

It colors every encounter.

Children, by the way, show us better than anyone whether we’re in alignment. Good to know, it means it’s still in all of us, by nature. 😌

They listen to what we say, but they believe, far more, what we do. They attune to our energy.

My little boy is brilliant at this:

“Everything okay, Mom?”

“Why do you ask?”

“Because you’re breathing differently.” 🙃😉

Even when a door just falls shut a little harder, or he hears me rummaging in the cupboards slightly louder than usual.

A perfect way to make me aware of my own alignment.

Children feel, with total precision, when words, behavior, and energy don’t align.

It isn’t as though, from my circle, I know exactly where to go.

I don’t come with a built in Google Maps for life. 🙃

I don’t believe in the shortest routes anyway.

More in detours, and getting lost.

And unexpected encounters.

And unwalked paths that turn out more beautiful than any mapped out plan.

Alignment also brings back a favorite mantra from my teenage years:

“Go with the flow.”

It actually suited who I already was, back then.

Not wanting to control everything. Letting go.

Staying curious. An open mind.

Trusting that something beautiful waits around every bend.

With one small extra detail I’d never really considered before:

knowing exactly which flow is truly yours. From there, everything moves downstream.

Because in someone else’s current, it’s hard to feel where your own current was actually headed.

Later, thanks partly to yoga, I discovered another line I like even more:

“Follow your bliss,” Joseph Campbell.

Give in.

“Bliss.”

A wonderful word. ❤️

And no…

That doesn’t mean skipping through flower fields all day, either.

Nor leaning back and expecting the universe to arrange everything for you.

It does ask for action.

Just not the strained kind.

It’s slowly turning your little boat until it sails with your current again.

That sounds childishly simple.

Yet we’re hardly used to it.

We are steeped in the idea that moving forward requires hard work.

But alignment…

makes so much simpler what once cost so much effort.

Because you listen to what brings you to life.

To that inner voice that has known what’s true for far longer than your head has.

To what makes you larger, not smaller.

To who truly meets you, and not just themselves in you.

To freedom, instead of fear.

And I notice I’m getting closer to it…

…when music makes me sing and move again.

…when I feel like getting lost again, out walking.

…when my eye keeps landing on words and symbols that radiate love.

…when a butterfly lands on my shoulder.

Or when my little one dances with me in the kitchen without a trace of self consciousness, taking the lead as if he were a professional tango dancer.

Wonderful. ♥️

Because then I feel it again too, and it isn’t merely a rational memory: the happiness of the joyful mother and woman I want to be.

So, are you looking for me?

You’ll find me in my own current.

And that current, remarkably often, carries me close to the glow of the sun. ☀️

❣️

Love,

Always,

Maaike❣️

If these words resonated with you, I’d love to hear your thoughts. Feel free to share this essay with someone who might need it today. ❤️

Love in Action – Maaike

I give words to what connects & what separates us.

To moments that move us.

To what builds bridges between hearts & people.

In the hope of creating a little more love &  connection.

For everyone who has ever struggled to understand someone else & themselves

❣️

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