May 27, 2021
Alignment.
I can guess what you’re thinking: “Alignment” is a concept used by New Age woo-woo spiritual people and as a proud Deconverted Man, you’ve shed all belief in supernatural nonsense and therefore have no need for “alignment.”
Hang on.
While I also take issues with certain teachings in New Age woo-woo spirituality, I do think the concept of alignment is important—even vital.
Here’s the thing about alignment. It’s relatively simple to understand, but it’s incredibly difficult to actually do. To me, that’s the mark of a spiritual teaching grounded in Truth.
So what does it mean to be in alignment? Many teachers, coaches, or “gurus” drop this term and explain it in different ways, which adds to the confusion about what it really means. I’ll share with you how it was best explained to me and what I think makes the most sense.
Alignment means that there is absolute congruency between these three things:
- Your thoughts.
- Your emotions.
- Your actions.
In short, if you get all three of those things aligned, then you will be in alignment, and therefore your life will be massively improved.
When I first heard this, I thought it was too simple to be true. As I later began to realize that all Truth is simple (despite being hard to accept sometimes) I also realized that the reason why this simple definition of alignment is so difficult to achieve is because those three things are rarely aligned in any given individual.
I’ll explain.
As I’ve explained elsewhere on my blog and in my book, everything begins with a thought. That thought will then produce an emotion within you that you experience in your physiology. Obvious examples would be: excitement, fear, anxiety, joy, love, etc.
That emotion, whatever it is, will spur you to take an action. If it’s a positive emotion, you’ll likely take an action that will amplify or continue that positive emotion. If it’s a negative emotion, you’ll likely take an action to make that negative emotion cease.
Going further, the action will have a consequence—whether positive or negative—that you will ultimately be responsible for, whether you want that responsibility or not.
If you can live your entire life having those three aspects in alignment, your life will be full of positive experiences. If instead you live your life with those three aspects out of alignment, then you’re going to have a lot more problems.
That being said, most people spend a majority of their lives with their thoughts, emotions, and actions out of alignment in at least one way. Let’s break it down:
Actions Out of Alignment
Literally everyone has had the experience of thinking something which makes them feel something and then taking the exact opposite action that doesn’t align at all with what they think and feel. This could be showing up daily to a job you hate, attending a church service for a religion you no longer believe in for the sake of a still-believing spouse, or hanging out with friends who you know drag you down.
Thoughts Out of Alignment
There are plenty of people out there (you may be one of them) who take action based completely on how they feel in the moment without putting much thought into it first. While this sounds free-spirited and romantic, the reality is that it can cause you some serious chaos if you live your life like this long-term. It often results in bad financial decisions, jumping into relationships that aren’t good for you, or extreme reactionary behavior.
Emotions Out of Alignment
There are also plenty of people who are quite out of touch with their emotions. They have thoughts and take actions based on those thoughts, but they don’t really feel much inside them as they go about their day-to-day life. This results in an existence that’s hollow and task-oriented and seems to lack meaning. It lacks meaning because they didn’t first determine if their actions produced any feelings within them that guided them as to whether they were doing the right thing. These guys also aren’t in touch with their intuition and are more prone to walk right into traps that seem logical on the outside, totally oblivious to the “gut feeling” that someone else would’ve detected and therefore avoided that particular situation.
There’s something you can do to test out this alignment theory. I did this myself and it revealed so much to me about who I am and who I’m meant to be that I’d totally missed before.
Think back to a time when you were completely happy. Everything was going right. Life seemed perfect. The good ole’ days.
Somewhere along the way, that came to an end. Really think back and hone in on when, precisely, that period of your life ended. Go for a walk and do some contemplation with some calm meditative music. Go back to that time, trace it through, and pinpoint precisely when it ended. This is similar to inner child work or shadow work.
My bet is that you’ll find an instance where your thoughts, emotions, and actions clearly broke alignment.
- Maybe you took a job that wasn’t right for you.
- Maybe you moved to another city when something was telling you not to.
- Maybe you let someone who didn’t have your best interest in mind influence you to think some thoughts that weren’t true to you.
- Maybe someone started making you feel negative things that didn’t reflect reality.
- Maybe you entered into a relationship that wasn’t suited for you.
Identifying this moment will do wonders in determining what your life looks like when you’re in alignment and what happens when you break alignment.
You may push back by saying, “I could never go back to that. I have responsibilities now,” or “That was then, and this is now; I’ve made my bed and I have to lie in it.”
I’m not saying you need to recreate the exact life you had all that time ago when you were in alignment. That would be impossible. What I am saying is that you have information on the kind of life that makes you feel fulfilled and living true to yourself. Use it to guide you for the future.
This concept of alignment also explains why faith deconstruction is so painful. It totally shatters your alignment. Your thoughts (God is real) your emotions (I’m saved, I’m forgiven, I’m protected, I’m set apart, I’m loved, I’m filled with the Holy Spirit) and your actions (I worship, I attend church, I evangelize) are all trashed and thrown out of alignment. At the very beginning of deconstruction, your new thoughts (God isn’t real, the Bible is unreliable) just don’t align with emotions you still have and the actions you still want to take.
Recovery from religious trauma is thus a process of reconciling your new thoughts with new emotions you aren’t used to feeling and new actions you aren’t used to taking.