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Recently, I posted a picture on my Instagram page ( @energy_vibration) of my husband and our son, Josiah, and wrote a caption based on my personal journey from being misaligned to finally being in sync with my vision & intentions.
The response to my post was overwhelming and I was truly humbled by the outpouring of love I received from my virtual tribe. What I found most interesting, however, was how many of my followers were transparent enough to comment that they too were going/had gone through a similar journey of self-love and self-discovery.
I even got a DM asking what (in my opinion) it meant to be misaligned and it was then that I felt compelled to write a post about experiences in my life that perfectly exemplify what it means to achieve alignment after feeling somewhat lost.
From my personal experience, being misaligned can look like:
Lacking a vision for your life (future or present).
Having a vision for your life but your actions don’t necessarily align with what you ultimately want to manifest.
Your words not matching your actions.
Your relationships with others, but more importantly your relationship with Self, not aligning with your intentions & vision.
Lacking the ability to establish necessary boundaries for yourself or others in an effort to preserve your inner peace.
Let me give you more genuine examples from my own experience:
Example #1 // CAREER:
As an adult ESL instructor, I have always cherished the opportunities to work with international professionals, developing both accuracy and competence in the English language as soon as they step foot in my classroom.
Despite my sincere love for teaching, a few years ago, I left the classroom and accepted a job offer that would provide more money, more benefits and more luxuries than the classroom ever did. At that age, what did I know about following my passion? What did I know about alignment and being committed to my passion? NOTHING. So I took the job and before long, I'd gone from the fun-loving teacher I'd always been to a competitive & somewhat aggressive administrator whose job it was to secure contracts and promote our language school (by any means necessary). I became someone who I never thought I would be (think Andrea in the “Devil Wears Prada”…that was me.)
This was one of the first times in my life where I felt completely misaligned. Here I was also getting a Master’s in TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) from one of the most renowned programs in the country and yet nothing that I was learning actually translated to the work I was doing everyday. *Sigh*
Example #2 // FINANCES:
I eventually resigned from the aforementioned job in an effort to finally align myself with what was most important to my profession & took a teaching job at another local language center doing what I love.
A few months later, I got in my own way again and made the impulsive move to buy a condo. Why? Because I was still at a place in my life where the advice of others was louder than the sounds of my own voice and I found myself in a condo that wore a hefty price tag of $302,000.
Did I have that kind of money? HELL NO.
Was it a struggle making the payments every month? HELL YES.
Outside of my home, I was happy to be teaching again but that was juxtaposed with the anxiety of trying to pay the mortgage every month, all while being in grad school. I was quite literally house poor and with that came an onslaught of depression, anxiety and doubt which subsequently gave way to a weight gain of nearly 50 pounds.
I WAS LOST.
Example #3// DATING (where sh*t really hit the fan)
Since I wasn’t in a position to make sense of my career or my finances & was physically and spiritually imbalanced, my external relationships perfectly reflected that imbalance.
How could I identify who my life partner was when I could barely identify who I was?
How could I ask a man to love me when I wasn't able to love myself?
How could I ask a man to bring joy to my life when joy didn't even reside within me?
I never took time to reflect on these questions nor the answers to these questions and subsequently entered blindly into the one relationship that would bring me to my knees in depression & self-doubt.
This, however, was the beginning of my transformation.
This was beginning of my journey towards alignment.
This was the beginning of my journey towards #BecomingBree.
…Stay Tuned for Part 2…
Feel free to like, share and/or comment!
We're a community of unique experiences and I'd love to hear yours.