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In this post, I want to share with you about aligning with your sacred yes. I define the term as that which makes your heart sing and your face light up when you talk about it. It’s your purpose, your passion, the reason you are here on this earth as the creation that you are. Put even more simply, it’s whatever makes you say YES! with great enthusiasm.
Monthly I chat with people about this topic. I’ve found that many aren’t sure what their sacred yes is, much less how to align with it. Here are some ways to discover what your purpose is…and how to better align with it.
Defining Alignment
Alignment is defined as “bringing something into a straight line or an easy agreement.” We are most familiar with spinal alignment associated with visits to the chiropractor. She adjusts the spine to bring it into alignment, for optimal health. As many people know, when the spine is out of alignment, we can experience pain.
On a deeper level, alignment means “discovering the essence of your being and the values by which you live”. We can live out of alignment with that essence of being or purpose. When our outer lives are out of sync with our inner lives, we live in pain as well.
Symptoms of living out of alignment include fear, loneliness, boredom, apathy, depression, confusion, restlessness, an identity crisis, feeling lost in life and and experiencing lack of motivation.
As we move into alignment, matching our desires or sacred yes with our actions and outer life, we shift into joy, peace, creativity, flow, excitement, happiness and fulfillment. We experience winks from the Divine, synchronicities and signs as guideposts that we are on the right life path.
Discovering Your Sacred Yes
So how can you discover what your sacred yes is? How do you know what your life purpose is? That’s part of the joy in the journey, discovering who we are and why we are here.
Consider these ways to learn what makes your heart sing and your face light up.
Live as Your Authentic Self
This is an important aspect of life’s journey…discovering who you are created to be and embracing that self. It seems easy and yet remembering who we are and in turn, why we are here, often appears elusive.
I believe children know, or at least live closer to their passions. Kids know what they like and don’t like. They connect with their gifts more naturally.
One of the most simple ways to align with your sacred yes is to embrace your unique gifts and talents. You instinctively do so when young. And yet, as you grow, you often lose that sense of self due the influence of others in you life. Parents or grandparents may attempt to steer you toward a different purpose. Or teachers may not understand what your gift truly is and dismiss it. Classmates may ridicule you for displaying you gift or, lacking understanding, they bully or pressure you to behave like everyone else.
Some of the saddest conversations I have with adults are those that reveal how they abandoned their dreams due to the opinions of others. The man who loved trees became an attorney because his parents discouraged him from a career as a forest ranger. And the woman who longed to be a ballet dancer grew too tall and too big, she was told. Both lost their way in life, disconnected from their truest selves.
Embracing Your Inner Child
The best way to discover your authentic self is to uncover that inner child, removing all the layers accumulated over the years that hid the gifts you were born with. How have you tried to fit in? Listening to others’ opinions about who you were, when did you silence your voice? What talents did you pack away, because others told you that you weren’t good enough? Pleasing others, when did you stop pleasing yourself?
Answering these questions, looking through photographs of your childhood, remembering what you loved as a child and hoped to do as an adult help you to reconnect with your authentic self. Be kind to yourself, as you dig deeper. Parent your inner child, if necessary. Practice extreme self care. Journal. And above all, wholeheartedly embrace that inner child and those gifts. Complete acceptance goes a long way toward helping you step into the person you are created to be.
Go Beyond Fear
While removing those accumulated layers, on the way to reconnecting with your inner child, it is common to encounter fear. Most often, in fact, the thing that keeps us from attempting that journey in the first place is the fear of what we will find.
Fear surrounds our hearts in layers as well. Keep going. Keep digging deeper. The fear of being alone is really a fear of connecting deeply with ourselves. My fear of the dark turned out to be a fear of accepting who I am and my intuitive gifts.
Once we see fear for what it really is, a form of protection, then we can face it. We don’t have to banish fear. Acknowledging it, thanking it for the protection offered and releasing it allows fear to bow and step aside.
Beyond fear, we find aspects of ourselves that we abandoned or locked away long ago. When my fear stepped aside, I found my inner child waiting, patiently. I connected again with playfulness and creativity and my desire to express myself through writing. And I recognized my intuitive abilities as gifts rather than a curse to hide away. For the first time in my life, I fully accepted myself exactly as I was, gifts, quirks and all. Doing so brought restoration and healing and alignment with my sacred yes.
Connect with Intuition
Although some are more so than others, everyone is intuitive. Call it instinct, gut response or a knowing, intuition is your inner guidance system.
Intuition allows us to know something directly without analytic reasoning. It creates a bridge between the conscious and subconscious parts of the mind and also between instinct and reason.
Learn to listen to your intuition. It becomes a deep knowing that goes beyond understanding, guiding you unerringly toward your purpose.
Free writing is a great way to tap into your intuition. Playing “random” games helps to build trust in your instincts. Meditation and energy work keep your energy centers open and your mind, body and spirit balanced.
Why is intuition important in aligning with your sacred yes? Because that powerful sense of instinctive knowing keeps you connected to your passions. When you know that you know, you are not easily persuaded to step out of alignment. You come to recognize what that alignment feels like, much as you know the rightness of your vertebrae lining up. Joy, peace and happiness replace uncertainty, anxiety and sadness. Moving out of alignment creates pain as a clue that something needs attention. Your intuition picks up on the subtle shifts before your emotions or body do. Pay attention to it.
I call it a disturbance in my spider sense, that feeling that something isn’t quite right in the web of reality around me. It is my signal to pause and go within and see what is pulling me out of alignment.
Engaging Imagination
Imagination is an important part of aligning with your sacred yes. Further defining what your unique purpose is involves following curiosity, imaginative play and creativity.
Try new things, to better understand what lights up your soul and what doesn’t. Paint, crochet, sing, travel. If somethings catches and holds your interest, continue to explore it. Writer and speaker Elizabeth Gilbert calls this the flight of the hummingbird. Hummingbirds, she says, flit from flower to flower, trying this and trying that. She shares:
“As a hummingbird person, you bring an idea from here to over here, where you learn something else and you weave it in, then you take it here to the next thing you do. Faithfully continue to follow the trail of the hummingbird and you just might look up and realize ‘I’m exactly where I’m meant to be.'”
Allow your imagination to open opportunities and bring possibilities. Play. Create many different things. Follow curiosity. Your sacred yes will appear.
Sparking Joy
I love the phrase sparking joy, popularized by organizational expert, Marie Kondo. When something sparks joy, it provides a little thrill of excitement. My granddaughter Aubrey called the feeling “ringing her bell” when she was tiny.
You know you are aligning with your sacred yes when you experience incredible joy. A feeling of intense pleasure and happiness, joy is a high level vibrational energy.
Joy begets gratitude. Aligning with your sacred YES invites joy and gratitude into your life, two powerful feelings akin to unconditional love.
When gratitude bubbles effortlessly from you, when “thank you” is your continual prayer, then you know you are living in alignment with your purpose. You are living as your authentic self.
As a method of confirming your sacred yes, pay attention to your feelings. What are you doing, when joy overflows your heart? What gratitudes do you express? Write them down, in a journal or your daily planner. Watch for patterns.
Are you most grateful and joyful when writing? Drawing? Baking goodies for others? Does teaching or helping others obtain greater health spark joy?
On the contrary, feelings of anxiety, dread or obligation are indicators you are moving away from your sacred yes. Of course we all have responsibilities and chores that do not spark joy. However, living a life that primarily brings those lower energy feelings reveals a life out of alignment.
Aligning with Your Sacred Yes
I hope you have a better idea of what your sacred yes is.
My life shifted dramatically, once I moved into alignment, with my outer reality matching who I am and my purpose for being here. I am aware enough that I immediately feel the difference, when something pulls me out of alignment. Rather than circumstances and situations defining me, my strong sense of self and my belief in what I am doing guides me.
As my journey continues, I gain more clarity. Living life beyond the edges is so much more than a tagline for my blog. Going beyond is what I am here to do, so that others know that they too can live life beyond the edges of their own comfort zones, limiting beliefs and fears.
Are you living in alignment with your sacred yes?
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