Three Kinds of Self-alignment
The idea of self-alignment comes up in various ways in personal development circles. In my work, self-alignment plays a central role and means something specific.
Self-alignment is related to self-respect, self-knowledge, self-esteem, self-realization, self-love, and many more of the qualities that we might recognize as valuable. But in the way that I teach it, it is something distinct, primary, and of utmost importance for people wanting to create satisfying, joyful, and successful lives.
When I talk about Self-alignment I am speaking of three things:
Aligning Your Three Operating Systems
First, there’s the alignment between your “three selves”:
- your cognitive self (thinking)
- your emotional self (feeling)
- your sensational (somatic) self.
These are like three human operating systems, each with its own kind of language and functioning. When all three are well understood, well maintained, and well aligned, a human being can operate at full capacity, with maximum joy, effectiveness, and well-being.
These three operating systems can also be understood as three distinct aspects of self, three modes of consciousness, and three styles of engaging the self, others, and the world. I refer to them as emotion, cognition, and sensation, and I help people understand and inhabit each one according to its unique characteristics and functions.
Most people are accustomed to relying primarily on one of these three operating systems or modes, occasionally engaging a second if absolutely necessary, and ignoring the third altogether.
The nature of these three operating systems is that no single one can be used anywhere close to its full potential unless all three are finely tuned and harmonized with each other.
The possibility exists to master all three, and to learn to move comfortably and nimbly between them, using each one intentionally and to maximum benefit.
The highest benefit and best use of each of the three human operating systems is in relation to the self first and foremost: When I engage my cognitive system maximally, I am thinking pleasing thoughts about my self. When I engage my emotional system maximally, I am feeling good about my self. When I engage my sensational system maximally, I am feeling good within my self. When I can feel the distinctness of each of these modes, and enjoy them in unison, I am in self-alignment.
From here I have clarity about how to understand and engage my self, and from this clarity flows my clarity about how to understand and engage others, how to understand and engage the world, and how to understand and engage all of the various topics, circumstances, and experiences that arise in my life.
Aligning Desire with Feeling Good
The second kind of self-alignment that I teach is the alignment between your desire and how you feel about your desire.
Desire is a cornerstone of human experience and is the primary evolutionary force shaping our individual and collective lives, so it’s worth understanding and engaging it with clarity and intention.
Here’s the simplest way to put it: When you want something and you feel good (eager, expectant, deserving, clear, easeful, certain, optimistic, hopeful, peaceful) about wanting it, you are in self-alignment. When you want something and feel bad (uncertain, doubtful, undeserving, guilty, ashamed, confused) about wanting it, you are out of self-alignment.
There is much value in finding ways to feel good about wanting, and in cleaning up whatever doubt or ambivalence you might have inadvertently introduced along the way. You will never extinguish your desire, and so you are wise to get into a good-feeling relationship with it. A lot of my client work focuses on helping people develop good-feeling, satisfying, and productive relationships with their desire, and I’ve developed some very effective tools for this.
Aligning the Physical You and the Non-Physical You
Virtually everyone experiences their self as a physical being moving through time/space reality and interpreting their experiences via their five physical senses. From this perspective, you might seem to appear out of “nowhere” upon conception, are born, live in your physical body here on Earth for some time, and then die, disappearing again into “nowhere”.
Religion offers various ideas about an afterlife, and some bigger perspectives on our human experience. Spirituality, superstition, philosophy, and the sciences all weigh in accordingly.
But none of this is quite the same as having your own personal first-hand experience of your self as a non-physical, eternal being at the leading edge of an intelligent and ever-expanding universe. This happens sometimes through meditation or contemplative practices, sometimes through scholarship or study, sometimes through imagination, intention, and desire, and often through what might be called grace, or even just readiness.
If you have an embodied, felt sense of your self as eternal and infinite in essence, then you’ll understand what I’m talking about here. If you have a cognitive understanding of the concept I’m offering, that doesn’t go quite as deep, but it does provide some valuable point of reference.
If you’re a hardcore skeptic and believe only in physical reality, that’s totally fine. You won’t relate to this part of what I have to teach, but that’s OK. Skip it. Work with the first two.
Assuming you have some sense of your physical, temporal (temporary) self moving about for a limited time here in physical form on planet Earth (most people do), and assuming you also have some sense of your self as an eternal, non-physical aspect of an ever-expanding universe, how do you align these two aspects of self?
Do you feel peaceful and eager as you use your bio-physical apparatus to comprehend and appreciate your non-physical eternal-ness? Or do you feel doubtful and uncertain?
When you can simultaneously inhabit your physical, time/space reality AND your non-physical, boundless reality, and when this feels good, you enter an unparalleled state of expansion and clarity, and a profound kind of self-alignment.
Three Kinds of Self-Alignment, All in Alignment
Self-alignment, as I teach it, takes three primary forms as outlined above, and as each form becomes stable in you, through practice, a powerful synthesis occurs.
To be self-aligned in your three operating systems, in your feelings about your desires, and in your relationship between your physical self and non-physical self, opens the door to a new kind of clarity that is simply unavailable otherwise.
There is no end, no bottom, no upper limit on the personal growth and expansion that comes with what I am describing here. There’s no final “arrival” or absolute mastery, only endless satisfaction in the process. Learning to take full satisfaction on this journey is the art of living, and it makes an artist and a master out of anyone who wants it enough to point themselves in that direction and keep on the path.
I have been traversing this territory for some years now personally, and I am successfully guiding those who want guidance. This has become the focus of my professional work as I have evolved my therapy and counselling background into a thriving coaching practice with Self-alignment at its centre.
It Isn’t Work, It Isn’t Hard
There’s one more thing I want you to know: This journey of Self-alignment is easeful and full of joy. It is not treacherous in any way, and it is never grueling.
Those people out there repeating the mantra of “growth is hard” (bless their hearts) are doing something else, not this, which is fine of course. There are so many ways to proceed along this path of life, so many ways to grow and expand and discover, and none are wrong… but you get to choose for you.
Self-alignment as I’ve described it might seem like an immense task or monumental achievement, but it is your essence, it is who you really are. It is who you are when you don’t put obstacles in your way, when you decide that struggle, while it may have served you or felt necessary in the past, isn’t the way you want to proceed with your life.
The self-alignment I’m describing here is the most natural thing in the world, and it is a way of being that aligns you not only with your self, but with life itself… and really, as you might discover, at a certain level of perception there is no difference between the two.
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