Aligning...

“Anything you lose by speaking your truth, isn’t a loss, it is an alignment”

Today’s quote kind of pisses me off.  What if something is a loss AND an alignment?  I mean, just because something aligns doesn’t mean it isn’t painful.  And my life is full of cycles of coming into and falling out of alignment.  In fact, so much so that it is like when you take your car to the shop and they  “align” it and then you leave the parking lot and hit a gigantic pothole and then your all fucked up again...that happens to me with the chiropractor also...like a lot.

I find myself struggling with this toxic positivity that attempts to reframe loss as something that is pain free, or should be.  Like if we label it something else, then we can usher ourselves through the change or growth without all that attendant messy pain shit.  And like somehow that should be the goal...

Somehow if you are doing it “right” then you are leveling up past the pain of the growth you are experiencing...

It is very hard to speak your truth.  I mean, who really does this all the time?  Um, no one!  Not one single person I know.  We all shave off truth in order to get along, not blow shit up and get through the motherfucking day.  And we often do this just to avoid the pain of the truth we are telling landing on us or someone we care about.

I also believe that when we tell the truth, the hard truth, not brutally but with an honest sincerity to be ourselves and allow the other person to be who they are too, then we also create an opportunity for both of us to align better and more completely with what is “right” for us.  And by “right” I do not mean good or holy or conventional or even wholesome.  Sometimes, in fact, a great deal of the time, I only arrive at my truth when I am unafraid to be unpopular, left out, discarded, mislabeled, judged and left.  It is when I can get to the place where my own truth is inescapable by me, and about me, that I am able to align better with what is best for me.   And historically, what is best for me is not without a great deal of attendant pain.  I just don’t pick the easy lessons...or people, or paths.  I am a contrarian to my core and I am going to pick the longest line at the grocery store but only when I am in a fucking hurry.  I am going to pick the hardest person in the world to date and then leave the others behind.  That is just who I am.

But oh how I will learn.  With a tremendous amount of pain and anxiety and wringing of hands, but oh, fuck, how I will learn...and align. And pain is just the natural outgrowth of this process for me.

Sometimes I look at how far I've come and I am amazed...then in the very next thought, I am embarrassed by how far I haven’t come...like at all.  But what I do see every single time is how much I have aligned with what is right for me, that is in alignment with the truths I hold to be revealed as self evident.  

My life has been a continued Declaration of Independence, my own, from all the things people tried to heap on me and all the shit I buried myself under.  And each act of defiance and reclamation and alignment has been about brining myself closer to who I truly am, instead of the nicely dressed up con of who I want you to think I am.

There is truth in alignment but there is also truth in losing alignment.  In fact, I am pretty sure the only way I have ever gotten any kind of alignment is by finding out that my alignment is completely gone and I have lost my way, again, still. And that requires a herculean amount of truth telling.

And I have lost a lot of things...things that at the time didn’t seem like a loss, but that I later came to view that way.  And many things that I experienced as a great fucking loss at the time that today I view in some sort of hallowed loss extravaganza that was really only the beginning of a great becoming.

Who the fuck knows...I just know, for me, that loss is part of truth and alignment.  And so far anyway, I can’t have one without the others.  They are all forever intertwined and related and mixed-up together.  I can’t separate out truth and loss and the alignment that happens when I am strong enough to withstand the pain of my own revelations.

Life appears to be this series of constant and repetitive micro adjustments that lead, on some days, to these great sweeping shifts...in perspective, in relationship, in communion with God and your truest, highest self...and it is all incredibly beautiful and exquisitely painful.  And it cannot ever be any other way...

Not for you.

Not for me.

Aligning, losing alignment, truth telling and loss are all inextricably interwoven and to remove one, or at least attempt to, is to short change yourself of all the true and lasting benefit of the total life living experience...

Again.

Still.

Fuck.

Ouch.