How I'm Aligning My Work With My Values

The last several years of my life (and perhaps, its entirety) have been about the adjustments required to genuinely embrace my individual and purposeful experience here.

Whether I’m the one making radical changes or the one presented with radical choices, there’s been a lot of “alignment” work (and re-alignment to follow).

When I say “alignment” I’m talking about the process of ensuring that what we do and what we value is a cohesive experience. ALIGNMENT is the ‘lining up’ of your life, your work, and your day-to-day experience with what your Soul holds most valuable.*

You can (often) determine what you value by noticing what you’re doing now… and what you’d like to do next: 

• Does your life right now line up with what you value? 

• Do the dreams you hold line up with what you value? 

• Do you know what you value?

THE PROCESS of aligning your actions with what you value requires your Orientation toward what you want and what you believe - and then your (regular!) Calibration toward those things. 

To Orient yourself toward what you value most (what you want and what you believe): Imagine pointing your bow and arrow toward those things.** 

To Calibrate (and Re-Calibrate!) toward what you value most (what you want and what you believe) - even if / when those things change: Imagine making small adjustments to your posture, your hand placement, and your breath as you point your bow and arrow toward those things.

Sometimes you will make active choices to align (or not) with your Soul-Self and her Values. Other times you will be presented with Radical Challenges that require your active choices to align (or not) with your Soul-Self. 

And whether we make a Radical Change or we’re faced with a Radical Challenge, we can actively make choices to align with ourselves (or not).

What I’m currently grappling with (and a life-lesson I’m still learning) is that ALIGNMENT DOESN’T ALWAYS FEEL GOOD.*** 

• My exit from graduate school seems like a Sacred Re-Calibration toward my deepest Soul-Values…  but it doesn’t feel good. 

• Losing a pregnancy last month seems like a Divine Initiation for taking my next, big, scary steps into my Voice as a writer… but it doesn’t feel good. 

In fact, both of these things feel like shit. 

And yet. 

I have never felt so impassioned in my Work-Life; I have never allowed so much balance within my Partnership with my husband (inside both easy and hard moments); and I have never been so confident in myself as a Mother to my girls, as primary decision-maker for their early childhoods.

The active choices I’m making inside this Radical Shift in my life don’t feel “good” so much as “right.” 

And that’s ALIGNMENT: the kind of ‘hard work’ that feels important, purposeful, necessary. The kind of ‘lining up’ that cracks open possibilities that are my birthright (and yours, too).

with so much love,

alycia buenger

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A FEW FOOTNOTES -

*Alignment isn’t always and completely possible inside an interconnected world plagued by patriarchal and racist systems that create an un-level framework for “choice.” My belief is that aligning our actions with our values is a divine birthright that’s been re-structured as “privilege” within our culture. But this is an untruth that requires our collection rebellion: Alignment with Soul is our birthright.

**This “bow and arrow” metaphor stems from a beautiful passage about parents and children from The Prophet by Khalil Gibran.

***Thank you to my dear friend, Kati Overmier, for helping me remember this Truth again and again.