Tuesday's post about synchronicity, dharma, Grace or what you will, was titled "alignment" and someone emailed me to ask why. Well- I had a longer post in mind and never got around to the part that had to do with alignment. Which turned out to be a good thing, cause Kimberly left a comment that just gave me more fodder for the topic.
In the style of yoga I practice, alignment is of paramount importance. Alignment in this case meaning the joints, bones and the spine are in a productive relationship with each other. BKS Iyengar initiated this emphasis on alignment in yoga when he discovered through his own practice that proper alignment allowed the energy of the body to flow freely, whereas improper positioning caused energy blockages. Outwardly, we can observe an ease of movement when the body is in alignment.
I use this same idea when thinking about life. I think of those Grace-experiences as a result of being in alignment - when your talents, your spirit and your desires are in a productive relationship with each other. As a result, the energy flows freely in your life and there is a sense of ease to moving forward and accomplishing your dreams.
The other thing that alignment gives you is space. One of my favourite yoga teachers, Ramanand Patel, once said at a workshop, "Yoga is all about creating space." Space is necessary for movement to occur. The tendency is to collapse as we age - we actually become shorter due to compression of spinal discs and loss of space in the joints. As the body loses the space, it loses the ability to change, to move, and becomes stiff or "frozen".
And so it is with life. If you are out of alignment you become too contracted. You lose the openness, the space that allows you to move. Richard Wiseman in the article to which Kimberly linked, put it this way:
The harder they looked, the less they saw. And so it is with luck – unlucky people miss chance opportunities because they are too focused on looking for something else. They go to parties intent on finding their perfect partner and so miss opportunities to make good friends. They look through newspapers determined to find certain type of job advertisements and as a result miss other types of jobs. Lucky people are more relaxed and open, and therefore see what is there rather than just what they are looking for.
Or from a slightly different angle, life coach Laura Berman Fortgang writes in her book Now What?
Too much focus on one thing makes your vision so narrow that you miss the peripheral clues that are trying to reach you. When you believe that you (and only you) can ultimately control an outcome, you lose the tremendous asset to any dream - the mysterious power of life wanting to be on your side and provide unexpected opportunities.
See, I still want to leave room for a little magic, despite Richard Wiseman's excellent studies. How else do you explain this - when I was visiting New York this summer I had lunch with some friends, including Kimberly. After lunch, we parted and went our separate ways. About an hour later, my husband and I were in Grand Central Station trying to figure out how to get to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and I was commenting that I wished I had had more time to visit with my friends. The place was packed with people, and suddenly I hear a familiar voice. It was Kimberly. She had gone shopping after we parted and now here she was, right beside me. So we had dinner together and had a really good visit that made my trip to NYC even better. You can call it chance, but I like to think it was meant to be.
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