Living In Alignment With Yourself

A Spiritual Practice (free download inside)

Your body is a divine stream,
as is your spirit.

When your two great rivers merge, one voice is found
and the earth applauds
in excitement.

Shrines are erected to those songs
the hand and heart have sung
as they served
the world

with a love, a love
we cherish.

— St. John of the Cross

In the two years since I sold my home on the mountain in Colorado and moved full time into my van, I have shed the 35 extra pounds I’ve been lugging around on my body (and desperately trying to offload) for more than two decades. Now I work out on average about six days a week, and I absolutely love every moment I spend in a gym. In many ways I’m in the best shape of my life, which is a weird but wonderful thing to say at 60 years old.

Over these last two years, I have also completed the principal writing on my fantasy novel tetralogy — a project I’ve been “trying to finish” since I was in my twenties. I’ve penned updated versions of Books 1 & 2 (older versions were published in the early 2000s), and completed Books 3 & 4, which are totally new. The books are now in production, and I’m delighted to report that all four will be coming out later this year. I can’t wait to share them with you!

While all that was going on, I also launched this substack, and began the serious-but-joyful work of refinding my “nonfiction” writing voice again, after years of keeping the bulk of my thoughts on life and faith and culture locked away in private journals.

All this, of course, I did while traveling over thirty thousand miles back and forth across the lower forty eight, sampling the beauty and wonder of this incredible nation I get to call home.

Many of my friends have asked me how I finally summoned the willpower to make all these changes happen, especially after so many years of struggle. The first thing I tell them is that none of it had anything to do with willpower at all. Unsurprisingly, this comes as a great relief to them, just as it did to me. I think we all know by now that, as change agents go, willpower peddles the worst sort of snake oil con. It promises the power to change the world at the start of any new ambition, but quickly collapses into pitiful self-indulgence once any goal requires more than a few hours to achieve.

What made the difference for me wasn’t about forcing myself to do anything, or pretzeling myself to fit into somebody else’s structured approach or predetermined plan.

The first step, actually, was the opposite of all that: I decided to finally stop listening to any of the voices outside myself that were telling me what to do. Or how to think. Or who to be.

I had been listening to those voices all my life. Mind you, those are not all bad voices. There are a lot of good, even brilliant, voices in that mix, and I remain deeply grateful for their presence in my life. But following those voices is what had gotten me where I was, and although where I was wasn’t exactly bad, it also wasn’t really good, either. It was hard to explain, even to myself. I felt like a wild animal that had somehow got lost in a habitat that wasn’t meant for my species. I could scratch out a life in it if I tried hard enough. But try as I might, I just could not thrive there.

All the while, there was this other voice, deep inside me, often deeper than words, that kept trying to get my attention. I wasn’t sure exactly what it wanted, but I caught its melody humming in my ear from time to time. Whenever I did, its song seduced me and terrified me in equal measure.

Finally, though, in my 58th year, after I achieved nearly everything the external voices told me I should, I still found my life deeply ill-fitting in some fundamental and indefinable way. So I decided it was time to listen to the one voice in the great cacophony of voices that I had most stubbornly avoided for fear of what it might say.

My own voice. My true voice. The voice that could, potentially, turn my whole life upside down.¹

“All holiness is about learning to hear the voice of your own soul,” wrote John O’Donohue in his classic work, Beauty. “It is always there and the more deeply you learn to listen, the greater surprises and discoveries that will unfold.”

I found this to be true.

As for how I listened, I created my own practice of self-inquiry, adapted from my study of the Enneagram. I call it “The Four Centers of Presence,” and, if you’re interested, you can download it right here:

“The Four Centers of Presence” Practice

For those who don’t know, in addition to being a writer, I’m also a coach. It’s how I make my living, actually, so my writing doesn’t have to bear that burden. I’ve been coaching professionally for over twenty years, and I absolutely love it. A few years ago, I got trained in the Enneagram with Integrative9, and became a Certified Practitioner. That was a game changer for me, both professionally and personally. There is so much richness to the Enneagram, I could talk about it for days. But one aspect in particular unlocked something for me that changed everything about the way I do life. It’s called the Centers of Intelligence.

The basic idea is fairly straightforward: We each have different centers of intelligence within us — Head, Heart, and Gut — and they aren’t always in agreement with one another. We’ve all experienced this in moments of internal conflict. Your head says to go one way, your heart says to go another, and your gut tells you to go a complete different direction than the other two. Typically when this happens, we give preference to whichever voice we personally value most, or whichever voice our “tribe” (i.e. work, home, religion, community, nation, etc.) says we should heed. The problem is no matter what we do in these situations, we’re always acting at least partly out of alignment with ourselves. We are in effect ignoring, or at worst betraying, some vital aspect of who we are. Do this often enough, over a long enough period of time, and we will inevitably find ourselves living a life that is far out of alignment with the life we want to be living…and, I would argue, far out of alignment with the life we are meant to be living…like an animal stuck in a habitat it wasn’t designed for.

As a person of faith, I added a fourth center of intelligence — spirit — to my own practice of inquiry. Then, every morning, I would follow the practice I created in the PDF I’ve linked above. When I first started out, to help me weed out all the external voices as much as possible, I would also hold one additional question in mind throughout the exercise:

“How would you answer this question if no one else got a vote?”

As I implemented the practice over the first few months, the main thing I noticed was how out of alignment I was with myself, especially when it came to my body. I had spent years ignoring my body’s wisdom. Having been raised in a body-shaming home, and having experienced sexual abuse as a boy, I had learned to see my body primarily as a burden I had to bear. It was something to be ashamed of, something I had to manage and control. Through this practice, however, I began to recognize the deep wisdom my body held for me, and, ironically, how it was that exact sort of grounded “body wisdom” I most needed in order to find my way off of the false tracks I had been racing down and set my feet at last on my own true path.

O’Donohue again:

“To enter into the gentleness of your own soul changes the tone and quality of your life. Your life is no longer consumed by hunger for the next event, exerience or achievement. You learn to come down from the treadmill and walk on the earth.”

The more I listened to the voice of my Body, my Heart, my Head, and my Spirit, the more I found myself moving toward new sweet, previously unmapped landscapes where all four voices aligned. I discovered a Great Secret: that when you find that place, or that work, or that relationship, or that way of engaging your life where all four aspects of your intelligence — Body, Heart, Head, and Spirit — sing out in full alignment, then, my friend, you have found your True Path.

As I began to walk my own True Path, I started naturally doing the things that had been such a horrendous struggle for me to do when I was stuck on the “not right” road. I lost the weight. I finished the novels. I launched the substack. It’s not that it has all been effortless. I still have to work at things. But I’ve never had to force anything. Not even once. It’s like that beautiful ancient Chinese principle of Wu Wei: Effortless Action. There’s a kind of gravity that is pulling me toward my desired ends, the same way gravity pulls a river toward the sea. All I have to do is listen for that place of deep alignment within myself, and when I find it, no matter what it is or what it is asking of me, I just need to surrender to it.

Here are some more words on the subject from other writers that have inspired me:

“There is something in every one of you that waits and listens for the sound of the genuine in yourself. It is the only true guide you will ever have. And if you cannot hear it, you will all of your life spend your days on the ends of strings that somebody else pulls. “— Howard Thurman

"We must make the choices that enable us to fulfill the deepest capacities of our real selves." — Thomas Merton

“Our first job is to see correctly who we are, and then to act on it. That will probably take more courage than to be Mother Teresa. To be really faithful to that truth is utterly difficult and takes immense courage and humility…The most courageous thing we will ever do is to bear humbly the mystery of our own reality.” –Richard Rohr

"Healing may not be so much about getting better, as about letting go of everything that isn't you—all of the expectations, all of the beliefs—and becoming who you really are." — Rachel Naomi Remen

“Now with God’s help, I shall become myself.” — Soren Kierkegaard

Of course, I’m still new to this True Path. I have a lot left to learn. But I’m eager to learn it.

Anyway, I hope you find this helpful. If you did, please share it with someone else you think might also be encouraged.

May we each find our True Path in the year ahead.

This is the Way,

Michael

1. It kinda did. But in a way that was really, really good.