Aligning your actions and behaviors with your priorities is the ultimate goal of authentic connection. Living in alignment means you have integrated your values and your daily reality. You live with intention, in harmony with your most profound truths. This the source of our greatest satisfaction and peace of mind.
Live with Intention By Integrating Your Life
The Indian philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti described alignment as living an “integrated” life:
“To integrate is to bring together, to make complete. If you are integrated, your thoughts, feelings, and actions are entirely one, moving in one direction; they are not in contradiction with each other. You are a whole human being, without conflict. That is what is implied by integration.”
So of course the 10 million dollar question is, how do we get there? The answer is different for everyone, but there are some simple tools you can use to nurture a meaningful and mindfully created existence. This means tending to yourself each day by vigilantly saying “no” to activities that do not fit you, and “yes” to activities that align with your soul. It comes down to making sure you allocate your time wisely, mindfully and intentionally.
Make A Plan To Live With Intention
By aligning your everyday behaviors and actions with your values on both the macro and micro levels, you can achieve a robust and sustainable sense of well-being that transcends ordinary happiness. Put simply, this means looking closely at how you spend your time, then making small changes to maximize the amount of time you spend doing meaningful activities every day. It’s most effective to tackle things in this order:
- Cut out meaningless activities. (This has two effects: removing drains on your energy, and making space for more meaningful acts)
- Create meaning for the activities that seem meaningless but cannot be avoided.
- Do more of the activities you find meaningful.
Time Allocation: The Key To Intentional Living
Failing to examine and maximize your time allocation can stall your journey of intentional living for years. If you’ve done the work of figuring out what is meaningful to you, and have a good inventory of your values and their relative priority, then you have the formula you need to live in tune with your own truth and feel more connected on a daily basis.
Making changes takes both energy and persistence, but your efforts to bring your life into alignment will make you feel that you actually have more energy and time. When we are deeply connected to what we are doing, abundance is ours: the time, energy, motivation, money we need for life all tend to show up. Joy, fulfillment, and tranquility are the welcome by-products of doing what brings us meaning.
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