STRENGTHEN Your Somatic Alignment | LIVE with Steven Jaggers
Steven Jaggers presents a framework for personal alignment built on three human needs: Being (rest and presence), Becoming (growth), and Belonging (connection). He defines alignment as the intersection of intention and attention, and teaches somatic breathwork and journaling as core practices to strengthen it.
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Moments for everyone to hop on here. How is your new year going so far? Would love to hear if anybody had any other realizations from last week. If you tuned in around intentions, the polarity of intentions, as always, let me know where you're tuning in from. Love to see. I appreciate that my vibe. Vibes don't lie. There is a topic probably next week that I'm going to go into is attunement, and that's the ability to read energy. Right. We use this language called reading someone's vibe or someone has good vibes or someone has bad vibes. What that's speaking to is nervous system communication, the electrical system where your body plugging in and tuning into another person and they can, they can feel, they can feel your vibe. So that's probably the best compliment that someone can give me. So I appreciate that. I'm also going live on YouTube as well. What's up YouTube? Thanks for tuning in. Appreciate that. We got South Africa, we got Australia, Latvia, Iraq, Nigeria. It always blows my mind how much of a global family this is. So definitely stick around to the end. I will take you through a little alignment exercise. But before we dive in, I would love to. Yeah. If anybody wants to share or has anything around their New Year's intentions. If you tuned in last week and had some more clarity on your one word, on the polarity of your one word. One of the other things that I did for my own New Year's intentions, journaling and really, you know, setting my alignment for, for the year is tuning into the three things that all humans desire, that all of life desires. And I highly recommend writing these down because it's a, it's a powerful framework for you to take a look at all of the areas in your life. And that framework is being, belonging and becoming. These are the three essential things that we need. It's the three essential nutrients being your ability to just be, to relax, to not feel like there is always things that you have to do or get done. Most of us struggle tremendously with this in the West. Being, belonging, becoming. I'm gonna break each of those down and I'm gonna give you some ideas on how to journal and look at these areas of your life. This has helped me so much because where am I out of balance in one of these three areas? So your ability to just be, to feel enough, to feel more than enough in your beingness, a lot of your self worth, your self value, do you feel that is as if you were to not perform, do anything like one of the Things for me is with somatic breathwork that has become a part of my identity that I. We naturally identify ourselves with the things that we do. But can you feel that you are enough just by being? Are you able to be with another person? And like I said in the beginning, when you are attuning to each other and you are with somebody who feels so comfortable in their ability to just be, there is a relaxation, there is a level of presence, there's a level of depth, there's a level of magnetism that comes from a person that is just able to just be. There's not even any distort distortion in their field. And this goes to like why we want to process our own trauma and why we want to discharge it. Why breath work is a powerful modality. To be able to. To relax into our being is because when we have unresolved stuff, it's constantly pulling at our ability to just be. And that is an essential nutrient that we need. Especially if you're a practitioner, because healing happens in the presence of an empathetic witness. If you are not able to just be, then you will not be able to be an empathetic witness. There's a desire for us to just be able. Be able to be. Things like meditation help with this. Things like breath work, obviously, practicing relaxation, practicing. Now, some of the other things that pull at my ability to just be is my inability to be okay with smart space. Like I constantly need to be looking at my phone. I constantly, constantly need to have external stimulus. Those all, all of those things pull at your ability to just be in alignment with yourself. Secondly, let's go to. We'll go to becoming and then we'll go to belonging. How many of you feel like this driving force inside of you that you need to become somebody? Probably all of you. There is a natural drive inside of you to grow. It's the same force that grows your hair. It's the same force that grows your body, grows your muscles, digests your food, repairs your cells. Life has an innate ability or an innate desire to crowd. There's a strife inside of you that wants to become somebody. And especially in our world in the west, we have become out of balance with our ability to just be and relax and not feel like there's this constant to do list that's just hanging over our head that keeps us in this sympathetic state where we're just going and going and doing all the time. So it's this balance between being and becoming. Because you all want to be. We all want to Become something realizing and journaling is your. Your own becoming. Is the energy of your becoming in balance? Is it in alignment with your being? These are powerful things to journal to like. One of my main missions is to help people realize the beauty in self inquiry. There is so much beauty in this process of self inquiry I spent. I guess I'll use Fish as an example for those of you that don't know. Fish is co founder of Somatic Breath Work. He's an incredible practitioner, incredible human, one of the most well traveled people that I know. He's been to like 94 countries. He's got me beat by a lot. He said he spent the first half of his life traveling externally and traveling all over the world. And Somatic Breath Work gave him. He used the example of. It was his travel agent to his internal world. He realized there is a vast infinite space. That is so rich. Yes, Andrew Fisher is his name. You can check him out on Instagram. His name is Fish Fisher. He's co founder of. He's very wise. He's a wise, wise human. I'm so grateful for him. But he said Somatic Breathwork gave him an opportunity to. It acts like a travel agent to your internal world. It allows you to explore the depths of your own being. Like your internal being, your internal becoming. What is the driving force? If you tuned in last, if you tuned in last week, you know that your intention, your internal tension, this driving force of what moves you into the world, it's so important for you to identify that because if not, then it's going to be. It's going to be driving you, right? If we're not living intentional, then and we're just going to be driven by an unseen force that will control our life and then we'll call it fate. Very similar to what Carl Jung was pointing out. Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will control your life and you will call it fate versus actually having free will over your life. Choosing your intention, choosing your internal driving force, your internal tension. Having your alignment between your beingness, being able to relax and enjoy life, being able to spend most of your life in a relaxed state without this pressure that you put on yourself that you need to get things done or you need to become somebody. So we got being, we got belonging and we have becoming done. Becoming and being. What about belonging? How many of you feel on here that you feel like you belong? You feel like you have places and spaces that you belong and are those healthy places and spaces? Are those places and spaces that you belong? Are they in Alignment with who you are being and becoming. Right there is an essential. This is the essential nutrient of community. One of, I think the greatest purposes of being human is to commune is to connect. Belonging is a sense of connection. It's a sense of integration. What am I connected to? Who are the people that I'm connected to? What are the communities that I'm involved in? What are the ways in which I show up for those communities? You know, I asked myself, why do we do this type of work? In general, it's to develop relationships. First off, the relationship with yourself, which this process, the beauty of self inquiry is developing a deep relationship to yourself, balancing your beingness with your becoming. And then the relationships externally. Do you feel like you belong? Do you have a place that you belong? And so it's a beautiful thing to journal on this and to sit with this in meditation or in breathwork. And I would honestly look and categorize each three of those parts of my life. For me, I feel like I have a lot of becoming energy. I have a lot of belonging energy. My being energy is a little bit out of balance. There is a block sometimes to be able to just relax into all that I am and to realize that. Let me know if you. If you found this of value. This is a powerful framework that I take people through their beingness, their becoming and their belonging. Healing is. Healing happens in the presence of an empathetic witness. It happens when we feel like we belong and we're seen and we're heard by someone who can just be there for us. And then we can tap into our own innate becoming. Something interesting around becoming. For myself, I always think about the. The. The understanding of an acorn. An acorn has the imprint inside of it that it's gonna become an oak tree. It doesn't have to. It doesn't have to strive. I mean, it might have to strive, like physically. It doesn't have to figure out what it's meant to become. You don't have to figure out what you. You're meant to become because you already are becoming. It's imprinted inside of you. It's imprinted in the mathematics of your being. Your body, your being already knows what you're going to become most of the time. You need to get out of the way. How many of you feel like you've been in your own way of your becoming, your being? Let me know if this is resonating with you. So I'm going to shift gears for a moment now that we kind of have that framework of Being, belonging, becoming. Let's shift into alignment. What does alignment mean? Let me know if you. One of my favorite practices is defining words. Let me know if you, if you want to try to define alignment. What does it mean to be in alignment as a human? I talked a little bit about this last week. Lorna said that's the part of my intention I set last week. Getting out of my way. You already know what you're meant to become. Just let it take, let it, let it, let it flow naturally within you. There is a one thing that I heard from Jordan Peterson the other day, and whether or not you agree with him or not, there's things I agree with him, there's things I don't agree with him. One of the things he said was that truth is the truth is the greatest journey you'll ever take. Truth is the greatest journey you will ever take. Meaning that can you be truthful with everyone that's around? You can live your truth. Can you be honest? Radical honesty, Even if it might hurt somebody, even if it might not be what they're wanting, like what an adventure that would be if we were all 100% truthful. Because most of the time, most of us have people pleasing energy. And part of our makeup is to, is to hold things back so that we feel, still feel a part of a tribe so we're not like ostracized. But imagine if you were honest with every single human that came into to your life. Imagine if you were honest with yourself and you operated from that place. That's what it means to be in alignment, to be expressing your truth. So alignment as a skill, it is actually a skill that you develop to be in alignment. It's not just a state, but it's a skill that you develop. Because to be in alignment is a dynamic process. Life is dynamic. Life is not. Not still. There is no such thing as stillness because everything is moving even if you're sitting still. I have a kind of an issue with, you know, a lot of people when they meditate, they say we'll just become still. But really it's actually not about that. It's about becoming slow. It's about becoming slow so you can become sensitive. It's about becoming sensitive so that you can become full of sense. It's about becoming full of sense so you can become fully alive. Because to be fully sensitive is to be fully alive. The two ways we block ourselves from feeling are the two ways we block ourselves from being alive. Because we feeling is being alive. Two ways we block ourselves is we move faster. When something stressful happens, we move faster. Oh, I got a deadline, all right, I'm going to move faster. We move faster and we get harder. Wall off. Those are the two ways that we block ourselves from feeling. We wall off because whatever it is, is, is too much for us to feel. And then we move faster because maybe we outreach run it. So what are the ways that we cultivate more aliveness within ourselves is to become softer and to become slower and now to become soft. It doesn't mean that you're becoming weak. It means that you're becoming flexible. I look at a tree that if a tree is stiff, it'll break but still snap. But if you're like bamboo, you can bend, you can move your dynamic, that's alignment. When I, you know, coming from a body work background, a lot of people don't realize that I was a neuromuscular therapist at one point in my life. I was doing a lot of postural rehabilitation with people. I use a lot of cranial sacral therapy, polarity therapy. I, you know, I ran an injury rehab center. I taught anatomy and kinesiology and physiology for multiple years. So when you think about alignment, think about posture. Now you have energetic posture. The way you carry yourself. Energetic posture has a lot to do with your ability to be, your ability to relax and your becoming and your ability to belong. But alignment is a dynamic process because you're never going to be in perfect posture. There is no such thing as perfect posture because life is throwing things at you and you're going to have stressors and you're going to have different things that you're dealing with. And then someone's going to email you and then, you know, you're going to, someone's going to judge you and then you're going to have a hardship and then things are going to be great. And life is this beautiful fluctuation of breath and, and out, up and down, all around. And so how could you say that posture is one static position? It's not when you're in alignment, it means that when you get thrown a curveball, you can bring yourself back into alignment. It's a dynamic process. Do you have the skills developed to bring yourself back into alignment? Do you have the skills to know when your system is dysregulated? Because life is dysregulation, you're going to be dysregulated. But can you bring yourself back into, into a regulated state? That is the skill of alignment and that is how you know you're Growing because you are going to become dysregulated, and that's a good sign. That means you're growing. That means life is stressful. Now. Can you rise up to the challenge? Can you develop new, new patterns to be able to handle that load? And that's an aspect of your automatic alignment. That's where the beauty of self inquiry comes in. Do you know what your baseline is? Do you know what your intention is? Do you know who you are becoming? Can you relax into your becoming? Do you know where you belong? Do you know the tribe that aligns with you? Do you know the people you want to surround yourself with? Are you being truthful with yourself around that? Let me know if this is landing for you. I think, you know, as I continue to dive into, like, human design, I'm a projector, by the way, for those of you that find human design interesting. Sometimes it's hard for me to do lives because I don't have a lot of feedback necessarily. I'm good at plugging into people and playing off of the feedback. So, yeah, I just felt like I'd throw that out there. Alignment is the intersection of your intention and your attention. Do you have control over it? Another aspect of alignment is congruence. Congruence means that all of you is communicating the same. Same thing. It means that your words are speaking the same thing as your actions are speaking the same thing as your thoughts. Everything is congruent. And when someone is congruent, their body and their being lines up and it just. Perfect posture and things will just start to like. A lot of people talk about manifestation. I believe that's a byproduct of alignment. When you are. When you are in alignment, things will start to manifest. Things, opportunities will just start to come. You'll start to meet the people. Because you become a magnet. Because all of your being is communicating that this is who I am and this is who I'm becoming and this is where I belong. Right? Take the adventure of truth. Take the adventure of truth. Especially if you had a lot of trauma growing up and you had a household that was very dysregulated and you had. You had to protect yourself as a child if you had to protect yourself. Well, a lot of the times we develop these fawn responses or we develop these. We develop these responses that we have to hide our truth because our truth is not safe. And when our truth isn't safe, we learn how to morph into whatever the external world is wanting us to be. And then you're that acorn that never really gets to evolve into the oak tree that you were meant to be be. That's what I want for you. That's what I want for me. There's been a lot of times in my life where I've been out of alignment and you're gonna spend a most, most of your majority out of alignment. But can you bring yourself back and how much time does it take you to bring yourself back? That's what really matters. I love that. Joanne, your tree's growing. You know who you are, you know who you're becoming and you know you belong. Those are powerful affirmations to say I know who I am, I know who I'm becoming. I know where I belong. Say that out loud. Let every cell in your body feel that. I love doing these lives with you all. We're going to the depths here today. Wednesday Lives. Let's see. I would love to as we kind of start to wrap this up a little bit would love so working on a schedule for these lives and we're actually going to be be planning out different topics. If there are certain topics that you want to hear that you would find because usually I just tune into what's alive for me in the moment and then I share from that place. But if there are certain things that you would like to dive into and dive into more definitely message us, message me. We got quite a few people in the popping on here at the last minute so let me wrap up everything that I've kind of dived into. So obviously last week we went through intentions, New Year's intentions, the alignment of your intention, your attention. Another way to look at this is to look at the different areas of your life being, your beingness. Can you relax into all that you are belonging, you know where you belong. Are you truthful with where you belong? Are you truthful with your boundaries? Are you able to say yes and no to things that are in alignment with you and are you able to relax into your becoming and that allows you to when you get out of alignment because that is is what life is. We're gonna have things thrown at us. Can you bring yourself back? Alignment is not perfect posture. There's no such thing as perfect posture. There's no such thing as you being in alignment all the time. So let go of that. But do you have the skills, do you have the self inquiry practices that allow you to come back into alignment and how much time does it take you because that is where your energy gets drained. If you spend a lot of time out of alignment it's going to drain your energy. It takes a tremendous amount of energy from our nervous system to hold up a facade, to hold up a life that is not true to ourselves. I said earlier, why do we do this work? It's all for relationships. It's all for the relationship to ourselves so that we can relate to other people. It's all about connection, communion, community, communication. Communication is the number one modality beyond any everything. And that's the basis of what I teach in somatic breath work is all the different ways in which we communicate. And that's why I find the nervous system fascinating, because that's the deepest level of communication that's going on. We are communicating electrically. Before any words come out of my mouth. You're picking up on that, right? That is nervous system communication. It's the electrical bubble around you that can get big and. Or it can get small, depending on the state that you're in. If you are in a state of fear and contraction, your system will be ignited. Your nervous system, your electromagnetic field of your body will be small. You are in alignment. You know, you're able to relax into who it's all. It's never a forcing that. That's another part of being, belonging, becoming. You never have to force any of those things because you are already being, you are already becoming, you are already belonging. Can you get out of your own way within those? And then how. And the skill of aligning yourself to that is when you get out of that, when you are not in alignment, how long does it take you to get back? Do you have the practices, the rituals, the routines? This is this. These are what called routines. Basically they're rituals to set the rhythm of your life and look at it like music. If your life is a symphony of sound and based on. Based on your things that you repeatedly do, right? Like a drum, your rituals, your routines set your rhythm. And what rhythm? Rhythm creates momentum. You know what momentum creates? Momentum creates energy, Momentum creates movement, Momentum creates power. I hope you guys got a lot from this. Thank you so much for trusting me, for listening, for taking sweet precious moments out of your day to spend with me. It truly means so much. I appreciate your support. This has grown tremendously. It continues to. It requires so much of me. But there's nothing I'd rather do do with my time before it's my time and to show up for all of you here, right here, right now. So it means so much that it resonated or landed this way. You. And even if it just resonated and landed with one of you. That's okay. I hope you have a beautiful, beautiful rest of your day. Please message us, check in, let us know what you'd like to see more on these lives. And I'll just keep sharing from my heart. I appreciate that.
