Congruence matters. That sense of rightness that you feel in your body that lets you know that what you are doing is aligned with what is good to do.
You might think that we should act congruently all the time, yet you only need look at the daily damage to our planet home or to wars and conflicts to know we don’t collectively act with congruence. Closer to home, how many times a day to you find yourself over-riding your sense of things and doing what you think you should, ought to, need to, must etc etc, following unwritten, unarticulated ‘rules’ that from a congruent place make no sense?
It takes for us to have embodied presence for us to be attuned to what is congruent. We need to have our perceptual sense within our body, and to be listening and noticing what our physical experience is, what our intuition is saying. It’s not a complex or difficult art, it’s quite simple really, but it does require you to slow down, stop, and tune in.
A physical therapist invited me to use this approach recently with what I take into my body. To simply hold what I was planning to ingest and silently ask. I find when I relax enough my body speaks eloquently, swaying forwards or backwards in response to the invitation I’m offering. It’s been an education to notice what I really want to take in, rather than to move through my day on auto-pilot, making decisions solely from my intellect (which seems sometimes not to be so intelligent!).
Oftentimes we feel incongruence powerfully in our body. Tightening of muscles, churning stomach, instinctive drawing away or feelings or alarm, the information is all there to be taken notice of. Similarly, congruence has a powerfully settling effect, a rightness that for me is a feeling of energy and alignment, a sense of physically moving forwards, of somehow being bigger.
Do you know how you physically feel when you are congruent and incongruent? Do you pay any attention to it? If the answer to either question is no, this might be something to playfully pay attention to, there may be much to discover!
