“When you are in alignment with the desires of your heart, things have a way of working out.” Iyanla Vanzant
All of our marriage vows sounded something like this:
“I, ____, take you, ____, to be my lawfully wedded (husband/wife), to have and to hold, from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, until death do us part.”
Then the priest or pastor will say aloud, “What God has joined, men must not divide.”
I’ve never had a client whose marriage ended that didn’t struggle with this commitment they made, to some degree. As I did, too.
We enter into that agreement with the best of intentions.
So what do we do when the marriage falls apart around us and we try to reconcile the truth of a possible divorce and marriage vows we took?
In our Western culture, we are taught to believe that life is supposed to be hard, work is supposed to be difficult, life sucks, and then you die. As ridiculous as that sounds, we have likely absorbed some that bs subconsciously and made decisions and judgments based on them.
We are the ones who create the judgement about what’s right and wrong, or good and bad. These are fear-based judgments to make people feel better, more secure, more worthy, more whatever. They weren’t necessarily created out of hate; they were created from fear.
Our society, our families, our churches attempt to give us the only perfect roadmap (the singular, right way), rather than teaching us to know and trust our own internal guidance systems. We’re taught that we should believe the rules outside of ourselves, rather than the navigation system within us (an instinctive system that we were born with and couldn’t get rid of if we tried).
We’re taught that our steps are black or white, right or wrong, good or bad.
I prefer to think of our steps as being in alignment or out of alignment with who we really are and who we were created to be.
If we take a step and it feels good, we’re in alignment with who we’ve become and are becoming. If we take a step and it feels uncomfortable and painful, that’s a message for us that we’re out of alignment.
We’re not wrong.
We’re not bad.
We didn’t fail.
We’re not going to some proverbial hell.
We’re just out of alignment.
It’s information. That’s it. That information we’ve being given is trying to guide us back into alignment, if but we would only listen.
What If?
What if there was no such thing as right or wrong? What if it was all about being on the path or off the path, and the way we knew the difference was through our level of ease or discomfort?
Maybe the discomfort you’ve been feeling inside your marriage has simply been God trying to guide you back to your path.
Maybe that’s why the voices have gotten louder and the messages have become more and more undeniable – so that you will pay attention.
What if God / Source / The Universe isn’t ever going to give-up on you? What if He’s going to keep attempting to reach you in ways that will allow you to receive the message, even if it takes sending some pretty loud messages?
It’s all for us. What we’re feeling is information to help guide our souls on this journey through life. We can ignore it and fall back into the story of good and bad or right and wrong or we can gently move into the space of allowing ourselves to be guided back into alignment for our lives and our hearts.