When Your Life Is ALIIGNED The Difference Is Incredible

In the final chapter of Gabor Mate’s book, When The Body Says No, he recommends that to stay physically and mentally healthy we all get in touch with seven key parts or elements of our lives. These are the seven A’s of healing – acceptance, awareness, anger, autonomy, attachment, assertion and affirmation. This chapter is a playbook for good health, and one of the reasons Mate’s book is one of the Guides recommended in this website, and why his work has helped so many people worldwide.

I recommend you read the whole book and take great time over the final chapter. I read and reread it many times, memorizing the seven elements as a way of retraining my mind. When you realise some of your internal dialogue comes from repetitive thoughts regurgitated since childhood, you need to overwrite them with healthy thoughts, and this is often only possible with repetition.

This is the principle behind affirmations. However, trying to simply tell yourself you’re smart, clever, worthy etc. without diving into the reasons behind why you don’t already think that way, usually ends in disappointment. So start a dialogue with yourself, and heal those Parts of yourself that have learned to regurgitate useless, critical thoughts. For the practical process on how to do this see the article Meditation – 3 Ways, and also read the books No Bad Parts, and Self-Therapy, and follow their exercises.

While working on yourself in this way you can also proactively write in new healthy internal dialogue. This will help both the healing process, and it will help move you forwards. I created the acronym ALIIGNED for this reason. It summarises the seven A’s of healing, making memorising this knowledge much easier.

The second “I” in ALIIGNED is added for a piece of the jigsaw I felt was missing. Getting these eight elements of yourself in alignment is what brings good health, and happiness to yourself in the world, by providing ways to address many of your World Identity concerns.

Here is the acronym in short hand below, and then we’ll go through each element in more detail:

A – Acceptance – I accept all my feelings and thoughts, helpful or unhelpful,

L – Love – I love myself as I am, all parts of myself. There is no need to justify my own existence.

I – Individuality – I have an inner sense of control & boundaries. Other people are responsible for themselves.

I – Improvement – I live in a world of abundance.

G – Get Angry – I let anger out – healthy anger, not acting out as rage, or repressing the anger

N – Never ignore my body and feelings – I am aware of my needs & signs of these needs.

E – Everybody needs somebody – I connect with others and let people in. I enjoy being with people I like and who get me.

D – Dust enlivened and eternal – I know my place in the greater scheme of things.

A – Acceptance

I accept all my feelings and thoughts, helpful or unhelpful, from the past & the present & about the future. I allow unhelpful thoughts, (about the world, others, my actions etc.), without allowing them to define my approach to the future, (I put my arm around these parts of myself that are hurt). I have self-led compassionate curiosity towards all parts of myself, (as I do for others).

Acceptance is the first of Mate’s A’s of healing, and for me acceptance is a cornerstone of all health and healing. It is also very misunderstood.

What acceptance doesn’t mean – passively accepting your “fate”, such as an abusive relationship, or a job you hate. Acceptance also doesn’t mean having to forgive anyone who has hurt you in the past, before you can move on from them. These views of acceptance are hangovers from Christianity and other religions.

Acceptance simply means acknowledging how you feel, and not fighting against it, or pretending you don’t have such feelings. Say you have an overbearing mother who you know oversteps your boundaries by always asking you to do things for her. You do these things even though you don’t want to, but instead of admitting your anger about the situation to yourself, you tell yourself that a good son/daughter does things for their mother, who has loved them from birth.

Acceptance here means accepting who your mother is, both the loving part and the overbearing part. It also means accepting your anger at her, as well as your feelings of love. With this kind of acceptance you can choose to remain in the situation, though seeing it differently, or change it without guilt. Without acceptance you are stuck in unhelpful modes of thinking, and trapped with unhelpful, sometimes unacknowledged, feelings.

L – Love

I love myself as I am, all parts of myself. There is no need to justify my own existence.

For Mate this is the A of Assertion. It is really a deeper level of acceptance of yourself. This is acceptance without any need for analysis, without any need for feelings or thoughts. The bare fact of your existence is all you need to love yourself.

You don’t have to do anything, be anyone, go anywhere, be told who you are, or find yourself. You are alive – for this you can love yourself unconditionally. This is a vital step to knowing your World Identity and feeling the Universal Consciousness of yourself.

To explore how to develop acceptance, and love of yourself further through practicing daily meditation, please see the article Meditation – 3 Ways.

I – Individuality

I have an inner sense of control & boundaries. Other people are responsible for themselves. I know what I like, what I want and don’t want. I know what I want and go for it. I know how I feel about other’s actions.

This is Autonomy in the seven A’s, and is a vital for exploring yourself, and balancing all parts of yourself. Too much individuality sends you into egotism and self-righteousness. Too little, means you become a doormat, always trying to please others, never pleasing yourself.

We all struggle to find this balance, with most of us falling down on the pleasing others side. This is because society, starting with your parents, and the school system, is about pleasing or appeasing others. As children we lack power and so aim to keep ourselves safe by looking to fill the needs of our caregivers. Dr. Aziz Gazipura’s book Not Nice is an excellent exploration of this subject, and a great book to use to find out what you want, and help you balance your actions, especially if you find you are too much of a people pleaser.

It can go the other way as well. If a child is neglected, or given mixed and erratic messages, they may turn into themselves, seeing their own needs as the only truth they can rely on, and so becoming overly selfish and egotistical.

We are all a mix of both, and all of us we can be selfish in some areas, and people pleasers in others. Perhaps at work you are a tyrant boss, while at home a slave to a tyrant spouse! Complicated, right? To simplify it though you must start from a position of what you want yourself, your own individual needs. Knowing what you want is the most important part of this puzzle, however don’t assume that you are justified in getting what you want, just because you want it.

I – Improvement

I live in a world of abundance. I set goals from my values & use my growth mindset to learn from mistakes & persist.

This is my own addition, not one of the seven A’s of healing, but still I think a vital link between the seven A’s and action, and in this way a vital part of healing yourself. Without a sense that improvement is possible it can feel difficult to believe change is possible. This is explored more deeply in the article Get Into A Growth Mindset, and is so important because if you have grown up with a mindset that you, and life itself is of a fixed, unchangeable, nature then you are sunk from the beginning.

With a belief in Improvement, you can change, and can always improve. At a deeper, Universal Consciousness level, improvement here means something more like continuity, or abundance rather than achieving some desire. There is always more to learn, experience, feel and know. This is the infinity in Infinite Existence.

G – Get Angry

I let anger out – healthy anger, not acting out as rage or repressing the anger. I stand up for myself without invading other’s boundaries. I pay attention to what I am angry about, without distracting from it with mental or physical illness.

Anger is one of the most important of Mate’s seven A’s of healing to accept, to prevent or treat, illness. Anger unmeasured, released without thought, is toxic. Anger unmeasured, buried within yourself and repressed, is toxic. Anger understood and accepted is healthy.

We all get angry, it’s allowed. However, if you find you’re angry all the time that’s a problem. Alternatively, if you find you never get angry, that’s also a problem. When it comes to which emotion seems to cause the most problems physically and mentally, if not expressed, then anger seems to always top the list.

This subject is vast, and explored in depth by Mate in When The Body Says No. It is also explored in the book’s Healing Back Pain, and Cured, and the article Mind Body Healing. Suffice to say, it’s vital, for a healthy mind and body, to experience and understand your anger, and so learn to feel anger without hurting yourself or others.

N – Never Ignore My Body & Feelings

I am aware of my needs & signs of these needs. I am aware of how I feel & what I want. Me first, then help others.

This is the A of Awareness. Maybe this seems at first read the most obvious of all the A’s, but this can be deceptive. Yes, you know when you stub your toe it hurts, and when you lose something you value you likely feel sad. But, how much do you really feel your feelings? How much are you aware of your body? What do you do when you have a feeling you don’t like or a pain in your body? Do you push these feelings and pains away? Do you want them to just go away, so you can get back to normal?

Never ignoring your body and feelings means just that – never ignore them. Don’t push them away, or hope they just go away soon. Instead, acknowledge your feelings. Acknowledge any pain in your body. Ask them questions – why do I feel sad? What is this pain for, is there something I am hiding from myself? Is there something this pain is trying to tell me?

Again, like with the effects of repressing anger, this topic is explored in more detail by Mate in When The Body Says No, and in the books Healing Back Pain, and Cured, and in the article Mind Body Healing,

E – Everyone Needs Someone

I connect with others and let people in. I enjoy being with people I like and who get me.

In the seven A’s of healing this is Attachment. None of us are islands. Humans have evolved in groups, and though other people may do things that cause us pain, most of our pleasure and fulfillment in life is derived from our personal relationships.

Many studies on health and longevity reference the importance of social relationships, and the very real physical, and mental danger, of social isolation and loneliness¹. In Fear, by the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, the importance of the sangha, or community, is devoted an entire chapter and is seen as one of the antidotes to fear.²

None of this means you have to be a social butterfly, or get on well with everyone you meet. Your sangha might be a larger community, such as a church group, or group of like-minded individuals, or it may be your spouse and kids, and a couple of close friends, or relatives. I am an introvert, and not particularly social, and know that trying to force myself to be so only makes me feel uncomfortable.

Whether your own sangha is big or small embrace it as part of the joy of being human. If you have no-one you can call your sangha than this is a question that requires an answer, as it suggests you are closing your heart off from others. This closing off often suggests you are unaware of your own needs for connection, and so unaware of your own hopes and fears, and we have already looked at the importance to health and well being of knowing these parts of yourself.

D – Dust Enlivened & Eternal

I know my place in the greater scheme of things. I am part of all things. I follow my first urge – to create.

This is affirmation, the final of Mate’s seven A’s of healing. Affirmation is the importance of both acting in the world, and of seeing yourself as more than a puzzle that, given enough data and analysis, could be figured out. Mate uses the term Dust Enlivened³ to describe this and for me this sits well within the framework of Infinite Existence. Our World Identities are the Dust which Universal Consciousness enlivens.

For Mate the importance of allowing your creative juices to flow is a vital part of affirmation. This doesn’t have to be creativity only in an artistic sense – it is more about acting in the world, taking what you have learned about yourself, and making it concrete. For me this could be any kind of change in your life that brings something new forth, like moving to a different area, or getting a different job, starting a community, raising a family, as well as art, music, writing or a work endeavour. Whatever it is, you are doing it because you feel you must do it, that it is a vital expression of who you are.

In Mate’s book The Myth Of Normal, written several years after When The Body Says No, he explores further the feeling that we are Dust Enlivened, that beyond all of our concerns we are connected to something vaster, which he calls God and others have called Tao, or Consciousness. I call it Universal Consciousness but the names don’t really matter, the important point is to feel it is true.

Only The Beginning

When I first read through the seven A’s of healing, in the final chapter of When The Body Says No, and created the ALIIGNED acronym, I saw its effects in my life immediately. Living in alignment with Mate’s seven A’s of healing encourages good health, and helps with a thorough understanding of life, and your relationship to yourself and others, and wider reality.

You will start to do the things in life you want to do, and say no to things you don’t want in your life. You will make choices, sometimes difficult, about who you want in your life, who is part of your sangha and who only wants to sabotage it. You will feel and know yourself and your body more intimately, and with greater love and understanding, thus creating better mental and physical health.

Without good mental & physical health we are trapped in our World Identity concerns, and there is little way to see outside/inside this to meet ourselves as Universal Consciousness, and feel part of the vastness of Infinite Existence, to feel we truly are Dust Enlivened & Eternal.

ALIIGNED

To finish this article here is the acronym again with the words I recommend memorising to help start making this part of your everyday thinking.

A – Acceptance – I accept all my feelings and thoughts, helpful or unhelpful, from the past & the present & about the future. I allow unhelpful thoughts, (about the world, others, my actions etc.), without allowing them to define my approach to the future, (I put my arm around these parts of myself that are hurt). I have self-led compassionate curiosity towards all parts of myself, (as I do for others).

L – Love – I love myself as I am, all parts of myself. There is no need to justify my own existence.

I – Individuality – I have an inner sense of control & boundaries. Other people are responsible for themselves. I know what I like, what I want, and don’t want. I know what I want and go for it. I know how I feel about other’s actions.

I – Improvement – I live in a world of abundance. I set goals from my values & use my growth mindset to learn from mistakes & persist.

G – Get Angry – I let anger out – healthy anger, not acting out as rage, or repressing the anger. I stand up for myself, without invading other’s boundaries. I pay attention to what I am angry about, without distracting from it with mental or physical illness.

N – Never ignore my body and feelings – I am aware of my needs & signs of these needs. I am aware of how I feel & what I want. Me first, then help others.

E – Everybody needs somebody – I connect with others and let people in. I enjoy being with people I like and who get me.

D – Dust enlivened and eternal –I know my place in the greater scheme of things. I am part of all things. I follow my first urge – to create.