299 Holly Worton ~ How to Get into Alignment with What You Want in Life

Today’s Guest

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What You’ll Learn

• How to know when things falling into alignment
• How to tell when things are out of alignment
• Clear signs that things are aligned for you
• What it feels like to be walking the “right” path
• Why it’s always the “right” path, even when it feels crappy
• Things you can do today to start getting more aligned with your path

Things I Discussed

• Cracking the Code to My Weight Loss: Keto + OMAD
• The Complete Guide to Fasting, Dr Jason Fung

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Related episodes

• 319 Holly Worton ~ How to Let Go of the Past and Future to Focus on the Now
• 311 Holly Worton ~ How to Quit Feeling Like a Victim & Start Taking Responsibility for Your Life
• 310 Holly Worton ~ How to Feel More Safe & Secure in Life
• 305 Joanna Hennon + Holly: How to Forgive, Even When You Don’t Want To
• 291 Holly Worton ~ How to Open Up & Be Vulnerable in Your Creative Ventures
• 287 Holly Worton ~ How to Let Go of Worrying & Focus on What You Actually DO Want

Transcript

The transcript for this episode can also be downloaded here (no opt-in required).

Holly:  Hello, hello, and welcome to the Into the Woods podcast, episode 299. We are almost at 300,  I can’t believe it!!!

This is your host Holly Worton, and I am back this week with another solo episode. Today, I am going to talk about alignment, which is something that I have talked about a little bit in previous episodes, but I really have felt a massive shift for me in terms of alignment, and so I wanted to talk about that with you, so that you can kind of get a feel for what that is like for when you are in alignment.

So, before I get into today’s episode, I wanted to thank first of all Naomi for increasing her pledge, thank you, thank you, thank you to everyone who supports me on Patreon. And I would also love for you to join me on Patreon. If you get value from this podcast, I would love to have you join the Patreon community, so head over to http://Patreon.com/HollyWorton and you can support me there to make sure that this podcast can continue production. Membership starts at just $1 a month and you will get exclusive access to content that I don’t share anywhere else, including a monthly Q and A and also done-for-you mindset work. So that’s: http://Patreon.com/HollyWorton.

Also, I wanted to quickly mention fasting, those of you who have seen me in the past couple of months know about my fasting journey and I have probably talked you ear off about fasting, but I received a message from a listener who wanted to hear me talk a little bit more about it. So I would like to direct you, first of all, to a blog post that I wrote last year, I think it was October. If you go to: http://HollyWorton.com/weight and I talk about fasting and how I lost some weight last year, after years of struggling with a thyroid problem, and low-energy, and what I did to shift that, but basically it is fasting. I do intermittent fasting, which means that I fast for a set period of time each day, and then I eat in a restricted window. So, there are many different kinds of intermittent fasting and many different kinds of fasting and if you want to learn more about fasting, I would highly recommend a book called The Complete Guide to Fasting by Dr. Jason Feng, he is the expert on fasting and he is a medical doctor, which I really like because he talks about all the science behind fasting.  But fasting absolutely changed my life, not only did I lose weight, but my energy levels are just absolutely boosted, I am getting deeper sleep every night, and I feel like a whole new person, it has been absolutely life-changing.

Like I said, there are so many different ways of intermittent fasting, what I do is usually 22 or 23 hours of fasting and then one meal a day, sometimes I try to cram all that food into one hour and sometimes I will spread it out into two hours and have kind of an extended dinner. But, basically, I am just eating dinner every day, and that has given me so much energy, it has been absolutely fantastic. I look forward to eating now, I look forward to planning what I am going to eat, and it has been absolutely wonderful. So, if you are interested in this, get the book, The Complete Guide to Fasting, and look into it, there are so many different ways to do it and everyone has got a different way that works for them. So, basically figure out how many hours you are going too fast and how many hours you are going to eat, play around with it, and see what works for you and as always I welcome your emails if you email me at: [email protected] I am happy to answer any questions. However, I will probably also direct you to the blog post and the Complete Guide to Fasting book, that’s a really great place to start because it is the complete guide.

Today’s topic

So, getting into today’s episode, this episode was really strange for me, I had some kind of false starts, I started out on Monday, setting up some show notes, and fleshing out some bullet points for one topic and then just didn’t feel like it and then I started fleshing out the notes for another topic, and then just didn’t feel like it. Then yesterday I was really busy and today I was dragging things around on my google calendar until I left this until the end of the day. I am actually feeling quite refreshed now, I have had a break, I have had a snack, I decided to break my fast early today, so that means I will be having earlier dinner as well and here I am ready to podcast.

So, what I wanted to talk about is alignment. So, if you have listened to this podcast at all you probably know that over the last ten years ever since I left my first company, I have been slowly getting into alignment. I feel like I have been peeling off the layers and the masks of crap, stuff that I took on that had nothing to do with me and I am slowly, kind of spiralling into the centre of myself and I am doing that through tons of mindset work, I have been doing lots of shamanic journeying lately, and getting a lot of healing done there and also just taking action toward the things that I want to do and letting go of the things I don’t want to do. I feel like it has been such a long journey but, you know, the previous ten years of my life were all about getting out of alignment {laughing} I don’t recommend that to anyone. {laughing} So, my first business was ten years of little-by-little getting more and more and more out of alignment and then the last ten years have been the exact opposite. I highly recommend the latter and not the former.

So, I was talking a couple of weeks ago, to my master group about how everything is just feeling so aligned. I had been so disenchanted with the online marketing world and online business world and marketing my business always felt so strategic and calculated and it just got worse and worse and worse until I let go of my business and I let go of focussing on getting business mindset clients and shifted into helping people through my writing. And, the book is going to be live next Monday, it aligns with episode 300 of the podcast which I am super-excited about. And, it has been so natural, and organic, to talk about this book online. I have been marketing this book a lot more than I have any of my previous books, I have just been sharing, not every step of the way but especially in the last couple of months in terms of wrapping up the first draft and doing the editing and I crowdsourced the cover and I asked people for help with it and that I really, really, enjoyed just getting the feedback from people about what cover they enjoyed. I got a book trailer done and have been sharing that online, and it was last weekend when I got the book trailer, it came in from the guy that had done it for me and I don’t usually work on weekends but I was doing my final round of proofreading of the book and I was so excited about it that I just dropped everything and went to social media and I shared it on Instagram and I shared it on Twitter and I shared it on Facebook and I was really excited and I realised natural it felt. I am excited about the book, I want to talk about it, but at the same time, as you know, it scares the shit out of me because again I am talking about talking to trees in it. So, on the one hand, I am scared because I am coming out of the closet with my tree talk but on the other super excited about this thing that I spent all of last year doing. And it feels unlike anything else, every other iteration of my business, I always felt it was so strategic, calculated, following all the Marketing rules, teaching marketing rules, if you know me from way back when I was doing social media as a business, and it never felt quite right. This feels totally different an absolute, absolute, shift.

So this is my shift and the reason I am sharing this with you is that you can recognise these signs when they show up in your life, signs that have showed up for me, I sent out an email asking if people could read the book and they could review it as soon as the book came out. I instantly got back tons of people saying yes please I would love to do that for you and getting excellent feedback about the book, people really jumped to help me with that, and I am super, super, grateful. Friends of mine have said: how can I help you? Would you like to be on my podcast? Can I interview you? How can I help you with this? Can I share it on social media? Can I review it for you? What can I do for you? People are offering to help me with this and that is something that I have had before but not like this. I have always been pretty generous about helping other people out and in return people have helped me out, but here I feel like people are, without even asking them, without even offering, some people are just stepping up and saying: how can I help you with this? I really want to help you get this book out into the world. So people showing up and offering to help me is really, it is a huge shift for me and for me it is a clear sign that things are aligned. I am doing what I am meant to be doing. And it feels like I am walking “the right path”. I feel like the last ten years I have been getting more and more aligned to the point where here I am, and it has all fallen into place and I am on track.

As I have said before, there is no such thing as a right or wrong path, we are always on the right path, even if it feels like crap because there is something we are meant to learn or something that we are meant to experience or there is something that is happening that benefit’s our souls journey. So, I firmly believe that I am always on the right path, however, there is that concept of always being on the right path and then there is the concept of being aligned with the right path. And, to me, now that things are falling into alignment, I just feel like they are flowing, it just feels easy, I am taking easy action, even though it scares the crap out of me, and it is just flowing in ways it hasn’t flowed for a really, really, long time. I recorded my first audio book for this book, I wrapped that up in about a week. I had never done an audio book before, it didn’t start out easy, but it got easier the further I went along and I learned a lot and I look forward to doing audio books, but it was so easy and it was fast, it was faster than I expected. You know, I created this Gantt chart for this book and all the things I needed to do, and I had mapped out x amount of days to do this and x amount of days to do that, and everything is being easier, and everything is happening more quickly. It is not just things happening, I am getting stuff done more quickly, it has been super easy for me to just get things done. I have got out everything blocked out in my calendar and it is just flowing beautifully. In fact tomorrow I have got to go down for an interview, someone is interviewing me about my previous book, On The Wey South Path, that came to me out of nowhere, I just got an email saying: hey, can I interview you? That was exciting and that was my last walking book about the Wey South Path. Super-excited about that, stuff is coming to me, things are coming to me and I am really, really, excited about this, everything is just flowing beautifully, and I am really, really, enjoying this!

After feeling so long I was just stuck in the mud, wading through treacle, it just feel like it was so rough going for so long and I absolutely know that this was a result of all the mindset work that I have done to clear off the fears, blocks and limiting beliefs and all the mind crap, that was keeping me stuck, but also taking action towards the things that I wanted to do. I have been wanting to focus on my writing for a long time, and there were things that I had to let go of to make that happen and that was difficult and that took me longer than I thought it would to let go of but it has been part of the journey and now that I am here I really feel truly, truly, aligned.

When things are out of alignment

So, let me tell you about how to tell if things are out of alignment because even though as I said the last ten years, I have been kind of slowly, slowly, getting into alignment there were still a lot of things that were out of alignment. There were things that felt off, but I didn’t know what they were, and I was really disenchanted with the whole world I had got into which was the online marketing world and the online business world. It felt disconnected at times from myself, I felt things weren’t quite right, and I didn’t know what. My life wasn’t really what I wanted, more and more it was becoming that, but I wasn’t really living the life that I exactly wanted, things were really difficult, even though over the last few years they were getting easier and easier and easier as a result of the I was doing. But it still wasn’t in flow the way it is now. There were times on my path where I felt really stuck like I couldn’t tell what I wanted, or what I was doing wrong, why things weren’t working, it just felt like things weren’t working out sometimes and then I would do a lot of work and take a lot of action and things would get better. I kind of went through these stuck period and then it would flow through, stuck period and then it would kind of flow through, but it was like how I say about going up the spiral staircase, where you kind of hit a new level and you do some mindset work and then you hit a new level, it was kind of like that. Things would be difficult and then I would break through, things would be difficult and then I would break through. Those difficult times, those unclear, stuck, yucky times, those are signs that you are not aligned, or you are not taking the right actions, or you have got mind crap that is in the way. It just felt like things weren’t always working out. If you are in that situation where you feel stuck, frustrated, things aren’t working out, things are hard and it is like you are stuck in mud, pushing your way up a mountain, that to me is a sign that you are out of alignment or you need to do the mindset work to more easily take the action you need to take to move forward. So those are the signs.

Conversely, as I said, when things flow, when things are easy, when you are taking easy action, when you are getting stuff done in record time, when it all just feels like it is working, that, to me, is a sign that things are in alignment or coming into alignment. This is again what it feels like to be walking a path of alignment. So, even though the crap from my past including my first business was all stuff that I needed to experience to grow and to learn and get where I am today, it is a very clear difference in how it feels.

So, if you are feeling stuck, if you are feeling out of alignment and you want to feel in alignment, which I assume we all will, what can you do to start getting more aligned? It goes back to getting clear on who you are, where you are today, and where you want to be headed? What kind of life do you want for yourself? What lifestyle do you want to live? What do you want to be doing with your life? How do you want to feel with your life? How do you want to feel every day when you wake up when you are doing the stuff that you do throughout the day? What do you want to be experiencing? You need to get super, super, clear on that, and then you need to take the actions you need to take to get there, while simultaneously doing the mindset work to clear the stuff that will simultaneously trip you up along the way. It is as simple as that.

I think a big problem for a lot of people, myself included at certain points of my life, is that we don’t know exactly what it is that we do want. We may know that we don’t want what we currently have but we don’t know what we want instead and I think, from the first time I started doing mindset work, about six years ago almost, one of the most important questions that I learned to ask myself was: what do I want instead? So, I am feeling like crap, I am feeling stuck, what do I want instead? I want to feel like I am in flow, I want to feel like things are easy, I want to feel like I take effortless action, whatever, whatever it is that you want, get clear on what you want instead of what you currently have. It also helps to get clear on, of the things that you currently have, which are the things that you want to keep, because very rarely is everything absolute shit in your life. Even when I was at the deepest, darkest, stage of horribleness of my previous relationship in my first business, there were still things that were great; I lived in a really beautiful part of the world, I was travelling, I was making lots of money. So some of those things were good it just that the other stuff was so bad it really outweighed the good stuff and dragged it down and made me feel horrible and hopeless and unhappy. So, get clear on the stuff that you have that you do want, and get clear on the stuff that you want instead of the stuff that you don’t want — that was really unclear, but I think you understand what I mean, because I have said that a few times now! It all comes down to knowing what it is that you want in life and then taking the action to get there. Both doing the inner work, and doing the outer work, or the practical action.

And, for me, last year, a huge part of my journey in helping me to get into alignment was working on this book, because, in collecting the stories from the trees, a lot of them were about personal empowerment, a lot of them were about things that help bring us into alignment, things that help bring us into a place where we are in touch with ourselves, we trust ourselves, we know ourselves better, and we can start taking more actions and making better decisions for ourselves that will get our lives aligned with what we want. And so, as I was collecting these stories from the trees and listening to their wisdom and putting it all together into a book and editing the book, it was helping me on my own personal journey of, as I said earlier, kind of spiralling towards the centre of myself and really getting in touch with myself on a deeper basis than I ever had before. And if I learned one thing from the trees it is a phase that kept popping into my mind and they kept telling me, it kept just coming into my mind, as I was going out to get the stories: slow down, you move too fast. And last year was very much about slowing down, I did my Walk1000 challenge, I am not doing it this year precisely because I want to change the way I get outdoors, I want to change the way I connect with nature, I want to change the way I commune with the trees and the outdoors and I want to spend less time walking and more time just being still because that is where the magic happens in terms of getting into alignment with myself. And, if you feel drawn to do this kind of work, I highly encourage you to pick up my book when it comes out next week and ask me any questions you might have about how to get into alignment through getting in touch with nature and listening to the wisdom of the trees and wisdom of our bodies because as we slow down and as we make space and give ourselves time our inner wisdom speaks up in the same way that the tree spoke to me last year.

So, I highly, highly, encourage you, as part of your journey into getting into alignment, get outdoors, get into nature, and above all slow down and give yourself the time and the space to just be. I always talk about how I have an extensive morning routine where I read, I do my morning ceremony, I will do a Shamanic journey, I do all kinds of stuff in my morning routine, but I am doing, doing, doing. And, yes, there are parts of that where I am kind of sitting and meditating but a lot of it is doing and the more, we can sit and be still and just be, the easier it is to get into alignment with ourselves. And the trees, in this book, have given us a number of things that we can do, practical actions, activities we can do to help get into alignment with ourselves. Some of the trees talked about joy, some of the trees talked about giving ourselves time and space and paying attention to cycles, each tree was very different, but the overarching theme, I would say, is slow down you move to fast, slow down and give yourself permission, and the time, and the space, to just be with yourself.

And I think that is something that can be really challenging for a lot of people, a lot of people aren’t comfortable with themselves. I am an only child, I didn’t have siblings growing up, there weren’t a lot of kids in my neighbourhood, so I spent a lot of time alone. Also, you know, I have high functioning autism, formerly known as Asperger’s, so super awkward kid, so I really liked being alone, as being alone was easier than being with other people. So, I am pretty good at being alone, whether it is in my house, or out in nature or wherever, but not everyone finds it easy. So if you are one of the people who thinks: oh my god I just can’t do it, I can’t be alone, I don’t want to sit, I don’t want to be alone. No, start small, try five minutes, three minutes, and then expand from there, ten minutes, fifteen and then little-by-little just stretch your comfort zone of being with yourself, not being with a phone, not being with a book, not being with a guided meditation, but just sitting in stillness with yourself and giving yourself the time and the space to be with yourself. Because, once you learn how to do that, and once you learn to become comfortable with that, and expand the time that you are with yourself, being with yourself, it amplifies that sense of connection with yourself, and it amplifies that sense of self-trust and it activates your intuition and all kinds of magic starts to happen. So, I highly recommend, whether it is indoors or outdoors, slow down and give yourself permission, give yourself the time to just be with yourself and, again, if it is difficult, start small, and stretch your comfort zone.

So, I think this is going to be a short one today. It is a message I really wanted to share with you because I feel like things, it is very, very, notable to me how things have shifted for me in terms of what life is like when I am in alignment with the journey that I want to be on, and the path that I want to be on, and the life that I want to be living. And I want to help you recognise the signs on your path that can, not only help you to get into alignment, but recognise when you are in alignment, it feels easy and I think it is important to pay attention because sometimes when we get unstuck, we don’t notice it at first. And I think it probably took me a while as well, to notice that I was in this special space of alignment and I kept noticing synchronicity and ease and the speediness, with which I was doing things and it all came together when I was talking with my master-gut group and they said: you are loving you purpose, you are in alignment, this is what you have been working towards and it took someone else’s observation to notice, yeah, absolutely that’s exactly what it is. So, pay attention to when things start to lighten up and ease up and just keep doing more of the things that make it easier for you and help you fall into alignment.

So, that’s all for today and I will be back next week with another solo episode, I am not 100% sure what I will be talking about because it is a very special day, because It is Earth Day, my book is coming out and it is episode 300 of the podcast. So, we shall see what I end up talking about. It might be a mix-up of a number of things but as always, I want to make sure that it is useful to you and it is not just me blabbing on about myself. The stories I tell you are always told with the intention of helping you on your own path. So that’s all for now, please drop me a line and let me know if you have any questions or comments, you can email me: [email protected] or find me on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter and get in touch. I am spending more time on Twitter and it is super-fun! I have been on Twitter since 2007 and I used to love Twitter and then I started hating it and now I love it again, it is great. It is amazing what things are like when things are align, I am even liking Facebook again, so, anyway, life in alignment.

As I said earlier, I would love for you to join me on Patreon, if you head over to http://Patreon.com/HollyWorton, you can join me there. And thank you as always, thank you so much for listening. Next week, as I said I will be back and regarding the show notes on this week, remember to visit http://HollyWorton.com/299.