By Annmarie Early

Over the years if you invited me to your house you risked having me move your furniture around. I’m not joking.  I would offer, at times boldly and at others timidly, but nonetheless I would suggest a few changes that would help the space.  I would walk into a room that couldn’t breathe or energy felt off and I’d ask for permission to start moving couches—or at least I’d suggest considering a few changes.  It was a feeling of rightness that was missing—like a picture hung slightly crooked on the wall—and everything within me was holding my breath until the release would come by making a shift.

 I try not to be so forthright these days, but my boys know when life needs to shift as the furniture gets moved, piles are taken to the thrift store and angles are worked until the relaxing arrives. It is as if my house is my guide and I am simply following what is coming from the unseen, but not yet manifest.  I now know there are whole traditions like Feng Shui that teach this art, but from my early childhood I worked with spaces and let them lead me into my own inner rightness.

 And that is really what it is about.  You have a sense of rightness within you that you are feeling for when you align and begin to expand your awareness.  You are waiting for the “click” that says, ah, now there it is. The sense of rightness becomes your guide, for everything is energy and we are looking for balance and flow.  You can begin with the felt sense—the practice of going inward and getting a handle where you listen from within the experiencing to what is yet to arise— but it is more than this that becomes the open landscape we listen from. 

 In awakening, the place of expanded awareness provides access to the landscapes—subtle, natural, and mystical—that guide and inform.  It’s almost like the wise inner knowing that we all carry finally has our attention and we join the council that sits within and we wait for everyone to speak to weigh action. We may try on options or play around with possibilities, but tangible steps are only taken when rightness arrives.

 I’m in one of those expanses these days as I’ve released the familiar categories and boxes that have organized me for so long and I’m waiting without clear outlines for what will take their place.  I keep finding myself trying to fill (or my ego does) the empty spaces with content for the emptiness is uncomfortable and it comes with rising fears about loss and failure if allowed to rest vacant.  And yet, even as I notice the messages to pack something in, I feel for rightness and it’s not there.  It’s like living within a conundrum— as I feel emptiness, see how to fill it, get a sense that’s not right, I then open for something and nothing is there. I feel again, I hear to wait, I enter stillness. I feel rightness in the silence. And I wait. At times I have guidance that informs and at others the sense of rightness in what is in this moment is the guidance and I rest.  If there are adjustments needed I listen in and shift and then I feel for rightness, entering the quiet yet again.

 I guess life is a bit like a crooked picture being righted as we feel our way forward through the mystery that we call life.  Rightness isn’t something to learn or achieve.  It is most simply a way of being. It is what life is truly about.