For eighteen years, I worked in a building on Main Street where the truth about me — too liberal, too feminist, too much — never had anywhere to go. That’s misalignment in the most literal sense: who I actually was and who that room needed me to be never matched up. In Buddhist terms, I wasn’t living in sammā there, not lined up with what was true, mine or anyone else’s. Leaving looked like running away. It was actually the first aligned thing I’d done in a long time.
Sri Lanka is where I found out what alignment feels like once you stop forcing the mismatch — strangers who cared more than family ever let themselves, a community I’d been quietly begging for and could never find at home. The Core Alignment exists because I don’t think I’m the only woman who’s been called too much in a room that was actually just too small.