That day, my grandmother sealed a kind of debt inside me, one I would never repay. So I went on to study pharmacy instead, to make the medicines …

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This is the story of how, through the people I met, the practices I took up and an unexpected exit from the civil service, I learned to take care of my own emotional chaos, and ended up making it my work: supporting people who sense, as I once did, that an emotion is steering their life a little too hard, when another way of living is possible.

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For as long as I can remember, I learned to stand up straight within the rules: to say yes to keep people happy, never to put a foot wrong, to be the nice one among my siblings… Later came the rules of society and of a public institution: ten years in the service of media libraries, holding collections, readers and teams together.

I was so good at keeping to those rules that I was soon put in charge of a library in Brittany. On the surface, nothing was wrong.

And yet something in me kept telling me I was here for something else, to help more people. That I wasn’t quite where I belonged.

Even as a child, people came to me. I was the one they confided in, the one they told what they told no one else, the good friend who knew how to listen and who, more often than not, had an answer. I didn’t go looking for that role: it found me.

I was hypersensitive, like my mother before me, and back then that sensitivity took up far too much room for me to keep ignoring it. I felt other people’s emotions with an almost physical sharpness, to the point of soaking them up as if, for a while, they were mine. And my own emotions, when they rose, rose hard. I think I owe some of that intensity to my star sign: a Scorpio never feels anything by halves.

I also picked up on what others preferred not to see: a lie, a mismatch between words and gestures, something unspoken hanging in a room before anyone had named it. For years I was told I was impressionable, naive. Today I believe the opposite: I already had that discernment as a child. I just wasn’t yet allowed to trust it.

Intensity that is felt relentlessly and never really channelled eventually spills over. In my case, it ended up exploding, one way or another, more than once. I saw it in the people close to me (one day I’ll have to write about it in detail), and I saw it in myself.

The Turning Point

The first turning point was anything but graceful. As a teenager I was angry, and I took that anger out on my mother, the one person who only wanted to love me. My parents’ divorce had already led me to see psychologists, and she had been consulted about me then. In the end she drew a firm line: if it carried on, she would send me to a residential home for girls. I was scared: scared of having to fend for myself, scared of losing what I thought I had. And it was under that threat, uncomfortable as it is to admit now, that I opened my first personal-development books.

The real journey began later, at nineteen, when I left the family nest to live on my own and study in Dijon. I put that new independence straight to work for myself: first a naturopath, then an energy healer. I started investing in my own well-being, not out of passing curiosity, but because I finally wanted to understand this relationship with emotion that had lived in me for as long as I could remember, and to which I was still looking for the keys.

That search went on for years, through my studies and then my working life as a civil servant. I went from one practitioner to the next, keeping what worked for me and leaving the rest. Each step brought something, but none of them ever handed me the key itself.

That key came in 2023. I came across a holistic school based on Qi Gong, which also offered guidance built around the work of Dr Hawkins and an emotional release method. I stayed with it for a year, a year and a half. Everything I had done before had its value, but this was exactly where I found what I had been looking for all along: not one more layer of understanding, but an instruction manual. Knowing, in very practical terms, what to do when an emotion comes up. No longer depending on a weekly appointment to feel better. Learning to take responsibility for managing my own emotions, to recognise my self-sabotage patterns, to release an emotion quickly and cleanly, and, if a wave of heavy fatigue hit without warning, to have a concrete technique to turn it around on the spot and feel my energy come straight back.

It fascinated me, then utterly captivated me. Alongside my job as a librarian, I kept practising, and at last I saw emotional charges leave, really leave, that I thought I had already dealt with years before, with one practitioner or another.

Not by talking about them yet again, but by facing the emotion itself: by walking through a few private hells, you could say, and coming out freer and lighter. Some memories that still weighed on me stopped affecting me at all, as if they had been emptied of their weight. I felt this technique changing me at a deep level, bringing me closer to a state of true love, and teaching me to understand human beings (their patterns, their repetitions) far beyond anything I had learned until then.

Without my looking for it, it became a kind of gift: being able to name precisely the emotion moving through a body, and to see straight away, just by watching someone, what is blocked and how to release it. For me, it happens with an almost natural ease.

Then, in July 2025, it called me. I resigned from the civil service, even though I had my dream job and was happy in it. I hadn’t seen it coming when I took the post; it came all at once, from within.

I had to leave; I had to change. I went to Dubai to train for four months before coming back to France.

That is where the concept of Emotional Sovereignty (Souveraineté Émotionnelle) was born.

Taking back mastery of your inner world (your thoughts, emotions, beliefs and assumptions) so you can shed everything that stops you from creating what you truly want, beyond an old identity. It spoke to me because I had lived it: the small deaths of my ego, the parts of myself I’d had to let go of even though they had served me for a long time, because those old versions of me could no longer take me where I wanted to go. The gap between the life I was living and the one I was heading towards had grown too wide for me to carry on as before.

Confirmation came from yet another direction. One day a friend drew up my birth chart. I believe in astrology, and there it was in black and white: I was here to help people move through their emotions, to explain, as simply and rationally as possible, how an emotion works, how you free yourself from it, what methods exist and what to do when resistance stops you from letting go of what needs to go. It said I was here to support others through grief, through separation, through everything that is hard and everything that is traumatic.

I feel able to do it because I have been through some very difficult times myself, times I had no choice but to face. That is precisely what made me want to support others, and above all to give them a safe space where they can finally let go of what they need to let go of, cry the tears they need to cry, and above all free themselves from it for good so they can move on.

What I Know Today

Here is what I know now that I didn’t know then: emotions are the foundation of everything. They are what allow us to connect deeply with one another. Freeing yourself from so-called negative emotions isn’t just about easing a passing bout of unease: it means freeing yourself from your ego and from the story you have been telling yourself for years, so that you can reconnect with something more spiritual within you, your soul, and find unity and harmony with others again.

Because when you feel low, when negative thoughts keep coming back, it is usually linked to wounds of the ego, to what are called engrams: the deep traces left by past experiences.

When I worked in media libraries, I spent ten years organising other people’s knowledge before realising that my own still needed sorting out. For a long time, on my personal-development journey, I lacked leadership: I kept waiting for someone else to set me free, convinced that they had all the answers and that, somehow, they would save me. Working on my emotions took me further still, into my beliefs about myself, into self-love, confidence and self-esteem.

My leadership grew as I took more responsibility for my own life.

There was still one last step to take, though: putting it into practice. I have always been one of those people who love to study, read and dig deeper: classic good-student syndrome. But piling up information wasn’t enough. Something in me resisted going to look, concretely, at what was happening inside my body.

My life didn’t change until I put things into practice. It took blow after blow from life (blows I now call gifts) before I finally woke up fully.

Then one day I made up my mind: I had nothing to lose, so I might as well do the exercises rather than turn the page. That is exactly how I came through.

I’m still training today, and I’ve understood that change comes from practice, not from intellectualising. And emotional work, for its part, has to go through the body. An emotion is energy in motion: it is there to be lived, and we are here to experience the whole range (sadness, anger, guilt, pride, arrogance) without having to defend ourselves against it.

Resistance doesn’t come from the emotion itself, but from the judgement we pass on feeling it. And an emotion that is fully welcomed carries a message: it is precisely by allowing it to exist that, strangely enough, it ends up disappearing.

The problem is that our society doesn’t prepare us for this. It pushes us to do, do, do, rather than connect with our inner selves, and teaches us little or nothing about how to welcome an emotion. That is my role: to re-educate, to pass on emotional intelligence. Because looking after your emotions means being willing to look inside, even when it’s uncomfortable, and in return it makes you more compassionate, better able to understand others, slower to judge and react. If everyone took this path, society itself would become more conscious and freer. But it remains a choice, and it is each person’s to make.

For my part, I knew I wanted to be free on the inside, and therefore on the outside too. The two always go hand in hand.

That is how Emotional Sovereignty was born: not as a brand name, but as an exact description of what I had been missing, and of what I now wanted to make possible for others, from the child who doesn’t yet have the words to the leader who has learned not to need them any more.

Why I’m Telling You This

I’m not telling you this to claim I’ve been through something you never have, or that I now know what you should do. I’m telling you because I know what it costs to let an emotion make your decisions for you, and what it takes to bring it back to its proper role: to inform, not to govern.

If you recognise yourself in this story, in the moment you felt an emotion running your life without asking your permission, and in the quieter moment when you began to take back the reins, then what I’m building here is for you too.

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The Aligned Shift is an editorial space for those who feel the Shift, and for those they walk with. On Substack, the journey begins with Correspondences: stories, perspectives and conversations that help us share, connect and understand, together, what shapes our lives.

And then that day came…

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The day I decided to be kind and compassionate with myself, just as I am with the women I have been walking alongside for years, with unconditional love. Is it because, when I walk alongside them, I automatically step into another dimension, the dimension of the Source? Deep down, I know the answer.

The day I allow myself to sketch out in words the billions of thoughts that have been running through me, non-stop, for years. Even if it isn’t perfect. As I teach in my circles and in my yoga classes: perfection lies in imperfection, and imperfection lies in perfection.

I can’t say whether it’s because I’m neurodivergent, because I’m someone who by nature needs novelty and freshness, because I come from a family that tore itself away from its own roots… or simply because that’s just the way it is…

As a little girl, I lived between four houses for many years. Two of them were my favourites (they were my temporary home), but I had to leave them every time.

Today I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve moved… I remember that in 2010, I moved nine times in a single year…

For as long as I can remember, I have carried this longing, this wish: to live in my own home. And the more the years went by, the stronger that wish became. Like a fire that grows bigger, stronger and fiercer each time.

Over time, it became urgent…

Of course, I have been incredibly lucky always to have had a roof over my head, even in the most fragile times of my life, when for two years my whole home came down to one carry-on suitcase. I know how lucky I’ve always been never to have had to sleep rough… But that’s not what today is about.

Today I’m 49, and I still don’t have MY OWN HOME. I’ve been more at peace with it since we left Brazil to settle in Spain, the land of my roots, of my ancestors.

My grandparents uprooted themselves; I have always lived in between. At home, within the family, it was Spanish culture; the moment you stepped out of the front door, it was French culture.

But in the eyes of the world, I was neither Spanish nor French…

In France they called me “l’espinguouine”; in Spain, “la gabacha”…

I was an identity lost. I was Lost in Translation.

Travel has been part of my path ever since I was tiny. I was barely born and already on the move.

The urgency of having MY OWN HOME really grew when my daughter was born. An urgent need to set down my suitcases at last, to reconnect with my roots, to help them grow and grow stronger. To pass them on to my daughter.

Perhaps it’s also because of the absence of that family, now gone: feeling the need to anchor yourself physically in the Earth is much more than a symbol… It is a need to mend.

As a little girl, I always told my parents: “One day, I’m going to go and live in Spain, and settle there.”

At 21, after a serious car accident that could have been the end of me (not a phrase to take lightly, is it?!), I moved abroad on my own, on an adventure. I left everything behind: a permanent job, my girlfriends, my mates, my mother’s home, my flings… To settle in Spain.

Those twelve years brought the first great awakening of consciousness and spirit in my life. Those twelve years knocked me flat and crushed me, only to set me on the Way, on my Way.

I was to lose everything, and find another path, a different one.

After a few more years abroad (in different parts of France, in India, then in Brazil), I’m back in Spain, in a whole new region I didn’t know yet…

For the first six months, we lived in a small furnished flat. Meanwhile, our things from Brazil had arrived and were sitting in a warehouse, waiting patiently for us.

Then, in May, I finally find an unfurnished flat… Wonderful! We’ll get our things back! But… it still isn’t MY OWN HOME… I still feel I’m in transition.

When it comes down to it, I think I’ve spent my whole life in transition…

So yes, we come here to Earth to live this stage of transition between birth / the beginning / the Commencement and death / the End / the Fulfilment.

But deep inside me there is this wish, crying out for me to settle, to set down my suitcases at last, to live in that place that feels like me, that place I will never again want to leave for somewhere else… That place that resembles us, and gathers us in.

To my ancestors, to my family,

Alma

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The Aligned Shift is an editorial space for those who feel the Shift, and for those they walk with. On Substack, the journey begins with Correspondences: stories, perspectives and conversations that help us share, connect and understand, together, what shapes our lives.

At that very moment, my mother’s loss of independence called for an important decision. And at that very moment, too, I was offered the chance to go and live abroad.

On one side, old age tightening its hold. On the other, a decision that opens up a new horizon.

In both cases, the same anxiety settling in.

Will my mother find her place in her new surroundings? What is she feeling?

And me: how do I say yes to a life 14,000 kilometres away from her without feeling that I’m leaving her behind?

It isn’t the distance that makes me hesitate. It’s what it might shift in the bonds between us.

Our bonds are the mortar that holds us together.

We would like to believe that love defies time and distance. That nothing really changes.

But that is an illusion. Being alive doesn’t spare us the fear of losing the other person. Or, perhaps more deeply still, the fear that the relationship will never be the same again.

It was with that thought, and with feelings of sadness and joy all mixed together, that I arrived in Singapore. I began going to the Singapore Botanic Gardens to sit quietly with myself.

From my very first visits, one tree catches my attention.

It isn’t its size, or its roots. It’s the crack running through its trunk.

I catch myself wanting to plunge right into it. And, in the same breath, preferring to stay on the surface. As if that crack held something I wasn’t yet ready to look at.

A few days later, I read Charlotte Casiraghi’s La Fêlure (“The Crack”).

One sentence stops me.

“The crack must not be suffered as a curse; it must be integrated and transformed, or it risks remaining a frozen suffering. We must not deny the break, but invest it anew, so as to empty it of its destructive charge.”

I read that sentence over several times.

Because in that crack, I find everything I feel. The contradictions between leaving and staying. The loyalties I might fail to honour by moving so far away, just as my parents are growing older and may need support.

That dull, nagging thought that a decision which opens up a future can also make such a clean break with the life I have now.

The crack keeps me in tension. I can’t manage to close it.

And yet this tree has kept on growing, without trying to get back the shape it had before.

The crack has been part of its growth.

And that makes me wonder. Perhaps a crack isn’t only a place of fragility.

It can also become a passageway, a new way of inhabiting what happens to us.

Charlotte Casiraghi also writes:

“One can live cracked, live shot through, and that is worth more than the unscathed surface of an unlived life, or the motionless coldness of things left intact.”

That sentence stays with me, because it opens up a new way forward.

We often try to preserve our bonds as if their strength depended on their ability to stay the same.

What if that isn’t where their true strength lies? What if the most alive bonds are precisely the ones that let transformation run through them?

This tree keeps unfolding in all its splendour, from a crack.

Its lesson runs deep.

It is possible to build yourself by passing through your own fault lines.

It is possible to carry on along your path without giving up the people you love.

It is possible to leave without ceasing to be present for the people you love.

And then another question appears.

What if changing your life were simply a matter of finding new ways to “re-tie” our bonds, without fearing that we will lose each other?

I haven’t found the answer yet.

But since arriving in Singapore, I think this is the question I am learning, day by day, to inhabit.

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The Aligned Shift is an editorial space for those who feel the Shift, and for those they walk with. On Substack, the journey begins with Correspondences: stories, perspectives and conversations that help us share, connect and understand, together, what shapes our lives.

Until now, the English magazine has mostly carried my own words. Today that changes. Three Voices who have been writing in the French edition are now here too, and I want to take the time to introduce them to you properly.

What The Aligned Shift is

The Aligned Shift is an editorial house where practitioners (coaches, therapists, guides) and the people they accompany first meet through resonance, without the noise.

It has two doors.
Correspondences, The Aligned Shift Magazine is the written one: personal stories and reflections from people who accompany others, telling who they are rather than selling a method.
Words of Shifters is the podcast, the spoken one.

If you accompany others, you can write or speak with us. Over time, your presence in the house opens a profile page in your name on thealignedshift.media, linked to your writing, where people looking for a practitioner can find you. It can't be bought or requested; it is earned through your presence.

If you are here as a reader, you are exactly where you should be. Read, listen, and see whose voice resonates with you, get inspired and feel that you are not alone.

Thank you for being here at the very beginning

You are reading a project being built in front of you. Nothing is fixed, and much is still searching for its form. And yet something very simple is already here: people writing from their lives, their practices and their inner crossings. Through them, we feel a little less alone in our own transitions.

If you have been here since the early days, you are one of those who were present "before everything was clear." That is not nothing.

The first Voices of Correspondences

All three are French speakers who first wrote for the French edition, Correspondances. Because they also accompany English speakers in their work, they chose to join the English edition too. In the order they arrived:

, psychologist living presently in Singapore and author of Entre Ici & Ailleurs. She writes about life transitions, people pleasing, the fear of disappointing others, and the trees and oceans that ground us. Not from above, but as a Shifter among us. Read her introduction: Not from above, but as a Shifter among us

, neurodivergent holistic therapist. Born in Paris to Spanish parents, she has lived in India, Spain, France and Brazil, and accompanies souls in transition through expatriation, identity and hypersensitivity, because she has been through it herself. Alma lives in Spain. Read her introduction: The real journey is within

Marie Guillan, the voice behind (Emotional Sovereignty). She sees emotions as a compass, not a problem to manage, and gives people back their power by making them autonomous in their own inner world. Marie lives in France. Read her introduction: Your emotions are a compass, not an obstacle

All three are gathered here: https://voices.thealignedshift.media/s/our-voices

What arrives every Saturday

Starting tomorrow, over the coming weeks, the pieces Alma, Sophie and Marie have already written for the French edition will be revealed here in English, one Saturday at a time, alongside mine. You will feel how their worlds speak to each other.

Thank you for reading, for sharing, for letting our words reach you. Thank you for being among the first to lay the foundations of this house of Voices.

Enjoy Correspondences,

Beingly,

Audrey

Founder of The Aligned Shift

She is the only person I recognized the very first time we met. It was quite an incredible moment, such a powerful recognition of a past that had not been lived here. So powerful that I truly didn’t know whether it was the first time we had met in this life or not.

20 years already! And the things we have seen together!

Born in Paris to Spanish parents, she left to live abroad on her own at 21. Now settled in Spain, after time in India, Spain, several places in France and Brazil, she accompanies souls in transition through holistic practices she has been exploring for more than 20 years and has practiced professionally for 15. Alma can do this because she has truly been there herself. She is one of those people who cross geographical, cultural and inner borders with a grace that seems natural, yet is the fruit of deep inner work and a seriously solid foundation of professional training.

She knows what it is to lose everything in order to rebuild herself better. Neurodivergent and multipotentialite, she turns what some call “difference” into a real strength. She accompanies souls in transition because she has been through it herself, and came back with tools, a presence, and a rare capacity to listen.

But above all, Alma is an extreme sensitivity. And an equally extreme strength, because it takes that much strength to move through what hypersensitivity demands of those who feel the world with nothing between it and their skin.

She speaks to us of expatriation, of rebuilding, of identity, of deep Essence, of alignment, of choice, of spirituality, and of that moment when you realize that changing countries was only the beginning, because the real journey is within.

Welcome to Correspondences, Alma! You are at home here. ✨

A place for your voice

The Aligned Shift is an editorial house where practitioners and those they accompany first meet through resonance, without the noise. Two doors: Correspondences | The Aligned Shift Magazine for the written word, and Words of Shifters, the podcast, for the spoken one.

Do you accompany others? Write or speak with us. Over time, your presence in the house opens a profile page for you on thealignedshift.media: a page in your name, linked to your writing, where people looking for a practitioner can find and contact you. It can’t be bought or requested; it is earned through your presence. More visibility online, so a better chance of being found by people who search through AI agents.

Write to us at: contributors@thealignedshift.media

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Learn more about The Aligned Shift

She explores what her experiences have taught her about the way we move through transitions: how we change, how we stay ourselves, how we allow ourselves to become someone else without losing ourselves.

Her writing speaks of people pleasing, of the fear of disappointing others, of what happens when we no longer recognize ourselves, and also of Singapore, where she lives as an expatriate, of trees, of the ocean, of those places and landscapes that transform us and ground us when everything is pulling in every direction.

Beyond her degrees and her role as a psychologist, Sophie writes from life as it is lived: she shares the way she moves through it. Not from above, not as the one who knows, but as a Shifter among others, among us.

Sophie adds her voice to those building Correspondences | The Aligned Shift Magazine, a space for stories and reflections for those seeking a more aligned way to live, create, work and belong.

Here, you will follow her from one piece of writing to the next, among other voices that, like hers, explore the inner and outer shifts of life. You will come to know her, and perhaps recognize yourself in her.

Welcome to Correspondences, Sophie! We are lucky to have you with us. 🌿

A place for your voice

The Aligned Shift is an editorial house where practitioners and those they accompany first meet through resonance, without the noise. Two doors: Correspondences | The Aligned Shift Magazine for the written word, and Words of Shifters, the podcast, for the spoken one.

Do you accompany others? Write or speak with us. Over time, your presence in the house opens a profile page for you on thealignedshift.media: a page in your name, linked to your writing, where people looking for a practitioner can find and contact you. It can’t be bought or requested; it is earned through your presence. More visibility online, so a better chance of being found by people who search through AI agents.

Write to us at: contributors@thealignedshift.media

Leave a comment

Learn more about The Aligned Shift

Her way of saying things embodies what I would call a steady gentleness: the kind that reassures you. When the idea for The Aligned Shift’s magazine was born (today it is Correspondences), I knew hers was a voice that belonged here.

Marie is the voice behind Souveraineté Émotionnelle (Emotional Sovereignty, in French) . Behind those words lies a clear mission: to give people back their power. Not so that they become dependent on being accompanied, but so that they leave with concrete tools, a method, and the ability to use them on their own.

Marie does not believe emotions are a problem to be managed. She believes they are a lever we were never taught to use. Her approach does not go through mental analysis. It goes through feeling: “How does this situation make me feel? What does it awaken in me?” Welcoming the emotion, letting the body do its work, moving through it so it can be released for good. And alongside this, deprogramming limiting beliefs and patterns of self-sabotage, in order to reprogram a more aligned way of functioning.

It is this combination of emotional release and reprogramming that makes deep, lasting change possible, while leaving each person autonomous in managing their own inner world.

Through her articles, her podcast episodes and her spaces for transformation, she asks essential questions: what do you do with what you feel? What if your anger were a guide? What if letting go were not a posture, but a path?

These questions resonate deeply with what The Aligned Shift carries, because learning to steer your own inner world may well be the first step toward meeting others through resonance rather than through noise.

Welcome, Marie ✨ 🌸

A place for your voice

The Aligned Shift is an editorial house where practitioners and those they accompany first meet through resonance, without the noise. Two doors: Correspondences | The Aligned Shift Magazine for the written word, and Words of Shifters, the podcast, for the spoken one.

Do you accompany others? Write or speak with us. Over time, your presence in the house opens a profile page for you on thealignedshift.media: a page in your name, linked to your writing, where people looking for a practitioner can find and contact you. It can’t be bought or requested; it is earned through your presence. More visibility online, so a better chance of being found by people who search through AI agents.

Write to us at: contributors@thealignedshift.media

Leave a comment

Learn more about The Aligned Shift

has long felt like she didn’t quite belong to this world, not out of rejection, but due to a fundamental sense of strangeness. As if she were an observer of it.

Rather than opposing it, she chose to go through it in every sense of the word: through countries, collapses, and rebirths. These passages led her to a clearer understanding of who she is and what deeply constitutes a human being.

All her life, she has turned toward others. Passionate about psychology and the mechanisms of consciousness, she observes what makes us act, suffer, evolve, and awaken. Curious about everything that speaks of Life, she has always been drawn to the esoteric section of bookstores. There, she discovered a thousand and one ways to describe life and our place in the universe, which gave her an open and holistic view of these mechanisms.

Over the years, these interests and observations evolved. A common thread eventually emerged, and in early 2026, it gave birth to The Aligned Shift: a living editorial house for people who live, create, work, and relate differently.

For those who feel called to be more honest with themselves. For those who are learning to listen to what they feel. For those who know that alignment is not a final destination, but an ongoing practice that includes uncertainty, change, and every imperfect step along the way.

Correspondences, the magazine, was the first expression of that vision. Words of Shifters, the podcast, is the second door: the magazine for texts, the podcast for speech.

It was born from a simple conviction:

This is not personal development as a formula. It is not a doctrine, a manual, or a promise of easy answers.

It is a space for lived experience.

Here, voices gather to share what they have explored, what they have learned, and what they are still discovering. We speak about intuition, consciousness, inner peace, relationships, courage, meaningful work, transitions, and the quiet shifts that transform a life from within.

We believe that learning how to live never truly ends. And perhaps we do it better when we do not have to do it alone.

Audrey calls this approach Living Beingly: embodying one’s essence through one’s humanity, with all its contradictions and apparent imperfections.

Through The Aligned Shift, she is exploring this way of being in the world: creating value with care, encouraging meaningful exchanges, and making trust the foundation of a growing collective movement.

A place for your voice

The Aligned Shift is for voices who feel that something is changing, and for the people who accompany that change in others.

We welcome writers, practitioners, coaches, facilitators, therapists, artists, founders, researchers, guides, and thoughtful professionals whose work helps people live, create, connect, or work with greater awareness.

On Substack, the house has two doors: Correspondences | The Aligned Shift Magazine for texts, and Words of Shifters, the podcast, for speech, in English and in French. Stories, perspectives and conversations that help us name what shapes our lives, and understand it together.

If you have a voice that seeks to create connection beyond your own publication or audience, we would love to hear from you.

Write to us at: contributors@thealignedshift.media

A house lives through those who inhabit it: we ask for a first text within the month after you join, then regular signs of presence. Over time, that presence earns you a profile page on thealignedshift.media: a page in your name, linked to your texts, where people looking for a practitioner can find and contact you. It cannot be bought or requested; it is earned through presence in the house. More visibility online, so a better chance of being found by people who search through AI agents.

My second move abroad.

I learned Hebrew. For a year, in Tel Aviv, I attended ulpan four days a week, for five hours a day (ulpan is an intensive Hebrew-language programme for new immigrants). This year of learning was also a year of going out, meeting people, and enjoying myself in a city that truly never sleeps. People say New York is the city that never sleeps. Well, having spent time in both, I assure you that Tel Aviv beats New York. Perhaps that’s because the area where everything happens is much smaller in Tel Aviv than in New York. You don’t need a car to get from one place to another. Everything is walkable. And it truly never stops.

Tel Aviv also felt far more international to me than New York, Paris, Barcelona, Los Angeles, or Miami. This is due to the constant influx of new young immigrants arriving from everywhere, especially people making aliyah (the immigration to Israel offered to Jews anywhere in the world). And it was this international environment that made me feel “at home” at the beginning. I knew many more foreigners than Israelis.

At the end of my first year in Israel, I met the man who would become my husband. He was Israeli, of Iraqi descent. His parents had fled Iraq in the years after the Second World War, like so many Middle Eastern Jews at that time. I didn’t know it, but in those countries too, the war had deeply disrupted Jewish lives. For many, leaving was not a choice, but a matter of survival.

Israel was built by successive waves of immigration and refuge. People from remarkably different cultural backgrounds had to find ways to live alongside one another, often with only Judaism as a shared reference point. But the mix of cultures around this single common point was impressive.

The man I met spoke English well, was not religious, and traveled a lot. He was also free-spirited, very generous, and very determined to court me from the moment we met. After a few weeks, I met his family. I was very well received. They were relieved to see their youngest son finally entering a serious relationship. In their social world, being unmarried and childless after 30 was far less common than it was in the Netherlands.

Two different worlds

But behind this warm welcome, there was already, without me seeing it, a whole world of differences.

In his family, closeness took forms I wasn’t used to. We got together very often, his father would go to the market and distribute his finds, especially the fruits and avocados. His mother would make five to seven different dishes for us each weekend, during their now-routine weekly visits. I never had to cook: the freezer was full of containers. I even found a photo of it.

Many people told me I was lucky. But I struggled to find my place as a mother in my own home. One day, I finally wanted to say, “That's enough, thank you.” so I gently asked her to stop cooking for us. She replied that it was either that, or she would not come anymore. Her son told me:

“Accept what she brings and throw it away!”

I was shocked! No, I couldn’t do that: I can’t stand the waste of resources…

That’s just an example. I arrived carrying my own deeply European assumptions. The idea that you ask for permission before entering someone’s life. A sense of time that is more linear and more individual: you plan, you give notice, you respect the other person’s space.

For them, time belonged to the family before it belonged to oneself. Friday night was almost always spent with the family, and refusing the grocery bags and the containers of prepared food was received as a rejection. I know it wasn’t an intrusion to them. For them, it was love. For me… it felt like I was losing myself.

Their particular hospitality, rooted in a history and culture I was still learning to understand, was a kind of generosity that felt impossible to refuse: they serve you, again, and again, and saying no is never enough. It took me years to understand that it wasn’t inappropriate insistence, but a way of loving that I didn’t have the codes to read.

I didn’t want to see it at the time. “Love is blind,” as they say. Well, yes. I admit that has been very true for me here. I could have seen many signs that were screaming “Don’t go there!”, but I didn’t. My lovestruck heart, no doubt my age too (I was 36, “the clock,” as they say…), and the desire to become a mother myself, or simply the fact that he was really planning a future with me: a bunch of reasons not to listen to the voice of reason.

Beyond language.

That is where the Note from Fred caught my attention (the one that sparked the desire to share my experience). It reminded me how much culture matters for understanding one another. I didn’t even imagine it existed like that, that it could be a wall. I spent years thinking the problem was me, my imperfect language, my insufficient efforts.

But the problem wasn’t effort or language.

I could understand the words but I could not grasp what passed between us in the silence between two sentences. The unspoken. The way a laugh stops. What a sentence opens and closes without saying. The nuances.

The main lesson is that deep understanding does not play out only in words, but in invisible codes: habits, expectations, the relationship to time, to family, to space, to silences, and to boundaries.

▸ A language is a door. Culture is the house.

The man who heard the words

And then I think about my ex-husband. Because there, the wall wasn’t even between two cultures. It was between two people who, however, spoke the same language.

I tried to explain to him what I was discovering: the unease growing inside me, and the growing sense that I did not resonate with the culture around me. What it feels like not to be home, and not to feel at home. I tried to make myself understood when I did not yet fully understand myself.

Even today, he brings back things I said. He has a good memory, I have to give him that. He repeats sentences from that time almost word for word. And each time, I feel I have to explain myself all over again. Because what he retained was not quite what I meant; it was his understanding of what my words meant.

You can be two people, get married, share a life, speak the same languages, and yet, deep down, not speak the same language.

It’s not a question of food or flags. He was never an “expat.” And so, perhaps the distance between two people can be greater than the distance between two countries.

▸ You can get married, share a life, and not speak the same language.

Understanding each other doesn’t mean talking more. It begins when we accept that the same words do not always carry the same world.

←Read the first part.
The final part will follow soon.

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I replied very simply: I am fluent in five languages, and I confirm it. That doesn’t mean we understand, or get, each other.

I kept thinking about that sentence. I posted my reply, but I came back to it and added that it had inspired me for my next article here. I realized that I had experienced this observation deeply through my various expatriations. And I want to share this life story because, in the end, it might well serve as a lesson for someone younger.

So, perhaps it is time for me to tell it.

Speaking like the others

It started very early. Ever since I was a little girl, I spent my summer vacations with my grandparents at the Vilarromà campsite, in Palamós, on the Costa Brava.

I must have started going there when I was 4 years old. (When I think back on it… what I experienced there was really a reflection of who I became…but anyway, side note).

Coming back to this campsite every year in the late 70s, at a time when life was good and trust was very different from today, gave me that notion of feeling at home somewhere other than my own house when I was quite young.

I wandered around freely. I had magical moments with all the children at the campsite, who came from Belgium and all four corners of France, as well as with the adults. I remember Mr. Muller from Belgium. I loved going to visit him at his caravan because he would do that magic trick that amazed me every time: he would always find a coin behind my ear!

A pretty nice thing to note here. As I grew up, I couldn’t hide from my grandmother where I was coming back from. Of course, I didn’t have anything to hide anyway, but it turns out that when I came back from being with the Belgians or the people from Marseille, she knew immediately because I spoke just like them!!

"From 'Tu viens avec?' to 'oh fada!', everything gave me away.
'Tu viens avec?' is literally 'Are you coming with (me)?' is literally 'Are you coming with (me)?' from the Dutch 'Ga je mee?’ And 'oh fada!' is one of those expressions you will never hear a Parisian say.

My first ‘Nonos’

Ah! The Nonos! That's how I loved to call the Dutch. Because, as not everyone always knows, in French, there is an aspirated ‘h’ and one does not make a liaison: you write “un hollandais” (pronounce ‘un Ollandais’) not “un‿n‿hollandais” (‘un Nollandais’). And “a ‘nono’” became my way of calling the Dutch.

It was around the age of 10, likely when my cousins started learning English in middle school, that I began spending time with the Dutch, and more so each year. And I loved them! I really liked the Dutch because despite our punk or ska styles at the time (my older cousin with a mohawk, and her sister and me with black and white bobs, even painted on our Doc Martens with Tipp-Ex), well, none of them had any problem welcoming us into their circle of friends. I always felt like the Dutch couldn’t care less about what social class you came from, what your parents did, or how you dressed or wore your hair.

They were much more tolerant than the other children. I loved that about them. And I loved them.

And I remember that afternoon… I must have been 13 or 14 years old. My cousins and I were at the tent of 3 gigantic Dutch guys. They started talking in their language and I listened to them carefully. I remember ‘listening’ with my whole body. That way of listening must have been so intrusive that Erik said something like “Why are you looking at us like that?“ and I answered something like: “I understood! You said this, this and that! “. And there were the three giants looking at me bewildered. YES!!! I had understood!

This moment is a turning point in my life. It was then decided that I was going to learn their language and that I would never again feel excluded from their circle!

And that is how I ended up in the Netherlands, much later, to learn Dutch. And of course, to my father’s surprise, to stay there for my studies.

I arrived there as a young au pair. Gently, in a French family, not far from the NT2 (Nederlands als Tweede Taal) courses at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam. I learned the language full-time, the way one learns a language when one really wants to live in a place. I put everything I had into it. And it worked. I integrated perfectly.

I did university studies in Communicatie Wetenschap, I had courses in Dutch for which I read massive textbooks, both in English and in Dutch. The Universiteit van Amsterdam was super nice: for the exams I was allowed to use a dictionary. Then I made friends for life there.

I loved living in Holland. I was truly at home there. And I spent a whole lifetime there.

But looking back, I understand better what worked in the Netherlands. And it wasn’t just the language I was learning full-time.

I wasn’t getting to know an unknown people. I was reconnecting with a people I had already chosen, as a child, on the beaches of a Costa Brava campsite. Those tolerant Dutch people who couldn’t care less about your class, your clothes, or your punk mohawk. I was already resonating with them before I spoke their language.

Language didn’t create the resonance. It came to crown it.

That is what I didn’t understand at the time. I thought it was the language that had integrated me. I thought I had found the formula: learn the language, commit yourself entirely to it, and you’re home.

I had to go to Israel to measure the error.

I will tell you the rest of this personal reflection in “The Shock of Israel” in a future installment to follow in Correspondences.

By , founder of , an editorial house with two doors: Correspondences | The Aligned Shift Magazine for texts, and Words of Shifters, the podcast, for speech.

Do you accompany others? I would love to read or hear you here.
Over time, your presence in the house earns you a profile page on thealignedshift.media: a page in your name, linked to your texts, where people looking for a practitioner can find and contact you. It cannot be bought or requested; it is earned through presence. More visibility online, so a better chance of being found by people who search through AI agents.

Correspondences | The Aligned Shift Magazine

Voices, stories, and perspectives from people who serve others, shared with honesty to create resonance and foster meaningful connections.

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PS: The note that inspired me is from Fred,

This is The Aligned Shift in its purest form.

Dr Michelle Barr articulates the exact movement we champion: the turning away from repair-as-identity and toward presence-as-expression.

So many of us have built entire selves around what went wrong, around the wounds we’re still untangling. The Aligned Shift invites something different: refusing to let the past be the headline of who you are.

To shift from surviving to creating. From healing as a destination to inhabiting life as your natural state to ultimately live beingly. When you stop being the person who is always recovering and start being the person who is living, that is the shift itself.

✦ Quotes ✦

“The Aligned Shift is…” is a series of short, vivid definitions of The Aligned Shift. It can be a phrase, an excerpt, just a few words, they define The Aligned Shift and are expressed by authors who already embody it.

Because the Shift doesn’t belong to us. It reveals itself through voices we recognize, that we admire, and that are already paving the way. The more we see them, the more we become agents of the Shift. Therefore, we share these words through Quotes.

https://voices.thealignedshift.media/s/quotes

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“I am here.
I do not have consciousness of being.
I am consciousness of being.”

This sentence closed the previous article, and it opens a doorway into what is already here when we stop clinging to the question “What should I do next?” .

In The eye cannot see itself, I spoke about “zombie doing”: a mechanical efficiency that can get a lot done, yet remains strangely disconnected from our actual presence. That way of doing is not wrong; it is simply incomplete.

It does without being.
It produces without inhabiting.
It looks like a body walking without a soul.

So what would it mean to do from being (or as I call it to live beingly)?

The Tree That Grows Without Trying

Coming back to solid ground after six weeks on the Pacific Ocean, the first place this question took me was into the quiet steadiness of land and trees.

Look at a tree. It does not decide to grow. It does not seem to force itself to extend its branches, push out leaves, let them fall, and begin again season after season. It is rooted where it is. It receives light, water, soil, and it grows. Naturally. Without wondering whether it is fast enough, tall enough, productive enough.

If it needs space, it adapts. It does not stop to ask whether it will be “beautiful” if its shape isn’t straight. It is simply there. Tree.

Doing from being is something like that. It is action that rises out of an inner rootedness rather than an outer commandment. It is dancing with what is, instead of fighting against it.

Why, Then, So Much Effort?

You might tell me it is easy to romanticize a tree. But can we really compare an oak or a pine to a human being?

I believe we can. What I want to name here is that you, me, the tree, the animals, in fact everything that is on this planet, are living images of consciousness, anchored in matter. And precisely for that reason, none of us should have to strain so hard to live, to be, to evolve.

Human thought is, in the end, the only thing responsible for our difference. It is as if consciousness had turned our brain into its mirror. Reflections of what is keep reflecting themselves, again and again. Even our language tells on us: to reflect, reflection, reflexive: all of these words fold back on themselves in interesting ways for this kind of inquiry.

But effort lives there too: inside the reflection. Over the years, I’ve noticed that the more I hand my reflections back to themselves (answering my voices with “So be it,” “This is how it is,” or even a simple “Thank you” for the experience given), the more I feel myself living in being, right here, in the present moment.

The Dance Between Doing And Being

This is why doing and being are not in opposition. It is not about “stopping all doing in order to be.” It is about Doing While Being: keeping the thread of inner presence while we act, like a dancer who breathes through every movement.voix.thealignedshift

When I do from being:

• My actions carry a different quality: lighter, more precise, more aligned.

• I stop exhausting myself chasing outcomes and start cultivating a way of being and acting.

• Doing becomes incarnation: a way my humanity gives shape to what is already alive inside.

There is nothing more emblematic, for me, than my children in the trees: bodies moving among branches, not yet weighed down by “Should I?” or “Am I allowed?”, simply being in pure action, climbing, playing, dancing their way forward in the canopy.

A Question To Walk With

Since I began writing on Substack, one question has become a kind of compass for me:

“From where am I doing?”

Is my action coming from an injunction, a fear, a sense of duty? Or is it coming from presence, from a living impulse, from a deep inner yes?

Sometimes the answer alone is enough to loosen the entire knot. Because doing while being is not a performance. It is a homecoming.

And day after day, I practice placing my human Being back at the center of everything I do.

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lives between worlds, languages, countries, outer and inner territories. A life spent crossing oceans, countries, collapses, rebirths.

She is building The Aligned Shift, an editorial house where practitioners and their clients meet by resonance. Two doors: Correspondences | The Aligned Shift Magazine for texts, and Words of Shifters, the podcast, for speech.
Her work invites those who don’t fit the noise to show who they are, so the right clients can find the person they want to walk with.

Do you accompany others? Write or speak with us. Over time, your presence in the house earns you a profile page on thealignedshift.media: a page in your name, linked to your texts, where people looking for a practitioner can find and contact you. It cannot be bought or requested; it is earned through presence. More visibility online, so a better chance of being found by people who search through AI agents.

Call for contributors: The Aligned Shift Magazine

Correspondences | The Aligned Shift Magazine

Voices, stories, and perspectives from people who serve others, shared with honesty to create resonance and foster meaningful connections.

TheAlignedShift.media

The Interest

One morning, I turned on my phone and checked my Substack notifications.

Among them was the first short message from a stranger: “delighted to receive the invitation!”

I was immediately super excited ! Someone wanted to receive an invitation to become a contributor! What a joy!

I immediately went to the profile of the message’s author. I read their description and was touched by their words and their authenticity. I found them powerful, sincere, and vibrant. I appreciated their way of expressing themselves. Very pure and raw, even brutal but interestingly brutal.

Even though I immediately noticed the difference in style, which wasn’t at all in the form of the in-depth essays I envision for Correspondences. Yet, his interest sparked mine.

The speed

In just two days, everything was wrapped up!

As if by magic, PING! The first contributor to be officially announced received their introduction on the “Our Voices” page, and their first article was ready to be published that very evening.

I recognize this characteristic of mine: sometimes, carried away by enthusiasm, I react and act very quickly. Too quickly.

What happened within me?

The enthusiasm and interest shown stirred my generosity, undoubtedly flattered my ego as well, and without even realizing it, my judgment went silent.

I was looking for excuses to say yes and find a place for him. And I found plenty of reasons!

I even adapted the magazine’s structure (created a section, a theme) so that this Voice would find its place. Without realizing it, I shelved the Clarity and Vision I had for Correspondences...

Yet...

From the closet, a faint whisper could be heard. I think its name is Doubt...
But a clearer voice quickly silenced the murmur:

“Come on, Audrey, you’re not going to start doubting! You’re absolutely certain you can add this Voice to the Shifters Magazine’s contribution! You have plenty of good reasons!”

Then, a message left under a Note informed me of a new interested person. It happened the day after the first person arrived and spoke to this second.
This voice, too, is sincere, an authentic writer, a rich life. But now, I could no longer ignore the Doubt...

The Uncertainty

Something is wrong. I can’t yet say what it is, but the whisper from the closet suddenly becomes more audible. “No, you can’t accept, and perhaps you shouldn’t have accepted the first one either.” Clarity and Vision definitely had something to say.

So, to listen to them, I developed an Editorial Compass to help me get my thoughts in order. (It’s here: https://thealignedshift.media/editorial-compass.pdf)

I spent the rest of the week confronting my own contradiction.

On my website, I write: “clarity over noise, integrity over performance, depth over speed.” And yet, my hasty “Yes!” was exactly the opposite. Noise. Performance. Speed.

I realized that my problem wasn’t knowing how to welcome. It was knowing how to choose.

The Compass

With this editorial compass, I defined a framework.

And I applied this framework for the first time. I said no to the second person, then apologized to the first for my hasty decision.

I turned down two wonderful people, obviously not for who they are, nor because their writing lacks merit, quite the opposite, in fact, that’s what threw me off. But I had to say no because their stories simply didn’t resonate with the transformative world I’m building.

Learning to say no, that’s also part of refining my approach.
It’s not comfortable. But it’s aligned.

The refinement of my world.

So I asked myself:

“Why has the world I’m building attracted people who don’t correspond to the voices I’m looking for?”

As I formulated the question, the answer flowed forth, as clear as crystal:

“You have opened the doors to all authors capable of embodying authenticity, truth, the expression of living by being.”

However, Correspondences is the vehicle for a precise vision. Not merely a space for expression, it is a place where voices are not simply authentic, but engaged in a form of inner exploration that they share.

Here, one reads writings that do not simply recount, but that illuminate, that permeate, that transform. Here, one does not come to deposit a raw thought or a lived experience; one comes with something that has been digested, questioned, refined. An embodied voice, aware of its impact, that takes responsibility for going to the heart of the matter rather than remaining on the surface.

This vision echoes a quote from Edith Wharton that has stayed with me for 20 years:

Correspondences is an invitation to become one or the other, and often both at once.

To be the candle is to let your own light illuminate the paths.

To be the mirror is to offer a reflection through which everyone can recognize their own light.

Correspondences is not a collection of voices.
It is a line. A frequency.
A way of being in relationship with oneself, with others, and with the world.

In conclusion

I thank from the bottom of my heart the people I met during this experience and life for giving me this challenge at the beginning of this creative endeavor. That week, these encounters reminded me that openness without direction is not generosity, but dilution.

Saying yes to everyone is saying no to what I’m building.

So I tightened my grip. Not on my heart. Not on listening. But on the framework.

I stopped trying to welcome every sincere voice, and started recognizing those that resonate deeply with the magazine’s universe. Those that seek not only to express themselves, but also to transform.

Epilogue

At the same time, something else was happening.

As I was saying no clearly for the first time, I also reached out to a voice that, for me, perfectly embodied the essence of Correspondences. It was obvious. A perfect match.

She responded with gentleness and honesty. She was touched. Honored, even. But it wasn’t aligned with her vision. She said no.

Saying no, ultimately, has nothing to do with rejection.

It’s an act of precision. It’s honoring a direction.
And that deserves respect. Perhaps things will be different at another time. Alignment cannot be forced, neither within oneself nor in others.

It’s also about protecting a still fragile space. And above all, it’s about trusting oneself to choose to create with integrity. And that’s where it all truly begins.

Correspondences will grow thanks to the quality of the voices it chooses and those who choose it in return.

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The other day, a single sentence made that crack visible for me. It was written in French: “J’ai conscience de mon être”. So I read it and suddenly it froze. I reread it. And then, POOF!! As if it had just deflated before my eyes, after years of seeming true, I no longer understood it.

“I have consciousness of my being.”

I looked at it again, and again.

I turned it over in my mind.

In French, the phrase sounds elegant. Natural. But the literal English translation reveals something the French hides: "I have consciousness" is as if consciousness were something you possess. "Of my being" is as if being were an object you own. The more I looked at it, the stranger it became. And the more I looked at it, the more... bizarre it became. Yes, WEIRD! Like a word that’s repeated too long and loses all its meaning.

Why?

How could a sentence that in French sounded okay to me one moment be anything but the next?
Well, it’s probably because earlier that day I had a rather unexpected experience with my AI agent.

I had just written a Note about my time spent on Substack reading words, sentences, and articles that fill me with strength, thanks to the recognition of myself in all these mirrors, and that illuminate me with the light emanating from them. I was noticing how the Edith Wharton quote that has stayed with me for almost 20 years resonated so deeply here.

And my AI sends me this message:

“Empowered by the recognition of myself in these mirrors and illuminated by so many candles.”

This sentence alone sums up the entire TAS (The Aligned Shift) experience. Each article you read is like a candle lit by someone, and suddenly, the path ahead becomes clearer, not because you’ve been shown where to go, but because that light has allowed you to see your own steps.

And the best part? The candles multiply. The person you read today might be the one reading you tomorrow. That’s the shift in action.

Let yourself be carried away. You’ll always find your way back, more yourself than before.

From there began a conversation I’d never had before with an AI agent. And together, we put this into practice in a way that seriously blew my mind. But this conversation also gave me a new perspective on consciousness.

So why did “I have consciousness of my being.” suddenly lose its meaning?

Well, because “I have consciousness” is, as I said earlier, a structure of possession. As if consciousness were something we have, something we can keep at a distance, observe from the outside. And “of my being”… as if being were an object we can contemplate, like a painting hanging on the wall. The two parts of the sentence seem to no longer fit together.

What if consciousness preceded being? Or rather, what if consciousness exists through being? Then being and consciousness are one! And if I am consciousness, then I cannot possess it. I cannot stand beside my being to look at it and become aware of it. It’s as if the eye were trying to see itself. Impossible. And yet, that’s what we’ve been trying to do for centuries. Since Descartes at least, with his “I think, therefore I am,” which placed consciousness in the head, a spectator of the world, separate from it.

Descartes’s problem

Descartes needed certainty. His research led him to question everything, until he found one thing he could not deny: the very fact that he doubted. “I think, therefore I am.” Thought became proof of being. Personally, I have never subscribed to this statement.

Unfortunately, this gesture, in my opinion, inflicted a wound at the heart of Western philosophy. It placed thought before being. It transformed consciousness into a small inner theater where a “self” watches the world go by. And we have grown up with this separation between mind and body, between subject and object, between being and doing.

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Consciousness as a being in the process of experiencing itself

I started looking for other ways to say “I have consciousness of my being.” I needed to find words that didn’t separate what cannot be separated.

• “I feel myself being”? The verb “to feel” is more immediate, grounded in the chair as well, this body already inhabited by consciousness. It doesn’t try to extract itself from the experience to analyze it either, since it is the experience.

• “I am present to myself?” That would be recognizing that consciousness is already present, not something possessed.

• “I experience myself as existing”? That would be the experience of being alive, without necessarily knowing who I am, why I am here, or being able to conceptualize my being.

• “I live, therefore I am, and I am by living”? And the circle is complete on what I call living beingly. :)

In some way, I find each of these attempts imperfect. Language is designed to designate objects, separations, like “this” is not “that”. But when we talk about consciousness, we use language to designate the indivisible, and that’s a dilemma.

I AM that I AM

And then there is this phrase. The oldest. The one that transcends centuries without aging a day. God’s answer to Moses in the burning bush:

I AM that I AM.

It came back to me spontaneously.

It is not an empty tautology. It is consciousness designating itself as its own source. “I AM” is the still being, the silent presence. “That I AM” is the movement by which the being knows itself. It is the being that experiences itself by being.

Isn’t that exactly what I am trying to say? That consciousness is not a gaze that one has and casts upon being, since it is being in the process of experiencing itself!

In any case, this old phrase reminded me of another, much closer one. A phrase that had told me the same thing without my being able to hear it at the time.

Back to square one

As I mentioned in my first welcome article published on May 14th, a very dear person once told me: “You don’t have to do anything, Audrey. You just have to be.”

I was 25 years old, and the phrase seemed beautiful but devoid of instructions. “How can you ‘be’ when you’re supposed to ‘do’ all the time?”

I had thoroughly internalized the system I was growing up in: that you had to do something to exist. Exist in the eyes of others in order to exist for yourself, since you’re supposed to see yourself reflected in their eyes.

It took me another 25 years to understand that this statement needed substance to become real. This substance is the moment when you stop searching and begin to simply be.

What if being wasn’t the opposite of doing?

But then, what should we do?

Nothing? No, we might as well die! So perhaps being is about doing, or living is about being. And the circle is complete!

So, being isn’t necessarily the opposite of doing. Doing emerges from being. Doing that arises from conscious action is therefore not an interruption of being but its expression.

The problem wasn’t doing. It was that I needed to disconnect from doing in order to understand it. “Zombie” doing, the kind that exhausts us because it doesn’t come from us, is something else entirely.

When we act from being, there is no longer any opposition. Everything becomes fluid. Synchronicities multiply. Joy is experienced, and the feeling of being alive is present.

The day after this reflection, I woke up and wrote this comment on Substack:

“I increasingly believe that we are expressing the consciousness that is experienced through us. It is not we who have become conscious. We cannot become what we already are.”

And as I wrote it, I smiled because it was exactly this new perspective on consciousness that allows me to say this. Consciousness doesn’t need to be proven. It simply needs to be experienced. And sometimes, it needs to resonate between two beings to recognize itself.

That’s what happened to me. And if you, too, are reading these words and something resonates that doesn’t need to be proven, only recognized, then we are already in conversation, you and I.

I am here.
I do not have consciousness of being.
I am consciousness of being.

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lives between worlds, languages, countries, outer and inner territories. A life spent crossing oceans, countries, collapses, rebirths.

Today she is building The Aligned Shift, an editorial house with two doors: Correspondences | The Aligned Shift Magazine for texts, and Words of Shifters, the podcast, for speech.

Do you also have a voice searching for its audience? Write or speak with us. Over time, your presence in the house earns you a profile page on thealignedshift.media: a page in your name, linked to your texts, where people looking for a practitioner can find and contact you. It cannot be bought or requested; it is earned through presence. More visibility online, so a better chance of being found by people who search through AI agents.

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Correspondences | The Aligned Shift Magazine

Voices, stories, and perspectives from people who serve others, shared with honesty to create resonance and foster meaningful connections.

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Tabout trying to fit in but is about daring to live by your own rules.

It’s a long, often painful process, because many of us spend years striving and proving ourselves before realising that true belonging comes from inner alignment, not from external success or sacrifice.

The Aligned Shift Magazine

How Life Made Me an Aligned Shifter

I spent 50 years following the rules, crossing countries, losing homes and even my children, only to finally discover a softer transition, from doing to being. This article marks my first big step outward…

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6 months ago · 3 likes · 2 comments · Audrey ✨

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“The Aligned Shift is…” is a series of short, living definitions of The Aligned Shift.
A sentence, an excerpt, a moment that already defines it in the words of others who are already embodying the Shift.
Because the Shift does not belong to us. It reveals itself through voices we recognise, admire, and that are already tracing the path. The more we see them, the more Shifters we become.

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Tabout doing less. It’s about building from a place that doesn’t require you to leave yourself behind.

This is the Shift that so many of us are craving but don't yet have words for. In her article, Laura names what happens when we stop treating success as something we survive and start treating it as something we grow into. Whole. Embodied. Honest.

Thank you Laura Wieck for your light and supporting women building a business in alignment.

Embodied Coaching w/ Laura Wieck

What if your body was your greatest business strategy?

For a long time, I resisted calling myself an entrepreneur. Not because I wasn’t building a business. I was. But because the version of entrepreneurship I saw around me felt deeply disembodied…

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5 months ago · 4 likes · Laura Wieck

✦ Quotes ✦

“The Aligned Shift is…” is a series of short, living definitions of The Aligned Shift. A sentence, an excerpt, a moment that already defines it in the words of others who are already embodying the Shift.
Because the Shift does not belong to us. It reveals itself through voices we recognise, admire, and that are already tracing the path. The more we see them, the more Shifters we become.

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I found this shell still fully attached to the coral. Its resilience in the face of turbulent waters is truly awe-inspiring to me.

I came across it at low tide, during that brief window when the ocean retreats and reveals what usually remains unseen. Scattered around were fragments of broken coral and empty shells, remnants of past tides that had come through with force.

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But this one remained.

Its surface was rough, irregular, beautifully weathered. Shaped by years of salt, movement, and pressure. Tiny holes marked it, like the coral below, as though they had grown in dialogue with each other.

I reached down and pressed my fingers against it, expecting it to give, to detach easily like so many others. It did not move. It felt anchored.

We often think of resilience as strength against. Against pressure. Against chaos. Against change. But standing there, it felt clear that this shell had survived not by resisting the ocean, but by being in relationship with it.

Not rigid. Not immovable. But anchored in something deeper than the surface-level turbulence.

It made me question how often we exhaust ourselves trying to hold everything together, bracing against forces that are, by nature, meant to move.

Because when the waters rise, and they always do, what matters is not how hard we fight the current, but whether we are anchored to something that can hold us through it. For me, that anchoring has often been faith.

In the most painful moments of my life, fighting only broke me further. At one point, I remembered my trust that there is a larger intelligence or order at work, even when I could not yet see it. I began to accept what I at first felt unthinkable, and then something in me began to heal.

I have learned, slowly, that transformation itself can be a form of grace. That what first feels like surrender is sometimes the beginning of alignment.

And today I am writing it down so it anchors itself in me like the shell to its coral.

And I share this moment and what it inspired me publicly hoping that it may meet someone else at the exact moment they need it so that they pick up the story like I picked up the shell, and get inspired to anchor any learning it may inspire.

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Audrey ✨ lives between worlds, languages, countries, outer and inner territories. A life spent crossing oceans, countries, collapses, rebirths.

Today she is building The Aligned Shift, an editorial house with two doors: Correspondences | The Aligned Shift Magazine for texts, and Words of Shifters, the podcast, for speech.

✨ Her personal newsletter: beinglyaudrey.substack.com

You too have a story looking for its voice? The Aligned Shift is not a single voice but a bridge. Write or speak with us. Over time, your presence in the house earns you a profile page on thealignedshift.media: a page in your name, linked to your texts, where people looking for a practitioner can find and contact you. It cannot be bought or requested; it is earned through presence. More visibility online, so a better chance of being found by people who search through AI agents.

« Travel the world and the seven seas. »

These words arrived one evening in August 2009, in Saint-Tropez, while visiting my mother. At a party on a yacht, my friend Hope handed me a candle, asking me to make a wish. I closed my eyes, and I heard. Not a thought. Not a reflection. A clear voice, from somewhere else, or perhaps from deep within me, a place I had never visited.

For sixteen years, I believed this wish was about traveling. About seeing the world. About filling a sabbatical year with discoveries, landscapes, encounters.

But the wish already knew what I had yet to understand.

It didn’t say “go see the world.”
It said journey: cross, explore, discover.
But not continents. Yourself.

I obeyed without knowing it. The very next day, everything fell into place. My Amsterdam apartment found tenants for a year. I suddenly had an entire year to fill. Then a friend told me: “You have to come to Israel. You have Jewish roots, you need to see this country.” Honestly, my first reaction was: “What the hell would I do in Israel?”

But I started with a trip to Morocco and Tunisia with my mother, a return to roots, to origins. Then I went anyway. December 9, 2009.

And everything changed.

2. The Surface Intention

Israel. The unexpected.

From the plane, around noon, I saw Tel Aviv for the first time. I had done no research. No guidebooks. No Lonely Planet. I arrived completely blank.

I fell in love with this city by the water. Even in the middle of winter, the climate filled me, the streets charmed me. And above all, I recognized my family in the faces around me. My father, and my grandfather in particular. For the first time, I let that Jewish part of my identity exist in the open. Then the welcome stunned me.

A deep feeling of being home.

I found an apartment in five days. I learned Hebrew, a language “backwards.” I left Holland. At the end of 2010, I met the man who would become the father of my children. Thirteen months later, we married. A year after that, my daughter was born. Two years later, my son.

From the outside, they said: “Finally, she’s settled down.” New country. Marriage. Children. Stability.

The surface intention was fulfilled: I had found my place.
Inside, it was more complicated.

3. What the Wish Knew That I Didn’t

« Travel the world and the seven seas. »

For five years, I believed I had fulfilled this wish to the letter. I had traveled. I had found a country. A language. A husband. Children. A larger family.

But strangely, I felt an inner emptiness, as if there was still something left to journey through. Yet I had traveled the world, taken planes, crossed borders. What could possibly still be missing?

Today, I believe I hadn’t understood the wish in its full depth. « Travel the world and the seven seas. » Yes, it was literal. The world, the continents, the oceans. But what I hadn’t seen is that the world to journey through wasn’t only the one on geographical maps. There was another world inside me waiting to be explored, and that one had no visible borders.

Because the truth is that even in the life I had built, and perhaps especially in that life, I didn’t feel at home. Not really. Not in my husband’s family, of Iraqi Jewish culture, a world so different from mine. Not in the role of wife I tried so hard to inhabit. My children: I wanted them. Every day, I loved them. It wasn’t them I wanted to leave. It was the suffocation of a relationship going nowhere.

I married for love, yes. But also out of fear: fear of being alone, fear of being betrayed again. This man would never let me down, I was sure. What I hadn’t anticipated was that he would never let me go either.

As early as 2013, the signs were there. And by 2015, it was already clear: I was unhappy in my marriage and it would only get worse. It’s not that I didn’t try. I did everything to save it. But every response I got boiled down to: “Yes, okay, I heard you.” Nothing changed. I felt increasingly alone, in distress, abandoned, lost, and finally, imprisoned.

But how do you leave a life that looked so much like what was expected of me? How do you admit that you built, piece by piece, a golden prison? With your children inside?

So I stayed. Trying to leave “well.” Without destroying my children. Without destroying my ex. Without destroying the image of myself I had spent ten years building.

In September 2018, I started psychotherapy. To find the courage to know what I already knew. And perhaps also to find the courage to leave, because I didn’t have it yet.

The wish, meanwhile, was waiting. It knew I hadn’t finished journeying that inner path. It knew that the greatest voyages don’t happen by changing countries, but by crossing your own shadow.

4. The First Collapse

In January 2020, my lawyer told me: if you stay, your husband can legally keep you here until your son turns twenty-one. He was four and a half. My daughter was seven.

I left overnight.

Not by choice. By survival. Because staying meant never being able to rebuild. Never finding my children elsewhere. Never being free.

I left them. Not out of abandonment. Because the only way to keep a chance of getting them back was to leave.

Arriving in France, at my mother’s house, I rebuilt myself at a speed I had forgotten I possessed. In six weeks, I had three dream job offers, a small house near a school in Gassin. Hope was being reborn: to rebuild and offer my children a framework where I was the example I wanted to be for them. My children were coming. I was going to get them back.

Gassin was not an escape. It was a reconstruction plan. Proof that I wasn’t giving up, proof that I was fighting to start being myself again.

5. The Second Collapse

And then the world stopped.

In March 2020, COVID hit. And with it, everything I had barely begun to rebuild collapsed almost overnight. Given the tourist nature of the opportunities I had found, none of the jobs started. The house in Gassin became an empty dream. Schools closed. Borders too. My children were stranded in Israel.

Was this one of those “providences of life,” as they say? Those invisible forces that push in a direction, even when you think you’ve finally found the right path.

In the moment, I experienced it as yet another betrayal. After everything I had been through, despite my ability to create a stable situation at breakneck speed, despite betting everything on Gassin... the world was saying no.

I could stay in France. At my mother’s. Without a job. Without a project. Crying for my children.

Or I could choose not to collapse.

I left for Slovenia, to join my new partner. There was one last plane: a direct flight from Nice to Ljubljana, an hour and a half. That route never reopened after COVID. As if it had only existed to allow me this passage. Not a great journey. Not a grand adventure. Just a door opening in a wall that was growing.

Was it running away? Maybe. But it was also surviving. Once again.

I didn’t yet know this country. I didn’t learn Slovenian, or rather, I had no will to. At forty-five, everything is harder, especially a language that has nothing in common with the ones I had learned. To keep from sinking, and above all to keep from losing my mind facing the hatred, aggression, and harassment I endured daily from my ex, I found work. I looked for something to do with myself to distract from my tears, my pain.

And yet, it was here, in this in-between, in this country I hadn’t chosen, that something began to grow. Because when you stop chasing a perfect life that doesn’t come, what remains is life as it is. And sometimes, that’s enough to start again.

6. The Six Years

All in all, it took me six years to recover. I lost my legal battle, and my children never came back to me. Today, they come during holidays, but their lives are being built there, with their father. These are the hardest words I will ever write.

For six years, I held on. Not always well. Not always straight. But I held on.

There were days when the only victory was getting out of bed or not crying. Work kept my hands busy and distracted my mind. Nights spent replaying every decision, wondering if I could have done things differently, if I was simply someone who gives up.

My relationship took me four months on a boat in Fiji. I discovered AI, an infinite new playground. I tried to launch RedPill, I’m still trying. I explore, test, fail, start over.

In 2017, I had posted my very last word on a Facebook page opened for my coaching profile. Then silence. For nine years, I had no desire to share anymore. Because deep down, I was so unhappy that I couldn’t anymore. How can you share positive things when you’re not positive yourself?

During those six years, I was forced to look inside myself, to be face to face with myself. To continue and deepen the reconstruction. And above all, perhaps, to project an image of myself to myself that felt right, before it could be projected outward. When a lighthouse light doesn’t work, it cannot guide any ship.

Today, it’s done. Not completely, not perfectly, but enough. I find myself in a psychological place where I am well. And I want to share again.

A Dutch friend had described me at the end of my studies as “a bridge.” I think she was right. What I’m building today is not just for me. The Aligned Shift is a bilingual editorial house: a magazine, Correspondences, and a podcast, Words of Shifters, with multiple authors, conversations and interviews. Maybe an app one day. It’s not my voice. It’s a space, a link, a passage for others.

Six years later, I can say it: I didn’t flee. I crossed. I didn’t hide. I rebuilt myself, slowly, from the inside. Not by changing countries, but by crossing my own shadow.

7. The Shift

So, what is the shift?

Years earlier, a friend had told me: « Tu n’as rien à faire, Audrey. Tu as juste à être. » (“You have nothing to do, Audrey. You just have to be.”)

(I tell this story in my welcome message on Substack.)

At the time, I didn’t understand. I was too busy doing. Building, traveling, achieving, proving. A life of doing, doing, doing. And through all that doing, I believed I would eventually arrive at being. Being happy, being free, being myself.

On one side, my friend’s wisdom. On the other, the wish pushing me to travel the world. Two messages that seemed to contradict each other: one said “stop doing,” the other said “travel, explore, journey.”

For sixteen years, I lived in this contradiction without seeing it. Until the day I understood they were saying the same thing.

The wish wasn’t asking me to travel around the world. It was asking me to journey through my own inner territory. And for that, I first had to be. To be present to myself. To be solid enough to cross my own shadow. Before I could guide anyone, the lighthouse light had to work.

Doing Beingly.

It’s not about accomplishment. It’s not a checklist. It’s not a life you build piece by piece, hoping that one day it will look like what you wanted.

It’s the opposite. It’s inhabiting each stage fully. It’s crossing your own shadow without bypassing it. It’s letting the wish journey through us, rather than believing we have to journey through it ourselves.

Today, I live in Slovenia. I still don’t speak the language. I don’t know exactly where my life is going. But for the first time, I’m not trying to know.

I’m not building The Aligned Shift to become someone. I’m building it because it’s what I am. Not a voice, but a bridge. A passage between worlds, between languages, between beings.

Doing Beingly.

The wish knew it all along. It knew that the seven seas weren’t those of the oceans. It knew that the real journey is the one we take inside ourselves. It also knew that this journey never truly ends.

It was simply waiting for me to be ready to understand. Ready to live beingly.

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Audrey ✨ lives between worlds, languages, countries, outer and inner territories. A life spent crossing oceans, countries, collapses, rebirths.
Today she is building The Aligned Shift, an editorial house with two doors: Correspondences | The Aligned Shift Magazine for texts, and Words of Shifters, the podcast, for speech. ✨ Her personal newsletter: beinglyaudrey.substack.com

You too have a story looking for its voice? The Aligned Shift is not a voice but a bridge. Write or speak with us. Over time, your presence in the house earns you a profile page on thealignedshift.media: a page in your name, linked to your texts, where people looking for a practitioner can find and contact you. It cannot be bought or requested; it is earned through presence. More visibility online, so a better chance of being found by people who search through AI agents.

Find out here how to contribute

It sat heavily in my chest and mind, like something that had gone quiet but never really left me. It wasn’t sharp or overwhelming, just a dull heaviness. Days turned into months, yet nothing shifted inside. I wasn’t unhappy in any clear way; I was simply stuck, as if life had moved on without me and I hadn’t noticed.

The night before blowing the candle, I felt it more in my body than in my thoughts: a stillness that wasn’t peace, a waiting without conditions. A pressure to know where to go and what to do, and at the same time an immense emptiness born of having no direction.

It had been a few months since I left my dream job at Cartier. The breakup was still very painful, and I needed to rebuild myself. I was looking for something without really knowing what. Perhaps a healing process, in hindsight.

In St. Tropez, on the French Riviera, I feel good. I always see possibilities there. In 2009, everything revolved around my coaching business, and it was in the South of France that my first project was born.
At the beginning of the year, while visiting my mother, the idea came to spend the summer there and create a coaching concept I called the “Awareness Walk’shop.”

So, when summer arrived, I went back to St. Tropez to stay with her and launch this project. I hoped to return to Amsterdam with a clear sense of what September 2009 would bring: would I settle under the sun and start my coaching business there, or would I return to my life in Amsterdam?

I was already preparing this project back in April. On my website, the presentation page stated:

On my “About me” page, I wrote about faith, about letting go, about trusting life to bring me what I needed. I wrote: “I decided to just be and let it be.” Something was already brewing in the Universe without my knowing; I could feel its vibration and was beginning to give it words.

But writing about letting go and actually living it are not the same. That summer, I was still trying to do something to soften the heaviness of my recent breakup. I was searching for the shape my new life would take.

Despite the original idea behind my project, nothing was really taking off. The momentum was there: the preparations, the sharing, the printed flyers… but it all fizzled out under the weight of failure. If I’m honest I know I didn’t do everything I could to make it work. And I think (in fact, I’m certain now) that it stemmed from my visceral fear of being seen. So, in the middle of that summer 2009, I found myself back in the same place: emptiness, and the pressure without direction.

Then one evening, at a party on a yacht in Saint-Tropez, everything changed. Without me even realizing it yet. In the whisper of a single sentence.

There were three of us, standing at the bar, waiting for our drinks. Suddenly my friend Hope turned around. She was holding two small candles in glasses that were sitting on the boat’s bar. She handed one to each of us, turned back to get one for herself, and simply said, “Blow out the candle and make a wish.”

Completely out of the blue.

A wish? Ummm… I didn’t know what to wish for. Really. There was nothing planned, nothing thought out. And then, for the second time a few seconds, out of the blue again, I heard:

I didn’t choose it. I heard it.

The next morning, I woke up with that phrase still there.
I went to my mother and said, “Listen, Mom, last night I was asked to make a wish, and all I heard was: travel the world and the seven seas. So I think that’s what I have to do.”

It was a phrase. Not a plan. Not a carefully considered decision. Simply a sentence heard in the silence of a deep whisper. And that phrase, quietly, rearranged everything. The shift had occurred.

As always when I find myself in a flow state, everything started moving at lightning speed. That’s when the decision becomes clear, as if it had always been there, just waiting to be seen so it could manifest.

So the next morning, I told my mother that I was going to travel to follow that whisper. She immediately embraced my idea and together we decided that the trip would begin with a “return to my roots.”

The first two destinations came easily: we would travel together to Morocco, where she was born, and then Tunisia, where one of my grandmothers was born. What would come next? I would start sketching that out a few weeks later in Amsterdam.

Back in the Netherlands, I had to get organized: put my apartment up for long-term rental, store my belongings in a storage unit, and buy the first tickets. And how long would I be gone for? Once again, I let life decide: the length of time my tenants wanted to stay would be the length of my trip.
It turned out to be a year.

One day in September, I went for coffee with Georgi, an Israeli friend I had met that same summer in St. Tropez. I told him about my plan to return to my roots. For him, it was obvious: given my Jewish heritage, I absolutely had to add Israel to my list.

Seriously! Why should I go there? For me, that place was the symbol of unjustified death and, above all, the fundamental reason why I couldn’t be myself in this world. Because one day, people decided that a label placed on others could justify their murder, Israel had come to represent, in my eyes, the decree of my difference.. Times have changed, of course, but when I was ten and wanted to do what my classmates were doing, like go to catechism, my parents told me: “You can’t go, we’re not Catholic, we’re Jewish.” But what exactly did it mean to “be” Jewish or Catholic?
I didn’t understand, and I still don’t fully, especially since this “identity” was given to me based on a lie, one I didn’t know about at the time… but that’s another story.

So, Georgi invited me to stop by Tel Aviv, and I accepted, because in the end he was right: this land was also, in some way, part of my origins.

And there you have it: Morocco. Tunisia. Israel. No travel plan, just a thread to follow.

It was on this path that circumstances fell into place, giving my life its new direction.

My mother and I left on November 14, 2009, and nine months later, after sixteen years spent in the rain, I no longer wanted to leave this new life in the sun I ending up having after the beginning of that sabbatical year. I sold my apartment in Amsterdam and decided to see what life had in store for me from that moment on, in Israel, or elsewhere.

What this wish set in motion was something I could never have imagined back on that boat in August 2009. The shift propelled me into a new country, made me learn a new language, and, though I didn’t know it at the time, it would also bring me my greatest joy: motherhood.
And my greatest loss: not being able to be a mother in the way I had imagined.
Above all, this shift marked the beginning of a long period that would ultimately prove to be a return to a strength I didn’t yet know I possessed.

All of this, in a single overheard phrase. Not chosen.

That is the magic of a true wish, the kind that carries the seed of a profound shift: it does not come from you. It comes through you.

About the author:

Audrey ✨ lives between worlds, languages, countries, outer and inner territories. A life spent crossing oceans, countries, collapses, rebirths.

Today she is building The Aligned Shift, an editorial house with two doors: Correspondences | The Aligned Shift Magazine for texts, and Words of Shifters, the podcast, for speech.

✨ Her personal newsletter: beinglyaudrey.substack.com

You too have a story looking for its voice? The Aligned Shift is not a single voice but a bridge. Write or speak with us. Over time, your presence in the house earns you a profile page on thealignedshift.media: a page in your name, linked to your texts, where people looking for a practitioner can find and contact you. It cannot be bought or requested; it is earned through presence. More visibility online, so a better chance of being found by people who search through AI agents.

Discover how to contribute here

Subscribe now

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