Integration and the power of slow

     I had a wonderful, soul feeding conversation with a dear friend last week.  We talked about change  Integration is a bit of a buzz word. It gets thrown around a lot in relation to healing and being in process, but what does it mean?

and integration, among other things.

     What is integration? It’s the process of moving beyond the surface layer of an “ah-hah” or an experience. Integration incubates meaning. It allows the experience to become part of and change you. It’s also a way of honoring your experience.

   No matter how deep or amazing the initial experience was, without integration it becomes two dimensional. My mind will hold it as a memory snapshot that the rest of me has little access to. Even the most incredible “ah-hahs” become trite if I don’t integrate them.

    When more change is happening in me and around me, my need for integration time is greater. I feel the pull to slow down and hibernate. When I begin to feel disconnected from myself, it’s time to be still and catch up. The space to do that rarely just presents itself. I have to create it. No matter when I choose to slow down, there will be something else I could be doing. The dishes aren’t done. There is email I haven’t answered. There is a project I want to start.

   Stepping away and letting those things go undone can be a challenge. We live in a culture with a heavy utilitarian bias. To varying degrees, we’re all conditioned to believe that if we’re not producing something “useful” we’re being lazy. Useful usually means something concrete and tangible. Integration doesn’t produce a tangible thing.

    A day spent integrating won’t give me something I can point to and say “look, I did that.” However, if I let the busy deter me, what am I really doing? What is being productive worth if most of what I’m producing is just a way to distract me from me?

     Integration takes time. A whole day where I can slow down and be present with my internal landscape works best. Staying with that interior focus requires unscheduled time where I can move, in solitude, to my own internal rhythm.

     Often my stepping away from the external means I stay in my pajamas, don’t take a shower or engage in the other things I do to meet the outside world.

     Staying with the integration process involves letting myself be uncomfortable. Even if I’m not aware of what’s happening, I’m stretching to encompass something new and let it find its place inside me. That’s uncomfortable. The discomfort deserves my attention so I sit with as long as I can.

     Sometimes the discomfort spawns restlessness that calls for movement. Actions where my body is in motion but my mind is not work best. I take a walk. I do the dishes.

     What I chose to do on an integration day is less important than allowing my actions to come from inside rather than from my “do” list. Sometimes I watch three movies in a row. Often I’m drawn to being creative. I write, draw or make a collage. I find music that creates a soundtrack for where I am, lie down on the couch and just listen. Sometimes I drink coffee, watch birds and stare at the sky. Sometimes I do absolutely nothing.

     Integration invites stillness and silence deeper than the mere lack of activity or sound. I used to believe I had to go out in the woods or away somewhere to create that. However, the most profound experience I’ve had with this state occurred in a hospital room.

    Several years ago a close friend, Katie, was dying of cancer. For a couple weeks she drifted between conscious and unconscious, between this world and another. I often sat with her at night as she drifted. The hospital was noisy and busy with nurses, other patients and visitors.

    One night as I sat in Katie’s darkened room, something else began to gather around us. Katie’s door was partially open, but the hospital sounds faded away. I sat in awe as the silence deepened and expanded around us until the whole Universe was there, in that little room with us. In the presence of that sheer vastness I felt wonderfully small in relation to Bigger. A hospital room was the last place I expected to encounter the Divine and exquisitely vast silence.

     That deep silence can come anywhere, but it rarely enters uninvited. I have to be still and issue the invitation. Although I haven’t since experienced deep silence like I did in Katie’s hospital room, I can still invite in the Bigger. For integration I need that connection. The Bigger, the Divine, the Universe, my soul, my higher Self or whatever you want to call that, already has a place for what I’m stretching to encompass. When I am reminded of my right size in relation to Bigger I can step into that place with more ease.

     In the silence I can hear myself better. Life is loud. During most days I’m occupied with interaction, conversation and the sounds of a busy world. My internal dialogue is generally quieter. It’s easy to miss the whisper in the noise.

        My slow days are rarely filled with revelations or even a conscious awareness of what’s coalescing inside me. Integration takes longer than a single slow day. I rarely wake up the next day filled with revelations. I do usually wake up feeling clearer. The magic of a slow day is that reconnects me to my experience. The engagement somehow allows all of me to keep digesting the experience as I move through my daily life.

Hope and the elusive "now"

     Happy Equinox all! It’s spring, the time to be fecund and see what winter’s fallow has been incubating. I’m doing my best to remember that I am not in control or in charge of squat; to see what the Universe will grow in me rather than imposing my own wants onto what is. The more I’m able to be in the now, the easier that is to do. Staying in the present is a lot of work. My body does a good job of staying here; the rest of me…not so much.
    What is taking me out of present? Sometimes it’s a fear fueled projection from the catastrophe factory in my head. Often it’s hope that takes me out of now.
    Not a surprise. I first noticed this friction between “hope” and “now” in my twenties. Working my
way back from an addiction showed me I don’t get to be anywhere else until I own where I am now. It took many rounds of vaulting off into the future, to where I wished I was and hoped I would end up, for me to understand what I was doing. Each time I got off into the future, I neglected the present. I rendered myself powerless to make any choices in the present that might support where I wanted to go. Since then, I often refer to hope as the luxury I choose not to afford.
     By nature, hope is about something that could or might happen. Hope is focused on the future. When I surrender to hope, I am out of the present. Even if I hope I don’t spill the ice tea I’m pouring, and I’ll know whether or not that happened in 10 seconds when the glass is full, my hope is a few seconds ahead of now.
     These days my flights of hope often begin when I need to schedule something next week or a couple months from now. I put the dates down in my calendar. My mind offers up a little day dream about what I hope happens on those dates. Without realizing I’m doing it, I get attached to that outcome.
    As I’ve watched myself drift in and out of now over the past couple weeks, I’ve glimpsed a facet of this process that I haven’t clearly seen before. My hope contains a strand of anxiety and not all of those jitters are excitement. When I let in hope, I open the door to its shadow – fear. Duality is inherent in nature. That’s just the way it is.
  We usually think of disappointment being the flipside of hope. But I feel disappointed until I don’t get what I hoped for. That feeling is based on the outcome of my hope being realized or not. Long before decisive moment, my hope comes with a fear of not getting what I want.
     So it’s not just hope that keeps taking me out of now. It’s a different sort of fear based projection…and a kind of sneaky one as it arrives looking like something else entirely.
    Last summer I read an article, Eight Fearless Questions, where Margaret Wheatley talks about this relationship between hope and fear:

“There's something very interesting to understand about hope. That is, that hope and fear are one. Any time we're hopeful, we don't know it necessarily, but we're bringing in fear. Because fear is the constant, unavoidable companion of hope. What this simply means is that I hope for a certain outcome and I'm afraid I won't get it. I hope for a certain result and I'm fearful it won't happen. This is the way that hope and fear are wedded together. There is a place called, "beyond hope and fear." It is to be free from hope, so that we are free from fear.”

    Although this paragraph stuck with me, I couldn’t quite get my head around the idea of being hope free. Totally ditching hope leaves me with what? Hopelessness? Despair? Pessimism? Now that I’m seeing another layer of how hope works, maybe not.
    Hope is an emotion. The feeling can take me out of now momentarily. What really catapults me off into next month or next year is the story I come up with about the hope and how attached I get to that outcome. The fear is all about the story and the outcome. The fear story will strand me in next week or next year over and over if I let it.
    The story I make up inevitably focuses my hope on a specific event, outcome or possibility. Once my brain gets ahold of hope it’s no longer an unfiltered emotion. It’s hope for something. As soon as my hope is fixated on something specific not only does the fear take me out of now, I begin to forget that I’m not in charge.
     My attachment to the story leads me into convincing myself that I if I do things just right, I can make that outcome happen. That one is: a) a big fat illusion and b) guaranteed to toss me even further out of now.
     Moving beyond hope is about detaching from imaginary outcomes, no matter how much I want them, and staying in surrender. I can feel hope without making up a reason for it. I can feel hopeful without attaching it to a specific outcome or to any outcome. Hope with no story lets me stay in the present.

Taking it personally? Blame your brain.

  

     Tongue-in-cheek? Oh yeah, but the topic of not taking things personally has been written about ad

nauseam. I’m sick of it too, but here I am again. Part of being human seems to mean that not taking things personally is an issue we wrestle with over and over and over.

    Last week I listened to a Sounds True podcast, Our Attempts to Feel Better, while I was on the bike at the gym. In the podcast Dr. Kelly McGonigal talks about how the default state of the brain is to interpret any experience we’re having as being about who we are. Oh, wow. My brain is preset to take every experience I have personally.

     This was a startling “ah-hah” for me. I listened to the podcast three times. It also made me laugh because it confirmed something I’ve suspected for years. My brain is entirely self-centered. Thankfully my mind doesn’t have to lurch along in the same biological rut.

    How on earth is that biological preset useful? Despite how much we’ve evolved as a species, our gray matter still contains a strong lizard brain. The lizard brain is concerned with survival. Feeling good equals surviving. Feeling bad equals I might die. In this instance “good” means food, shelter and a measure of safety. “Bad” means I might starve or I’m about to get squished by a wooly mammoth. Given the way many of us live, this may seem like a ridiculous association, but it is part of who we are. We have a direct experience of how hard wired into our brains this is when our fight-or-flight response kicks in during non-life threatening situations.

     The lizard brain operates on an “all or nothing”, black and white premise. Survival is either threatened or not. There is no discernment around the level of the threat or the possibility that my emotional well-being may in jeopardy rather than my physical survival. The lizard brain equates taking things personally, i.e. interpreting whatever is going on as being about me, with being able to survive period.   

     Layered on top of this brain preset, I have my own experience with what happens when someone blames me for something and gets angry. We’ve all had those experiences. The ones that occur in childhood leave the deepest impressions.

      Say you’re raised with a critical parent who blames you for things not being done “right.” When that parent blames you, s/he gets angry at you and you get punished. Your child brain makes an association that says, “If someone is angry, I get hurt”...and your lizard brain agrees.

      Your child brain isn’t able to distinguish the difference between someone being angry at you and someone feeling angry when they happen to be standing next to you. The difference between someone being angry to what you did vs. being angry at who you are is lost too. It’s all about you. The lizard brain affirms that perspective as the one most likely to ensure your survival.

    So if someone is upset at me, gets upset when they’re with me or says something negative to me,  my lizard brain and all my experience that supports it jumps to tell me I’d better take this personally or I might not survive. Fortunately my mind and higher brain functions give me more options. But even beginning to disconnect from taking this personally means I have to step out of my biological programming.

     I go to my favorite question, “What else might be happening?” Not that I know my brain is programmed to take things personally, I have a new way to answer that question. For this question to really interrupt the mental hamster wheel I’m running on I need to have more than one answer.

    If I can’t come up with anything else, I go back to a trick I learned from a therapist I saw in the twenties. When I answered “I don’t know” to a question she asked, she’d respond with “Make something up.” It took me years to figure out what that was really about.

    It doesn’t matter how improbably most of my answers to “What else might be happening?” are. What matters is that while I’m engaged in answering the question I’m not feeding my story about why whatever happened is about me. I’ve distracted myself enough to get out of my own way.

     And what about that story I’m telling myself? The story is where I assign meaning to what happened. Inevitably the story comes from some other experience that felt the same but may not be relevant. So the next step is to disconnect how I feel from what I’m telling myself about the feeling.

     When I take something personally it has nothing to do with the situation or what the other person said. If you tell me I’m a crappy firefighter because I can’t save anybody, I’ll be confused. I might laugh. I might wonder if I’ve wandered into a Salvador Dali painting. I won’t take it personally. I’m not a firefighter. Nothing in what you said applies to me.

     However, if you told me I was a crappy firefighter because I’m too selfish to save anybody….oooh. Regardless of whether or not the rest of your statement applied, I’d hear “selfish.” I’m not a selfish person. But I do wrestle with the distorted belief that being a healer means showing up for other people all the time so if I take a day off, I’m being selfish.

    So there is a land mine in my internal landscape that can get triggered by word “selfish.” If I react to that trigger and take what you said personally, nothing in my largely unconscious choice to go there is about you or what you said.

     The entire process happened inside me. It occurred because part of my internal landscape reacted to the word “selfish.”  I am more likely to take what someone says personally when their words match what I am already saying to myself.

     I am far from mastering the art of not taking things personally. I do it less when I’m feeling pretty good about me. Now that I know there is a biological basis for believing it’s all about me, I can be more compassionate with myself when I go there. In the meantime, repeat after me….I am not the center of the Universe.

Emotions and authenticity

Ten years ago I was wrestling with the pull to let go of my job and work as healer. For several months I’ lived with a nagging awareness that barista was my calling, but the job came with a steady paycheck. Letting go of that was scary thought. Then a book called Callings by Gregg Levoy dropped into my life.

    The book is a wonderful exploration of the search for authenticity in all aspects of life. After reading the book, I realized that the real question about whether or not to follow my gut and work as a healer had nothing to do with letting go of a steady income. It was a question of authenticity. How far was I willing to go to step further into who I truly am?

    There is a quote in book from F. Scott Fitzgerald that stuck with me:

            “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”

     One of the things I find amazing about us human beings is our capacity for paradox. Even though we all have our own beliefs, we are capable of understanding opposing views. We can see multiple sides of an issue. We can even encompass opposing ideas of equal value. This allows us to be flexible and stretch beyond reducing our experience down to “right” and “wrong.”

     We have an equal capacity for emotional paradox; for feeling several apparently conflicting emotions at once. Yet when it comes to emotions, many of us are prone to selecting one feeling over the others rather than staying with the paradox.

     Authenticity is about being true to you and remaining loyal to internal rather than external values. So when we sort our emotions and pick one while denying the rest, we are moving away from authenticity.

     This emotional sorting process is largely unconscious. It’s also fueled by judgment. We are habituated to regard some emotions as “good” and others as “bad.” Some of this conditioning comes from socialization. We learn from our families and the society we live in which emotions are seen as acceptable and which are not. In fact, five of the infamous seven deadly sins (wrath, greed, sloth, pride, lust, envy and gluttony) are emotions.

      We also carry personal judgments around feelings. Often these come from painful experiences that we associate with feeling a certain way. In an attempt to protect ourselves and avoid repeating the experience, we label the feeling that we believe triggered the experience as “bad.”

     Some of our personal judgments about feelings really aren’t personal. They’re distortions and beliefs we’ve internalized from an external source. The distortions often come from our tendency to compare our insides with someone else’s outsides, i.e. compare how we feel to how someone else looks.

     When we reject an emotion based on what someone says about it or a fear of how another person will judge us for feeling it, we are sacrificing our authenticity.

     Personal beliefs around certain emotions being “bad” essentially arise from our desire not to feel things that are uncomfortable. No one likes to feel jealous, vulnerable, lonely or ashamed. The desire not to feel difficult emotions, coupled with the mistaken belief that avoiding them is possible, can push us to label these feelings as “negative.” The numerous articles and books we’ve seen about how feeling happy is a choice only affirms our belief that we’d be better off not feeling certain things.

    Bottom line – emotion is part of the human experience. Repeatedly rejected an emotion only serves to disconnect us from our emotional body. If we’re disconnected enough, we may have little or no awareness of what we’re feeling. However, that doesn’t change what we’re really feeling.

    What happens to those rejected feelings? Whenever we disown about ourselves becomes part of our shadow. The energy we exert to push a feeling away actually feeds it. This sets up a vicious cycle. The judgments around the rejected emotion get stronger. The next time that feeling arises, it comes with more judgment. This leads us to put more effort into rejecting the emotion, which in turn reinforces the judgment, etc., etc.

    When we judge an emotion, what are we really judging? Feelings aren’t facts. We are not our emotions. At their simplest, feelings are information. Emotions are perhaps the most direct and raw information we get from ourselves. When we judge an emotion we’re effectively saying it’s only okay to listen to certain types of information from ourselves.

    Direct rejection of a feeling is the gross level of our emotional sorting process. The same thing occurs in much subtler way with mixed emotions. Human beings rarely feel only one thing at a time. Most of the time we experience mixed emotions. Even getting something we really want comes with a touch of sadness related to the change involved.

    Here again we carry a lot of baggage about what’s okay and not okay to feel. If something wonderful happens for a close friend when your life is not going so well, you’ll probably feel both happy for your friend and envious. The envy arises from you wishing something amazing would happen in your life too. Both are natural emotional responses.

    It’s socially acceptable to feel happy for your friend and probably not acceptable to feel envious. So in a fraction of a second, your emotional sorting process grabs “happy” and rejects “envy.” This may happen so quickly that the envy is pushed away before you even realize you’re feeling it.

    While it may not be the best idea to act on feeling envious, not allowing yourself to acknowledge it only reinforces your pre-existing judgments.

    A variant of this process occurs with mixed emotions that don’t involve another person. If something wonderful happens, your immediate emotional response may be to feel happy. After that initial wave of happiness recedes, you realize that in order to meet this wonderful thing you’ll have make some changes. Grief and change are pretty intertwined. So now there’s some grief mixed in with your happiness.

     But wait, something wonderful happened. You’re “supposed’ to feel happy. That judgment opens the door for your emotional sorting process to jump in and rescue you from this apparent conflict.

     In these situations I usually experience some disbelief at feeling two apparently opposite emotions at once. Some part of me wants to see those feelings as opposing forces that will cancel each other out if they both occur at the same time. This pushes me to turn feeling two disparate emotions into an either/or situation where I have to pick one or the other. I don’t. I can chose authenticity and go to “and.”