Integration as a Practice
Letting Experience Land.
As I get into this week’s theme… I have to share two other accounts that really have helped me ground all of the dismay and disgust I am feeling these days towards the US government… Jess Craven’s “Chop Wood Carry Water” has been such a resource for the days where watching news can be come obsessive. She has incredible action to pair with perspective in a way that feels empowered.
I have also found that “Cut off the Spigot” super helpful in researching alternative companies to use so I can be mindful of where I spend my money.
I need these small ways to take action, so I can feel my feet beneath me when the world or life feels unreasonable.
Showing up at The Threshold is another one of those actions for me…..
There’s a quiet kind of disconnection
that happens from not actually integrating
what has/is happening….
And that is the theme today. Integration.
We live in a culture of constant intake: seeing, scrolling, consuming, reacting. But without pause, without space for reception, experience remains fragmented.
I saw a short video from Justin Scott where he spoke about spiritual entropy. Entropy being the gradual decline into disorder… the measure of energy dispersing, chaos. Justin spoke about,
When presence becomes performance,
when story becomes spectacle,
when connection becomes content —
everything is visible, but nothing is integrated.
It was a really powerful connection for me in the way authenticity can be bypassed if I am only concerned with collection, expansion or consuming…
and I love the antidote to entropy is on the the path of Integration.
Integration is not a linear act, nor is it purely intellectual.
It is the slow, relational process of allowing experience to land in the body,
in its own time, through its own pathways.
There is a layer of trust in my nervous system’s intelligence to know when it is safe to metabolize experience and when it is not.
Some moments integrate immediately.
Others require distance, support, conversation, writing, or years before they reveal themselves again asking for care.
The work of integration is not extraction of information for the sake of knowing or understanding.
Instead to discern what is useful, surrendering what is not.
Tending the whole so I can root into my experience and carry forward a new way of being. Whole. Present. Mine.
