I believe that at anytime, anyone of us can choose to accelerate our own process of authentic integration.
Our body-heart-mind is a system, interconnected and self-organizing.
This system wants to fully sense all of itself and feel connected to all its parts – this is authentic integration.
As the system moves toward authentic integration, people experience more flow with life, fulfillment, clarity of purpose and direction, and compassion for self and others.
When some part of the system is cutoff, people experience fear, despair, hopelessness, overwhelm, numbness, and/or traumatic reactions to everyday events.
In response to being cutoff from some part of the system, some people need to live narrow, controlled lifestyles with structured routines, while other people go to other extremes and fill their days with people, activities, variety (new experiences), so there is little time to think deeply or feel fully.
For some reason, some of us, including myself, learned at a young age how to use our cognitive capacities to turn away from sensing other parts of the system. In order to turn away from painful emotions and experiences, we learned to direct our attention in certain ways.
In the last year, I have actually re-lived some of the early moments in my visceral experiences stored in the body and its memories, and identified three major patterns:
turning attention away = e.g. directing attention away from the body sensations and emotions. and eventually keeping it away by engaging in thinking all the time. all the time.
suppression = e.g., disconnection and disassociation from some aspect of self, in my case, from the pure potency of individuated life force and its aggressive power.
over-identification with some part of the system = e.g., relying heavily on a story about who you are and why that is good/right/better/best/safe/superior, in order to justify staying the same.
Through meditation and somatic work I have discovered these patterns in my mind and body and slowly learned how to integrate these parts back into the central system.
The techniques for how this was done vary:
from simple awareness of meditation, observing what is happening inside the system,
to guided meditation to invite split off parts to return and connect into the center of the body (heart and hara),
to somatic therapies like biodynamic craniosacral (my favorite),
to being witnessed by other people while sensing into these split off parts of the system (this is very important because: beyond core issues of existential survival, most of our pain lies in the social realm, from interactions or lack of quality responses from other people in our childhood and early years, so they need to be integrated through social interaction. My time with teachers in Waking Down and Trillium Awakening communities was what I needed to discuss what was happening and to help me hold the emotions as they began to be felt fully.)
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