Tag: long-term integration

Embracing All Parts

April 22nd, 2023
In my last post, I wrote about how I sometimes hate the slow pace of long-term integration, and I realized I should back up a half-step to even let you know what integration means to me. Integration of self feels like a true unification and embracing of alllll the parts. The beautiful parts, the shitty parts, the proud parts, and those that elicit shame. And integration of experiences of insights means incorporating all of them into life. The fun ones, the boring ones, the ones that leave scars, and those that heal those same scars.

I’m learning to live this balance between true acceptance, really embracing it all, and striving for change that feels like the crux of the learning in long-term integration. In studying the teachings of Buddha and Buddhists for years, I’ve learned that acceptance is necessary, but this does not mean being resigned to living with whatever circumstances arise. It’s like saying, “Alright, here I am, in this particular situation. Now what?” before making thoughtful decisions about what happens next.

Moving forward with acceptance. Love.

Aaaaaaand, let’s be real. I get triggered. I throw tantrums like a two-year-old when things don’t go how I want them to. I have expectations and end up kicking and screaming when they’re not met. Turns out integration is hard. Not just once, but over and over and over and over.

I tell myself these things:
- Sometimes, it’s choosing the hard thing and deciding that, because you love yourself, you will do what you’ve had the brilliant insights to do.
- You will hunker down, saddle up, and be like the beaver you need to be to just get shit done. Not by gritting your teeth and doing things you know you hate fully from the depths of your being, but actually by doing those things you *need* to do in that same depth of being. It’s IN you to do these things, just like it’s IN a beaver to build dams. Only in doing these heart-driven things will you be honoring yourself and your experiences.
- And by doing some things that may not feel great in this moment – or not as great as the thing that will just assuage the underlying discomfort – there may be payouts. The moments where you choose what you really need over what you really want. (sure, cue Rolling Stones…)
Sometimes my nervous system seems to want comfort, regardless of how many pep talks I give it. And if I provided that comfort in the quick-and-easy ways I’ve come to prefer, I’d be shoving my face with comfort foods, guzzling liquor, and engaging in a whole Rolodex full of other things. Trying to get full. But those things only fill me up in one or two ways, while often ignoring the totality that contains physical, mental, emotional, relational, and spiritual hungers.

So I’ve been doing this. When I go to reach for something, I sometimes stop and ask myself the question, “Is this what you really need?” Sometimes, I can gently answer, “Nope, I actually am just tired,” or, “You’re right, wise human. I’m lonely.” And other times, another inner voice will rage, threaten, and say, “Yeah, it’s what I fucking need! SHUT UP!!!” It squints its eyes at me and hisses, “Watch this,” as it tears into meals typically consumed by families of four and guzzles amounts of alcohol pounded by houses full of frat boys. But this side has become so increasingly rare. It is learning it no longer needs to try to protect me from discomfort, albeit in ineffective ways.

There are so many cliches around these concepts of really needing to feel things. The only way out is through (Frost). What you resist persists; what you embrace dissolves (Jung). If you want to know what you are numbing from, stop the numbing behaviors (someone else). It is what it is (some jackhole).

I know that no amount of the wrong thing will fill the hole.

As Pascal wrote about what has come to be referred to as “the god-shaped hole” (which, side note, didn’t start as a biblical proclamation but has been co-opted by the Christians):

“What else does this craving, and this helplessness, proclaim but that there was once in man a true happiness, of which all that now remains is the empty print and trace? This he tries in vain to fill with everything around him, seeking in things that are not there the help he cannot find in those that are, though none can help, since this infinite abyss can be filled only with an infinite and immutable object; in other words by God himself.”
Blaise Pascal, Pensées VII(425)

Some days the hole is there, threatening the next best step I’m trying to take. And some days I can barely even believe that it ever even existed. And on both of these types of days and all the types in between, I do the best I can to integrate all the voices, all the desires, all the lessons. Some days that best doesn’t feel like much, and other days I amaze myself.

This is the non-linear work of long-term integration.
Lasting Effects

April 15th, 2023
I’ve been contemplating the “lasting effects” of peak experiences or really of any healing modality, and when I was directly asked this question the other week, I figured it was time to put this out there.

Maybe it’s because I’m a woman, or maybe because I have the lived experience of being wrong so. many. times, then learning from others or other experiences that there is a more helpful way to view things, that I feel the need to put a big disclaimer on this whole post. This is simply how these things are sitting for me now. I am certain that researchers and plenty of others have written more eloquently and more informedly, and I would love to hear about them! These are just the pieces that are bubbling up to the top after stewing for quite some time in my life.

There are so many factors that determine the length of effect of any experience or insight, but here are at least three that have impacted my personal experience.
1. How intense the experience was.
  - I find that the more intense the experience, the longer its effects linger within me. For some people, having a peak experience in any healing modality report that they are nearly instantaneously changed, and that that change remains over time without having to expend any energy or do any more intentional work. You don’t have to dig very deep to find stories of people who have had huge sustained changes in their lives after one experience with plant medicines, or following a huge insight in connectedness at a meditation retreat. This has not been my reality (see #3 below, after #2 below).
2. How big the disconnect or difference is between this experience or insight and my daily experiences.
  - If I walk into a space that has the opposite energy of what I experienced in that healing space, then of course the effects take that much more effort to maintain.
  - The resistance offered by dissonant living situations can deplete the energy of the experience or insight.
  - When I lived in Cambodia, I had such intense experiences during my repeated 10-day silent vipassana meditation retreats. Between and after the retreats, I maintained a solid 2-hour a day meditation practice (this is intense long-term integration!) and lived what is perhaps the most guided year of my life. And then I moved back to the United States and expected to just slide back into the life I’d left the year before. I mean, what could’ve possibly changed that much in one year, right? Me. That’s what. But I tried to shoehorn myself back into this incredibly dissonant life, and in the process lost much of the beautiful daily lived experiences I had experienced before. With the reintroduction of all my American responsibilities and societal expectations, I simply didn’t have the energy to maintain that level of resistance now coming my way in the face of what I actually knew from my recently lived, bodily experiences to be true.
  - I want to caution both you and myself that this isn’t necessarily considered a “negative” thing to experience this disconnect. It can be a huge lesson about what changes may be emerging as necessary or helpful, when supported.
3. How much I keep it in my conscious mind, and put structures in place, often requiring actions, reminders, and support.
  - For me, this currently looks like sitting each morning and reading some of the major insights I’ve had in the past year and then asking some key questions guided from those insights. Most days I ask what my heart wants, and often also ask what the next best step is to help me walk that path. It also means scheduling an appointment with a counselor or taking some other supportive action when I know I just don’t fully have it in me.
  - This, to me, feels like “the work.” It’s this long-term integration that I have found to be the least sexy of any of the work that needs to get done, yet this is exactly where I am finding the actual growth and change that I was seeking. Not in the moment of that beautiful, intense moment of insight, but in the slow, day-to-day actions. I admit that I hate it at times, and rage against the glacial pace of some things. Acceptance and patience are not currently my strength areas! But since my lived experience has taught me that without long-term intentionality surrounding integration, I fall back into patterns that have been established without any sense of intentionality, I need to keep coming back to this.
This long-term integration will undoubtedly continue to be my lesson for life seasons to come, choosing some intentionality surrounding action in all areas of my life, including multiple aspects of my self (physical, mental, emotional, spiritual) and my life.

Tag: long-term integration

Embracing All Parts

Lasting Effects