What is Spiritual Integration?
One of the foundations of the approach and philosophy of Wild Iris is the ongoing cycle between insight and integration, between transformation and practice. Throughout our life, whether through a spiritual experience, during a meditation retreat or medicine journey, or just through the natural unfolding of our daily lives, we have breakthroughs, insights, openings, healings, awakenings, and transformations. They suddenly, and sometimes dramatically, alter our sense of ourselves, our view of the world, the way our bodies feel, the beliefs we hold, and our understanding of deep existential questions. We often get the feeling that our lives will forever be different, we will never act the same as we did before, or have the same emotions or patterns. And sometimes, yes, we do change forever. But more often than not, we eventually fall back into familiar patterns and habits. The same old emotions and triggers reemerge and we seemingly forget all about our big insights and transformations.
That is where the role of integration and practice comes into the picture. Our habitual ways of being are deeply ingrained and operate at a level that is usually unconscious. They live in our bodies, in our nervous systems, in the neural networks of our brains. Without the continual act of practice, of integrating our insights and transformations into our moment-to-moment life, the sheer inertia of our conditioning will take over and pull us back into our usual habits.
Practice makes our ideals real. Just about anything can be a practice: from formal sitting meditation to how we put together a meal, to how we interact with our friends, partners, and coworkers, to how we express our creativity, to how we nourish our bodies and minds. Through this holistic and expansive definition of practice, a few key things are opened up for us.
One, we are empowered to turn our entire life into an expression of our personal and spiritual ideals. Nothing is too small or mundane to be considered practice and in some ways it is these little quotidian moments that are the best indicators of our growth and the place where our practice comes into contact with the messiness of life. The concept of practice begins to grow from something we do in special moments of spiritual concentration into something that is woven into the fabric of our daily lives.
Two, we are probably already doing many of our core practices, only without sufficient intentionality or refinement. We probably already know some of the ways that we best practice self-care, but need to do it with more regularity or simply give ourselves permission to hold it as a central part of our spiritual practice.
Three, the framing of our spiritual life as an act of practicing something now that will later bring about a state of greater peace, joy, fulfillment, etc. becomes transformed into an unending refinement of our ideals, intentions, and forms of embodiments. We begin to drop the imagined future, more-perfect state of our being and settle into a profound depth of presence that experiences the perfection of my being at the same time as its need for growth, and is unbothered by that apparent contradiction. Our practices are transformed from an act of self-betterment to an expression of our infinite nature, which is both complete and incomplete in every moment. As the Zen master Dogen says, “Practice and enlightenment are one.”
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