LIVING INTEGRATED 

Actualized Self-Realization

Living integrated is not an act of doing but rather a state of knowing from which all doing and activity arises.  Living integrated is simply knowing yourself and being that no matter what is showing up in appearance in either your inner or outer worlds. 

Many people have at some point in their life touched or awakened to an aspect of themselves that is beyond their ordinary body-mind self.  Names we give to this newly recognized aspect of ourselves are things such as Soul, Heart, Universe, God, Source or Love.  Once touched many (but not all) people hunger to live and experience this awareness of self as Love in their every day moment to moment existence.  When people have this awareness of something beyond what they normally identify themselves as but aren’t yet living as it we tend to say that they are integrating or in the integration process.  

If we make it really really simple, integration is the process of aligning all of ourselves to that awakened or new found awareness of ourselves, aka our Heart.  What this means is that we are “integrating” only as long as we choose to stay out of alignment with the recognition of ourselves as Love.  In this way you can see integrating as a way that we postpone the full acceptance of ourselves as what we truly are.  Now granted there is a timing and rhythm to everything and all will unfold accordingly,, however it is also important to realize where we put the brakes on our own development, expansion and forward progression.  How long do we want to delay the reality of living as love that we desire?  When will we quit making excuses and accept that we are Love already?  What needs to be perfectly and precisely aligned in the world of appearances before we do?  

Sometimes after having a self-expanding experience people have the tendency to try to bring that awareness of Soul into mind, meaning they make it conceptual so that they can explain the experience to their more ordinary self or make it more relatable to others.  This is frequently what people call integrating, but its really just making the experience mental, and it is an attempt to bring a more unified awareness of self into a less unified awareness of self.  I would invite rather to include soul in addition to the mind-body-human experience as something beyond it rather than trying to put it inside of mental containers. Soul is not supposed to fit inside of mind or be reduced to it.  Soul is not to be flattened into the mundane and ordinary so that “more people can get it” or it can be more relatable to your mind or other’s minds. Everyone already has soul. It’s not by shrinking Soul that more people get it, instead it’s simply the shining of more light/awareness onto that which already is, that enables the “spreading” or waking up of it to more of itself.   

TRUSTING LOVE 

Getting in Alignment with how the Universe sees

Integration is prior to knowing. To say you must integrate is to hold onto a less than complete version of you or a lesser truth. To integrate, or to live as yourself, you must discard your story of incompleteness. Each moment you hold onto it you create an illusionary reality for yourself in which you experience suffering, separation and disconnection. 

Insisting on our own imperfection or the world’s imperfections is the prime way we disconnect from our true selves and hence we need to continually integrate. It is our lack of trust in Love/God that keeps us on the outside and in a world of objects and appearances.  When we don’t trust Love we are constantly trying to control the in’s and out’s of our moment to moment experience rather than place our focus on Love.  Most people are not taught that they can choose where to place their focused awareness so many of us have our awareness placed in the world of things rather than rested in God/Love. The turning point where you see that the choice is yours is instrumental to living integrated or fully self-realized and actualized.   A key practice is remembering God moment to moment. Putting the knowingness of God in the forefront of everything else. Placing the attention of your mind solely on God rather than appearances or things. This illuminates all appearances with the awareness of God as all that is and all that can be, and makes integration, or the being of one’s self, seamless and effortless.  An inherent trust in a natural order also arises which enables your body-mind to rest more deeply in a larger container of wisdom and Love.

The only thing that then remains is the perfection working through your vehicles of mind-body.  Any time your mind comes up and insists that something is even just one hair thread out of alignment then your experience of the life will be out of alignment.  You will not only perceive out of alignment-ness in the external world, but the generation of it internally as well.  You will begin to feel like life is up to you, that you have to manage it on your own, and you will attempt to control it all costs because you are disconnected from the larger you and out of alignment with how the universe/God perceives, which is always the lens of perfection.  

Disciplining your mind to see as God/Universe/Love sees is really the only practice you ever need.  All doubts will dissolve.  Only trust in Love will remain and thus your experience of life will be connected, open, inviting, embracing, encouraging, and expansive.  Your discovery of the container that holds all inside of it, as yourself, enables the perception of you as Creator, as God.  All movement, all actions and all unfoldings happening within you.  To resist, reject, attempt to leave out, push away, or even make different begins to seems ridiculous as you recognize everything, even all of the thoughts, feelings, sensations, things, situations people, as you.  There isn’t anything that isn’t Love and its becomes evidently clear to you once you stop insisting on incompleteness and imperfection.  

Incompleteness and imperfection are merely thoughts in your mind, nothing more.  Master the thoughts in your mind to align with the one perception that the Universe has of creation as complete unified perfection, and that is the reality that you will create.  All of physical reality will follow your singular perception.  We don’t create or re-create the world through physically and mentally hard work and toil.  We create it with our perception.   I know it seems like things happen out there, but they don’t.  They happen inside of your consciousness.  Now is the moment to realize that every form follows consciousness whether that consciousness is awake to itself or asleep to its self.  The benefit of being awake and thus creating awake is that rather than experiencing cyclic suffering you experience eternal bliss.  The bliss that comes from knowing yourself and being yourself.  Alive, awake and integrated.  

Dr. Amanda Hessel, Chiropractor, Network Spinal Analysis & Somato-Respiratory Integration, Boulder, Colorado