Integration: A Life’s Practice Of Compassion, Self-Care, And Wholeness Making

I’m well into the last half of my life at age 56. With over 40 years of introspection, over 20 years of studying psychology, I manage my life with a level of observation, like a drone hovering above with more perspective.

I still have human reactions, activated by a trauma-organized brain/body system, impacted by abuse that informed my early life. Tips on self-care will really help you.

Compassion To Seek New Ways of Responding To The World

With research in neuroscience, attachment theory, trauma theory, addiction, and more, I find the compassion to seek new ways of responding to the world.

Now more than ever, as a community experiencing planetary trauma through the COVID pandemic, racial revolution, political unrest, and aggressive polarity, our self-care practices must be a strong resolve.

I often invite clients to “radical self-care.” I remind myself I must also focus on the same task. Radical self-care compassionately brings together the entirety of our experiences: we let go of parts from the past that no longer work for us and integrate with conscious awareness, to create layers of wholeness over time.

First Step For Radical Tips On Self-Care

The first step for radical self-care is naming the trauma we experienced and the defenses we habituated in response to trauma. Often, we continue to mimic our abusers and perpetuate an inner dialogue of self-loathing or pressure.

We act out against that past uncertainty with drink, drugs, overworking, sexing, food, social media, myriad choices this material world offers to dissociate from the pain. My body reflects these dissociative reactions as an illness; our bodies talk over time and tell us “no more.”

Voluntary Actions We Tend Not To Feel As Though They Simply Happen

Naming the underlying history of our narrative, telling our story, without indulging back into the trauma, is central to finding peace, agency, and autonomy in these bodies. Agency is the ability to stand as and for our current adult tips on Self-Care.

When we make voluntary actions we tend not to feel as though they simply happen to us, instead we feel as though we are in charge.

The sense of agency refers to this feeling of being in the driving seat when it comes to our actions. (Moore, 2016, p. 1) The feeling sense of words like agency and autonomy, discerns a gentler response, a grounded sense of Self, a personal authority in the community of healthy relationships. We integrate our stories into the whole tips on self-care.

I diligently sit in observation to identify who I am now, rather than a representation of or reproduction of my past. I can’t be me now without those experiences, but if my choices only reflect from the lens of uncertainty or insecurity of safety, I’ll roll around in the muck of stuck.

Kat Duff spoke of how the “alchemists began the Great Work of spiritual transformation with what they called prima materia, the basic matter or problem. . . . In psychological terms, this means the work of spiritual transformation springs from the places we feel most inferior or debased” (2004, p. 47).

As a self-knowing practice we sit with the wound, go into the original material with professional support to understand and have compassion for the deepest part of the experience; carefully and lovingly witnessed as an act of radical tips on self-care.

New Ways To Deal With Injury, Illness, Wholeness, Compassion

The ability to stay still with the body and see what transforms is much the same as the alchemical scientist, as “they amplified the distress, until the matter transformed of its own accord, in the recognition that healing is derived from the illness itself” (p. 47).

With radical tips on self-care, transmutation forces become a daily practice, for myself and my clients. Agency and autonomy are strategies for voice, purpose, to create new ways to deal with injury and illness.

Sick people often speak of peeling back the layers of a lifetime like an onion, for the deepest parts of ourselves are also the oldest. Homeopathists and acupuncturists point out that in healing we work back through every illness we have had, in reverse order, until we eventually arrive at the root. (p. 49)

During this time of planetary transmutation, we get to play bigger and better when we question our defenses and step back to observe what got us here: What do we need to carry with us? What is it time to leave behind? This is integration, bringing together many experiences and gently, over a lifetime, consciously create layers of wholeness making.

We Committed To Developing Through a Conversation

MindLeap Health is committed to developing through a conversation of personal agency, information, and self-understanding for wholeness and well-being. We hold ourselves accountable to the same: self-analysis for personal understanding.

I’m not willing to create anything here that I’m not willing to do myself and for that, I’m grateful. It’s been a long journey, now realizing my great adventure. May you have peace and ground strongly in your agency and autonomy.

Disclaimer: The following material is provided for informational purposes only and is not designed to prescribe, diagnose, or treat any physical or mental illness. None of the information presented here should be treated as medical or professional advice. Mindleap does not condone the acquisition nor consumption of illicit psychotropic compounds.

References

Duff, K. (2004). The alchemy of illness. In The Nature of Healing: Writings from the World’s
Spiritual Traditions (pp. 45–53). New York, NY: Parabola Books.

Moore, J. W. (2016) What is the sense of agency and why does it matter? Frontiers in
Psychology. 7:1272. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01272