Integrating All We Are
This week’s rhythm of loving evolution: Being
From the sacred beckoning of spirit and through our divine becoming, we embrace and inhabit new and deepening ways of being.
Here and now, we offer and respond to invitations to inhabit our divine being in conscious and spacious ways.
We make space for being who we are becoming, who we truly are, who we are now.
We rest in abiding within our holy communion, our Christ union with all things.
And we open up to new and deepening habits, the in-habiting of new ways of being that authentically reflect the beauty, truth, and goodness of who we have become in our transformative work and in the grace of the mystical body of Christ.
We hold all of these rhythms of being in the field of belonging.
In support of our rhythms of evolution—Beckoning, Becoming, and Being—you are also invited to participate in a new gathering called WeEvolve, on Fridays at 10 am Central Time.
This week’s WeEvolve gathering will be a spacious, communal time of Being together.
If you’re not already on the Mystical Garden, our online community page, click here to join
If you haven’t yet engaged with the Beckoning & Becoming offerings, we encourage you to explore those first:
Leave Behind Nothing True
From the beckoning of our invitation to sacred and loving evolution, and our acts of spiritual becoming, incorporating each the Three Faces of God in our divine dance, we have opened into new and deepening ways of being.
As we move through our evolving journey, we come into our being made new. The old has fallen away and we have been released. The new has come and is still unfolding before us.
In our movements of being—release, embrace, inhabit—we go from releasing and being released from all that is no longer who we truly are. Through this shedding, we are freed to embrace both who we are becoming and who we always have been. From this welcoming and integration, we can more fully inhabit being who we are now in our lives.
This week, we focus on the movement of embrace. While this is often about welcoming what is emerging and coming forth anew, it crucially also includes embracing previous aspects of our true being that have been lost, scattered, or forgotten.
This is the integration that comes after differentiation, recovering and including the genuine elements of our being that are still vital and essential to who we truly are, but have become subsumed or displaced in some way.
As the old saying goes, “don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.”
What qualities of your being have in some way been “thrown out” along the way?
What parts of your natural and essential being have you forgotten?
Remembering Who We Are
As a kid, I loved the movie “Hook.” It tells the story of a grownup Peter Pan who has forgotten who he is. Lost in the adult world of business, he is constantly on his phone and distracted from life and his family. After Captain Hook kidnaps his children, he has to go back to Neverland to rescue them. The problem is, he has no power to actually do so because he can’t fly, fight, or crow anymore. He doesn’t remember who he really is.
At one point, one of the small lost boys tugs adult Peter Pan to crouch down to his level—no longer standing tall above him. The boy removes Peter’s glasses and starts pulling on the skin of his face, stretching back the wrinkles and folds. And then, he spreads Peter’s cheeks so his mouth is in a big smile. He smiles in return, exclaiming, “Oh there you are Peter!”
While growing up is about developing, maturing, and becoming an adult, we also find that we sometimes need to look back to how we were as a child to remember who we were in a more pure and innocent form. And in the process, we might even come to discover that, maybe, actually, we can really fly.
In the same way, in our spiritual growing up, we sometimes forget as well. Or we have become lost to ourselves in some way. We have neglected something of our true being, and so we are living in less than fully true version of ourselves.
We can do this by literally looking at our childhood, recollecting who we were in that time in our lives. This can be a wonderful way of remembering and re-embracing—my kids often remind me of my more playful, curious, and delightful ways of being I used to inhabit more.
And, we can also often find these qualities by looking closely at the times and ways we have changed through our differentiations and releasing. In the times when we have let go of old ways, previous forms, past structures, we can “check the bathwater,” so to speak, to see what truths of our being might be hidden in the dirty water.
This is the movement of being we invite today—embracing greater fullness of who we truly are through a process of reintegration.
Embracing what has been Lost, Scattered, or Neglected
This “practice” of being may tap into past experiences and woundings that could potentially trigger deep emotional responses or buried trauma. Please take care to tend to yourself with gentleness and seek support if needed.
You are invited now to a time of reflection and remembering.
Set your intention to be open to receiving, to recovering, to reintegrating who you truly are.
Tune into and be present from your entire being, from your whole body—all of the centers of knowing and structures of consciousness, alive and awake in you.
Now, as you are drawn, recall a time in your life when you went through a significant personal change, a time of significant spiritual growth and evolution. Consider what ways you experienced release, differentiation, and transformation. Particularly, you might be with a movement of being released, such as a way that cords were loosened, old skin was shed, or the path of water shifted.
Stay with this time of change as long as you need to feel into it and remember the shifts that occurred in you. Welcome a sense of feeling them in your body.
When you’re ready, welcome the inquiry:
“Is there a lost, disowned, or neglected way of being, of my true nature, that I am being invited to re-embrace here and now?
You’re welcome to stay in this place of receiving, of listening, of reflecting as long as you need, opening to an arising of recognition, of inner knowing, whenever and however it might come.
If helpful, you might consider three possible ways this re-integration might move.
Recovering
You might sense a part of yourself, a quality of your being, that used to be more present and accessible. And along the way it became lost, buried, and somewhat forgotten. This may have occurred because of shifts and changes, woundings or pain, or natural growth and evolution. The reason is less important now.
Now, just feel into the truth of that aspect.
Does it feel like a true quality or essential aspect of your being to embrace?
If so, gather it back up into yourself here and now.
Here, we might call forth Jesus’ story of the pearl of great price and the treasure hidden in the field. What was buried and lost has been revealed, and we claim it, recovering it with eagerness and joy.
Restoring
You might sense a part of yourself, a quality of your being, that was cast out and disowned in some way. Perhaps because of the place you were in, the community you were a part of, or other life circumstances, this way of being was not welcomed. This aspect of our being was scattered and dispersed from us.
Now, welcome the possibility of having it returned and restored.
Does it feel like it is still a true quality or essential aspect of your being to embrace?
If so, draw it together in wholeness with your being here and now.
Here, we might call forth Jesus’ story of the lost sheep. In this way, the one sheep the good shepherd goes to recover is the lost inner part of ourself that we restore to communion with tenderness and healing.
Reveling
You might sense a part of yourself, an aspect of your being, that has simply been neglected or overlooked. Perhaps, in the process of growth and change, we became more focused on other qualities. Or over time we simply underappreciated or even felt shame about this facet of ourselves.
Now, we see this as a precious and treasured aspect of who we truly are.
Can you embrace this quality within yourself, holding it close and magnifying it in the truth and glory of your divine/human fullness?
Here, we might call forth how Mary, when told of the divine life growing with her, treasured up and pondered all these things in her heart. So too can we revel in the Christ within us all, the divine and human aspects of who we are—even the ones that have seemed smaller and lesser to us in some way.
Being Made Whole
In whatever it is you have recovered, restored, or reveled in, receive it with gratitude. Take a moment to appreciate and be thankful for this reintegration, this embrace.
This whole process is about embracing the truth of our being in wholeness.
What a grace and great gift!
As there is almost certainly much within us to be embraced and reintegrated, perhaps set the intention to return to this practice of being throughout the week. You might feel drawn to a different movement than the one that spoke to you this time—or some other movement of integration entirely.
Another consideration in your revisiting: perhaps you experienced this practice primarily in your singular personhood, as a personal practice. That is probably natural for most of us. When you go through it again, what might it look like to move through it in a way that invites more of the communal nature of your being? Recovering, restoring, and reveling in aspects of our interbeing and deep communion with others, with the earth, with all things?
In the context of Christianity, this might apply to ways of recovering and reincorporating the best of the tradition, overcoming our allergies and healing from damages done by perversions and lesser forms, and finding the wholeness and goodness from various stages and expressions—not just as beliefs or values of those forms, but ways you and others inhabited and embodied these qualities together. Our ways of being that come from our beliefs and values are always born out of and held in context. These contexts of spiritual communities, traditions, and subgroups affect us a great deal. Sorting through those external aspects can help reveal what is truly of our inner being and the truth of who we are actually are.
And one final note. This movement of being, to embrace and reintegrate, is a crucial and vital part of our loving evolution. Not only does it bring us into healing and wholeness, but it is only from this greater wholeness that we are even able to further evolve. As Jean Gebser put it, “Consciousness mutations are completions of integration.”
One way that has been crucial to my own reintegration has been a deeper embrace of the magic structure of consciousness—the mystical and mysterious ways of being in the world and with reality that seem otherwise obscure or irrational to my mind, to the overly mental way of being I had to release. I came to re-welcome the wizard within who had been buried and hidden away. I am still in process, embracing those qualities and living more fully into who and how I am in this way. And recognizing this has always been a part of who I truly am.
And how about you? What are the ways you are recovering, restoring, and reveling in who you truly are!?!
If you struggled with this practice, perhaps you might find it helpful to look up lists of positive qualities, archetypes, or fundamental virtues. Be open to one of these sparking with resonance as something in you that used to be more apparent and present. Then revisit the practice as a way to reintegrate and embrace anew.
Statement of WeCreating Authorship
This article was WeCreated with authoring and editing support from Luke Healy, Beth Biery, Martha O’Hehir, and more.
All of the wisdom, creativity, and spiritual emergence in ICN comes from the communal field of wisdom and spirit speaking in and through the “We.”
All text in this article is human-authored without the use of AI, according to our AI policy: 0 out of 10
All Images and videos are open-source, used with permission, or created by ICN using AI