Integrate!

 It was a beautiful, sunny afternoon and I'd worked all weekend. So I got up from my computer and went for a long walk. I was looking for stress management through fresh air and exercise. And I was looking for something more. One important, invisible problem with knowing we have an impact is that we are not really sure who "we" are. We call the part of our mind that makes most of our choice the "unconscious." This is not because it lacks consciousness (it's always wide awake) but because we are not conscious of it within us. How can we trust ourselves when we can't even know ourselves? It's the fundamental insecurity of life as a human. And the answer, is that we cannot see or know our unconscious selves, but we can observe their connection to the world around us. You can notice how the things around yous resonate with the things in you. You can develop awareness of how you show up in your relationships with people and with the problems you like to s...

What do you get to choose? It's too easy to say that you cannot choose what happens to you, but you can choose how you respond. That turns choice into a consolation prize. We think we "have to" choose instead of we "can choose!" We get to choose our actions and reactions without being fully aware of how they will make change in the world. That sounds dangerous, and it is. But it is also the seed of optimism. No matter what happens to us and around us, there are choices we can make.  Identifying the choices that you have the ability and resources to make pushes you to be more self-aware: more aware of the feelings, perceptions, biases, memories and hopes that combine to keep  you moving. Self-awareness is fundamental to both feeling better and having better influence on others. When life knocks you down, you look up and say "so what can I do next?" You can change your mind, your communication, your actions. You can begin with an impulse or an inventory....

 Try this thought experiment. Think of three wonderful conversations you have had. You might not remember what you said or even what you heard, but you remember the flow of words and the way you felt. Now look around each of those memories. Where did they happen? Now connect the "where" to the "what." Some wonderful conversations are wonderful because they make you feel so close. You feel that you and the other person (or even a group) are sharing a mind and heart. And often those conversations happen in close spaces, spaces where you share so much in your senses that it is easy to share similar thoughts and feelings. Other conversations require more space. High ceilings or wide open skies. The room to stretch your legs and create motion. An expanse around you that creates expansiveness in your thoughts. People get confused by science. They think that because science is rational, the only way to be practical is to pretend that our bodies are separate from our reason...

 Place is such a basic metaphor, that sometimes we forget there is a difference between our physical location and our state of mind. We've all heard that the thing that counts in real estate is "location, location, location." There's a good reason for that. According to research described by Annie Murphy Paul in The Extended Brain , we use our surroundings as a way to prompt our thoughts. When we are out in nature, we think one way and when we are staring at a computer screen, we think another. Although our experience of our thoughts is that they are related to content, often the kind of thoughts we think are also related to context.  We have a lot of language about place: we have to find our place and know our place (sometimes in that order). While it's hard to change what goes on inside our heads directly, it's easier to change our place. We can get up and move to a new location. We can choose a walk under trees or a quiet, safe den (we name our thinking spa...

 When someone asks "What do you really want?" the answer tends to come up in pieces: we think about what we want in one part of our life. It's hard to think about all the parts of our lives at the same time. Yet everything we do in one relationship or project or place affects who we are and how we show up in all the others. It's like a jigsaw puzzle. You hold one perfect piece in your hand but it only works if you can find out how it fits with all the others. Photo by    Lynne Bookey   on   Scopio We cannot see the whole puzzle of our own lives. It's more than our conscious minds can handle and it's always changing. We are only comfortable thinking in 4 dimensions (height, width, depth and time). But if we use our extended mind (we journal, we connect with others, we create physical spaces as memory aids) we could stretch to 7. And with 7 dimensions, we can begin to see how the pieces come together to form a life well-lived. There might, of course, be more tha...

 When something bad happens, people generally fall into two camps. One camp says: "This bad thing happened. We need an investigation and we need apologies. We need restitution. We need justice." These are all good things but they are mostly attempts to solve a problem that is in the past. This is what grief does. It makes us look back and value what has been lost. They build a lighthouse so others will know where the dangers are. As we heal from grief, we ask different questions. What's next? This is the response of the second camp. That happened and it's horrible. But now what? What do we want next? They know that a lighthouse isn't enough. You also need a better boat if you want people to travel safely. The second camp is the NLP ( neurolinguistic programming ) camp. It believes that the best way forward is to make a mental model of a desirable future. It's not enough to know what you wish had never happened. You have to know what you want to rise from the a...