Integrate!

 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...