To no one’s surprise… I have been thinking a lot.
This time, it’s about integration.
I’ve been doing this quietly while I meditate, openly when I have conversations, and sporadically when I need to work through a chaotic circling of my mind. And in my thinking, I’ve noticed that there’s a difference in my thinking.
I’m not just thinking about the idea of integration. I’m not just mulling over the theory of holding truths at the same time. I’m not merely dissecting the concept of non-duality or reworking the beautiful language we use when we talk about becoming whole.
I’ve been thinking as one piece of the whole puzzle of my existence. And lately, my thinking has been less about theory and more about witnessing my actual lived experience of integration.
I believe I have been integrating the answers to:
What does it feel like when the mind, body, and spirit are not competing for attention?
What does it feel like when the intelligence of the head, the intelligence of the body, and the intelligence of spirit are not operating as separate systems?
What does it feel like when I am not leaving one part of myself behind in order to access another and lead with my whole self?
For most of my life, I have known how to live from my head. I can understand theory. I can digest complex information. I can explain it, organize it, simplify it, turn it over, and translate it back to someone else in a way that makes sense. This has always been one of my gifts and it has been well received. I know how to take something layered and make it feel accessible.
And for a long time, I trusted that brain intelligence the most.
The mind was fast, clear, capable, and in this world, extremely useful for proving my worth, creating value in business, generating systems to funnel money, and so much more. It also had a heavy hand in my adaptability, my problem-solving skills, and my quick adoption of new skills or habits. My mind is an absolute powerhouse, and so I continued to focus on strengthening it until strengthening it was something I could do in my sleep.
I had become an expert in cultivating and listening to my mind.
The body was there, of course, but it had progressively taken a back seat because I wasn’t paying it attention the way I did my smartness.
I used to dance when I was younger. Embody characters on the stage. Exaggerate my movements to strengthen a story. I knew pleasure through movement. I knew there was wisdom in sensation. Somewhere along the way, like many, an imbalance formed.
I became very, very in my head, and very, very out of my body.
Not completely, because nothing is ever that simple, but enough that my body eventually had to get loud to get the attention it needed after so many years of taking a back seat to the mind’s control.
For me, that loudness came as career burnout and then sciatica.
At first, these felt like problems to solve. Pain usually does. There is a part of us that wants to fix it quickly, identify the source, stretch the right thing, strengthen the right thing, release the right thing, get back to normal.
With lots of work, I started to understand burnout and sciatica differently. These were not just pain. It was my body screaming to no longer be ignored. It had been asking quietly and I ignored it. Then it would speak louder and I still ignored it. So it had to yell to get my attention, first through exhaustion so deep I left my entire life behind and ran away to Utah, and then through a physical debilitation so severe I couldn’t walk. It was the parts of me I had overridden finally refusing to stay quiet.
The highest moment of this pain was in my left glute, but it was part of a deeper pattern. The left glute pain seemed to be connected to tightness in my right hip, my right low back, and my right shoulder. And you know what this stemmed from? Stress, over producing, not enough rest, no joy. Sure, my body had attempted to give me head aches or show me that I was sleeping on vacation, but I didn’t receive those messages. So the burnout manifested itself into something bigger and bigger and bigger until I did.
I like using breaking down the sciatica because it feels like a pinnacle of something and it’s so tangible. There were three points. Three places I could feel individually, but not yet as one connected system. They kept calling me, so I did what a skilled analyst does: I kept chasing them.
One practitioner would help me see one part. Another would help me feel another. My trainer. My physical therapist. A pelvic floor and jaw physical therapist. A massage therapist who also works with energy. Each person seemed to hold one piece of the map. I think they all saw the big picture and while they could communicate that to me and I could nod in agreement, I was only understanding theoretically. I wasn’t being holistically.
Very, very slowly, though, I began to put those pieces together and not just understand the map, but be the map. I started to understand, deep in my knowing, not just my head, that my body was not asking me for one correction. It was asking me to return to relationship.
So thanks to my well-practiced brain that won’t stop, can’t stop… I kept returning to practice with my healers. Digesting their wisdom and doing my best to embody it. I would jump in triumph when little moments felt like big shifts and I would be in devastated tears when I didn’t recognize those little moments as big shifts. It felt like I was drawing a two dimensional circle… repeating the same shit over and over and over again. It was annoying and defeating and every tear felt like an opportunity to quit, but ever laugh felt like a reason to continue. For multiple years I walked the circle, sustaining myself on hope and little wins.
A few weeks ago, I learned what it really felt like to live with my hips very open. My legs have been externally rotated for a long time, probably from dance, probably from the way my feet pronate, probably from years of my body adapting to quick fixes that corrected one part without teaching the rest of me how to participate. At one appointment, through craniosacral work, my left leg found something closer to parallel. More neutral. More aligned. It was incredibly uncomfortable. And it also felt totally right, like my leg had returned to a place it had forgotten. As my left side began to find parallel, my right side started responding too. My body began reorganizing itself around this new information.
At the same time, my trainer and I were noticing that I could not fully lift and lower my hips. Basic movements revealed how much my right side was clenched and how much my left side was open. My right hip did not want to open. My left hip was already open. My legs were not penduluming freely. The message I kept getting was: There is a drought in your hips. Later, when I said this to the massage therapist, he confirmed it in his own way. He said it was like there was a dam. From my ribs upward, there was flow. From my legs downward, there was flow. But in my hips, there was not much water movement. He told me I needed to move my hips. I needed dance. I needed water. I needed sensuality. I needed to return moisture, nourishment, and flow to this part of my body that had become dry, braced, and cut off from the rest of me.
Which, of course, is what everyone had been telling me in different languages for years.
My trainer through movement.
My physical therapist through the pelvis and jaw.
The massage therapist through energy.
My younger self through the memory of dance.
My intuition through the image of drought.
It was at the end of this particular session, this past Sunday, that something deep finally clicked. What had appeared like a two dimensional circle, a pattern I had been walking for so damn long, finally looked like a spiral. Until I shifted perspective, until I met this moment of integration, I could only see the circle from the birds eye view, but now, now with the side view, I could see that circle had been rising towards the sky this whole fucking time. I just couldn’t see it until I could.
The massage therapist and I were talking about complexity. About what it means to hold multiple things at once. And as we were talking, he was also working on my body. I was feeling my body. I was feeling the energy moving. I was having an intellectual conversation. I was reading his energy. I was responding to him. I was aware of myself and aware of him. I was tracking sensation and language and intuition at the same time.
Suddenly I realized: “Oh my God. I am holding complexity. I am not talking about integration. I am integrated.”
In that moment, I was doing the thing I had been trying to understand for so damn long I forget the origin point.
That felt enormous because when I first started reconnecting with my body through the sciatica, I could not do anything else at the same time. I could not listen to music. I could not have someone talking to me. I could not keep my eyes open. Any sound, image, or stimulation felt like too much. I had to close my eyes and place all of my attention on one big section of my body. That was the only way I could hear it.
Throughout all the work, the Pilates, the physical therapy, the retreats, the therapy, the meetings at work, the medicine journeys, the journaling, the soul readings, the educational courses, the silent meditations, the art classes, the podcasting, the EVERYTHING I HAD BEEN DOING FOR A DECADE… all that time, the relationship had been becoming significantly more nuanced. I saw some of it growing little by little. The times when I could feel smaller places. I could listen and move while music is playing. I could speak while staying connected to sensation. I could be with another person and still stay with myself.
In that session I was aware that everything, everywhere, was happening all at once: Head. Body. Voice. Energy. Intuition. Relationship.
Holy shit.
THIS is what all the gurus and spiritual texts and Instagram snapshots spouting enlightenment mean by integration.
It is not a perfect state, nor is it a permanent arrival. It’s a moment of presence when parts of me that used to function separately begin to function together.
It’s a goddamn aha moment, Rocky, and it’s happening right the fuck now.
Yes, I celebrated hard.
And then today, with my trainer, it happened again in a more physical way.
Those three points I had been tracking for so long—my right hip, my right low back, and my right shoulder—suddenly felt connected. I could feel them all functioning as one system. Not as separate problems. Not as isolated sensations. As one integrated pattern.
It was the same teaching in a different language.
Spiritually, I had felt myself holding complexity.
Physically, I had felt my body holding complexity.
And somewhere in that messy what-the-fuckity-fuck ball of chaos, I understood something I had been circling for years:
How do you be spiritual in a three-dimensional world?
How do you do the laundry and do the awakening?
How do you touch God and still live inside a body?
How do you float in space and still come home to your hips?
THIS.
Just like this.
THIS IS BEING.
And how do we get there? How do we be?
We practice awareness. We release knowing. We sort of do a bunch of things and try to do nothing at the same time. Omg, it’s such a cluster fuck to explain because it wasn’t meant to be explained. It was meant to be lived and in the moments we live it, we need to relish it. We need to honor it so that we can remember it when it arises again and we can release the expectation of having it when it doesn’t arrive.
We can’t force ourselves to arrive. We can only practice it and become aware of the practice. And sometimes, we get the aha moments, too.
When asked recently how I’m doing, I’ve been responding: I feel like I am floating in the cosmos. Like I am surrounded by stars. Like I am aware that there are directions I could move, but I cannot yet see the path. Part of me wants to swim toward a star just to be moving, but another part of me keeps hearing: “Not yet. Wait. Rest. Feel. Clear the path, it’s coming.“
Even when my brain says, “Yeah, but what the fuck is coming?!” I hear it, but I don’t listen to it. It doesn’t get the final say because that old version of me would have called this doing nothing: “Ha, you lazy bastard.” Heard and ignored. Thank you for your input.
Because I know that isn’t true.
I am moving because I am being.
I am also gathering energy. I am becoming aware enough, embodied enough, and integrated enough to recognize the right star when it appears. And when it does, I think I will have the energy to move toward it.
This is where trust comes in. I wish I had more clarity. Of course I do. That beautiful mind of mine is still learning to collaborate with the rest of my pieces, and sometimes it likes to get loud because it’s scared. Because we used to always give it the driver’s seat. I’d let my brain name the thing, build the thing, explain the thing. Put it into a framework. Give it a title. Tell you exactly what is coming next and why it makes sense.
That is the head’s comfort zone.
My next chapter cannot come only from my head. It also has to come from my body. It has to come from my hips. It has to come from my voice. It has to come from my intuition. It has to come from the part of me that knows before I can explain how I know.
It has to come from ALL OF ME. This integrated, whole thing that is me: a three-dimensional capable body, an intelligent mind wired for incredible survival, and this spiritually gifted soul that has a deep purpose while I’m on this earth. If all of me is collaborating together, maybe I get to not only find out what that purpose is, but live it in its fullest expression.
This is also showing up in small, almost ridiculous ways.
A few days ago, I was sitting on the couch when I felt my jaw start to tingle. At the same time, I received the message that Barry, our cat, was going to claw the couch.
And then he did. What a dick.
It sounds so small. Almost silly.
It felt important though because I recognized many things at once. The physical sensation. The intuitive message. The trust. The confirmation.
I think I have been receiving information like this for a long time, but often unconsciously or in pieces. What feels different now is that I am aware of the whole process while it is happening.
I am feeling.
I am receiving.
I am trusting.
I am witnessing.
THAT is integration.
Based on everything I am being told by the wisdom keepers in person, via books, visuals, and however the messages are coming my way, I am connecting to the deeper medicine I am here to carry.
I do not know exactly what that medicine is yet. I do not know what shape it will take. I do not know if it will be writing, teaching, guiding, speaking, holding space, creating containers, or something I do not yet have language for.
But it has something to do with THIS.
This moment. This aha. With helping the unseen become felt. With translating complexity without flattening it. With bringing spiritual awareness into the body. With helping people trust the intelligence that lives beneath the noise. With showing that coming home is not just coming back to the body, or the mind, or the soul.
It is learning how to live with all of them at once.
My journey has been many complex things, and there’s no way to summarize it cleanly, but of course, I want to try just a little bit because that’s the whole point of writing: exploring new language, a limited tool, to the best of my ability, to story tell my experience so that hopefully it will land with someone else. A medicine share, if you will.
I was born whole, connected in all ways.
I learned to trust more in my head and less in my body.
I forgot spirit existed.
I had to relearn how to trust my body.
I had to remember to trust spirit.
I am learning to trust the integration of all these things.
Overall, it feels less like certainty and more like devotion. Less like control and more like relationship. Less like chasing the path and more like becoming the person who can recognize it. This feels like a culmination of so much work and struggle. Not just the sciatica. Not just this season. It feels connected to leaving San Francisco, burning out, moving to Utah, burning out again, slowing down, feeling my emotions, reconnecting with my body, opening to the spiritual space, and practicing the forever practice of awareness. The continual return to home again and again and again and again and again.
Home is not one place inside me. Home is the whole thing. The mind that knows. The body that feels. The spirit that receives. The voice that shares. The hips that remember how to move. The heart that is relearning to trust.
I do not know what is next, but my intuition, which is strong as fuck, knows this is preparation for creation.
I have been gathering the pieces of myself for a long time, and in their deepened connection, they are speaking louder to each other and collaborating more holistically together.
I am excited.
I am scared.
I am still in the mystery, but I am less anxious about the path than I used to be.
Something in me is trusting more deeply now. Something in me knows I do not need to force the star to appear. I just need to keep becoming integrated enough to see it when it does.
And when it does, I don’t just think I will know.
I know I will know.
Not just in my head. Not just in my heart. Not just in my body. But in my whole being.
Fuck yeah.
