Becoming a Unified Person

“You can’t hold on to anything new if your hand is tightly grasped around something else.”

These were some of my words spoken to my daughter Ana when she was about seven years old. We were just two days from the biggest move of her life and rightly so, she was sad about leaving her home in Florida. Two days later we all opened our hands and started over. That was fourteen years ago and since then we’ve been everywhere.

Vancouver, Washington. Two houses in Tacoma. Between a hotel, RV, borrowed apartment and our house in San Clemente, California. Then, Chattanooga, Tennessee.

Along the way we experienced joy, surprise, grief, loss, pain—and it all mattered. Today, many years later we are still integrating what happened during those times.

Learning to Embrace What Looks Like Disunity

In my last blog, I touched on how we heal when we can learn to release control, we find joy. But what then? I’ll tell you. When you embrace joy, you embrace mess. And what is mess? On the surface, it looks like disunity.

We’ve got a little friend we go and see every so often (pictured). He’s just started walking and occasionally knocks things over. Recently we went to visit him and I remember a cup of water tipping over as I played him my guitar. Someone quickly rushed to clean it up and before we knew it, it was like it never happened.

We treat our lives and organizations that way. We rush to clean things up and move on. We don’t like out of place things that seem to hinder us from our goals so we quickly keep going. Problem is, when we don’t stop to face the mess, we miss what matters in the midst of it. A flaw in our Western Worldview is that we can just start over as if things aren’t connected (listen to episode 6 with Randy Woodley on my podcast on this subject). Even in our political drama, we assume that a new leader and a new government can simply reset things. In our new years resolutions, we convince ourselves that things will reset after midnight strikes and we find ourselves in January 1st. Sorry friends. It doesn’t work that way.

Things don’t just reset. The way it actually works is called integration, a word that comes from the latin “integrare,” which means to make whole. In other words, we learn to accept all parts of our lives and find where they belong—like puzzle pieces that finally find their place.

Bringing Every Part Home

Amy and I are big fans of Richard Schwartz’s book, No Bad Parts. In it, he teaches us how to love all the parts of ourselves, not just the parts that are favorable. “Basically, what I found is that love is the answer in the inner world, just as it is in the outer world,” he writes. And by learning to apply this same love to our inner lives, “people wind up doing in the inner world what Jesus did in the outer—they go to the inner exiles and enemies with love, heal them, and bring them home, just as he did with the lepers, the poor, and the outcasts.” (p. 17)

What parts of yourself do you need to bring home?

What I mean by “bringing a part home” is those parts of us that we shut down and tell to stop making so much noise. It’s like that Cartoon movie Inside Out, where all the emotions are fighting for center stage. What if you let the angry part speak? What about the creative part? or the scared part? Make space and you’ll see they all have important wisdom to share, fears to voice, and gifts to give.

“What does this have to do with joy?” You ask. Joy is like happiness. They are both bi-products of something else. We find joy when we’ve slowed down to embrace the mess.

Can We Go Any Slower?

In the years following our move to Tennessee, we slowed down a lot to integrate many things. In fact, my good friend Jonathan joked with me once, “I don’t know many people that live a slower pace than you!” That actually made me proud. And I’m trying to slow down even more. Because in the slowing down we’ve learned to integrate the chaos of those years on the road, how it formed our family and pointed to areas we needed to grow and change. I’m proud that we did what we did, and I’m proud of the deep psychological and spiritual healing we’ve done since.

What this means practically is learning to accept all parts of our lives. Our stories, ethnicity, spirituality, aches and pains, all of it. We’re done trying to be people we’re not. Neither you or the world will be will served if you try to be someone you aren’t. Take all the intricacies of who you are, stir them together, and what do they make? They make a strangely diversified person. And like a good garden, health is found when you plant different vegetables close together. The plants enrich one another just like all aspects of your life do.

New Happenings & How to Get Involved

In my next blog I want to unpack what acceptance of all these parts looks like. But until then, I wanted to share that I’m getting better at embracing all parts of myself. So here are a few things.

• In January, I’m launching an Artists Way discussion group for local friends. It’s for those who want to tap in to their creativity. If you want to be involved, please contact me via Facebook.
• I’m also launching my first ever Coaching Cohorts for leaders in the business world called The Leadership Renewal Collective. It’ll be a group that’s absent of business-speak. It’s all about the relational disciplines we need to sustain all the demands of the world—payment is on a sliding scale.
• Last, in the next few weeks I’m launching six “pay what you can” retreats. I’ve grown tired of the fee-for-service model and want to try a more open handed approach to deeper work with people. If you’d like to schedule a two day retreat, please contact me through my business site. More info coming soon.
• Join my personal email list if you want to stay in the know.

In conclusion, by embracing all aspects of ourselves, we can achieve a deeper level of integration and fulfillment. This involves accepting our strengths, needs, joys, and sorrows. When we do this, we become more authentic, compassionate, and resilient. By slowing down and embracing the mess, we can discover the hidden gems within our lives. Want to be part of the action?