Transcript
Michael O’Connell:
Welcome to the Mindfulness Integration Circle with the Collective Therapy & Wellness. I’m Michael O’Connell, and we’re going to talk today about building your foundation, laying the groundwork for the changes you are making in your life and how integration plays a pivotal role in bringing a insight or breakthrough into full fruition and impact. And here’s an overview of our contents. And routine, perseverance, renunciation, and renegotiation, these are going to be our four cornerstones to our foundation. Well, first, let’s talk about integration and talk a little bit about what it is, what does it mean in this context? And I chose this picture of someone weaving a tapestry on a loom. And I think this is a great metaphor for integration. Our life is like a tapestry of all these different threads and pieces that are woven together to create this really complex and beautiful work of art.
And sometimes we have to really integrate a new thread into the tapestry. And these threads that we are weaving are based on our learning experience. It’s based on our journey and the wisdom that we accumulate. So really who is integration for? It’s anyone who’s going through a process of change, transformation, and healing, whether you are… It’s a word used a lot in psychedelic therapy, but psychedelic experiences aren’t the only way to insights or to a transpersonal experience. We have breakthroughs in conversations with our therapist, we have breakthroughs when we go on a long walk, and we have breakthroughs when we go through difficult life experiences and we have to process them, when we lose a loved one. So there’s a lot. It’s for anyone going through a change and just re-evaluating their beliefs. So what do we integrate? Insights. And this comes in many shapes and forms.
Why do we integrate? Well, integration is this process of re-engineering our habitual responses. We have a default operating system, and it’s how we usually are trained and conditioned to respond to things. And this perpetuates our existing patterns, perpetuates our existing beliefs. So when new information or new truths… We realize new truth, we need to weave it in. We need to weave it in through our reactionary mechanism and actually create a new way of responding to life. So how do we do this? Well, we have mindfulness practice as number one here, and concentration, ethics, and wisdom is really the three big themes in Buddhism of the Eightfold path.
So all the practices fall under these three themes. And concentration… We need to concentrate and we need to pay attention so we can notice when patterns are coming up so we can see our mind in action. We have to be able to concentrate and pay attention. And then intentional action is we have to act with ourselves in mind, but we have to act with others in mind. Are we exuding effort? Do we have the whole as the goal? And reflection basically relates to our wisdom and our beliefs. So when do we integrate? And this isn’t the present moment always, but some other times integration is really good, is in ceremony. And this could be whether you are celebrating a certain phase of the moon, if you decide to light a candle and just be quiet with yourself. Ceremonies happen all the time.
We make little ceremonies for ourselves throughout our lives, throughout our week. And if we don’t, it’s a good practice. It opens up a container… Ceremony opens up a container so we can kind of go a little under our surface. And this is great for reprogramming and weaving in new insights. And art and creativity is always good to integrate. Here’s a Venn diagram, but I want to just pay attention to the internal-external part. So insights kind of happen on the internal and the internal world. And then we want those revelations, those visions, those new ideas, we want to see them then reflect into our external world. So we have a change going on inside of us, and then we want our reality to reflect those changes. But there’s a lag. Sometimes our external reality doesn’t quite reflect our internal. We have to put a little work in. It doesn’t always happen right away.
So take some time, you can pause this video and do it now or later, but take some time to reflect on what recent insights have you had? What are current themes and new ideas you’re working with and bringing into your everyday life? What are some goals? What are some intentions? What was your last big idea about yourself and how to live a better life? Have fun writing these down. Go nuts. Write a whole bunch if you had a bunch and maybe if you only had one or two. And if you feel like you haven’t had any insights at all, maybe journal a little bit about what that experience might’ve felt like in the past.
Okay, so here’s a picture of a really good-looking foundation. And it is ready. It is ready to be built on. And these are the four corners, routine, perseverance, renunciation, renegotiation, and just quickly a little play with words here, ground work. Work is the challenge. It’s creative, on the clock, off the clock, willpower, form, structure, wakefulness. And this is what we do towards the earth, the physical, beneath our feet, strong, old, relatable, calming, that’s ground. So we’re applying the work to the ground, the stuff that really supports our whole life, our whole infrastructure. And we start with routine because these routines… We have so many little routines and they keep us… They are in service. Our routines serve our maintenance, our spiritual, physical, and emotional maintenance. And these routines are… They enforce. They reinforce certain patterns. They keep us in line, so to speak.
And sometimes some routines are a cause for a rut or a cause for stuckness. Some routines kind of help us decay. And then other routines help us grow and help nourish us. So through mindfulness practice, we want to identify the routines that are kind of decaying and then the routines that are more allowing for growth or fostering growth, and what new routines can we implement. It’s always good to implement a new routine, even if it’s for a short while. Nothing has to be permanent and forever. We can try something new for a week. We can try something new for 30 days, 60 days, a year. But what is a new routine you can add into your daily flow that will help your integration process? So considering your insights, your new insights, considering your intentions, what’s a routine you can incorporate into your day? I really like daily routines best. I feel like a day is really a sweet spot.
And morning and before bed are the best times for a routine because we’re going to get out of bed and then at the end of the day, we’re going to go to bed. So that’s already like… Sleep is… That’s one routine that we have and need for life. So we can piggyback sleep and bookend it with something that can really ground us and ground us into our intention. That’s the point. Every day we want a reminder of our new way of being. Okay, so perseverance. And these colors are just kind of alluding to the chakras. So the last one was orange, because routines are very active, very self-expressive. And perseverance here is solar plexus, has a lot to do with willpower and personal strength.
So perseverance is a long-term perspective. It’s gearing all our actions and our tasks that we are involved in now and we’re looking towards the bigger picture. We’re looking at our long-term goals. And anything worthwhile, it’s worth the journey, but difficulties, adversities are bound to come and fear can show up, doubt can show up, tiredness and lack of interest. And we go through that. And as human beings, we have different feelings and emotions all the time, but our perseverance keeps us connected to the bigger picture. And in this way, we build stamina and resiliency to achieve these longer timeframe goals.
But we don’t want to bowl our way through it. I’m not one who wants to force my way through anything. We want to remain open and flexible. We want to remain very fluid in this process. So it’s like if you walk in the wrong direction and you refuse to turn around, even though you know you’re going down the wrong direction, you’re just being stubborn. You’re not persevering. But knowing that you went in the wrong way and now you have to turn around and do a little extra walking or traveling, that’s the perseverance. And it’s a lot like fortitude, having the strength to stick with things even when it gets hard.
So where do you feel the most tested in your life right now? Where are you meeting the most resistance? And what needs to come into balance to help you persevere? So where are you meeting resistance? Where do you feel just run down and tired? Maybe your patience is being tested and what do you need to keep going? What’s the balance? And living in an urban, suburban area, I know I need to balance that with nature. If I don’t get around trees or get under the sky or by a body of water, the urban concrete jungle can just wear me out. So I need to do these self-care, self-balancing tasks to what? To just consider where you’re meeting resistance and what you can do to help balance in order to persevere.
The perseverance, it’s still going to be hard, but you’re going to be more equipped for it, and you’re going to be able to do it if you take care of yourself. So what do you need to balance? Oh, renunciation. All right, now we’re at the root chakra, red. And this is really what is it that we need to throw into the fire and burn away in order to really clear our minds, clear our space, clear our heads, and be able to focus on what’s really important. And renunciation, again, these things don’t have to be forever. They might wind up being forever, but renunciation can happen within a certain timeframe, we can renounce things for a week, a year, a month. One thing I always think about growing up with my grandma was, “What are we giving up for Lent?” And Lent is 40 days leading up to Easter, and we would choose one thing every year, and it would be somewhat of a challenge, whether it’s giving up meat or giving up delicious sweets.
Celibacy, alcohol, intoxicants, these are all part of human life but this is a process of a moment to build our foundation and to purify. And we want to build our foundation on top of clarity and hard work and good habits. And we need some space. We need to open up some space. So what can we let go of? Every great life has had in it a great renunciation, something that had to have been let go of in order to achieve something great and forming relationship with mystical quietude. And that’s really where we get a lot of our insights, a lot of our wisdom, visions, intuition is in that space of quiet connection with reality, with the moment, with ourselves. And in order to experience more of that, we have to strip away all the doing, the rote mechanisms that we operate by.
So what are you ready to let go of now? And what’s no longer serving you? What can you use a break from to give you space and clarity and wellness? Okay, last corner, renegotiation, the heart chakra. Renegotiation is a lot about bringing awareness to our karmic situation. All the choices we made, all the actions and thoughts in the past have led to this moment. We planted all these seeds in our lives and this is our harvest. This is our garden bed that we’re in, is our life from all the seeds we planted in the past. There’s still some that haven’t fully grown yet, and those we’ll have to deal with and work with when they do decide to sprout up.
So we want to take a good look at how we got here and acknowledge it and be grateful for it. Resentment for bad decisions isn’t going to help. We just want to acknowledge these things and just be grateful for the learning experience. And in the same vein, we want to look forward and know that the actions we’re taking today and tomorrow are planting the seeds for our future. So it’s a little bit of looking behind us how we got here, and then looking ahead of how what we’re doing now is going to that future for ourselves.
So yeah, we can’t change the past, but we can settle our karmic debt and bring more of what we love and desire into our lives. So yes, even if we make new habits, new routines, we’re doing things right, we’re still going to come to adversity and karmic scenarios that are going to challenge us because we brought them up from the past and we still have to deal with them, but we will be more equipped to do so. And instead of repeating patterns and reliving that karmic process over and over again, we can finally settle it and move forward and open up new pathways.
And then just a little point here about renegotiating soul contracts. So soul contracts are these big foundational relationships we have in our lives, foundation relationships with money, our relationships with our careers, relationships with our loved ones. And these are foundational. And sometimes we don’t think about our belief system around them enough. And maybe a time comes where we can… If it’s not working for us anymore, if our relationship with money isn’t working for us anymore, we can renegotiate that contract. But we need to be very clear on our terms and we have to be very clear on what we really want so when we declare it, the universe will hear. And when we declare it, we feel it deep in our body so that we hear it. So that’s the receptivity part.
So I want you to just come up with your own definition of karma. Karma is such a meme of a word, and maybe you haven’t really thought about it all that hard, or maybe you don’t believe in karma, but think about it. Come up with your own definition of karma and reflect on what you’re attracting into your life. What have you been attracting into your life? And what do you want to attract into your life? Think about what you are attracting and what you want to attract into your life and see if they align. And maybe think about some routines or renunciations that can help bring those into alignment.
So I want to just discuss a little bit about the mindfulness piece in the integration process. So I have another four. These are really the four gifts of mindfulness that help us integrate. Self-awareness. We need this piece of self-awareness. Know yourself in order to love yourself. And it all starts with self-awareness, not taking who we think we are for granted, but always remaining curious. Observe, witness yourself. Get to know yourself. Empty the preconceptions. Take a good look at how your mind is operating. Are you your mind? Notice feelings that come up in your body. Are you your feelings? These are great questions to ask. Presence. Oh, presence is a key to joy. Presence is a key to joy. I believe so. And by being awake and receptive to the natural flow of reality. And mindfulness helps us be more present in our lives so we can feel connected to loved ones, so we can feel a sense of aliveness in the world, so we can know with certainty our purpose moment to moment.
Emotional regulation. So being less reactive and more intentional. If we are reactive, we’re not going to get anywhere. We’re just going to spin our hamster wheel of reactivity. We need to cultivate equanimity because it’s where we can stop reactivity and be with ourselves, be with our sensations. This is where we can implement the changes. This is where we can integrate our insights. But the reactivity is the old stuff. We want to be present, awake, ready to respond, not react to our life. And then compassion and connection. This is more the big picture, being in service, our place in the grand scheme of things.
And here is our two wings. Bird cannot fly with just one, each wing sensation and equanimity. We have a sensation and we’re equanimous, non-reactive. Now, if we have a sensation in our body of feeling, thought, energy, and we react to it, we are just multiplying those conditioned responses. And we want to live from a place of intention. We want to live in alignment with our vision. We want to live in alignment with our truth. So that’s not going to come from reactivity because reactivity is going to come from all the other conditioning we’ve been through in our life. And these are just a few ways that we can work with the sensations in real time. We can identify and disrupt, we can acknowledge and reinforce, reinforce our insight, reinforce our new way of being. We can notice these sensations and thoughts, and we can just allow them and release them and not have to do anything about them. And take the energy and the power away by just allowing and releasing.
And then we can get curious and investigative, like when we have a certain sensation, we want to look into it more. We’re not sure how we feel about it. Maybe it’s new. Maybe it’s something we never felt before. And we want to make up our minds. We don’t want to just come from a conditioned response or a conditioned idea. We want to think about it fresh and new, beginner’s mind. So one practice I want to really encourage you to work on this week, this month is walking meditation. And walking meditation is unbelievably powerful for grounding, to get really grounded and on your feet and in your body, while at the same time cultivating the mindfulness, cultivating your concentration, and a few guidelines for doing walking meditation. You can do it in your room, in your house, outside. You don’t need a big area, you just walk in small circles.
You should just move very slowly, very slowly, very intentionally, and concentrate on your foot… On the connection, wherever your foot to the ground as you feel your heel, you feel the ball of your foot right into your toes, step by step. And notice the weight of your body shifting from left to right. Notice any aches and pains. Notice any tendency to go faster or slower. And just take a few laps, five, 10 minutes, however long feels good for you. And you can just clasp your hands, left hand on top of right in front of you, and soft gaze at the ground. View this eyes open, but just with a soft, unfocused gaze a few feet in front of you and set a timer. Decide how long you want to walk for. Set a timer and then start and give this a try and see how it makes you feel. Walking meditation.
All right, that ends our slide. That ends our circle this month, Mindfulness Integration Circle. So if you want to know more information and you want to find out what we’re doing over at the Collective Therapy & Wellness, check us out on Instagram at Live.Collective.Wellness, inquire about therapy, self-love, coaching, meditation, mentorship with me and more. A lot of different events going on, different opportunities, A lot of amazing content on the social media channels. So stop by, see what’s going on, and we’ll be having another integration circle with a new theme and we’re going to look more deeply and build upon our foundation. So all right, guys, have a good night.
