Integrating

There is learning and then there is knowing. Learning is what happens when we get information about somebody else’s experience. Knowing happens when we experience something for ourselves. Integrating is moving that learned information from our brains into our hearts and our whole being. Integrating is changing our learnings into knowings.

The idea is that your behavior has to say to yourself - I trust myself. I trust my instincts. I trust my gut. I trust what’s coming from within - that’s how things become integrated within us.

We can say affirmations all day long, every day, but if our behaviors do not match our affirmations, we feel tension, we feel stress, we feel depression, anxiety, frustration, anger. We feel the discomfort with the incongruence between who we say we are and our actions; actions can be thinking, speaking, or behavioral. So if I excessively worry, but I say I have confidence in myself or a process, I’m not congruent and I suffer. And the people around me suffer too. 

For instance, if I say I love myself and I trust my judgment, but I second guess myself often, or ask others to make decisions for me, then my behaviors are not congruent with my saying I trust and love myself. When we experience ourselves like this, we feel anxiety or depression, shame, disgust, frustration, and dis-ease.

Most everyone experiences incongruence to some degree. And most everyone can benefit from being more congruent, more integrated.

To learn more about specific ways to close the gap on your own incongruence, call me. Let’s chat about how we can shift your learnings into knowings.