Integral Awareness & Changes In Your Practice

Here's a question I recieved recently - ok so maybe not so recently - but one that nonetheless deserves some attention as it has continued to surface within my own body-mind's dissonance. "How do you or how do you not remain engaged in Integral Awareness when a piece of your practice is altered suddenly?" Integral Awareness - let's start with a definition to start this thread out. For our discussion here, I'm going to refer to integral awareness as a moment to moment awareness as your body-mind, not your body-mind as an presumed distinct whole or "complete" entity but a body-mind that fundamentally understands itself as a system or constellation of interpenetrable self systems. I know it's a mouth full, but it's a very necessary mouth full - and it's in this mouth full that we'll find some guiding insights to the question being explored. Let's unravel some of this... Integral Awareness - at least one perspective that can be cast on this subject - is fundamentally a refusal to see oneself as a single system or a discrete form. If there's one thing that integral awareness is not - it does not pretend to be complete. Integral Awareness and the sense of self that emerges and is identified with is a constellation of interpenetrable systems. You fundamentally know yourself through the moment to moment co-creation and co-emergence with the various parts of yourself and the various aspects of the world in which you are immersed and engaged. This doesn't mean you don't have enduring predispositions, characterological traits and so on. Quite the contrary, integral awareness discovers more of these dimensions of oneself as the developmental shift into integral awareness and an integral sense of self disidentifies with more limited belief systems and more rigid attachment to a few core traits. Instead of being "complete" and needing to be a certain way in the world, integral awareness and the sense of self that naturally follows is much more fluid and flexible. Why? The process that is being identified with is a moment to moment co-emergence or co-creation - that's what is fundamentally experienced as "me." The sense of "I" that is a discrete and complete object who then meets the world no longer is the foundation of what "I" experience. Remember, evolution or development is shifting more and more towards a conscious relationship with the present moment. Development starts with a largely unconscious embeddedness with the present moment, then development proceeds to develop a sense of self that exists and endures over time. Another way to say this is the present moment learns to discover, hold and use both the past and the future through the construction of a conventional self. As development shifts beyond the conventional - towards what we're referring to here as "integral awareness" - the present moment is approached and discovered as the ground for ones sense of self. This grounding with the present moment then lays an important foundation for higher "transpersonal" stages of development. So with that small tangent into Integral Awareness, let's again revisit this core question: "How do you or how do you not remain engaged in Integral Awareness when a piece of your practice is altered suddenly?" Integral Awareness is lost the moment your sense of self congeals to and consolidates itself into a perceived "complete" self. Anytime you experience yourself as a whole and complete entity entering into relationships, taking in objects "out there" in the world, and bouncing off others - this isn't integral awareness. Now this can of course be part of integral awareness; however, it is just that - "a part of" - not the complete whole that pre-integral awareness knows itself as. So, let us bring this to practice... Practice is not something that "you" do. You and your practice are fundamentally not two from the vantage point of the integral self. Your practice creates you and a various constellation of activated parts of your self simultaneously create, animate and illumine your practice. Changes are thus understood to be a natural part of the process of co-emergence. Practice is no longer perceived to be a static element or separate entity in which "I" - a presumed complete and distinct whole - engage with. The practice is alive, fluid and changing as is the sense of self from the perspective of integral awareness. Neither the practice nor the self is separate from one another. That is to say they co-emerge and are co-created together. Integral awareness is fundamentally not changed through alterations within the practice nor changes within the various parts of the self system. These are simply the natural by-products of the co-creative process that is always unfolding. Integral awareness is however lost when a change in one's practice causes the self-sense to recede back into a preferred part of the self system. Now the "I" believes itself to be a discrete entity. This is generally how integral awareness is lost through unexpected change. It should be noted though that it is not the recession back upon some preferred part of one's self-system that causes the loss of integral awareness. What causes the loss of integral awareness is the exclusive identification with this processes. If this processes is allowed to unfold within the larger spaciousness of the present moment, and the sense of self remains seated in and knows itself through the co-emergence and co-creative processes unfolding in the moment - integral awareness has not been lost. Either way, the dance goes onward. Enjoy ~R