A month ago, a project I’ve been deeply invested in for years came to fruition. Along with seven international colleagues in Paris, I became certified in Integrated Practice. We celebrated with a special workshop, a diploma ceremony, speeches, photos, and wrapped it all up with a três-chic…takeout pizza dinner (in Paris! un scandale!). It was all very low-key, but at the same time, meaningful and memorable: our little group of intrepid explorers of creativity, expression, health, and humanity—we have come a long way, baby! (Sorry—you just cannot get Madison Avenue outta my California-Girl head…). Over time, we gradually shifted from clumsy, black-and-white, fixed-thought habits toward processes of far greater flexibility, range, and imagination.
The 14-module curriculum confronted us with the widest possible array of challenges and provocations, as well as opportunities to… semi-publicly play the fool. Each person contributed their unique perspective, talents, obsessions, and clever ripostes. We have explored giving speeches in languages we don’t know, invented poems in iambic pentameter, and sung heretofore-unheard harmonies to delight in their resonance, harmonics, and vibrations. We designed quaternaries; we explored improvisation and repetition; we zoomed in and out, we sang and clapped and snapped our fingers. We explored gradations and latencies; we vocalised from “ah” through “ooh” to “ee”. We let our necks be free, our heads go forward and up.
We gave ourselves permission, again, as adults, to say “I don’t know”(check out this remarkably-aligned essay by Anne Lamott in the Washington Post), and became devotees of “do nothing”. We learned a bit of Italian hand gesturing and Indian Konakol chanting, and we watched an inordinate number of videos of cute (and beautifully-integrated) babies and children.
To the uninitiated, it might seem pointless; my reply would be: give it a try.
No really, I hear you ask, what IS Integrated Practice??
I shall tell you: it is a form of magic that allows anyone with the chutzpah to engage with it to shake off the mundane, the pat, the simplistic, the one-sided, the stiff, the “stuck”, the boring, the grind of modern living (l’ennui de la vie moderne…or, with both hands making a pistol-shape, point them at each other, palms facing in, and say emphatically: "la noia della vita moderna!”…). Capisci?? (You know the gesture for this from The Sopranos, ovviamente…)
But don’t take my word for it… Wait, do take my word, but also take the words offered by my esteemed colleagues—each will have a different explanation, because each of us is an entirely different person, with a different story, a different way of seeing absolutely everything. Now that I’m certifiably integrated, I know that. Or maybe I don’t…
You may think this weakens the case for Integrated Practice, but I think accepting differences is what the world needs a lot (A LOT) more of, right now. We are not all the same. Every person is a unique treasure, a one-off, the only one there will be, ever. How sad then that is seems easier to lump people into groups, push them down, shut them out… or WAGE WAR.
The world perhaps needs fewer knee-jerk reactions, and more “doing nothing” until a better “doing" can be discerned. More zooming in and out, more reaching across linguistic and cultural divisions, more examining of quaternities, for example, this one showing the intersection of love/hate and action/inaction:
I confess to being both delighted in my new certification (it’s been a while since I got a diploma!) and also alarmed and distraught, in the current historical moment, by how desperately Integrated Practice is needed in the world: seemingly for everything everywhere all at once…
In this season of holiday festivity, let’s remember ALL the beautiful babies and children—the one whose birth many celebrate, as well as the ones every single person once was, the ones yet to come, and the unlucky ones lost or left cowering in fear, for unspeakable reasons.