Integrating Body, Heart, and Mind

How often do you feel what you think or think what you feel? In the light of growing self-awareness, we may notice that our body, heart, and mind typically do not act in unison. Instead, they often work at cross-purposes to each other. For example, our body wants to eat the ice cream. Our heart recoils at the prospect of gaining weight. And our mind dwells on cholesterol counts. Or, our mind wants our body to exercise to stay healthy. The body, though, is lazy and resists. Meanwhile, the heart prefers puttering about the garden or conversing with friends. Such inner conflicts and lack of coordination sap our energies and hinder our effectiveness. In most activities we are not wholly there, because one or more of our parts refuses to cooperate.

If we could act with the whole of ourselves, the quality of our life would change dramatically. Our fractured sense of self would begin to heal. Our confidence and effectiveness would grow. Our presence would deepen and stabilize. A dynamic force would enter our inner work, simplifying and accelerating our path.

How can we evolve toward this? The surest way to work toward integration of body, heart, and mind is through seeing. First we need to see our actual situation, our lack of coordination, and our inner contradictions. In the face of this disturbing revelation, we do not lose hope, because seeing both reveals and heals. Seeing is the action of the conscious energy, the energy of wholeness. Seeing alone can bring our disparate parts under one umbrella, merging them within the fullness of our being, permitting each to play its appropriate role in the enterprise of life.

But this transformation occurs slowly and fitfully, with ample room for misunderstanding. For example, what we feel often drives our thinking: our thoughts just slavishly following the emotion. At other times, our thoughts drive our emotions. We may daydream a scenario in which we are insulted. Then our feelings wax indignant in response to the imaginary event. But these examples do not portray integration, rather they speak of the automatic operation of our parts reacting to each other. True integration derives from the conscious energy, not from automatic functioning.

The work of consciousness, the energy of seeing, is not so easy to jump straight into. The sensitive energies allow us to approach it constructively, however. By practicing sensitive awareness of each part of ourselves, we move toward sensitive awareness of all parts at once, which builds a foundation for true seeing in conscious wholeness. Simultaneously sensing our body, kinesthetically, viscerally and directly, coupled with awareness of our emotions whatever they may be, and of our thoughts and daydreams, expands the domain of our attention and opens the way toward consciousness and unity.

To be sensitive to all three parts concurrently is also not so easy. We may enter spontaneous moments wherein we find ourselves conscious, with will strong enough to unify our parts into a whole. But such moments do not last and cannot be repeated intentionally. To live in an integrated way, we train in the practices of awareness. We begin with establishing awareness of the sensitive energy body, as strong and as stable as possible. When in that state we can, at times, branch out to incorporate awareness of thoughts and/or emotions. In this way we train our attention and awareness toward the wholeness that integrates our parts, toward unity of action, toward the ability to act with the whole of ourselves.

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