Injury in an Integral Context

What is an injury within the context of an integral practice? And how should you work with injuries within your integral practice?

These questions have come up on several fronts, both in my Pod Integral Strength, questions to me on my Z-mail as well as in my consulting practice.

Let’s take a quick look at injuries, what is the basic nature of an injury?

An injury in the broadest sense of the term is some type of “pathological disorganization” with your body-mind. Now injuries are most often referring to physical problems; however, injuries as I’m framing them here can also refer to an interior “pathological disorganization” as well.

So, injuries within this context includes both the exterior as well as the interior.

Now as far as I can tell, all injuries have a cause, it may be getting hit playing a sport, too much weight for a joint in the weight room, a fall on the mountain slopes, etc. These all tend to result in a physiological injury (which obviously has interior dimensions to it but is largely external - meaning your “body” is what’s “injured.”).

Now we also have emotional assaults, the violation of trust, verbal attacks aimed at you that create pathological disorganization within your interior. What we have now is what’s typically referred to as psychopathology (which has external body based correlates but is largely an interior injury that has corresponding symptoms in your body). Much like the muscles, tendons, bones, etc. get “injured” in falling on the slopes, trust, confidence, and or your sense of self become “injured.”

So we have both external (the body part of the bodymind) pathological disorganization and interior (the mind part of the bodymind) pathological disorganization.

At the root we have some cause that has on some level disrupted our bodymind’s natural (or optimal) organization.

As far as I can tell injuries are simply part of life. So if you’re alive, you’re going to invariably run into injuries. Something is going to knock your bodymind’s organization out of whack.

To answer the question of what is an injury in the context of integral practice let’s take a quick glance of what integral practice is and what it’s central aim is.

Integral practice has two basic functions or two central aims:

1. To awaken. That is to cultivate awareness, consciousness, or what what essentially boils down to awakening to our essential Freedom. Integral practice fundamentally cannot avoid this awakening process. If it does, in my opinion this practice can’t in any genuine way be considered “integral.”

2. Shifting to the second basic function of Integral practice we find this: To embrace. Embrace as I’m using it means to enact, engage, activate, and cultivate manifestation as it arises in our self, culture and in nature. Put simply Integral Practice is committed to the Fullness of manifestation. That’s why we try to “exercise,” “train” or “engage” all of the major parts of ourselves.

Injuries naturally draw our awareness to our bodymind - both our interior and exterior dimensions in each and every injury we sustain along our journeys. Injuries within integral practice is a calling to awaken to what is. Each and every injury along our path is a call to witness what is. When we get injured, whether its to our interior or to our exterior, we get a clear picture of who we are and how we’re organized. This natural movement of our awareness of being injured is a calling to your witness.

Your witness is at its root freedom, it is the seat of your everpresent unflinching impartial awareness that without question, without hesitation holds all that arises moment to moment. It doesn’t matter if you’re heart has been shattered or your spine broken. The witness in its truest seat holds these experiences no differently than the radiant love of your heart nor the fluid open spinal column of a yogi.

So this is the first role of injuries within the context of Integral Practice. Here’s a summary:

WAKE UP!

The second role of an injury within the context of integral Practice is, you guessed it, to helps you embrace more of who you are. That’s to say it is calling you to engage, activate, fill out and enact the larger sphere of who you are in and as manifestation.

This is difficult because the natural response of the ego is to struggle with an injury. Integral Practice includes the ego’s struggle with injuries; however, a strong practice does not mindlessly (that is to say unconsciously) follow this process. The ego’s natural tendency is to withdraw from an injury, to contract around an injury and to fight to get rid of the disturbance.

This is good news/bad news. The good news is that this process in many cases starts the healing process. The bad news is that left to its own devices you’ll end up reinforcing the injury - you’ll often consolidate and solidify the disorganization within your bodymind.

Often times this process does not facilitate you embracing more of who you are, instead you end up avoiding more of who you are. Thus injuries often take on some type of chronic disorganization that becomes normalized and accepted as the “normal” organization of your bodymind.

One process I’ve practiced for years is what I call Working With The Envelope. The first step in this process is to find your “envelope,” which is the boundary in which you start to bump up against your injury. Finding your envelope is an ongoing process; however, you want to push out into your bodymind’s sphere and see just where you’re disorganization begins and where it ends. The closer you look the more fluid this boundary will become.

Once you’ve found this fluid space, the delicate boundary between what is normal and uninjured and what is injured you’ll want to start to work with this boundary. A professional who specializes in your injury is a useful resource to draw from. They can provide conventional norms of what to do and what not to do with regards to exploring around this envelope - the space around your injury.

Your central intention is to work with the injury within the moment. Live with the injury without trying to get rid of anything. With that said, you’re not solidifying your injury into some solid entity separate from yourself. There’s a delicate balance of accepting what is and working with what is, awareness of and embrace of, watching and dancing with your injury.

Ideally what happens is you’re bodymind’s organization starts to integrate the injury into your larger self system. You become more fluid with your injury and over time the envelope that you’re exploring becomes smaller and smaller, meaning your injury is healing more and more.

Now some injuries - interior and exterior - become resolved, healed and normal fully integrated functioning returns. Other injuries are more or less there for the rest of your life. The trauma, disorganization and disruption to your bodymind were lasting and become a part of your thumbprint so to speak. This isn’t to say these injuries aren’t workable or aren’t fluid from moment to moment. This is simply an acknowledgment of your conditioned history, your past. Some “injuries” become part of the more or less permanent landscape of our bodymind.

With these types of injuries, it’s important to acknowledge our egoic desire to struggle with these parts. Acknowledge this rejection of your injury but don’t allow it to be the single guiding intelligence.

Ultimately our injuries are something to be celebrated as beacons to our own awakening as well as sparks to drive us to deeply engage in our lives. Injuries are simply our call to freedom and fullness.

With that said, I hope this fuels a strong, consistent integral practice and the skillful use of your injuries, whatever type they may be.

Peace,
Rob