Integrity

Oxford Online Dictionary lists several meanings for integrity: “The quality of being honest …, the state of being whole and undivided, the condition of being unified …, internal consistency.” Integrity is an important piece of emotional intelligence. Like success, integrity is a quality we define for ourselves. If we don’t do so, the world is filled with people who will impose their idea of integrity upon us.

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Integrity is not about optics. We’re all familiar with people who talk the talk but don’t walk the walk. Internal consistency and wholeness mean our words, actions, intentions, thoughts and feelings work together. Integrity is not flashy, sexy, loud, or the center of attention. It’s a quiet, steady reliability; a deliberate and focused intentionality.

Integrity is not by any means perfect, or a destination. It’s a daily practice. It holds us accountable and responsible for our choices.

From an emotional intelligence perspective, the practice of integrity begins with keeping our word to ourselves. It also requires authenticity, or honesty. It sounds simple, but when I first began thinking about integrity, I felt blank. Honesty, yes, I could get a handle on that. I don’t cheat or steal. That seemed to me a superficial look at integrity, however. I wanted to push deeper into it than cheating and stealing.

At the same time I was learning emotional intelligence, I was reading a book titled The Energy of Money by Maria Nemeth, Ph.D. Several pages are devoted to excavating one’s individual standards of integrity. It’s a fascinating and provocative exercise, starting with exploring who we pretend we are, who we’re afraid we are, and who we really are. Nemeth provides a series of exercises, at the end of which I had a 3 x 5 card with six to eight words or short phrases that seemed, at that point in time, to be the bare bones of my integrity.

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Then I came to Maine and my whole life changed. For a long time, I felt myself to be in utter chaos. I still had the card with my standards of integrity on it, stuck in The Energy of Money like a bookmark.

Gradually, the dust settled. I stood up tall again and looked around me. I began to master emotional intelligence, transformed my health with a different way of eating, and wrote myself out of confusion, loss and my old life. I reread The Energy of Money, and the book, along with other resources, helped me heal my relationship with money. I put the card with my standards of integrity on my bulletin board in my work space, where I could look at it every day.

Then I encountered the idea of minimalism about a year ago. I gave up my habit of making lists, and lists of lists. I developed a practice of reverse listing — making brief daily notes about how I in fact do spend my time — rather than making long lists of what I HAVE to do or SHOULD do. I worked on feeling good about what I do accomplish instead of focusing on what I’m not accomplishing. I started to trust myself to the flow of each day and where my curiosity, creativity and standards of integrity led me.

Integrity does not provide me with a higher moral ground or a sense of righteousness. I don’t wear it like a medal. In fact, more often than not, it requires me to deal with life in ways I’d much prefer to avoid, like having difficult conversations with people, allowing myself to be seen and heard, or making hard choices and dealing with painful consequences.

Minimalism is, for me, largely about keeping it simple. One day I took my 3 x 5 card and started re-working my standards of integrity. I wasn’t happy with the language, and my life had changed a great deal since I had first written them.

I had changed a great deal.

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For a couple of weeks I played around with words and ideas. I thought hard about what really matters to me in a week, a day, an hour. One of the basic tenets of minimalism is if everything is important, nothing is. What are the most powerful ideas guiding my choices, the absolute essential core of who I am in the world? What are my best tools for navigation through life?

When I was satisfied, I got a new 3 x 5 card, labeled it Standards of Integrity, and listed: authenticity, creativity, seeing it clear, and warriorship. I put it back on my bulletin board. These four simple standards are always with me, as I write, as I work, as I relax, and as I interact with others. I visualize them as a circle of four overlapping circles, connected, with no beginning and no end. If I’m groping in the dark, trying to see something clearly, I’m resisting and fighting denial, assumptions, arguing with what is, and my own not-so-useful internal narratives. That’s warriorship. I’m in pursuit of understanding and clarity about the places where I can learn, grow, and use my power effectively. That’s authenticity. I’m sharing and communicating honestly with others in my life about my needs, thoughts, experiences and ideas. That’s more authenticity and warriorship, along with creativity.

I rarely use one standard without employing the other three.

I’ve discovered these four standards make to-do lists redundant. As long as I’m living by the standards, what I’m actually doing is less important than my being. My current daily to-do list is the same simple items every single day: Eat well. Hydrate well. Exercise. Write. Keep it simple. Stay now. If I successfully accomplish those most important tasks, that’s what matters. On busy days, when I deal with a lot of other tasks, housework, or hours at work, I might complete a lot of productive activities, but if I haven’t addressed my own physical and emotional needs and written, I don’t feel good about the day and the way I spent it, because I didn’t keep my priorities straight. The next day, I try to refocus.

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Developing personal standards of integrity is not some kind of a silver bullet. It doesn’t mean I float through life, confident, beloved by all (!!!), and never making a mistake. (I can’t even write that last sentence without giggling.) Most of the time, I feel like a hot mess. I’m constantly second-guessing myself. I’m rarely lost, though. My integrity is a compass, a way to ground and a place to start. Let’s face it: life is messy. We are all fallible and flawed, which is to say we’re all beautifully human.

I can’t make life less messy, but I can simplify my own life and the inside of my head. Developing standards of integrity is something of a hero’s journey because it requires us to take a long, hard, honest look at ourselves in relationship to not only money, but all the other things in our lives. For me, that journey was well worth taking.

 

Making An Offering

The seed for this post was a podcast by Pat McCabe, also known as Woman Stands Shining, who is a Diné (Navajo) mother, grandmother, activist, artist, writer, ceremonial leader and international speaker. In the podcast, she speaks about the idea of making an offering as part of our spiritual work.

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That idea started me thinking about offerings, what it means to make one, to whom we make them, and why. Spiritual and sacred practices are a strong theme in my Webbd Wheel series. Mother’s Day has come and gone and Father’s Day is ahead. Many of us mark these days with offerings of some kind. For Earth Day, I joined a small neighborhood group and picked up trash, and I framed that activity as an offering. Yesterday I cleaned up my summer-only dance space and danced there for the first time this season. As so often happens, during that hour of dance this week’s post crystallized.

An offering is “a thing offered as a gift or a contribution” according to a quick Internet search. A gift is “a thing given willingly to someone without payment.”

The act of making an offering is ancient, a practice we began long before we could go out and buy a gift. Various cultures have historically engaged in ritual sacrifice (an act of slaughtering an animal or person or surrendering a possession as an offering to God or to a divine or supernatural figure), an altogether different degree of gift from a cute coffee mug.

I’ve long struggled personally with gift giving. There’s something in me that resents and resists the cultural mandates we’ve created to give gifts of a particular kind on certain occasions or days of the year. It seems to me modern-day gift giving has moved away from making an offering and into a demonstration of possessing money and spending it on some new piece of something, just for the look of the thing. We may feel real love, or gratitude, or whatever, but the only way we know how to express it is by buying a card (never mind the trees) and some kind of a gift.

I know that’s how we do things, but what does it accomplish, aside from contributing to our capitalist economy? Is that what we most want from the people in our lives — more stuff — or is that what we take because we can’t get what we really want? Is a coffee mug all we think we have to offer? Is a coffee mug all we think the other will accept? Are we unable to recognize and cherish an offering unless it comes gift-wrapped?

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I’m thinking a lot about Pele, the Hawaiian volcano goddess, because I’m writing about her in my second book. Traditional offerings to Pele included tobacco, brandy, silk, crystals, tropical flowers and food. Offerings to Pele and other divine figures around the world involved ritual, prayer, music, song, dance and sometimes a sacrifice. Things, yes, although many were consumables or objects from the natural world, but also time. Presence. Creative, sensual and/or erotic expression. Community celebration, guided by spiritual leaders. Reverence. Appreciation. Gratitude. Acknowledgement of the Divine’s connection to the people and the natural world they inhabited.

Making an offering on this level is a demonstration of commitment and willingness to participate in the complex web of connection between people and nature. It’s a practice, not a one-time event. It’s flexible and not limited to the calendar or the clock. If there’s a community or individual need to speak to the Divine, time is set aside to do so. No money or commerce need be involved, because the offering is of self.

The offering of self, however, is often invisible, especially to our nearest and dearest. It’s so fatally easy to take one another for granted. The very act of feeding those we love is an offering we’ve been making and accepting since humans began. The acts of growing, harvesting, gathering, hunting, sharing and preparing food, absolutely necessary for survival, are almost obscured now by money and time constraints, ecological concerns, health issues, ideology and who does the dishes. Whether we recognize it or not, feeding another person is an offering of life. Parents know making that single offering to just one child, let alone other family members, is a colossal, exhausting, unending task. Yet it’s so often completely invisible, and who has time to enjoy the act of offering food to another (or ourselves, for that matter), or incorporate ritual, play or creativity into our eating? It’s just another chore in our busy days.

So, if our offering is invisible, unrecognized, unappreciated or even rejected in favor of something like a coffee mug, does it mean we’re worth nothing, we are nothing?

Of course not, but it feels that way sometimes, doesn’t it?

Making an offering means letting it go into the world and having faith in its worth. An offering is a gift, and a gift is a thing given willingly, without payment, remember? There isn’t a scorecard. It’s the practice of offering that enriches our spirit, not the outcome. Unfortunately, everything about our modern culture trains us to depend on immediate reinforcement. We’re hooked on likes, claps and our stats. We gloat over the number of our friends, subscribers, comments and shares. Deadliest of all, we compare our popularity and performance with the popularity and performance of others.

What others think about us and how the world perceives us is becoming more important than our own integrity and the authenticity and quality of our offerings. We’re forgetting how to trust and have faith in silence, in invisibility and in not knowing. We’re forgetting our worth is not defined by others.

What about the offerings we make to ourselves? What about our ability to meet our own needs, spiritual, physical, creative and emotional? Do we have any self to give ourselves? Do we tell ourselves there’s no time, no money and no point? Do we tell ourselves whatever our self-expression is, it’s not worth anything, meaning we can’t sell it to someone or no one will approve of it?

Woodshed

I danced yesterday in an old woodshed that was attached to a local one-room schoolhouse more than 100 years ago. It leans and tilts. The roof leaks. The windows and doors aren’t square and the wind blows through gaps. I swept out the winter’s accumulation of mouse and bat droppings, leaves and dirt. It was a warm, sunny day and as I danced I gradually peeled off my clothes until I was naked. The sun came in the west window and made a square on the floor.

I thought of trees and stones offering their bodies to moss and lichen, the earth offering itself to plants, and blossoms offering themselves to sunlight and insects.

I thought of smiling into a stranger’s eyes and complimenting a cashier on the color of her blouse.

I thought of the creators of the music I was dancing to making an offering of their talent, enabling me to offer my dance.

I thought of homes, rooms and gardens I’ve created that are long erased. I thought of people I’ve loved with my whole heart and volunteer work I’ve done. I thought of my partner, who was running an errand in town so I could eat bacon the next morning. I thought of picking up trash on Earth Day and the new trash that’s been thrown out car windows since then, and how futile that makes me feel.

I thought about words, all these words, all these stories and ideas and thoughts in my head that are here and in my books. I thought about all the words written by others I read each day and appreciate and share.

I thought about procreation, the red tide and the milky seed our bodies offer to life, to hope, to continuance. I thought about offerings of tears, of blood, of pain, of rage and of surrender.

Photo by Leon Liu on Unsplash

Offering is a circle. Life offers itself to us, and we can choose to offer ourselves to Life. What better offering can we make than our fully engaged participation and presence with ourselves, our experience and others? Such a gift can’t be bought or sold. It might not feed our fame, popularity or bank account. We probably won’t get validated by statistics or Twitter. Some people may never recognize or value it.

But our self-esteem will bloom. Our joy will increase. Our words and choices will add to the positive energy in the world. We will become self-empowered and spiritually strong and resilient.

I smiled and laughed and shouted as I danced, whirled and stamped and clapped. I offered up my white, winter-tender skin to the sun and air. A mosquito bit me on a knee; a blood offering. No one saw me, except maybe an astonished spider or two. No one cared. It was an offering of self to self, a private thing. It gave me joy. It gave my body a chance to move and be grateful. It fed my creative well.

It was nothing.

It was everything.

It was my offering.

All content on this site ©2018
Jennifer Rose
except where otherwise noted

Nothing for Fear

Last week I came down the steep stairs from my little attic aerie, sat in a chair in the living room and cried while I asked my partner if he thought I would ever have a less effortful experience of life.

It’s not that anything was really wrong. What I was feeling was an old, familiar feeling of trying to manage my life and myself as efficiently as possible and feeling worn out and unsuccessful.

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Trying. Manage. Efficiently. What am I, a machine?

I was tired that evening, and worried about diminished workflow and subsequent diminished paycheck. I wasn’t seeing a way out of my work/income situation, which is a place I’ve been in for several years.

One of the things I did last week during a work shift devoid of work was join She Writes, an online community for, obviously, women writers. I’d been procrastinating about doing so for a long time.

For years, I’ve been trying to find a writing community, both locally and online. I’ve joined a professional local organization, but their programs are rarely offered up here in Central Maine, as Portland is their headquarters. I’ve tried, unsuccessfully, to find beta readers for my first book. I put up an invitation to start a writer’s group at the local library and didn’t get a single call. I tried a give and take partnership with another writer so we could read one another’s work and provide feedback, but my partner had other priorities and needed to drop out.

And, of course, I need to work for that paycheck, so my time and energy are largely gobbled up by my financial needs rather than the joyful work of my life. This produces a chronic background tension that grinds away at my soul.

Anyway, I decided the time had come and I was ready to join She Writes and see what possibilities might open up through that community. I had to apply to join.

I knew they wouldn’t take me.

They accepted me (probably some kind of mistake) and the day after I sat in the chair and cried, I had another shift with no work and began exploring She Writes. I came across a blog post titled “The Only Reason to do Anything is Love,” by Bella Mahaya Carter, and had an epiphany.

Engaging with life from a place of love rather than fear is not a new idea for me, or probably for anyone reading this. It’s the kind of thing we hear and read all the time. I would have said I do that. It’s always my intention to show up in the world with love, which is to say kindness, compassion and respect.

The wording of Carter’s post, however, indicates motivation, an internal thing, not external action. Make choices with love, not fear. Decide what to do based on love. Do nothing for fear.

Right, I thought. I treat others and myself well. Of course.

Why?

I treat others well because I think it’s effective and I’m afraid of violence, hatefulness, rejection and just plain crazy.

I treat myself well because I’m afraid to be unhealthy, unable to earn a living and/or unable to be independent.

Photo by Milada Vigerova on Unsplash

It’s all for fear. It’s not for love.

Furthermore, treating myself well doesn’t equal loving myself. I caretake my physical form like a good property manager takes care of a rental. I exercise, eat well, brush my teeth, wash my body and take care of injuries.

What I think about myself is that I disappointed my parents, drove my brother nuts (not literally!), failed two marriages and made unforgiveable mistakes as a parent. I think I’ve never made a successful career or had a good enough job. I think I’m ridiculously hard to live with. I think I eat too much, use too much hot water in the shower, like obnoxious music, try too hard and am too sensitive. I think I’m unattractive and few people want to hug or touch me. I think I’ve spent years writing a 300,000-word book that, for all I know, has less value in the world than a roll of cheap toilet paper. On sale.

Those are some of the things I’m conscious of. When I look at my fear-based choice making, it appears I also think if I don’t hold my own feet to the fire at all times I’ll become a lazy, irresponsible, selfish slacker; demanding, mean, dishonest and greedy.

Carter’s post made me realize I could hardly think of a choice, any choice, whether important or mundane, that I haven’t made based on some kind of fear. Ever. From earliest memory.

The greatest motivator in my life is and has always been fear.

Not only that, but I’ve created a whole pantheon of idols I obsessively and ceaselessly worship in order to avoid the vengeful, punitive God I’ve made out of fear. I make daily bloody and brutal sacrifices of time, energy and life to appease them, but insatiable fear just gets more and more powerful. Here are some of the idols:

I read that post on Friday. There and then I decided to start making choices based on loving and believing in myself rather than fear of consequences and see what happened.

Without leaving the chair, I asked myself what the hell I was doing messing around with a job that wasn’t meeting my needs and I was unhappy in.

On Saturday I applied and tested for a job as an independent contractor to do transcription for an online company.

On Sunday I applied and tested for a job as an independent contractor to do transcription for a second online company and was hired on the spot. I also wrote the publisher of She Writes Press and asked for help with the next step for my book manuscript.

On Monday, when I ran out of work, I began getting qualified (via testing) to do various kinds of transcription through my new job and looked up the resignation process from my current medical transcription job.

Yesterday the second online business hired me.

This morning She Writes Press wrote me back with support, suggestions, a recommended professional who might read the manuscript, and what it would cost.

The fear is not gone. In fact, it’s louder than ever because I’m challenging it on so many fronts at once. The difference is I’m not standing nose to nose with it right now. Playing with the new toy of making choices based on what’s loving for myself gives me another option, which means now I can make a real choice.

Fear is not a bad feeling. We need it to survive. It’s just that mine has grown bloated and swollen on all the power I’ve given it over the years. The bigger it gets, the more space it takes. At this point I’ve become its thing. It thinks it can do as it likes with me.

It’s wrong.

I’ve had a belly full of life based on doing things out of fear. It’s exhausting, demoralizing, joyless and hag-ridden. It doesn’t work well and I’m sick of it. When I think about it rationally, I know I don’t need to beat myself with a stick through every day for fear I’ll become lazy, selfish, etc., etc. If I was going to turn into any of those things I would have done it long ago.

How would it be if I used regard for myself as a motivator and refused to do or not do out of fear? What might a life based on doing things out of thinking well of myself look like? What if I stopped giving anything to fear?

The funny thing is life looks much the same. The difference is largely in the outwardly invisible motivation behind my choices. Am I going to relax with music or a video and stretch because that’s the right and responsible way to treat my tiresome physical needs after a long day sitting in which I earned inadequate money, or am I going to do it because I love the way it feels after a tiring day in which I worked hard, whether I earned money or not?

Life is crazy right now. Everything feels like it’s in transition. I hardly know what to concentrate on in any given moment, there’s so much on the table. Even so, now when I run out of energy in the afternoon I spend a few minutes writhing between making a choice between demanding more from myself out of fear or doing something pleasurable and relaxing. So far, every day I’ve managed to choose rest and relaxation after another wild day.

It appears I’ve begun a new practice. I didn’t know that evening I sat in the chair and cried I was standing on an important threshold. I didn’t know by the end of the week I’d have not one but two new jobs. I didn’t know I was going to finally get serious about putting my manuscript into a professional’s hands and risk failure and rejection. I didn’t know in just a couple of days I was going to begin making a habit out of rolling out of bed and stepping into the day’s embrace with curiosity and a resolve to think well of myself as I navigate, rather than wondering fearfully what would happen next and whether I would manage it adequately.

So far, so good.

Nothing more for fear.

Photo by Stephen Leonardi on Unsplash

All content on this site ©2017
Jennifer Rose
except where otherwise noted