The Dance of Integration
La Danza de la Integración
A reflection on the challenge of integrating glimpses of openness into everyday interactions, and how others respond when habitual interpretations are relaxed.
The Dance of Integration
A reflection on the challenge of integrating glimpses of openness into everyday interactions, and how others respond when habitual interpretations are relaxed.
You have to draw the line somewhere. It's really interesting: the dance between that sense of needing to draw the line and the moment when you remove it even just a little bit, and you realize, "Oh, this is so much better." I feel like week after week we talk about that dance, but that's how it unfolded for me recently.
What I'm hearing is the process of integration. Glimpses are actually not that hard to have. There are all kinds of glimpses, and all kinds of depths to them, but glimpses themselves are not that hard. The challenge is what we learn from them, and whether we change our daily way of interpreting, being, and functioning based on what we've learned.
The habit of interpretation
What you're describing is very much in that space. You have a habit: when you see people, when you're with this person, this woman in the shop, you notice an interpretation that's habitual. That noticing is the effect of a glimpse. The side effect of a glimpse is that you can see the mind as mind, rather than taking it as simply the reality: "This person is this way, and I'm that way, and that's just how it is."
A glimpse reveals: "Oh, I have this interpretation. This is a thought about this person, and this is a thought about me." That's all it is, but it's powerful, because then you have the choice to relate differently.
When openness is felt
What you did in that story, and of course one never knows for sure, but her smile, to me, was her feeling you not relate to her in the usual way. I'm just playing with my fantasy there; I wouldn't know. But what I do know is that when we are open like that, others feel it. Even if the openness is just going from point A to point B, and you're usually at A and now you're at B, others feel it. They mostly feel it without knowing they feel it.