sabbatical reflections: integration
31 Jan 2024so the idea of integration comes from my single or multi-day spiritual experiences. the gist of the idea is simple (and the following version of integration is largely from gibrán. here’s some writing of his that mentions integration but it’s not the entirety of where the thinking comes from):
after any significant spiritual experience, especially peak or transformative experiences, there has been some amount of internal shifting that’s occurred. and once that happens, a LOT can be up the air. the experience might have generated many insights. but it can be too much to try and act on all those insights simultaneously. even with insight, change is hard and trying change everything about one’s life all at once can be a setup for failure; it can be worse to try and change everything at once, end up changing nothing, and then being back where you started before you had the spiritual experience. so instead of trying to do that, you narrow and choose intentionally what to try and take forward. for example, you might pick one insight and then figure out how to act on it via a simple practice you can do many times a day or week.
so after the epic experience of my first sabbatical, here i am, exploring what from this experience can i integrate into the rest of my life. for now, here’s what i’m working with:
- take longer breaks from time to time; it’s restorative in a different way than shorter breaks
- do less. i benefit and the things i’m doing benefit. so actually quit some stuff. it’ll be ok.
- my body registers being in extreme stress even if my mind doesn’t. pay attention to the body.
sometimes you have an insight that is largely an intellectual insight and it can feel tricky how to work with that insight in your life. but when you have embodied experiences, working with the insight can feel much simpler because your body remembers what it’s like to experience something different than your norm.
so each of these 3 things in some ways feel not so difficult to practice. but i want to write them down because even though they felt so clear right afterwards, even now that i’m 3.5 months out from the end of sabbatical, it’s easy to see how they could slip away.
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words / writing / post-processing
370w / ~20min / 4min