Version 2.0 March 31, 2010
© 2010 Howard McQueen
In Michael Brown’s Books, the Presence Process and Alchemy of the Heart, integrity, authenticity and intimacy are an important trinity in his process vocabulary.
As I reenter and apply the Presence Process for the second time, I have been building a working relationship with this trinity.
Integrity is the ability to recognize and honor our work-in-process, unprocessed emotions, no matter how raw and/or unsettling. We do this by feeling our emotions in order to begin the healing of our past discomforts and trauma. Connecting to our integrity allows us to become aware of our manufactured belief structures, how these fuel our reactive behaviors, and how we keep ourselves entrapped in mental confusion and delusion. By practicing integrity, we learn to insert a space of silence, of not doing anything other than witnessing what arises within us. What has, for so long, been automatic and reactive, begins to come into our focus and awareness. We see that our manufactured beliefs have created blind spots, black holes of emotionally charged memories that arise and come alive as others “push our buttons”. We literally become unconscious during these emotional hi-jackings. The space we uncover and create as we connect to our integrity sets us up to consciously challenge our ingrained habits of blaming / shaming, playing the victim or perpetrator (victor).
Authenticity is the process of discovering and learning to discern that these habitual, reactive behaviors of protection and aggression no longer serve us. Authenticity offers us connection to our inner landscape and our inner resources and we begin experimenting with the wealth of inner capabilities and insights to be @choice, i.e. to tend to our own garden. This allows us to begin disempowering and surrendering the belief structures triggering our reactive behaviors. We learn to choose the pathway of reflection, to become responsive and compassion with our self and others.
Intimacy is the clear-seeing, the piercing through the fog of our manufactured conflicted, in-resistance beliefs and behaviors. As we become intimate, we truly feel comfortable and connected with life as it unfolds, accepting the ever changing maelstrom of life’s forces without judgment or conflict. Intimacy is being consciously connect to the inner intent (peace, love, joy, acceptance) we wish to manifest into our world. We take full responsibility for experiencing life, on life’s terms. Even though others, including our birth family, may still be sleep-walking and deeply conflicted, we allow them and the external world to just be as it is. We share our open heartedness, joy and compassion with the world, infecting the world with our radical love and appreciation for life, by being more fully open and vulnerable to all of life and to the full spectrum of emotional feelings life offers us.
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