Integrating Notes – December 2024

My monthly newsletter seeks to connect you to sources of wisdom and inspiration in order to help you live a more integrated – joyful, purposeful, capable, and connected – life. 

Dear Boston Brain Integration Community,

And so we have come to the end of the year. How has 2024 been for you? For me personally, this has been a long, hard year. And yet, I have grown so much! In my office, I have watched clients both new and returning tackle profoundly difficult material with courage and tenacity. How you have been integrating! I define Progress as the mature determination to allow the full complexity of things. Our world this year seems to have moved both forward and back to the comforts of emotional simplicity: Good vs. Bad, Us vs. Them. Certainty is intoxicating. Sobriety is hard.

As we arrive at the winter equinox, the shortest day of the year, I take comfort in the profound truths of Joy and Delight shared by poet Ross Gay. In his work, Gay makes clear that these are serious pursuits in desperate need of our attention and care. The many rituals of gift giving and gathering at this time of year can lead us toward the pursuit of perfection: perfect presents, perfect photos, perfect memories. This is a fool’s errand. Everything real is messy. We are messy! We make progress, we regress. It is the way of things.
Perhaps in our wrestling, we might consider Gay’s insistence on remaining present as an answer. Delights are everywhere, even in the darkness. Let us look for them! Joy is not so far from sorrow, he suggests, but we need not push them apart. It is right there in the complexity of things that we find true integration.

Let’s just notice…

• How does it feel to imagine inviting sorrow in, in order to connect to joy?
• Do you feel joy when you care for others? Can you imagine others feeling joy when they care for you?
• Think of a time you shared uncomfortable truths with those you love. How did the experience surprise you? Did sharing your sorrows help you feel less alone?

From the podcast On Being with Krista Tippet: On the Insistence of Joy with Ross Gay:

Tippett: Our brains are wired to get riveted by something that’s scary, that’s threatening. We mobilize around that. It’s automatic. But I also think that the exercise of [your book, The Book of Delights ,] is to say, “Look how amazing this is.”

Gay: Yeah, totally…

Tippett: “And look how intricate it is.”

Gay: And intricate, and endless, and unbelievable. And I also think that there’s a part of our bodies that are wired…that when I would experience something delightful…so often, I’d be like, “I want to tell you.” It is this thing that actually makes me reach out towards someone. And that feels bodily. That feels…that people kind of want to share the stuff that they love.

From “How to Find DELIGHT Today (and Every Day) with Ross Gay” from the podcast. We Can Do Hard Things with Glennon Doyle, Abby Wambach, and Amanda Doyle:

I’m thinking of walking by the cemetery here, and there’s a beautiful sycamore tree. And evidently chimney swifts come into it. And I remember walking by one day, and a friend of mine was just sitting there looking up at the swifts, and it was not quite dusk, I guess, when they start to pour out. But I had to go do a thing and I was like, “What are you doing?” And she’s like, “I’m just waiting on the swifts.” And it’s just so beautiful to witness other people witnessing things that delight them, things that they love.

Let’s just notice…

• Pause for a minute and take a deep breath. As you soften your eyes and gaze around the space, what do you notice that seems to tug upwards at the corners of your mouth? That’s delight! 
• What happens when you tell someone you love about the delight you have witnessed? Do you find, as Gay does, that sharing your delight multiplies it?