Integrating Notes – December 2025 

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,

We have arrived at the end of the year! This is the time when days are short, nights are long, and ritual is all around us. Many cultures bring light to the dark at this time of year – on menorahs, Christmas trees, bon fires and yule logs, and in festive holiday light displays. As we notice the dark, it seems to me that all over the world, we celebrate our human capacity to bring light to it.

Psychologist, writer, and soul activist Francis Weller talks about how “the purpose of ritual is to derange us because the current arrangement is not working.” He sees ritual as a “recalibration” that helps us “come back to who [we] are. Not to the constructs, not to the strategies, not to the conditioned mind, but come back to who [we] are.” Weller reminds us that “ritual has that capacity to shake off all the dust of forgetting, all the ways that we’ve been shaped by energies and structures that are not supportive of soul and life. And ritual is that mechanism by which foundations can be shaken and we can be remembered.”

In my house, we celebrate with important rituals every day of the year, like “tell me three things” about your day, and nightly reading at bedtime, something I enjoy as much as my nine year old son, Oliver. One book we have been talking a lot about lately is featured below, the story within a story by Dave Pilkey, “Two Birds.” Oliver is fascinated by the topic of how we all get to choose the way we see the world. He would prefer that we all be like the bird who looks up. In this story about the viewpoints of optimism and pessimism, I see a middle path.

In Brain Integration, our work is not to avoid looking at suffering, or deny that we are facing what Weller calls, “the long dark,” at this time of year, and at this period of conflict in our world. Instead, our work is to notice the darkness and notice the light. Notice the beauty around us and notice the pain. Tragedies that unfold at this time of year hit harder. They just do. To look with integrated vision at the world is to notice the multiple truths that lie around us constantly. Your mother hurt your feelings and she didn’t mean to. You adore being together with your family and togetherness brings you some melancholy or irritation. We don’t have to solve these truths. We can choose to allow them both to exist: the beauty in the clouds and the trash in the streets, and choose gratitude over existential angst.

As I announced in my last newsletter, on January 15, 2026, I will be offering a free talk online via Zoom where I will explain more about my philosophy of healing, and how Brain Integration can help people at all stages of life learn to notice and survive the pain and beauty of human existence.

If you or anyone you know wants help seeing the lens through which you look at the world, in order to get unstuck and start the new year off with deeply felt intention, I invite you to join me.

Quote from: Deschooling Dialogues: on Initiation, Trauma and Ritual with Francis Weller

By Francis Weller and Alnoor Ladha

From How To Survive the End of the World: The Long Dark with Francis Weller.

A podcast by Autumn Brown and adrienee maree brown

There’s a term in the Inuit tradition called kartsaluni. And kartsaluni translates quite literally, sitting quietly together in the darkness, waiting expectantly for something creative to burst forth. And that’s where we are right now. I think we have to get really quiet and listen because we don’t know what’s happening. We don’t know. And we can’t use the same models of progress and push and control and forcing things to happen. We’re really being asked to approach it very, very differently…

Within the practice of kartsaluni are several values that we do not practice in this culture: restraint, reverence and patience. So restraint becomes a very important value for us to cultivate. Deep, not knowing and deep listening and patience. [This doesn’t follow] the heroic model. It’s following a different model. It’s following a soul model into the depths, into the darkness.

Let’s just notice…

• Where are you sitting in the dark in your own life? What unknown and expectant realities are you facing?
• How might the value of restraint aid you as you sit and wait for something creative to burst forth?
• If you chose to give up pushing, forcing, and controlling reality in favor of deep not knowing, how might reverence and patience steady you?

“Two Birds”

from Cat Kid Comic Club Influencers

by Dav Pilkey

One day as the world was spinning,        And the morning just beginning,              Two birds hatched in One Great Tree – And saw the world quite differently. 

One looked up and one looked down,   One bird smiled and one bird frowned   One bird sang and one bird roared.     One said, “Thank you !” One cried. “More!”    

Seasons changed and two birds grew. They longed to fly, as most birds do. And so both birds with tings unfurled Fluttered off to see the world. 

Two birds tumbled from their nest      Even though they tried their best.            One bird yelled and cried and swore,  One bird said, ” Let’s try some more!”

And after many, many tries                 Two birds finally learned to fly.         Soaring over land and sea,                 Still seeing things quite differently. 

One looked down and saw the crowds,  One looked up and noticed clouds      One saw mud and trash and cars,              One saw moonbeams flecked with stars. 

One bird saw the rain and cried,          “It’s too wet to be outside!”                    The other bird said with a laugh,      “What a nice day for a bath.

One day when they needed rests,       Two birds made two little nests.               Side by side upon a branch  –             One happy home, one ragged ranch. 

Then a tempest raged outside,             So two birds found a place to hide.  There they huddled, safe and warm       As they weathered out the storm.

Soon their tree began to sway                    And all their trappings blew away.            The wild wind raged on and on            Until their tiny nests were gone. 

One bird stomped and shook her wings. “We lost our nests! We lost our things! She cursed the wind that caused this strife. “This is the worst day of my life!”        

The other bird was homeless too.            “But I am safe, and so are you!”          And so she raised her voice to say,    “I’ve never known a better day!

Many, many years went by,                 and two birds grew too old to fly.  Collapsed before the setting sun.          one bird said; my life is done.

Too tired to walk, too blind to see, a  lifetime choked with misery.                She laid upon a rock to die,                  and with her final breath said: Why? 

The other bird was dying too.                    For that’s what every bird must do. Grateful for a chance to live,                  to see the world – to love – to give. 

And so she sat upon the ground, beholden to the world around:                  the trees – the stars – the riverbanks – and with her final word, said: Thanks.

Two birds passed away that day.        Each saw things a different way.          Two birds came, now they’re gone,        and the world spins on and on.

Two Birds: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vPrvjk1kcnI

At the winter solstice, the earth is tilted on its axis as far away from the sun as possible, giving us our longest night. Inside our bodies, it is our axis and atlas, the first two vertebrae of the neck, that allow us, like Pilkey’s two birds, to tilt our heads up toward the sun and down toward the earth. This holiday season, when things around you are beautiful, look up. And when they are challenging and imperfect, as life is want to be, breathe deeply. Stay present. There is so much for us to learn when things are hard, if only we can remain embodied and curious, and notice that we are not alone. 

The Inuit practice of kartsaluni invites us to sit quietly together in darkness waiting expectantly for something creative to burst forth. On Christmas Eve, I will sit together with my community in the darkness and raise candles high as we sing “Silent Night.” It is one of my favorite rituals of the year. Whatever your rituals are this holiday season, notice the dark. Notice the light. May restraint, reverence, patience, and gratitude guide your longest nights.

With reverence,

Elizabeth McIntire

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