Integrating Notes – November 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,

This week, as the season’s first blast of arctic chill reminds us that winter is approaching, I am struck by how easily life can feel surprising and overwhelming, despite what we know about the complexity of various seasons of our lives. The longer I live on this earth, the more compassion I have for the many layers of consciousness within each of us. Chilly weather might not be as complex to experience as the global economy or wonders of aging, but it is equally capable of making us feel small and out of control.

According to Lisa Lahy and psychologist Robert Kegan, “when we experience the world as ‘too complex’ we are not just experiencing the complexity of the world. We are experiencing a mismatch between the world’s complexity and our own at this moment.” Brain Integration is designed to help us notice this mismatch and then discover what drives it – Symptoms following a brain injury? Lack of neurological synchrony due to learning disability or autism spectrum disorder? Learned helplessness driven by trauma or the powers of culture? All of this and so much more.

In my view, promoting advances in mental complexity is one of the most important goals we can achieve in pursuit of a well lived life, and it is at the heart of every Brain Integration session. As Lahy and Kegan make clear, continued growth in our adult development “will permit a whole range of new abilities, not just meeting [a] single initial improvement goal.” In my office, I see this all the time. When I help a child organize their thoughts for reading, I have also helped them express themselves better in conversation with parents, teachers, and friends. When I help an adult respond more calmly to stress at work, I have also helped their bodies better regulate the stress they feel at home. Lahy and Kegan state clearly, “The payoffs for investing in an adaptive approach to personal improvement [is] many, many times the value of accomplishing a single goal.”

Come 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 break through developmental stuck points, whyever they exist. I am grateful to my teachers, Susan McCrossin, Jacque Mooney, and Dr. Charles Krebs for my foundation as a Brain Integration practitioner, and to Dr. Lahy and others for giving me language to describe the work I’ve been doing with clients and families for the past decade. As you have grown, I have grown too! 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.

Immunity to Change: How to Overcome it and Unlock the Potential in Yourself and Your Organization

by Lisa Lahy and Robert Kegan

“Every immune system is an intelligent force that seeks to protect you, even to save your life as you know it…Learning whether it is possible to think and feel that we can still be safe while pursuing a change is the essential change challenge. This is what we mean by working through anxiety: We come out on the other side with a new understanding that the world works differently than we had imagined, that we can still be safe – and even experience more expansive benefits – doing things we never thought possible before. We discover not only that we can survive, but thrive.”

“Among the most robust of [our] findings is what it takes for the mind to grow: challenge and support. Good problems, the sort that reveal the limits of our current way of making meaning; and support to bear the anxiety that goes with realizing we may not know ourselves or the world as well as we thought – these are as crucial for our growth today as they were when we were young.”

Let’s just notice…

• Where do you feel stuck in your life? Are you able to see the ways that this stuckness, while holding you back, is also trying to save your life?
• What are the “good problems” you are currently facing? How do these problems challenge your current way of understanding the world?
• What anxieties do these problems bring up for you? Do you have the support you need to bear the anxiety that comes with your continued growth?

The World Has Need of You

by Ellen Bass

everything here seems to need us… —Rilke

I can hardly imagine it
as I walk to the lighthouse, feeling the ancient
prayer of my arms swinging
in counterpoint to my feet.
Here I am, suspended
between the sidewalk and twilight,
the sky dimming so fast it seems alive.
What if you felt the invisible
tug between you and everything?
A boy on a bicycle rides by,
his white shirt open, flaring
behind him like wings.
It’s a hard time to be human. We know too much
and too little. Does the breeze need us?
The cliffs? The gulls?
If you’ve managed to do one good thing,
the ocean doesn’t care.
But when Newton’s apple fell toward the earth,
the earth, ever so slightly, fell
toward the apple as well

Human consciousness stands on a tightrope of what has been, what is, and what will be. Every neuropathway that grows starts with what has come before. Our very DNA goes back through our ancestry and epigenetic pathways shape our decisions in the present in ways we are only just beginning to understand. “It’s a hard time to be human. We know too much/ and too little.”

One of the guiding principles of my work as a Brain Integrator is to be a support to all those who desire to evolve and grow. I believe the world needs our individual maturation now more than it ever has before. Let us not be caught by the mismatch between the world’s complexity and ours at this moment! On January 15, 2026, via Zoom, I will speak more about how Brain Integration can help. Until then, may you feel the warm embrace of community in all of its forms. May your Thanksgiving table be filled with rich, challenging conversations that grow your mind and heart. May your gratitude outlast your fear.

With deep, abiding gratitude for every challenge and every joy

Elizabeth McIntire

For anyone who may receive this newsletter and knows someone on a cancer journey.

A Boston Brain Integration Announcement

Boston Brain Integration is a proud partner of Connect and Thrive

CAT’s mission is to help women connect with a community of partners who can help them thrive.

CAT is a social impact company for cancer previvors, patients, thrivers, and caregivers. CAT empowers women on their personal healing journeys by connecting them to our Marketplace of reputable practitioners and curated products. CAT’s partners offer integrative therapies and healthy living products that help to prevent cancer, navigate a cancer diagnosis, and mitigate the risk of recurrence. 

Reference: https://app.connect-and-thrive.com/marketplace/420