Integral Spirituality and Personhood

Integral Spirituality

By Terri O'Fallon

Integral spirituality is the experience of a Sacred, embodied, evolutionary “now”, speaking through us in multiple voices. It incarnates all facets of our lives, inviting past and future into one moment. Integral spiritual practice, then, seems to be a consummate, persistent inquiry of many shades and shadows extending throughout life. Though our assumptions about reality restrict and bind us, they also protect us from tumbling permanently into those amazing states into which we “peak”, but do not yet have the energetic capacity to live in consistently. As the formless universe awakens to itself through form, like a sleeping child, our incarnated being begins to know the Sacred as the Sacred simultaneously knows us.

Living fully into our earthly personhood as we “peak” into the transcendent, two prominent, implicit questions seem to be “Who am I?” and, “Who am I not?” Our embodied, immanent experience is with us in awareness from the day we are born. How can we wake up in consciousness to the everyday sacredness we hold within our flesh, skin, heart and bones, and unite it with the transcendent within which we are coming into being?

A question that arises in more comfortable times is “Who am I?” Steeped in the confidence of our own incarnate measure of knowing, there seems to be no other truth. “This is who I am!” In this full exploration of our knowing, we envision everyone else as having, or needing to have, these same beliefs. “Yes! This is the way the world works”!

But inevitably, a disorienting dilemma arrives; we tremble, wondering how we can survive this torturous and ghastly occurrence. We have no way to make sense of this experience. We flail, squirm and wish we could do something to get out of this agonizing space. Our assumptions and beliefs do not make sense any more. There is a discomfort in every cell in our bodies, for our beliefs are not large enough to make sense of the anguish we feel so deeply. Mind numbing fuzziness creeps into our ordinarily cogent mind; the simple task of making a “to do” list seems impossible; let alone the capacity to carry out a plan. We find ourselves living suspended in this liminal space where the being we once were no longer makes sense, and the being we are yet to be, has yet to emerge.

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