Welcome to my blog! I look forward to sharing with you myriad reflections, questions and musings. I’d would love to hear any responses and comments that arise for you, so please dive in and weave the conversation with me!
Miriam Mason Martineau
(Originally posted in Huffington Post, February 2, 2012)
This past week, I have been living life with tears just behind the layer of daily functioning, joys and busyness. The troubles of this world, the craziness of our humanity and the suffering we inflict and experience have felt so close, also the contortions, confusion and tangled webs we weave… It has felt as if my soul were getting cracked open a bit more.
Such times — when my skin feels thinner, and the darkness beckons more intensely — happen every once in a while. It is tempting to turn away. To distract myself. To give up and get cynical. Or angry, even allow a moment of “f*** it all.” Despair calling from just behind my ear, reaching with deliberate grasp, pulling on my coat sleeve, and yanking down.
What to do? As we grow up (as in “waking up”), our awareness increases. We become more and more conscious. We see more, and we feel more. Not just the good, beautiful and true, but also the deepest grief, suffering and ugliness. The illusions are stripped down. What’s on the other side is not always pretty.
It’s been over a month since we gathered at Whidbey Institute on gorgeous Whidbey Island for our 2011 seminar. Over 50 of us came together to explore and experience what integral community feels like, looks like, and what it takes to evolve the collective, both within ourselves and amongst us all. Most of all we came together to see what potential next steps emerge from evolving the WE.
It was an incredibly rich week. I look back and am so heartened by what happened. To tell you the truth, I was both excited and a bit nervous leading up to the seminar. This seminar was about discovering and exploring a new field together, pushing the edge of what we knew together! Territory that is so much more emergent than established. There was a definite sense of diving into the unknown.
Originally posted in Huffington Post, September 25, 2011 (Title “Can you be grateful for what you don’t like?)
“Lying under a starry night last week while camping and looking up for shooting stars with my 8-year old daughter, our conversation turned to gravity, what it is and how it keeps us from spinning off the face of the earth. We both lay there, letting the significance of gravity sink in, noticing our minds grappling with the immensity of it, and then turning our attention back to the Great Dipper and the Milky Way. The next day, as we shared grace before lunch and spontaneously expressed gratitude for a variety of things, my daughter spoke: “And thank you for gravity, even if I don’t understand it.”
Originally published in Huffington Post, July 13, 1011.
Sunday afternoon, with an hour to spare, I wander to the garden to thin some baby carrots – those wee beginnings of carrots, just tufts of green really – so as to create more space for the few I leave to fully grow and flourish. The sun is warm on my back as I get busy with this task that takes focused attention: one pull too many and a whole potential carrot is gone!
As I make my way down the rows slowly and carefully, I notice the challenge I face every time I perform this gardening task: To enable a few to thrive I need to pull out a lot of others and the thicker I originally sowed, the more I have to yank out. I don’t like yanking out baby carrots, even if my logical mind tells me they’re just tiny carrots and my gardening experience knows that if I don’t do this, none of them will do well. As I go about the task, I wish I hadn’t planted quite as thickly to begin with. I also try to figure out which ones look strong and healthy (those ones I leave) and I pay attention to spacing them evenly, so that each one left has enough soil and light to grow in. Read more…
Who am I to my child? Where do I come from in all my interactions with a child? Generally our actions reflect where we reside in consciousness, which in turn hugely effects the relationship between us and the children we parent or teach.
So when we speak of Integral Parenting we are talking about the parent being, thinking, feeling, and acting integrally.
“The secret of parenting is not in what a parent does, but rather who the parent is to the child.” - Gordon Neufeld
What might this look like in practice? Here some general reflections, followed by some practical suggestions (derived from adapted excerpts of a publication titled “Introduction to Integral Parenting”).
Given that our doing flows from our being, any steps we as parents take toward becoming more mature, present, and able to inhabit and respond to multiple perspectives will benefit our child and our parenting efforts. In addition, it would be hard to find another endeavor that asks someone to grow up as much, as persistently, as convincingly as being a parent. So, putting the two together—the far-reaching benefits of self-development (not just for oneself but also for one’s child) andthe challenge and opportunity provided by the very act of parenting to grow and stretch—make parenting an ideal spiritual practice. Read more…