Integrity and the Self
Allison Daugila
How do I continue to know myself when the world just lost what was its own identity?
The ahamkara of the planet has just disintegrated. Not to say I ever agreed with a lot of our worlds intentions, but our ability to survive as a species is being sorely tested.
Do you need to be your whole Self, in order to be present and to serve the world? No.
Does integrity belong to me? Or do the organizations I work for, the nation I live in, intercept my integrity to merely operate? Am I just a number? Conditioning, wealth, stories we have on repeat in our head about our understandings just smashed but then, not. I know this one lonely self. Integrity is something we are born with, perhaps we just need not to eat our breakfast lunch and dinner all while sitting on the yoga mat.
The small defining actions I take now differ greatly than the ones I took before the invisible grace closed our doors, but I am still serving. With zest.
Saucha should come with integrity, I thought. It always had in the past. It is still here, it just feels much different now.
I look to my teachers. Show us the way, but also please remain meek in the face of those who can’t breathe or pay for their next month in rent. What
the actual hell, pranayama.
I am calling for myself to stay clean, connected, uplifted, motivated, well rested and fed. Loose but disciplined. Aware but not hyper connected. So that I can serve you with integrity. Integrity now means to take care of ones‘ self well enough to still be present for others. It is not the same as it was before.
Integrity of Heart + Soul
Kimberly Cihlar
Who would have thought that the very times we are going through would have created an underlying, in fact undying, need for the utmost integrity? I’ve always thought I had integrity. That my moral compass points true north. But right now when I think of integrity, the one name that leaps out at me is NY Governor Andrew Cuomo. His steadfast completeness, his resounding soundness, his unscrupulous incorruptibility, as it appears, is beyond reproach.
His sense of honor and duty to his state leaves me with goosebumps. He in fact gives me LIFE, as the IG’ers say. In all honesty, he allows ME to tap into my own integrity, to feel honest, whole, undiminished by these trying times, these unprecedented times, these amazing times, we all are going through.
I love how in his pressers he personalizes doing the right thing, brings back to home to family to sibling connections the very everyday way of dealing with this virus. HIs moral compass is leading all of US in the right direction. In spiritual philosophy, the core concept of integrity requires a transformative journey. If not now, when else would we have been so thrown into a transformative journey.
I always say “you do you”when I’m leading class for yoga or in movement. But integrity is more than doing you. It is a consistency, as I am compelled to understand it. It is honesty and truthfulness in the face of everything. There’s no flimflam wishywashy-ness allowed. No speaking out of both sides of the mouth. Take a stance, a morally good one, and stay there. Stand firm. Ground down. Find your balance. Plant your seeds. Then…. Root through the growth and dig in.
We need to make sure, as humans, that we stand firm for the human race, for the planet, for all sentient beings. To allow every Being to be whole and consistent. To be a force of good and goodness, of truth and truthfulness, authenticness and authenticity, of wholeness, of completeness. Integrating all the compartmentalized parts of ourself, our schizophrenic souls, into one WHOLE HEARTEDNESS. Find yourself then, your whole self, in your heart and embrace the entirety of divinity within you and surrounding you. That is your truth, your path, your integrity.