Preserving Wholeness

In the last few days I have had the pleasure of attending two workshops, both taught by incredibly insightful teachers in the field of human development. Sandra Maitri, author of The Spiritual Dimension of the Enneagram and The Enneagram of Passions and Virtues has been a teacher of mine for the past four years. Her workshops have been instrumental in revealing things about my psyche that were previously obscure to me. The other teacher (and author of too many books to name), Dr. Daniel J. Siegel, helped me link together my observations of the the human mind and its internal dynamics with the emerging neuroscience that is beginning to explain such things as how our early relationships with our parents contribute to who we think we are, how we feel about ourselves and others, and why we tend to hold on to these beliefs even though they are limiting and often inaccurate. The thread that I took away from both workshops was this: Healthy maturation is fundamentally the movement towards ever-increasing degrees of wholeness which occurs through a process of integration.

Much of my drive to teach development and practices of self-regulation to parents is to help children grow up more whole and less conflicted. Over the last 15 years I have seen thousands of people from all walks of life trying to regain their wholeness and understand and integrate the dissonant patterns that live inside of them. This is really beautiful and courageous work to witness, but it has become clear to me that much of this could have been prevented if the parents of these now-grown-children only understood more about the nature of human development and were better capable of self-regulation when times got tough.

My desire is to preserve authenticity in our children while at the same time help them develop the capacities necessary to blend artfully into the wider contexts of family, school, and our global community that is increasingly interconnected. The key here is integration — the linkage of differentiated parts into a smoothly functioning whole. The outcome — as Dr. Siegel proposes — is a sense of well-being and the development of resilience (the capacity to bounce back and respond intelligently in the face of adversity).

Here is the best part: what is primarily required to support our child’s wholeness is for us parents to continue our journey of healthy maturation. This requires us purposefully setting the conditions so the mind and brain can do what they do best — link together differentiated parts into a functional whole. New insights contribute to greater integration, as does the process of self-regulation and rest. Relationships based on taking the perspective of the other, mutual respect, and open two-way communication are an interpersonal form of integration. The worldwide effort to help the Haitian people in their time of tragedy is another example of integration, this time on a large-scale cultural level. Practices, such as mindfulness meditation, are powerful forms of integration that have been shown to change the brains of practitioners over time in exactly the areas that are primarily responsible for integrating otherwise far apart and disconnected parts of the brain. (Click here for other integrating practices to incorporate into your parenting.)

This next wave of Essential Parenting blog articles will focus on the importance of maintaining wholeness (in the case of children), regaining wholeness (in the case of adults), and the reasons why wholeness is important. We will look at some of the intra-psychic structures and dimensions involved, such as the superego and the shadow, as well as look at the formation and functioning of the brain and its natural drive towards greater degrees of integration. The newly emerging field of Interpersonal Neurobiology will help us understand the ways our relationships with our children can contribute to impairments in integration, or instead be a source of nourishment and support for their innate drive towards wholeness and becoming fully themselves.

A deep bow of gratitude to my teachers for helping illuminate reality, and to my wife and son for the simple pleasures of living it.