This week’s question is about integrity: What part of my life doesn’t reflect who I am or want to be?

Reflection

Some of us may feel personally attacked by this question. We don’t like thinking of how we may be falling short of our goals, nor do we like facing how we aren’t being true to ourselves. For a human being it can be very confronting to ask these questions. Yet just like we deal with someone punching or kicking us in Kung Fu or trying to choke us in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, we must deal with this internal confrontation.

About a decade ago I heard about the concept of integrity in the following way. If we think about the way things work and how they don’t work, integrity is simple enough to grasp. If an airplane is missing a wing, or even more subtly, a wing flap isn’t functioning, the whole airplane doesn’t work. If one thing is out of integrity, the whole thing is. Now some of you who know more about planes may say you can actually land a plane that is missing a flap or something, and sure. But would you choose to take off and fly around with a busted wing? Me neither.

Living In Integrity 

We should take the same care in our everyday lives to live in integrity. If you have trouble sleeping at night, it might be because your neighbor’s dog is barking. It might be that there is something big in your life that you have to deal with. It might be something seemingly insignificant like a conversation we’ve been putting off, but it just doesn’t feel right. When we are out of integrity, it makes everything else feel off. It’s difficult to focus on other things and live in the present. Even now it’s hard for me to enjoy my lunch because I need to write this!

In martial arts, we practice integrity on many levels. With our technique, all the pieces must be working together. We pay attention to the smallest detail. If everything in a punch is correct but we hit with the wrong part of our hand, the punch is useless or can even hurt the person punching. In Tai Chi, we move our whole body from the center and let our breath lead. This creates synergistic, fluid movement. 

Acting Powerfully

In meditation, we learn to recognize unhelpful thoughts and let them go. Most of us take it personally when we are out of integrity. We make it mean something bad about ourselves. But if we can let go of that thought and focus on what works and what doesn’t work, we can act powerfully. If you are walking through your home and see a piece of trash on the ground, you pick it up and throw it away without a second thought. You don’t ruminate on what the trash means, nor do you obsess about your personal shortcomings that may have lead to the trash being there. You don’t put off throwing the trash away and let it take up more and more space in your mind. You just toss it and move on.

We can clean up our integrity and move on in much the same way. First, we recognize what works and what doesn’t work in life. Next, we deal with things from a logical perspective as quickly as possible. When we are in integrity, we fire on all cylinders. We are powerful because everything works together. We are happy and present because we are totally in line with our true, highest self.