The Dance of Integration: Rooting into the Soil of Our Being

"This is not a path of becoming someone new. This is the path of remembering, returning, and allowing all that we are to belong."

In a world so often obsessed with transformation— with becoming better, shinier, more evolved— I find myself walking a different path, a path I deepen in with clieents. The path of integration.

Integration, Not Transformation

In my work, I was never interested in changing you. I am not here to help you shed your scars or outgrow your tender places. Rather, as you gather the scattered, wounded, and beautiful parts of yourself, there is beauty in weaving these parts of who we are back into wholeness.

Transformation implies a becoming—becoming something different, something other than what you are now. And there is a place for transformation, always.

But what if you've worked with your pieces and parts, what if you hold things inside of you that likely will hold their place in your life? What is you twisted your ankle, and healed the wound, and still want to dance your dance of essence? This is the work of integration.

What if we learn to dance while we integrate the wounded, the obstructed, the sprained, the twisted parts of who are? Not as an avoidance, but as a rooting? What if healing can be as much about transcendence as it can be about rooting?

What if healing is not about changing, but about embracing?

About bringing the hidden, the hurt, and the patterned pieces of you back home into the soil of your being?

Integration is a sacred task. It is the work of honoring every scar, every ache, every defense mechanism as part of your living tapestry.It is the work of recognizing that you are not broken—you are intricate.

Allowance, Not Acceptance

Alongside integration, another subtle, vital distinction breathes life into my work: the difference between acceptance and allowance.

Acceptance often feels final, static, resigned. It can feel like giving up, like being forced to approve of something that deeply hurts. I know this intimately—there are things in my own life that I do not, and likely will never, "accept", like being told I will likely sooner rather than later lose my eyesight. I have refused to accept that. Because it doesn't serve a single cell in my very body, including the cells of my eyes that supposedly want to leave their zest for life.

It has felt deeply dishonoring to the magic and wonder my eyes have brought me to 'accept' they may leave me blind.

Acceptance would feel like a shutting down. But allowance…

Allowance opens a different doorway. Allowance feels like a breathing, living process. It is the practice of letting life move through me, even when I do not like it, even when it breaks my heart. Allowance says:"I don't have to like this. I don't have to approve of this. But I will allow life to be what it is, and I will allow myself to be moved by it."

To me, this creates respomsibility without wronging. It makes it so that I takes responsibility for whatever happens, to my body, to my life, despite me being at fault for whatever may happen beyond my will.

This allowance becomes the blueprint for integration. It becomes the rich soil where our wounds and gifts can take root, and where our full humanity can unfold.

The Dance of Essence

I once wrote the following reflection after a session, as I felt inspired and fueled, and it feels right to offer it here—to let it speak, in its rawness and heart, to everything I mean when I speak to integration and allowance:

This work is for the sensitive women, the women who are introverted and deeply feeling; those cast away in a society that wants them different, wants them feeling less, and wants them easy-going. But these women are deeply touched by life—deeply in love with life. Everything moves them: from feeling for another to the tastes, smells, and sounds that fill their senses.

Pleasure, in this way, is not about orgasmicness. It is about ecstasy—the ecstasy of being alive. Whether in heartbreak or grief, whether in heart-opening orgasm or deep celebration, an ecstatic life is always available.

After all the healing and transcending, more than anything, we need to root down. Root down into the very soil of our own being. Not to change, alter, or transform who we are, but to truly allow ourselves to step into the world—with our wounds, patterns, and scars—not in spite of them, but with them as part of our dance.

Because we have learned to dance with a twisted ankle.To see with softened sight.To feel with an unencumbered heart.

This is the dance of essence.The dance of your uniqueness.The dance of life lived from the very soil of your being—your embodiment.

Rooting Down into Life

Can you allow yourself to root down into your being—not after you have healed, or transcended, or "fixed" yourself—but now, with everything that is already here?

Can you allow yourself to dance, even with the twisted ankle? To sing, even through the ache in your voice? To live, even as life does what it does, in all its mystery?

This is not transformation. This is integration. This is living an ecstatic, rooted life—in full contact with everything that touches you.

This is the art of being wholly, wildly, beautifully human. This is the art of embodied living.