Creativity embeds knowledge so that it can become practice. We move what we’re learning from our heads to our hearts through our hands. We are born makers, and creativity is the ultimate act of integration — it is how we fold our experiences into our being…

The Asaro tribe of Indonesia and Papua New Guinea has a beautiful saying: “Knowledge is only a rumor until it lives in the muscle.”

Brené Brown, from Rising Strong

Integration is the means by which we take a new piece of information, a truth about life for example, and internalize that to the point at which it becomes part of our operating system.

Without integration, knowledge remains impotent in the mind, sans power or impact in our day-to-day life.

Once integrated though, it becomes automatic, a natural and joyful aspect of how we live and move day-to-day. It doesn’t have to be remembered or recalled.

We ARE it.

Once integrated, our creations flow with this new color added. Everything generated from “me” includes this knowing.

The path to integration includes experience, creating and “making” as Brene Brown says, and – ultimately – a clear witnessing of what life is like with and without this truth. It is this clarity, of the witness seeing the truth, that eventually shifts things.

Eventually, the truth easily and effortlessly nestles into my being without any “work” or “trying” on my part. It simply recognizes it’s rightful place or, rather, remembers it was already “there” in the first place and alights.

The shift happens on the heels of this pristine clarity, which is why meditation and a deep, enduring desire to know the truth are the two requirements for entry. We cannot undervalue the importance of seeing, and of being truly honest with ourselves (at the minimum) and with others (even better) about our blind spots along this path.

With it, anything is possible.

Without? Very, very little.