Integrity.

We are our actions.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines ‘integrity’ as ‘the condition of having no part or element taken away or lacking; undivided state; completeness.’

The word is derived from the latin, ‘integritas,’ which translates as ‘wholeness; complete, or undivided.’

I’ve been asking myself lately what it means to live with integrity.

Maybe what I’m actually asking myself is: how do I express my life as integrity?

Reaching back to that original latin, Undivided feels like a great place to start.

So, what does it mean to live, and express, and in a real way to embody, that undivided-ness?

Where do I become divided? How do I unify that division?

I can start where everything starts: with experience. What am I feeling right now, how am I reacting to what’s right in front of me in this moment – where does my experience of this moment get divided?

In the next moment: in the moment where I divorce the experience of my body from my critique of that experience. In that moment where instead of directly experiencing what’s happening, I start to divide that experience into thoughts, judgements, expectations, disappointments. That split-second between experience and narrating experience. Instantly, I’m divided: there’s my experience, and then there are my feelings about my experience, and then, there are my thoughts about my feelings, and then judgements about my thoughts, and resistance to my feelings, and then judgements about my resistance, and one and on.

The split-second where my tape-loop brain takes over from my in-the-moment body and starts to rate whatever’s happening according to whatever lens, whatever criteria, I happen apply to it. Instantly I’m divided from my direct experience, and caught in the net of my division. And, bingo: delusion arises. And what follows delusion? Suffering, right? The second Noble Truth, embodied in that division: suffering is caused by clinging. And what’s clinging other than the attachment or aversion to that undivided experience, that complete experience, of this exact moment.

That’s a call to pay attention in this moment, right? To pause for a breath and just let those judgements and that stream-of-thought-and-narrative arise and fade away without attaching to them. Just let the moment stand of itself, and nothing else.

To not be divided by my aversions, or my attractions.

So that’s maybe half of the story; the experience half.

Our lives, however, require us to do more than stand back and let experience wash over us; being alive and in relationship to so many things (family, lovers, friends, colleagues, strangers at the gas station or in the bodega, cats, dogs, wasps, hornets, cockroaches, rats, mice, bats, buildings, rocks, trees, fish, and the other Ten Thousand things that make up the world), we are asked again and again to engage. To respond to the cries and whispers and demands of our lives.

That’s the action half of the story. And that’s another place we divide ourselves. And it’s a really tricky and dangerous place: when I let the narrative, judgmental, reactive, engine of my aversions and attractions drive my behavior, I divide myself a second time. I lose my ability to respond and instead I react. Reacting is knee-jerk, action split off from experience by my delusion (the aversion-attraction dynamic of thinking and storytelling); responding is action based on that undivided experience where the cycle of thinking is released. Seeing the moment without the filter of my dividing brain.

So instead of a single defensive reaction, I have the opportunity to engage more completely (and honestly, and directly), to wholly respond, with whatever the moment — the person, situation, cat, dog, son, daughter, spouse, stranger, wasp, hornet, etc. — is offering.

I’m continually asking the noun integrity to act as a verb: by allowing my response to arise from that undivided whole, complete, unimpeded, experience, I have the opportunity to act from — and with — integrity. My undivided, unmitigated, self.

It’s a practice: sometimes I get it, and very, very often — far more often than I care to admit — I don’t. Thats’ why it’s called practice. You keep returning, over and over again, to what feels whole and undivided until it starts to be embodied in experience and expressed in action. That process isn’t a destination I’ll ever arrive at; it’s a path I have to continually, ruthlessly, and with great care and love and patience, embody and actualize — make real — over and over again.

Which is to say, a way of being in the world and expressing my truest self wholeheartedly and completely. A way of being as simple and honest and true as I am able. I’m way more complicated than I need to be. More honestly, I allow myself to be complicated by what I like, what I don’t like, and the stories I continually repeat to wrap myself comfortably in those likes and dislikes — because I know them, and they’re very comfortable blankets to wrap myself in.

Integrity isn’t always comfortable — at least not for me — but it has the advantage of simplicity. We can all use a little simplicity, right? I know I can.

Your comments are always welcomed and encouraged. I’d love to hear from you.

One more thing.

As a zen priest I’m a student of Tenshin Fletcher Roshi at Yokoji Zen Mountain Center. For more info on Yokoji, please visit www.zmc.org.

I’m also the caretaker of Warwick Zendo, a small in-person and online sangha based in the lower Hudson Valley of New York. if you’d like to check out our practice community, we’re at www.warwickzen.org.

How this works.

I plan to post at least once a week, at minimum. The Freeside offers those weekly posts, which will always be accessible. Payside will (eventually) offer access to some longer writing and ongoing investigations into practices both literary and zen.

Payside also helps to sustain this project, and this practice. Like any creative project, keep sweeping is a kind of labor, and as such, your support to sustain that labor is much appreciated.

If Payside is not for you, that’s all good. The posts will keep coming on Freeside. The support of your reading and attention is a deeply appreciated gift, and I thank you for being here.

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