Integrity is a word often invoked yet seldom defined.

If you look up its definitions you’ll find predominantly, “having strong moral principles”; the Cambridge Dictionary adds, “that you refuse to change”, worth noting.

It comes from the same Latin word as integrate – specifically, “make one.” This is making all the pieces fit together like cogs in a watch. (You have a digital watch? What way is “clockwise” for you?)

“With integrity, you have nothing to fear, since you have nothing to hide. With integrity, you will do the right thing, so you will have no guilt.” ---Zig Ziglar

The whole question goes directly to the heart of Character. The more you’re in integrity, the stronger your character. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., spoke of “the content of [your] character…” Indeed it does have content.

In my last blog post, I wrote about a situation which has been causing me a lot of heartache and how, despite all of the tools and wisdom that I have as a life coach and teacher of transformation, it has been hard for me to find a sustained sense of peace. I shared how after going to healers, therapists, and doing lots of deep work around my core wounds and projections, I was so grateful to read Debbie Ford’s new book Your Holiness: Discover the Light Within because it reminded me that when I feel cut off at the knees, I need to get down on my knees and ask to be shown. Bottom line, I needed some divine guidance to support me in finding resolution, relief, and a deeper understanding of self.

Days after working my way through the book and using prayer as a vehicle to connect and receive, I was running outside and heard the words, “Just be with the hurt.”

Stunned and amused, I stopped dead in my tracks. I realized that I had been literally running away from my hurt. In my fixation to figure out and fix my pain, I had avoided really feeling the deep hurt that was being triggered inside of me. I was trying to get to the destination without going on the journey. I’d been trying to bypass the feelings in my heart and resolve my pain in my mind, which, of course, was a strategy I developed long ago and even wrote about in The Integrity Advantage.

Losing a loved one is never easy.

On September 27, 2017, my dear mother made her transition from her body.

My mother was the purest soul I’ve met in this lifetime. She was unconditional love beyond human understanding. Her only desire was to serve and do God’s work in all ways.

I was so close to her my entire life, but strangely in her passing even more so. I feel her everywhere now. It’s once she left her body that I understood who she really was now that her loving was no longer limited to a human form.

In the year she knew she was dying, I once asked her if she was afraid. She simply looked at me with unwavering conviction and kindness and said, “Not at all. I am not this body. The soul lives forever. I am ready for whatever God wants for my life.”

In her last months, I realized my mother’s true greatness was in her depth of surrender to the Divine.

My favorite memory (I have so many) was simply holding her in my arms one day, my heart bursting with love, looking her in the eyes, and sharing what a profound privilege it was to incarnate in this lifetime as her son, to have had the opportunity to be loved by her and know a soul as beautiful as her.

A genuine social upheaval has begun, its theme is the empowerment of women. Old attitudes that have resulted in many kinds of unfairness are being challenged. The long-suppressed outrage of sexual harassment has been exposed to the light of day. No one with a heart and a conscience can do anything but respond with encouragement. It’s about time.

Rising from a position of weakness to become stronger, turning old wounds into a source of healing—these are important changes in anyone’s life. The eternal feminine has been a running thread in human culture for thousands of years, but each generation has to reinterpret it, and at the moment, embedded in a secular society where daily demands and distractions are the rule, envisioning the eternal feminine requires going deeper into our self-awareness.

Everyone’s source is pure awareness, which has no gender. When pure awareness manifests into creation, gender isn’t in evidence, either. When you wake up from deep sleep and become aware of your existence, the experience has no labels. The issues of masculine and feminine enter in a social context, defined by your beliefs, attitudes, and mental conditioning. To be a woman is to be a creation of many factors, going far beyond the physiological.

When you take heart, you're more able to deal with all types of challenges. 

What do you do when the bottom falls out?

The Practice:
Take Heart.

Why?

It takes heart to live in even ordinary times.

By "taking heart," I mean several related things:

• Sensing your heart and chest
• Finding encouragement in what is good both around you and inside you
• Resting in your own warmth, compassion, and kindness; resting in the caring for you from others; love flowing in and love flowing out
• Being courageous, whole-hearted and strong-hearted—going forward wisely even when anxious, knowing your own truth and as you speak it

When you take heart, you're more able to deal with challenges like aging, illness, trauma, or conflicts with others. You're also more able to take advantage of opportunities with confidence and grit.

Additionally, it takes heart to live in, live with, and live beyond times that are really hard. Your personal hard time might be bad news about your health, the death of a parent, or betrayal by others. Or it could be related to changes in your country and world, and your concerns about their effects on others and yourself; I've written about the importance of finding and facing facts at the level of society (feel free to skip it if you don't want my take on politics).

There are so many examples of honorable people facing great difficulty with dignity, principle, and courage. They did it. We can, too.

If you want to become a successful thought leader, author, speaker, or simply share your message with the world, you must understand how to lead a successful training workshop.

I am going to share with you my very own process – what we call The Canfield Training Methodology for leading amazing, transformational workshops.

These are the exact workshop plans that I use every time I speak, whether it is for an hour or a weeklong training seminar.

First, I want you to think like you were building a house...

When you build a house, you have to start with a blueprint. You don’t just keep your vision of what you are going to build in your head right? If you have ever built a house, you know that would be an expensive mistake. You think about all the details, the size, the number of rooms, the layout, the overall feel you want to create and so on.

You need to do this same thing when you are designing the content for your workshop.

Did you know that you have a sacred relationship to the creative force within you? Even if you don’t consider yourself “creative” you are actually doing it all the time. You create emotional scenarios to experience, you reinforce patterns of the past, and dream your intentions into the fabric of reality whether you are aware of it or not.

You are the artist that stewards reality forward on behalf of the Great Artist- the Conscious Universe that is the primal Source of everything- visible and invisible. If you’ve ever felt the pull of inspiration or the call to make something new of yourself you are in a dance with that integral part of you.

Philosophers have waxed poetic about this relationship for eons. I think the Greeks had the best idea when they explored the creative impulse as a sacred relationship between us and the Muses – the daughters of Zeus and the goddess of memory- Mnemosyne. These minor goddesses were birthed to represent the spirit of the arts, science, and literature to help us forget the sadness and darkness in the world.

The other day, I told my friend Elizabeth what I was thinking. She responded in the best way possible.

“You are,” she said, “right on time.”

Her words landed and made me feel grateful and joyful. Here I am exactly, where I’m supposed to be.

This week, my new book “I’ve Been Thinking… Reflections, Prayers and Meditations for a Meaningful LIfe” arrives in bookstores everywhere. Right on time. The fact that there’s a book at all is a testament to you, the readers of The Sunday Paper. Many of you suggested that I curate my “I’ve Been Thinking” columns and bind them together into a book. Voila, here it is!

This book couldn’t have come out last year or the year before. I wasn’t ready then. But, now I am. Thank you.

Today, I’m knee-deep in gratitude to those who have helped me, sustained me, and supported me along this journey we call life. I like where I am. As Hafiz says, I like that I am in a place that God circled on a map just for me.

It’s interesting to observe your own reaction when change presents itself in life.

It may be economic change in your circumstances, it may be a change in the way you spend your life. A lot of people, as their children grow, have an opportunity to change their lives, but they have such strong habits in how they’ve always done things and who they’ve always been, that they get frightened at the freedom to change when an opportunity presents itself.

Up until now, they justified their existence by what their karma commitments are; “I have to be this way,” and I would say that doesn’t have to be the case. They don’t have to wait for their kids to grow up, because that waiting becomes their daily routine.

How much of who I was yesterday is defining who I am today? How much can I allow who I am today to be totally open and tuning and responding to the situation, which includes everything I was yesterday, but also all that I will be tomorrow?

The morning is the most important time of the day. If you spend an hour a day to do these three things you will be happier in life, healthier, and more motivated than you’ve ever felt.

I call this my hour of power. Every morning I wake up and I spend 60 minutes doing three things. They've helped contribute to a lot of my success.

So what is this Hour of Power exactly?

It’s a full hour that is broken up into three 20-minute sessions:

• 20 minutes of exercise
• 20 minutes of meditation
• 20 minutes of reading (positive, uplifting material)

The benefits of doing just these 3 things are great.

The Benefits of the Hour of Power

Life at the beginning of the New Year is such a funny thing, isn’t it? It’s like we’re split in two. There is one side of us which is aware that we’ve set intentions and made resolutions and we feel driven to get things done in order to prove to the world we’re going to change! We think to ourselves; life in this New Year is magical and filled with P*R*O*M*I*S*E ! Now is NOT the time to waste!

Then there’s this other inconvenient self that wants to curl up and rest and dream and perhaps not move so fast too soon. That part of us can seem lazy, and not at all in alignment with our highest intentions!

Or, is there wisdom in this self? Maybe we need to listen to this need to regroup and dream?

The tension between these two selves, two perspectives, creates a kind of guilt for some of us.  We start thinking that we better get off our butts and prove that we mean business! The treadmill calleth! We have dutifully thrown away the leftover holiday sweets and have begun a new and healthy plan.

Regrouping and dreaming can seem like a waste of time at the beginning of a new year when we put pressure on ourselves to perform miracles right out of the gate. The truth, however, is that taking time is exactly what we should be doing. Whether you are in the dead of winter like we are in the Northern Hemisphere or midsummer Down Under both these seasons ask us to stand still and contemplate what we’ve set in motion and refine our intentions slowly and honestly.

You and I are in training to be free. We’re in training to be so present, so spacious, so embracing, we’re in training to not look away, deny or close our hearts when we can’t bear something. The statement, “I can’t bear it,” is what burns you out in social action. When you’re in the presence of suffering and contracting, it’s the contraction that starves you to death.

When you close your heart down to protect yourself from suffering, you also close yourself off from being fed by that same life situation.

If you can stay open to both the suffering and the joys and the stuff of life, all of it, then it’s like a living spirit. It just connects to your living spirit and there’s a tremendous feeding going on.

Once you see all this, what else is there to do but keep working on becoming conscious? You’d be a fool not to. You’re only going to perpetuate your misery and suffering and everybody else’s if you don’t. I’ll give it one year, I’ll settle for two, for you to live on two planes of consciousness simultaneously. The other thing is to do it joyfully! When you meet somebody that’s suffering, what do you have to offer them? You could offer them your empathy. That’s a good thing to offer because they feel somebody else is listening to them. The other thing you can offer them is your joy, your presence, and your ‘not getting caught in it all.’

Now, when you get older one of the things that happens is the change of the meaning of time, in a whole raft of ways. First of all, time gets short before you get ready to leave your body, and that has a certain way of ‘making it all more significant.’ Not that this is the last picnic, but I mean you just start to feel it differently. There’s this agitation and there’s a whole chemical thing in it that makes you experience time as moving faster. When you’re a child spring is a big thing, and summer is ‘summer’ and then, I mean, you know, the feeling of each season is really present. Autumn is going back to school, at least it was in my day, and for adults, it runs a pace.

We seem not to have enough time for anything, and then we get older, the years go by very quickly, and that’s one dimension of time.

Then there’s another interesting dimension of time when you say to friends, “How old do you experience yourself being?” instead of, “How old are you chronologically?” or, “How old is your body,” it’s, “How old do you experience yourself being?”

There are different kinds of responses. People like me would say, “No age at all, I don’t experience myself as age.” Some people would say,” I have always felt like I was 14 years old. I’ve always felt like a little girl up in a tree.” I think for the first 35-40 years of my life, I felt like I was a precocious child. I was a child who was living in over my head. This may be alien to all of you but bare with me. It’s just my pathology. Then I began to feel like I had gotten through puberty. I was about 40 and I started to experience this change in my psychological age. There were a lot of things that occurred in those years, of course, and I got up to the point where I started to feel that I was just who I was. I mean, I was this age at that time, 50-55, and it felt fine and comfortable. Then I went deeper, and I started to feel no age.