Integritus Prime

I am writing from all the magic and excitement of Bioneers – my favorite conference – being held in Berkeley, California. This year, I was invited to do three things: seed a Community Conversation using my Living and Leading Authentically Framework: The Four Phases of Flourishing; do a book signing for the book that captures the first phase, self-love; and facilitate a session on design thinking, which happens this afternoon.

After Amy Lenzo, my lovely facilitator for the Community Conversation, introduced me, I began my talk with this statement:

“There is one thing that can control our whole lives if we don’t heal it, including the relationships we fall into or not, the jobs we take or not, the risks we take or not…that one thing is trauma.”

As I spoke to 37 people (and soon more than 40 as people kept trickling in) about the four phases of flourishing, I saw many of them nodding and resonating with my words. The Bioneers audience was ready to receive and try on this framework (pictured below), and apply it to various parts of their own lives, from personal to planetary levels.

One of my remarks was:

What if the Earth was conceptualized as a woman, who had suffered great trauma, and decided to love herself, heal her traumatic wounds, emerge in all her authenticity, and manifest her true calling? What would that look like?

Two beautiful questions I received at the end of the discussion were:

1. What does the true self look like? It is a melding of the self you were before the trauma – with childlike wonder, curiosity, joy, and playfulness, coupled with the trauma-informed and empowered adult self that you are now or are on the road to becoming.
2. What about trauma we soak in from the outside, for example from the climate crisis, if we weren’t traumatized as a child? Well, that trauma is real too, because we are one with the Earth – we are not separate. And we, as gatekeepers of our consciousness, have a choice to make as to how much trauma we want to take in, because it can debilitate us. Setting strong boundaries with ourselves is a practice of self-love, so we can channel joy and healing to the world, instead of becoming compromised by all the hurtful things happening around us.

I closed the session (after Jason Bayani’s amazing spoken word summary) with a grounding session, and went off to sign my book. I am grateful for the opportunity to share this piece of my work with my Bioneers tribe. Onward as trauma-informed agents of change: trauma work cannot be bypassed, and although it is the hardest work we will ever do, it is by far the most rewarding and transformative. Share with me your thoughts on this.