Heroes Not Zombies

It was pretty late in my career when I came across the concept of “integration” in relation to health, and it took me a wee while to get my head around. It finally clicked when I read Dan Siegel’s “Mindsight” and I read his definition of integration – the creation of mutually beneficial bonds between well-differentiated parts.

Take a moment to let that definition sink in, because it’s pretty beautiful and it captures the key elements of integration – that involves very different entities establishing a relationship which enables each of them to better fulfil their potential.

When I understood this, I immediately thought of the human body. We think of the body as made up of very different parts – highly differentiated cells organised into tissues, organs and systems. We have a heart, a liver, a pair of kidneys, a brain…..and so on, and so on. Are these various organisms in competition with each other? Are they trying to outdo each other and grab most of the nutrition, the oxygen, the energy for themselves, even at the expense of the others? No they are not. They are not in competition. The co-operate. They collaborate. In fact, they are integrated. They are connected and they relate to each other in ways which enable every single organ and tissue in the body to flourish.

If you look at any other living organism you’ll see the same basic strategy – “integration”. If you see a healthy, flourishing ecosystem, you’ll see that it contains a diversity of plants and creatures and they are well “integrated.”

And yet, we have created a global, economic, social system based on competition. A system which creates a handful of winners, and a huge mass of losers. It doesn’t have to be that way. We could, if we wished, create a system where the core value is integration/cooperation instead of competition. Not to say that competition has no place. I think we understand that it does. But we’ve got the emphasis wrong. We need to shift our attention, our imagination, our energy towards integration.

What kind of world could we create if we worked to create human relationships based on integration, care and love, human to non-human creature relationships based on integration rather than dominance, human to planet relationships based on integration instead of exploitation?

A natural world – the way it evolved to be what the universe intended.