What is an Integration Specialist?

Much like every other thing we put into words, this title is made up. It has been born of a lifelong struggle with labeling. I find labels to be incredibly useless, always failing to hold the concepts they attempt to define. Their definitions shift and change throughout the times like quicksand. As soon as you feel you have found firm footing in a title, the meaning has shifted and you’re free falling once more.

Humans attach a great deal of their self worth to what they call themselves. In a society built on hierarchy, it is important to know what you call yourself and where you fit into the status quo. These labels do as much to give us structure as they do to confine us to less than we are capable of. We build boxes around ourselves which say I am this and not that. I can do this and not that. We only ever stop to ask ourselves if we might be better suited to something else when what we have chosen becomes utterly untenable any longer.

Failing to find a label which I feel does both tasks of accurately describing me and being comprehensible to others in our modern society, I have gone with Integration Specialist. Let me explore what that means to me, and some other terms I took under consideration.

I am, by nature, and in the soul of mine which reincarnates, a witch-druid-shaman-volva-pharmakeia-oracle-priestess-yogini. In the lives I have held, these are some of the words which have been used to describe who I am and the services I offer to the collective.

Imagine my dismay as a youth in this particular incarnation, facing the reality that these roles in society have been demoted to charlatanism, devilry, and delusion. Where at one point in time I healed, guided, served, and protected my village, and was a well respected community member and elder, now I find there exists no reputable training, education, employment, respect, or recognition for my sacred work. I went through a grieving process, I was disheartened and discouraged.

I found no healers among our health care system. I found no union between mind, body, and spirit in our approach to wholeness. I found similarly no union between humankind and our plant and animal brethren. I felt and heard their cries, and the screaming of the Earth beneath us. I tried many halfway endeavors to connect with who I am and translate that essence into a modern role. I found no gainful employment with which I could pursue my education. Part of this was due to economic factors (entering the workforce in 2008-9 during the recession) and partly due to a lack of community support (housing, education).

As with many individuals with such soul gifts such as mine, I have undergone many initiations and hardships. I live with chronic illness. It has flipped the table on my best laid plans to humbly follow along with those endeavors which would place me in a “normal” role in society. I have repeatedly been forced to leave my chosen life path because it conforms to a societal expectation, but doesn’t factor in my abilities, disabilities, and individual needs. When I couldn’t make my way in the world in health care for economic reasons (available jobs did not pay enough to cover housing and food), I went to serving tables. Within less than a year my doctor advised me that I would never be able to work in a career that requires me to be on my feet all day.

I needed health insurance, sedentary work, and hope that I would be able to make it to forty without needing a wheelchair. My life became focused on “improving my quality of life”, with a prognosis that I might always struggle to find joy, meaning, happiness, fulfillment, stability, and satisfaction. I was not yet 20.

I pursued a trade school education in dispatch, supply chain, and logistics. It was affordable, short, and within two months of starting the program I found work in the field. I graduated with honors, because I apply myself wholeheartedly and dutifully to whatever I am doing. I was paid less than I had been making in the restaurant industry, but I had health insurance and I was seated at a computer for my work day.

I spent five years total in various dispatch and logistics positions. My health was more manageable in a sedentary position than in an active one, but it continued to steadily deteriorate. I had a home of my own, and a small family to look after. When I became pregnant with my third child, my life choices allowed me the opportunity to stay home to care for myself and my young children. Pregnancy was particularly difficult for me thanks to my health, and I was incredibly grateful to be provided for for a change.

I began to realize that there was no amount of taking any well meaning advice that could alter the fact that I have a particular calling and role in society, and that no attempts to do anything else would bear fruit for me. Any endeavor to be other than I am in order to better fit in or belong to our culture would be faced with obstacle after obstacle intended to steer me back home to myself. I began to see my disabilities as a gift, intended to nurture me back to the roles I was meant to fulfill. To remind me that who I am would always be an essential member of community despite any temporary societal insanity that lends itself to the contrary.

I spent time pursuing topics and roles which felt authentic and meaningful to me. I focused on ignoring the prognoses, rejecting claims about what healing I could and could not find. I recognized “there’s nothing we can do for you” for what it is: “I am not qualified to help you and I do not know who is, nor am I willing to admit that there are gaps in my education and knowledge”. I concluded that where our modern understanding of healing fails to recognize how to bring an individual to wholeness, traditional healing methods suffer no such limitations. I plunged back into the familiar waters of my soul, remembering and reeducating myself on holistic and alternative healing modalities.

I do not pursue any of these activities to be trendy or competitive. I am fueled wholly and completely by stubbornness (that I will live a happy, healthy life in direct contradiction to anything a medical professional has ever told me) and a hope that I can find a way to wellness for myself as well as for others who are suffering with silent and invisible illness who have been given a bill of hopelessness and futility instead of health in their misadventures in healthcare.

I foolishly hope that I can help to restore the role of the medicine woman as a valid path to living well and healthfully. The loss of the divine feminine, and the direct assault upon and intentional eradication of holistic healers in order to sanction and validate a for profit illness management racket is a travesty. The making illegal of natural remedies in favor of petrochemical poisons curated in a lab with the express purpose of generating incomprehensible sums for the creators is an offense against the indwelling divinity in ourselves as well as the indwelling divinity in the natural world.

To integrate means to bring to wholeness. To take time to rest and reflect, and to unify previously disparate aspects of being. I often think of myself as a generalist, because I have pursued creative and healing modalities for the mind, emotions, spirit, and body. They feel disconnected in this world that profits from taking things apart in order to isolate expertise - one doctor for your heart, another for your teeth, another for your eyes. You can see a generalist in order for them to recommend you to someone else to see for whatever particular system is giving you trouble. Good luck if your issue is chronic and systemic, because you will need to see a different doctor for every day of the week in order to be treated as though you are fifty different problems instead of one problem which affects fifty different things.

When I say my specialty is integration, I mean in defiance to this. My specialty is seeing all of creation as a unified whole, and all of our selves as a unified whole. My specialty is in generating balance in unbalanced systems by seeing mind, body, and spirit as one. By bringing care and attention to the systems that need it, whether they be physical or mental, emotional or spiritual. To me, this is what Yoga is. It is union of body, mind, and spirit. It is wellness that is derived from wholeness of being. Healing is not in finding a cure for a disease, a magical pill which will make everything all better. It is in a radical love and acceptance for life, as it is, with all of its variety. Including the challenges. It is a love for a garden’s insects and weeds, its pests and predators.

I tend my physical body with exercise. With Yoga. With sunshine and adventure, love and family time. I grow, harvest, and utilize herbal medicines. I eat well, and I take time to rest.

I tend my mind with meditation and pranayama (breath work practices). I learn, I grow, I study, I converse and make connections with others.

I tend my emotions with creativity. I write, I paint, I craft. I spend plenty of time in water and with community which nourishes me. I learn about emotional body mapping, and the places where unresolved emotions live in the body as dis-ease.

I tend my spirit with ceremony. I use sound therapy, Reiki, crystals, herbs, sacred tools, you name it and I’ve probably tried it. I connect to the celestial realms and celestial bodies, and I immerse myself in the grand cycles and timing in order to ebb and flow with the inherent rhythms of all life.

I am always a student, because I love to learn. I have a boundless ambition to understand the universe we find ourselves in and how it works. In my lack of resources, I have discovered that the only resources we truly need can never be removed from us. I am spirit led, spirit taught, and initiated by the great goddess. I also do what I can to pursue more material education, within what I can afford and what time I have to devote to it. I invest only in what I know has actual worth, not just what our society has attached artificial value to. The things I do, I do because I feel they are truly meaningful, important, and valuable. The causes I contribute my time to are the ones I feel construct the world I wish to live in. I do not participate in “should”, “must”, or “have to”, and I see unsolicited advice as the psychic attack it is.

It is my honor to translate those gems of wisdom which have assisted me in my journey toward wholeness to tools which can be used by you on your own individual journey toward wholeness. It is my joy to be a living example of what is possible, in front of others who were told about all the limitations they must accept for themselves. It is my calling to stand tall in the face of dogma and ask “What makes you think that is true?”

In the end I would say that an Integration Specialist is just a Witch, wearing the modern clothes of the language of Jung and trying to avoid the misbegotten connotations of charlatanism, foul sorcery and devil worship. I am here as I always have been, to read the omens, to realign the spirit. To steward the healing garden, and lovingly craft her medicines. To sing over the drums in ceremony, and teach of the wisdom of the rising and falling tides. To celebrate the turning of the seasons of the sun and moon as well as those in our individual life journeys. I will continue to be here if ever you are in need of such services.

I have worn many hats which seemed logical and practical, and served for a time in a limited way. The one I wear now is pointed, and serves eternally in an unlimited way.

May you be whole. May you be holy. May the Earth be whole and holy. May the Goddess rise again. May we know unity in her garden.