The first Christmas card of the festive season

I arrived back from lunch today to find an envelope that looked distinctly like a card left on my chair. Confused I picked it up and wondered what it could be about. I couldn't believe it when it was a Christmas card, the first one I have received. Yesterday in my blog entry I wrote how there is no ego involved when something matters. What I realised today is that when something matters I have integrity around it. This blog matters. Not for any particular reason it just matters. That is why I am up in the early hours of the morning to write something, to be integrity because it matters. I had a shocking realisation yesterday that the reason I am not in integrity at work is because to me it is not important and does not matter. When something does not matter there is no integrity around it. When there is integrity around something it works. Integrity is the state of being whole, complete and perfect and it shows itself whenever I do what I said I would do in the way that I know it should be done. This is to act with complete integrity and as a result whatever I am doing works.

I am not in integrity at work. Yes, I turn up on time and put in my hours but I don't do my work to the best that I can do. This is for one reason and one reason only and that is because it doesn't matter to me, it's not important. This wasn't a comfortable insight and realization. I've had a vague idea that increasingly where I am working is not right but I always blamed the nature of the work. Now I see that the issue is solely to do with me and my integrity around it. It has nothing to do with the nature of the work or the people with whom I work. The responsibility for my lack of integrity rests solely with me. When there is no integrity there is also no responsibility. If something doesn't matter to me then if someone talks to me about my responsibility to it, then it just goes over my head because responsibility can only be understood within the context of integrity. Integrity and responsibility go together like hand in glove.

I'm up early because I'm going to my usual cycle spin class. I have integrity around this in that I get up and do everything I need to do to be there. Because of this, the class works for me and is whole and complete and perfect. It's not a case of having to 'do' spinning but a case of 'being' spinning which comes from the fertile ground of integrity. Without integrity nothing works. Yet integrity does not give power, just the foundation for power. When I do what I say I will do then I have power and life is much simpler. When I put something in my diary it stays there. On those occasions where I have ended up cancelling something to fit something else in and thus been out of integrity it's all gone a bit pear shaped and I've ended up wishing I had stuck to my original plan.....

Now I'm off to my spinning class which I use as my morning meditation. I've stopped the 'doing' around things spiritual. I realised that transformation is like the plant that is sitting on the top of my fridge in the kitchen. It doesn't matter how often I water and feed it, new shoots will only appear when the time is right. It is a natural process. Finally I have woken up to the fact that this is also the way it is for humans. Yes, a certain amount of reading and studying is necessary but there comes a point when it is when all the doing is let go and what emerges is the being. The mind with its emphasis on doing and understanding will never produce the shift of consciousness which characterises spiritual awakening. Wanting to understand is simply wanting to control the process. When the desire and need for understanding is not there, the consciousness is fully awakened. Awareness is no longer directing consciousness it has transformed to that state of Sunyata or emptiness.....