Between Tension, Awareness, and Daily Life
There is a kind of realization that cannot be measured with scales or diagnoses. It is the kind that emerges when we are able to welcome what disturbs us without needing to fight or flee. In the world of therapy, we often seek symptom reduction, resolution, or healing. But there is a more subtle skill, rarely taught and even more rarely embodied: the ability to integrate.
Integration is not acceptance in the passive sense, nor is it mere tolerance. It is the art of inhabiting what is happening, without turning away from it. And above all, without believing that what is happening defines us. This is not a metaphysical discourse, but an eminently practical one. I often tell my patients: if something hurts, look at it—not to force it to go away, but to finally stop running.
Namkhai Norbu, a master whose teachings I’ve studied and whose clarity has marked my personal and professional path, spoke often of integration—not as a technique, but as a living relationship with the state of awareness. He would ask: what happens to your awareness when you meet someone unpleasant? Can you stay present, or do you immediately react, pulled by anger or aversion? And if you meet someone you love, are you still in presence, or lost in attachment?
In the therapeutic context, these questions take on concrete form. Consider a patient, Martina, who comes in speaking of anxiety in social contexts. Her tendency is to prepare herself excessively before any interaction, rehearsing phrases, imagining reactions, calculating every possible discomfort. What is she doing? She is trying to avoid the unpredictable. When we begin to work on this, the goal is not to make her “more social”, but to help her integrate the unpredictable, so that it no longer threatens her. The moment she enters a conversation without armor and manages to stay present—even with her heart pounding—she has not only improved; she has stepped into something larger. She has started to live.
Norbu often emphasized that realization is not an achievement, but something that becomes visible in the everyday. He wrote: “If, through distraction, you hate or get angry, but with presence are immediately able to liberate this feeling, it means that you are practitioners and that practice is something living in yourselves.”
This is why, in therapy, I often speak of the moment before. Before we lash out. Before we shut down. Before the old defense kicks in. If we can become aware in that moment—even for a breath—we open a door. It’s not an abstract awakening; it’s neurological, relational, spiritual, and embodied. And yes, it is difficult. Not because it is complex, but because we rarely choose it.
Let’s make it real. There was a man—let’s call him Marcello. A long-time practitioner of meditation, versed in philosophy, a man of discipline. And yet, during a family dinner, his brother said something triggering, and Marcello exploded. Later, filled with shame, he asked me: “How can I integrate when it feels like fire?” I asked him, “Did you know it was fire, even as it happened?” He said yes. That was the beginning. The point is not to never feel fire, but to know it as fire, to feel its heat without losing our form. Integration begins when we don’t lie to ourselves anymore about what we’re feeling.
Norbu used a powerful metaphor: to grow flowers, we need seeds. Pouring water on barren ground with no seeds won’t yield anything. Similarly, if we don’t first discover our tensions, how can we liberate them? Many people meditate for years without ever seeing their mechanisms. Others go to therapy looking only to feel better, not to know themselves.
But self-knowledge without presence becomes analysis paralysis. And presence without integration risks becoming spiritual bypass. The middle path—dynamic, raw, luminous—is to integrate. To sit in discomfort without constructing a story. To cry without losing ourselves in drama. To love without grasping. To say no without hate.
Integration is not a goal, but a posture. A choice. A direction.
It does not mean enduring everything passively, nor suppressing reactions with stoicism. It means being able to stand in the storm, letting it pass through, without claiming it as identity or failure. It is poetic, yes, but also deeply political: in a world of polarization, to integrate is to refuse reduction. To resist the temptation of “good guys vs. bad guys”, of victimhood or blame. It is not neutrality, but radical clarity.
Choosing integration is like tending a fire that doesn’t burn but warms. It is remembering, when the old wound speaks, that we are not just that wound. It is walking through the same doors with different eyes. It is answering life not with performance, but with presence. And sometimes, it is standing in silence while others demand noise.
To integrate is to allow ourselves the right to be incomplete and still live fully.
It is a path—not toward perfection, but toward truth.
And the truth, once integrated, never needs to shout.
Egidio Francesco Cipriano
Foto Wikiepedia https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Namkhai_Norbu
