An interview with Integrated Awareness
founder, Lansing Barrett Gresham
Lansing Barrett Gresham guides others to awaken their innate
healing abilities. He is both the founder of Integrated Awareness and principal
of Touchstone, a healing center in Cotati, California, devoted to that purpose.
He teaches and models a healer’s most important duty —to recognize and respond
to the whole person.
Q: What is Integrated Awareness?
A: Integrated Awareness describes an inherently possible but usually inhibited
state of consciousness in which all the aspects of the person are self-aware and
actively cooperate. It refers to a quality of living in which the mind does not
have precedence over the body, in which spirit is as tangible as skeleton, where
emotions are recognized as the source of creativity and in which the energetic
fields of the human body and soul are as immediate and as tactile as the skin.
In such a state, you may sense simultaneously all those levels in another person
as well.
Q: You have spoken of deriving your work from your observations
of what is common to all humans, and that the body is the most basic component
of human experience. What are the other basic common elements?
A: The physical body is not only the most basic, it is the means through which
all of the other aspects are appreciable by consciousness. The ones most
interesting to me are the emotional self, which operates across a very broad
band of highly reactive, highly polarized energies; the mental body which
primarily utilizes narrow band energetics, not very charged, but very rigid, and
many vibrational frequencies higher than the mental body ranging all the way up
to spirit itself. Your Soul definitely has a characteristic vibration. The
emotional body has an orientation biased towards the past and the mental body
towards the future. All the other elements tend to move along the temporal axis
as well and not to occupy the present moment only. The one part of ourselves
that remains permanently present is our physical body.
Q: Can you tell me more about the temporal axis?
A: In practical terms, what most people call the mind is really a small portion
of the total mental body—specifically that portion which does two things: it
describes itself as “I” and it is primarily concerned with creating predictive
models of reality. Given those two characteristics it’s not surprising that the
mind regards both present and past moments as data blocks enabling it to predict
where pain is likely to be in the future and avoid that. The emotional body’s
highly charged and polarized nature tends to produce relative fixations in its
own field, so it tends to pull the attention and the self towards the past, the
same way the mind pulls it toward the future.
Q: What does that mean in relationship to healing and how would
you define healing?
A: Healing is acceptance embodied in the present moment and space It is not
simply restoration to a previous state. Healing is accomplished when there is no
longer resistance in the self to the current condition. Many people with outward
limitations do not experience themselves as diminished at essence. That
condition has healed for them. Plenty of others continue to inflict present
suffering upon themselves in relation to long past events. In spiritual terms
learning, healing and accepting are ultimately the same thing.
Physically, I would define healing as a bodily state in which you
are capable of doing what you want without fear of pain. Emotionally, healing is
responding to present moments instead of recreating past hurts. Mentally,
healing is quiet. Energetic healing is the habitual condition of congruence
between the physical body and various energetic bodies. Ultimately, “healing” is
the “self” merging into the Self, Most of the time on earth, the closest we come
to that is compassion. You might define "healed" as a state in which all parts
of you were present and that no part of you wished it different than it is.
Q: What is the relationship between healing and learning?
A: Learning is acceptance. Healing is the effect of acceptance throughout our
system. In a spiritual sense, they are indistinguishable in the end. Healing
occurs as a direct result of the overlap, the intersection between these two.
Q: How are the lessons encoded so that we get to experience them
again and again until we learn them?
A: They are encoded in the binding consciousness which surrounds and
interpenetrates genetic endowment and are coded energetically by the genes
themselves. The processes of creating a physical body and teaching it to adapt
to the earth then ensures that we will have the most opportunities to experience
certain lessons. We pattern our body language, imprint our energy fields and
define our structure. This results in powerful attractive and repulsive
polarities which draw the other players we need.
Q: If we keep repeating experiences over and over, what is the
best approach to increasing our understanding and incorporating the lesson?
A: Enhance the conscious acknowledgment and usage of the information already
coming from the physical body. Embrace your experiences. In terms of Integrated
Awareness® it means preferring to physically relax the muscles, habitually
orient the body to be open, move the emotional field toward the present from its
habitual dwelling in the past, pull the mind back to the present moment from its
hangout in the future, restore mobility to the energy fields where there have
been imprints and fixations, and willingly draw to the self the consequences of
your experiences. Stop pretending that what you experience is created outside of
yourself—as long as you do pretend that the experience is externally generated,
you will continue to have it.
Q: Can you speak of how the quality and ease of movement of the
human body reflects the state of permission or lack of it as experienced by the
individual?
A: All aspects of the Self must rely upon and utilize the same physical body for
manifesting their various purposes. Often they require the same specific part.
To the degree that internal desires and intentions conflict, conflicting
instructions are given to the body. This is perceptible as a decrease in ease of
movement, an increase in effort and tension and a dis-congruency among the
various states of consciousness—mental, emotional, physical and energetic.
Q: You speak of healing by presence. Can you comment?
A: By presence, we mean congruence—spatially, temporally, and intentionally. If
no part of yourself is off doing something else, then you are in that moment,
operating in a state without judgment. The most intransigent portion of anyone's
consciousness is the mind, and it is usually the last to yield. When people
encounter one another, they are often inspired into better health when they
encounter someone who is operating in a state of compassion and expired further
into ill health by their responses to the judgments of another. Presence offers
both a model of how to be healthy and a mirror in which others can see
themselves. It gives energetic support for their own innate courage, desire, and
permission to come to the fore, and it calls for them to live this embodied life
more as their divine Self.
Q: In closing, would you speak of the relationship between
healing the Self and healing the planet?
A: We certainly believe the best way to learn to clean house is to start with
your own room. We also believe that people are entitled to see an example of
both process and result before deciding that here is a path attractive to them.
Unlike conventional modes of teaching, one of the things required in IA® is to
give up control. If we wish a change in the consciousness of the planet to a
higher level, it cannot be accomplished by coercion, demanding of performance,
insisting that our way is right, or any of the other well-documented (and
historically boring) examples of how to pretend change while actually
perpetuating the status quo.
On a spiritual plane, we find that most people who are highly
motivated to contribute to the world at large and want a life of service to the
planet are actually carrying more than their individual share of the karmic
responsibility for resolving a particular lesson, whether that be violence, or
gender confusion, or shame, or not deserving or hatred of others. We think that
people will follow not behind, but alongside a good example.
Copyright © Touchstone
1998-2003. All rights reserved. Reprinted here with permission.
