Integrity

in.teg.ri.ty n 1. honesty, incorruptibility. 2. wholeness, entirety.
–Oxford American Dictionary

Every martial art I’ve encountered promotes integrity. Honesty is one of the main cornerstones of the martial arts. While I don’t know any adult who entered the martial arts to learn or improve their integrity, many of us — including me — have enrolled our kids, hoping that they’ll carry this lesson out of the dojang and into the rest of their world. (In fact, Dynamo is going to be getting a lesson in integrity when he comes back from his Dad’s. We were set to test for our next belt rank on April 18th, but I got word from the school that he hasn’t turned any homework in for the last several weeks. Which means, he’s been lying to me about not having any. I’m still planning to test – he won’t be).

There’s another side to practicing integrity: being whole and present in whatever we’re doing. Boy, do I need to practice this. I try to approach my training sessions with the attitude that I’m doing everything for the first time; if we’re kicking targets, I try to make each kick, whether it’s the first kick that day or the hundredth, as if it were the only one I would ever do. I put everything other that the task at hand out of my mind. Or, at least I attempt to – like everyone else, there are days when Dynamo’s report card and “what do we need at the store for dinner” just won’t go away. It helps me to center and focus before I begin a session. If I’m running late to class and miss the beginning meditation, the rest of my practice will be off.

On the mats, the sessions I’m focused and present out number those I’m not. My track record in other areas, though, isn’t so great. I know Dynamo deserves every ounce of integrity I can give him. Some days, that’s really hard. He’s a constant chatterbox: his mouth starts moving as soon as he wakes up and doesn’t stop until he falls asleep at night. His whole day is a running monologue. So it gets far too easy for me to tune him out (after all, I’ve had 12 years of practice ). I need to pay attention — really pay attention and not just give him distracted “humms” and “un-huhs”. The real challenge for me is to be honest with him at the times when I do really need to be concentrating on something else. I’ve been making more of an effort to say, “I’m sorry, I really need to focus on this right now. I’ll be happy to listen to what you want to say at dinner.” And then to follow through on it and actively listen to him at dinner.

But, as the definition above indicates, there’s yet another meaning to integrity — wholeness. Like courtesy, integrity is something women in our culture are taught to extend to others, but not to ourselves. We’re taught to deny our feelings and our needs in favor of our families’. For the ten+ years of my previous marriage, I compromised my integrity on a daily basis. I said “yes” when I should’ve said “no”, “wait”, “maybe”, or “let’s think about this”. I submerged my own personality, my thoughts and feelings to attend to those of my ex. Two and a half years out, I feel like I’m only now recovering my own integrity. It’s been a long process rediscovering who I actually am, not who my ex tried to shape me into.

To be true our path, we need to be true to ourselves. I also believe that our children need to see us model integrity towards ourselves. Otherwise, we risk perpetuating the cycle we’re struggling against.

Next post: Perseverance.

Tags: children, five tenets, integrity, Parenting