What if your integrity is wholeness? Not wholeness as a destination you arrive at, but wholeness as a practice—a continual calling back of all your parts. Guided by your intentions.
From a physics perspective, when all parts of a structure are working together, it can hold more. It's sound. It has integrity. But when parts are pushed out, excluded, denied—the structure becomes unstable. Those pushed-out parts don't disappear. They become your blindspots. They show up sideways. They run you from the shadows.
We all have parts we've exiled. The angry part. The needy part. The part that failed. The part that's too much or not enough. The part that got the message early on: You're not welcome here. And so we split. We perform. We please. We show up as the acceptable version of ourselves while the rest waits in the wings.
Wholeness asks: What if all parts of me are held and seen? What if I can do the same for the people around me? This doesn't mean acting on every impulse or letting every part run the show. It means acknowledging them. Making room. Calling them back into the fold so they're not running you unconsciously.
When you stand in your own wholeness—when all parts of you are present and accounted for—you can hold more. You can be with others more fully. You're not trying to hide anything, which means you're not using energy to perform or protect. That energy becomes available for something else: connection, creativity, presence.
The Patterns Underneath
Here's the deeper layer: the way we live, the way we connect with others, with our partners, our children, our communities—these patterns reflect what's inside us. Patterns we've had since we were young. And we have so much agency over how we navigate these patterns—if they're conscious.
The challenge is they're not always conscious. Sometimes we're just running on autopilot, following through on patterns without any assessment of them. These autopilot patterns are often the places where we've pushed parts out. The patterns protect us from having to feel something, face something, be something we decided long ago wasn't allowed.
So the first step is to examine: What are my patterns? What do they look like? Which ones do I want to keep? Which ones don't serve me anymore? What parts of me have I been leaving out?
Then comes the intention—one that guides you toward a new pattern, a new way of being, a more whole version of yourself.
Why Intention Matters
When I pair intention with integrity, I'm talking about creating a clear focus that filters through your entire life. Your intention becomes the thing you use to assess: Is this moving me toward what I want to create or how I want to connect? Is this aligned with who I'm becoming?
Take a look at your schedule right now. How much time are you spending working? With your children? In community? Doing creative things? Playing? These questions matter because what you're doing shows you what you currently value most. And if your intention is to delight in life more, to play more—but all you're doing is working—there's a gap. Your intention can become the filter that helps you close it.
The Intention Hacks:
Amplifying Results
Let's say you go swimming. Great. It keeps you healthy, keeps you exercising, keeps you moving. But what if you added an intention to it? Maybe your intention is to move through your emotions, to allow anger to move through you, or to process a significant loss. Intention allows you to use the resistance of the water to move through the unconscious or conscious resistance to feeling your feelings. Suddenly that workout has a twofer effect—you've amplified its impact by adding intentionality.
This is also a way to call parts back. That anger you've been pushing down or out? It needs to move. That grief you've been compartmentalizing? It needs somewhere to go. Adding intention to movement or an embodied activity gives those exiled parts a seat at the table. You're not just exercising—you're integrating.
Let Go of the Outcome
Here's where it gets sneaky. We set an intention, but underneath we're actually holding an expectation: If I do this, THEN I'll be happy. That's the quickest route to suffering—looking for the outcome instead of participating in the journey.
Even patience can be a trap. If you're patient for something, you're waiting for an outcome instead of allowing for what could arrive that's even better. Your intention is the focus you keep returning to—not a destination you're trying to reach.
Wholeness isn't something you achieve and then you're done. It's a practice. You call parts back. They drift. You call them back again. The intention isn't to arrive at wholeness—it's to keep returning to it.
You Can't Do It Alone
This is the piece we often forget: intentions require support. We need people to assist us, especially if our intention involves shifting behavior or changing deeply rooted patterns. Just like our individual New Year's intentions aren't sustainable without accountability, without community, without someone to witness our progress—the same is true for families and organizations.
Calling parts back is vulnerable work. It's hard to do alone. We need witnesses. We need people who can see our exiled parts and not flinch. We need spaces where we can practice being whole before we take it out into the world.
A big shift for two weeks is brilliant. But how do you hold that thread consistently, sustainably? It might mean starting smaller. It might mean celebrating the little wins. It might mean celebrating when you mess up and celebrating your renewed commitment. It might mean feeling like a failure, and recognizing it's not the end yet—so you couldn't have failed.
Showing Up More Fully You (During the Holidays)
Building off last month's newsletter on courage and nervous system patterns: How can you go into your holiday gatherings with a new intention this year? To show up more fully you—with more of your parts present.
Maybe it's in subtle ways—excusing yourself to the bathroom to reconnect with yourself before returning to a crowd of family. Maybe it's dressing how you'd normally dress with your friends, even if it's not what your parents or relatives expect. Maybe it's using your voice in new ways. Maybe it's letting the part of you that usually stays quiet have a little more room.
The intention is simply: How do I stay present with all of myself while being present with others? How do I not abandon parts of me in order to belong?
Walking your Talk
Say you're working for an organization with great intentions—maybe transforming generations through economic opportunity. But it's not caring for its own people very well. There's a huge blindspot: the organization isn't “walking its talk”. Parts of the mission have been pushed out.
Wholeness in organizational intention means there's room for mistakes, for challenges, for struggles—because those are part of all of us. Part of all organizations. Sometimes that's the space where we do our best work, where we connect most deeply. When we try to present only the polished parts, we lose integrity. We become structurally unsound.
By "best work," I don't mean best by polarity. I mean work done with the most integrity, the most alignment, the most foundational congruence—where all parts are invited back, held and acknowledged. It becomes easeful. There's less burnout. Less harm in order to create good. Less of a need to positively impact others at any cost, while negatively impacting those providing the impact, which is never sustainable.
If You Aren't Sure What Your Intention Should Be…My Suggestion: Presence.
Presence is the container that holds wholeness. You can't call parts back if you're not present enough to notice they're missing. You can't integrate what you can't see. Presence is how we find the exiled parts and welcome them home.
Presence includes all time: the future, the past, the now. It keeps you firmly on your journey. It keeps you out of outcomes and expectations. It allows you to sit in the moment-to-moment changes happening in front of you and return to them, over and over and over again.
With the intention of presence, we can notice the subtle signs—even when someone's telling us they're OK, but if we look harder and we watch them more, we can tell they aren't. We're not just hearing words; we're present to the whole person in front of us, including the parts they might be hiding.
With the intention of presence, we can play with our kids and listen to the language they aren't using yet—not because they're hiding it, but because they don't know it yet. We can be present to parts of them that are still forming, still emerging.
With the intention of presence, we can really listen to the people we work with and serve. We can listen to what everyone needs, what's possible for the organization to hold, what the organization itself needs. We can be present with all these things—and be present with all the feelings that come up in the moment of presence.
Presence is how we practice wholeness in real time. Every moment is an opportunity to notice: What part of me is here right now? What part is missing? Can I call it back?
Those of you who know me know I've done a lot of work around birth and death—and I keep returning to this question: How do we live each day as if tomorrow isn't promised, without any regrets? The answer that keeps being given to me by friends, mentors, and community members is presence. Be here. Be whole. Be all of yourself, right now.
What if we're all just a little bit more present with each other in 2026? What if we all call a few more parts back home?
December Offering: Start the Year Intentionally
Because we all need a little extra support for new beginnings, I'm offering a special package for new clients: two sessions focused on setting an intention for the shift of the year, looking at patterns you want to shift, and building structures so you can start 2026 intentionally—and more whole.
If you're curious about larger packages, please reach out. And if you just want to get to know me and my work, a two-session package is a really good option. I'd still love to have a 20-minute consultation call with you so you know what you're signing up for. (You have to purchase in December to receive this offer.)
The Non-Negotiables
You cannot do this alone. Your brain won't let you.
Progress isn't linear. You'll regress. That's not failure—it's data.
Small disruptions create big changes. Don't try to transform everything at once.
Wholeness is a practice, not a destination. Keep calling parts back.
When you change your dance, you give everyone permission to change theirs.
Remember: You're not broken. Your patterns aren't character flaws. They're just neural highways that served you once. Now you're building new roads. It takes time. It takes practice. It takes presence. And all of your parts are welcome on the journey.