Contegrity

Contegrity is a word, a made up word that is not yet in the dictionary yet one day will be.   Contegrity signifies a deep integrity and wholeness of Self and Others and Life and that which integrates and fulfills life, lived out across a background of time and circumstance.  Contegrity, as a word, was invented by my friends and mentors, Ken Anbender and Gail Cantor of Contegrity Program Designs.

The following words are my own.   Ken and Gail have not reviewed these words; I am sure they would say this all quite differently.  Yet just as I feel free to weigh in on Perelandra and the gifts I have received there, while still pointing people directly to the Perelandra material itself, so too I feel free to say in my own words the great gifts I have received and continue to receive from Contegrity.  The gift of gratitude works in the soul, and by the fruits of the gift, one, over time, comes to know what the gift must have been.

Ken and Gail are professionals who were interested in supporting all that goes in the direction of what integrates and fulfills life.  They needed a word to distinguish and set apart what is worth steering by and engaging with when the intention is to have life fulfill itself in and around you. 

There is something whole at the heart of life.   Whether one calls it God, Nature, the Beyond, the Inexpressible and Ineffable Wonder of Life, there is something about the way life is working itself out that is worth observing, cultivating, and in a Ken-and-Gail phrase, belonging to become.  Life is not (just) a bunch of bodies interacting.   Nor is life (just) a set of conversations, disconnected from the physical life that embodies them.   Life is whole.  It is as unsatisfying to be "all physical with no spiritual" as it is to be "all spiritual with no physical".   What is needed now, today, is wholeness, balance, completeness, integration, and flow, and the real-world A-class results that come from there.   Ken and Gail set out to determine what goes in that direction and what does not.   Nothing else would satisfy.  If you will, they simply observed that many, even most, of the approaches to "having a great life" did not offer this. They set out to find what does.

In my words, Ken and Gail started investigating how to garden wholeness.  What are the seeds to plant if wholeness is the intended crop?  What ways of engaging and conversing help the tiny seedlings of wholeness emerge and blossom, the way that water, sunlight, good soil and fresh air help the tiny plants become a bumper crop?  And, conversely,  what ways of conversing and engaging are like weeds that grow quickly yet do not satisfy, and will take over the entire garden if left on their own without being lovingly pruned and weeded.

And even beyond the means to do so, what is the crop itself that is being gardened for wholeness and fulfillment? What is wholeness and fulfillment, anyway?  Contegrity is the word for the crop of wholeness. Contegrity the word signifies the aspect of life that is worth planting and tending and caring for, and defending with ones honor and ones life.  Ken and Gail needed a made up word for this.   All the existing words already point at something and what they point at isn't working.

Here are some basics.    Contegrity is a different view of what it means to be a Self. To be a self is to be already connected, related, enmeshed, engaged. Contegrity, the crop of wholeness,  is relational, not thing-like.    To be a self has nothing to do with being separate, though it has much to do with being unique. Contegrity is discerned not invented.  There is that which goes in the direction of wholeness and that which does not. One can tell the truth about that but not determine it.  Right use of will is to will what works, not to will what one wishes would work.

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To learn more, browse the Contegrity Program Designs web page, especially their FAQ and the pages that are linked from the top right corner of any page.  Or consider participating in one of their programs.  One of the Contegrity flagship programs Life Design will be held in the Hartford, CT, area on October 21 to 24 this year.  Life Design focuses on what, uniquely, is your one wild and precious life designed for.  What is unique about you and what connects you with others and the world are one and the same.   Getting the truth told about what that is -- and what that is not -- is a key starting place for living with freedom, ease, and joy.   In a phrase I have used in the second post in this series, joy comes when you stop giving what you don't have, and start learning to give in abundance what you have in abundance because it is who you are.