Integrity and Obama

Integrity is a joining of our inner self and our external self. What we deeply believe is right, what we know inside, what we feel to the depths of our soul, what we inherently see as the essence or spirit holds and centers us. when we are able to hold a focus on this inner strength and align it with our behaviour, our decisions, our speecha and our actionswe are integral. It is the translation between the inner and the outer worlds that sometimes gets lost- lost to ourselves. As such we then lose our own integrity. Perhaps others may see this, perhaps not, but we know. When it becomes significant then others do see the gaps, the falseness, and the lack of integrity. Mark Nepo in his book The Equisite Risk-daring to live an authentic life, gives us a definition of integrity from Rabbi Jonathan Omer-Man “Integrity is the ability to listen to a place inside oneself that doesn’t change, even though the life that carries it may change.” The US, and the world, are hopeful that Barack Obama listens well to his inner self and that his translation to the world lives in integrity. It gives us hope that leaders can model for the rest of us what it means. It gives us hope that thhis translation space can be gentle, kind, compassionate, authentic and draw peace to it. We hope that this new beginning provides us with a new form of leadership, one that we have been waiting for, for a very long time.