Heading north to Greenland, Angaangaq Angakkorsuaq of the Eskimo tribes says: When we don’t relate to each other … we don’t celebrate each other’s beauty. Only by melting the ice in the heart, you and I will have a chance to change.

The fundamental question, then, is how can we construct the most integrative experience of self possible to promote well-being in our world?

this effort to find a common ground among the independent ways of knowing can be called “consilience.”

Modern culture is not promoting an integrative self, identity, or belonging. This impairment to integration is leading to the accelerating chaos and rigidity in our personal, public, and planetary lives.

La Donna Harris and Jacqueline Wasilewski (2004) suggest:

Relational flow indicates energy that is shared between people and between individuals and the natural environment with which they are fundamentally connected.

We can choose to take on these integrative ways of living in relationship with responsibility, with a mutuality of reciprocal influence, and in ways that redistribute and share our gifts—all driven by the innate force of love.

we might find a way to have both a broad belonging and an integrated identity, which would allow for the wide focus of attention on our overall world while at the same time honoring the importance of the individual’s focus on inner experience.

This capacity to shift the focus of what criteria we choose is what we will call an “identity lens,” which we can adjust from a narrow focus on our body or brain alone to a wide-angle perspective, seeing who we are as fundamentally intraconnected within the whole energy system of the universe.