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key to well-being as well as physical health.
    Being a fully integrated person means having three strengths that reflect a baby’s approach to the world and avoiding three obstacles that plague us as adults.
Three strengths: Communicating, staying balanced, seeing the big picture
Three obstacles: Isolation, conflict, repression
    When you are in an integrated state, either in body or mind, you communicate openly. You know what you feel; you express it; you absorb signals from everyone around you. But countless adults experience a breakdown in communication. They feel isolated from all kinds of things: their feelings, other people, the jobs they go to every morning. They become entangled in conflicts, and as a result, they learn to repress what they really feel and all their real desires. These feelings are not just psychological factors. They affect the brain and, in turn, every cell in the body.
    Bottom line: If you want to return to the natural state of health and well-being, be like a newborn baby. Integrate your experiences into wholeness instead of living with separation and conflict.
    YOU ARE BECOMING MORE INTEGRATED WHEN
You create a safe place where you can be yourself.
You invite others into the same safe space so that they can be themselves.
You desire to know yourself.
You look at areas of denial, accept hard truths, and face reality.
You make peace with your dark side, using it as neither a secret ally nor a feared enemy.
You honestly assess and heal guilt and shame.
A sense of higher purpose dawns.
You feel inspired.
You offer yourself in service to others.
Higher reality seems real and attainable.
    HERO #3
THE BUDDHA
FOR EXPANSION OF CONSCIOUSNESS
    We use our brains first and foremost to be conscious, and some people take their consciousness much farther than others. Our heroes, our paragons for inner growth, are the spiritual guides of humanity wherever they arise. One particular hero, the Buddha, and the type he represents—saints, sages, and visionaries—display to perfection a unique trait of human beings: to live for meaning, which leads to a craving for the highest meaning. Meaning comes from within. It goes beyond the brute facts of life. The raw data that streams into the five senses is meaningless by itself. Looking at the brief, brutal lives of Paleolithic cave men or early hunters and gatherers, you would never suspect that their brains were capable of mathematics, philosophy, art, and higher reason. Those capacities were hidden, and a figure like the Buddha, who lived amid the poverty and struggle of life in India more than two thousand years ago, indicates that much more remains hidden inside us, if only we could tap into our yearning for meaning.
    The key is expansion of consciousness .
    No matter what kind of experience you are having, having it presupposesthat you are aware. To be human is to be conscious—the only issue is how conscious. If you strip away all overtones of religion and mysticism, the state of higher consciousness that Buddha exemplifies is part of everyone’s inheritance. An old Indian adage compares consciousness to a lamp at the door, shining into the house and out into the world at the same time. It makes you aware of things “out there” and “in here” simultaneously. Being aware creates a relationship between the two.
    Is that relationship good or bad? The heavens and hells conceived in the human mind are all products of thought. We think our way into them, and we think our way out. “You are only as safe as your thoughts,” says a wise aphorism. But where do thoughts come from—the dangerous, unsafe kind as well as the reassuring, trusting kind? They originate in the invisible realm of consciousness. For the mind, awareness is the womb of creation. To achieve a life filled with meaning, you must figure out how to be more conscious; only then do you become the author of your own destiny.
HOW TO EXPAND YOUR CONSCIOUSNESS
Put a higher value on being awake, aware,