We often hear wellness experts talk about "integration" - how the goal of various health and well-being practices is to be better integrated. Integration is a term that’s been thrown around too much and too loosely, and consequently its popular meaning has become imprecise. “Integrated” has become sort of a blanket word meaning together, with it, not scattered in a million directions. The dictionary definition of integration is “to bring parts together into a whole.”


What’s missing from the popular use of integration is: Which parts? What exactly is scattered, and what is being brought together? Is it that we learn to focus on one thing at a time rather than mindless multitasking? Is it that we’re better organized, that our schedules and homes and lives are not fragmented and redundant and wasteful?


Maybe. But in mindfulness terms, the meaning of “integrated" is simpler and more precise. It means our mind isn’t in a different place from our body. Mind and body are working as a team in the everyday world we call life. Imagine how much time we spend with our minds somewhere other than the rest of us.


It’s a bigger problem than we realize. The Korean Zen master Seung Sahn taught, “While driving, if you are attached to your thoughts, you’ll go through a stop sign and get a ticket.” I would say, if you’re lucky! You might also kill someone.


That metaphor isn’t over the top. The disconnect between attention and location might be what’s harming the world most. In disagreements with our loved ones, are we paying attention to the needs and situation of the person in front of us, or away in flights of fancy about our own issues? In politics, are the sides paying attention to the reality of the world we live in, or away on fantasies of being morally superior?


Nearly any problem we can think of boils down to the mind being somewhere other than where we actually are. And nearly any solution boils down to the mind coming back home.


Mindfulness is about calling the mind back home to the body, back home to the present moment in which the body exists. When we meditate, we use awareness of our physical sensations to help the mind locate the body and come back from wherever it’s flying. The mind will fly away again, looking for amusement, escaping fear, pursuing desire. For a few minutes each day, we practice calling it back, back, back. Until, over time, it rests more comfortably at home.


You know the saying, “Get your act together?” Mindfulness is about getting our act together before we act. Once the mind is comfortable at home, we can let it travel under control and with a purpose. Even when we’re thinking about something, we know we’re thinking about it. If the mind doesn’t find what it’s looking for, we let it come home and rest in the sensation of the body, so it can travel fresh again when ready. That’s how worry and escape become insight and problem-solving.


The world is disintegrating. We think that’s new. But everything is always disintegrating. That’s a physical law of the universe. What balances and saves the world is our own integration, our minds brought together with our bodies, our sensations, our shared spirit.