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Survival trumps integrity and well being. The survival habits we develop as children are more important than our integrity and our deeper well being. Childhood survival strategies become automatic and unconscious habits. This is why we carry these habits and this sense of identity into adulthood and why we tend to think of as “who I am.”

The survival strategies we are brilliant enough to intuitively develop to save our lives as children habits, and that we automatically carry into our adult lives, become the very habits that sabotage our integrity and fulfillment as adults.

This is why most adults have significant integrity deficits and never attain the level of life fulfillment they seek.

The Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study is a landmark research study that posed the question of whether, and how, childhood experiences affect adult health decades later. To answer this question, Kaiser Permanente, a large U.S. Health Maintenance Organization (HMO), in conjunction with Robert Anda, MD, of the Centers for Disease Control, studied 14,421 adults. The answers they discovered were stunning and conclusive. (For more information about the ACE Study, visit www.acestudy.org )

Through my psychotherapy, mentoring, training and consulting, I have found that achieving high level well being and lasting life fulfillment requires aligning three core drives we are all born with:

I have learned that the more we are aligned with these core drives, the more well being we attain, the more fulfilled we feel, and the more natural it is for us to live lives of integrity. Natural developers have taught me about the importance of outgrowing our childhood survival habits and replacing these with seven core life skills that appear to be responsible for integrity-centered life fulfillment. But, what continues to amazes me the most is that the rest of us appear to be able to attain similar results through deliberately doing this same kind of outgrowing and upgrading.

The name I eventually gave to the seven core life skills my natural developers taught me about is WisePassions. This is because these crucial skills live at the intersection of wisdom, passion and compassion and I know no word in the English that captures all three of these qualities.

I will describe the Seven WisePassions later in this article. But first let’s take a closer look at the survival patterns we adopt as children when the adults around us do not know how to teach us the Seven WisePassions.

Natural Developers Have a Passion to Outgrow Their Childhood Survival Patterns

There is a saying that you can’t afford the luxury of a negative thought. I believe a much more accurate statement would be that you can’t afford the luxury of an undigested life experience.Most children are not sufficiently taught how to digest their life experiences in ways that deepen their relationshipwith their three core drives for authenticity, connection and impact. Coping with a growing backlog of undigested life experiences, and the faulty learnings about authenticity, connection and impact that these engender, tends to cause children to focus increasingly on survival over integrity-centered fulfillment.

The researchers found that:

The ACE Study revealed a powerful relationship between our emotional experiences as children and our physical and mental health as adults, as well as the major causes of adult mortality. It documented the conversion of traumatic emotional experiences in childhood into organic disease later in life. This study makes unequivocally clear the importance of you learning how to properly digest your life experiences.

The ACE Study also found that time, in and of itself, does NOT heal Adverse Childhood Experiences. One does not ‘just get over’ some things, not even fifty years later

and this is why I stress the importance of understanding the anatomy of your own childhood survival plan and subsequent redemption plan, and of freeing yourself from their control.The findings from the ACE Study provide remarkable insightsinto how we become what we are as individuals and as a collective. The findings are vitally important medically, socially, and economically. In other words, ACEs affect all three of our core drives, and hence our integrity.

The Seven WisePassions

Natural developers and successful deliberate developers provide a valuable model for how all of us can prevent ACEs from damaging our wellbeing as adults. The Seven WisePassions they use are the secret formula for digesting our life experiences, freeing ourselves from the control of our survival and redemption plans and moving into integritywith all three of our core drives.

This is the essence of integrated adult development and the WisePassions I am about to describe to you may well be your key to navigating your integrated adult development in the most efficient ways possible. Indeed, the Seven WisePassions appear to be the master key to integrated adult development. No one should be without them. You need them for the sake of your personal well-being, freedom and self-expression. You need them in order to connect, collaborate and co-create well with others. You need them in order to be an effective leader. You need them in order to serve highest collective good. Now, that’s efficiency. You likely will appreciate the purpose and importanceof each WisePassion almost instantly. The reaction I most frequently get when I explain them is, “I knew this but I didn’t know enough about this to fully harness their power of the seven WisePassions in my life.”

As it has been a while since I first introduced them earlier in the book, here in greater detail, is a list of the Seven WisePassions:

Teachability.

Your willingness to respond to unexpected, unasked-for and undesired events with self-responsibility, humility and receptivity, so you find the motivation to ultimately transform these experiences into blessings instead of baggage.

Self-Care.

Maintaining the abundance of life energy you need for living in integrity with all three of your core drives (authenticity, connection and impact) so that you can attain the life fulfillment you seek. This is the core of personal wellbeing.

Discernment.

Your ability to recognize and effectively utilize useful input from inner and outer sources that are wiser than the rules your inner critic tries to enforce. Your capacity to distinguish between what fits and doesn’t fit for you. Your ability to tell the difference between truth, partial-truths and lies.

Harvesting.

Your capacity to effectively digest all of your life experiences so that you extract unexpected gifts from them. This prevents “life experience indigestion” that creates more baggage that impairs your health, your integrity, your life fulfillment,and your ability to honor your three core drives.

Power.

Taking humble ownership of, and fully expressing, your inner light, gifts, deepest truths and creativity without holding back, and remaining true to the boundaries you must honor in order to do that. This is the core of personal integrity.

Synergy.

Co-creating more fulfilling, collaboration-based, effective and resilient relationships than you ever thought possible, through synchronizing your intentions, boundaries, energy and manifestation abilities with others to create resultsthat are even more wonderful than you can create by yourself. This is the core of relationship integrity.

Stewardship.

Your capacity to synergize with others, as your truest self, and to accurately co-discover and serve collective highest good. Stewardship includes leading with impeccable integrity in the forms and contexts that are authentic for you and without doing so at your own expense or the expense of those who are precious to you. This is the core of societal and leadership integrity.

The first four WisePassions (Teachability, Self-Care, Discernment and Harvesting) form the foundation for personal, relationship, leadership and integrity development. The last three (Power, Synergy and Stewardship) are the core aspects of what I call “3D Integrity.” Together, all seven WisePassions are the ingredients required for building a life of wellbeing, fulfillment and integrity, and this I refer to as “3D Living.”

Each WisePassion builds on the ones that come before it. The natural developers and successful deliberate developersI have worked with create successful transformation chapters (periods of particularly intensive integrated development)by building these WisePassions in sequence, as developmental stages.

One WisePassion is not a substitute for the others. All are equally important and all are necessary; there is no fluff or filler here. The WisePassions collectively provide the antidoteto the toxic effects of adverse childhood experiences (as documented by the ACE Study).

The rest of the articles in this series will go into detail with each WisePassion one at a time.

Resource Overwhelm

Resources now exist that can help virtually anyone develop or upgrade any of their seven WisePassions. (The exceptionsto this are those who are significantly developmentally disabled, mentally ill, brain damaged and the criminally insane.)

I cannot put into words how excited and gratified I am that the human development field is finally at a point where virtually no one need be left behind ever again.

At the same time, so many resources are now available that selecting the right one at the right time can be quite a challenge, even for helping professionals. Just take a peek in the self-improvement, relationships or leadership section of any bookstore, or look at the articles and advertisements in development-oriented magazines; the choices are staggeringand the marketing for each one screams out as if it were saying “Pick me, pick me!” This is what I call “resource overwhelm.” How are you to choose the right ones for you each step of the way? The more you know about how to outgrow your automated childhood survival patterns and replace these with the sevenWisePassions, the easier it will become for you to do this. This, then, is your antidote to resource overwhelm.

Energy Psychology

There is one all-purpose resource that I want to mention here. Some truly exciting new upgrades in the field of psychologyhave been gathering momentum during the last decade. Advances in the newly emerging field of Energy Psychology are finally beginning to align psychology with the stunning discoveriesthat have been made over the past 75 years in the field of quantum physics.

Following some rather hefty initial skepticism, I have become persuaded that these methods are leading the way into twenty-first century psychotherapy and coaching. Energy Psychology methods such as EFT (Emotional Freedom Techniques) and TAT® (Tapas Acupressure Technique®) appear to provide rapid, reliable and lasting assistance with a broad range of baggageremoval and peak performance challenges, through utilizing some of the principles of quantum physics and the new biology. This recently emerging family of methods appears to provide an all-purpose way to upgrade each of your seven WisePassions.

For more about Energy Psychology, go to www.TheNewIQ.com/epaExcerpted & Adapted from “The New IQ: How Integrity Intelligence Serves You, Your Relationships& Our World”

The New IQ Website

Sanoviv Medical Center Website

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Information presented is of a general nature for educational and informational purposes only. Products and information presented herein are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent disease. If you have any concerns about your own health, you should always consult with a physician or other health care professional.