"John Beebe, who has made a lifetime's study of the psychological depths of integrity, says that we learn about integrity when someone brings us their genuine outrage and we have it in us to see what they are talking about and why it was felt as a violation. Letting in that sense of the other's violation might bring a hot scorch of shame, but in the wake of the bushfire appear the truly amazing green shoots of recovery. This kind of opening to the psyche of the other, and its renewal of awareness, can only take place in exchanges of mutual honesty and care, where what is disclosed respects and fits the actual nature and boundaries of the relationship. It is not about maintaining indiscriminate porousness, or making unsolicited or misplaced self-disclosures. When you are seated at the center, a natural sense of checking boundaries and taking care of the boundaries of the other is always in play.
Nor does the openness mean a blind acceptance of every projection that might come your way. For just as integrity starts to nudge us inwardly with shame at our lack of wholeness as we deepen into practice, so too intuition begins to develop in the dark. Intuition sharpens the emotional eye that sees character. And as it develops, so does a more acute sense of the difference between integrity's shame that arises within, and the projection imposed on us by another person to attempt to make us feel bad."
....from Susan Murphy in Upside-down Zen: Finding the Marvelous in the Ordinary, pg. 165-66.
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