Watch as Beena Sharma, Susanne Cook-Greuter, and Corey deVos offer a must-see presentation to help us understand the many healthy and unhealthy responses we are seeing to the coronavirus pandemic, all the way up and down the spiral of development. Chances are you are already seeing all of these responses surfacing all around you: in your social media feeds, among your friends and family, and even within yourself. And it can be confusing at times, seeing all these different and often contradictory responses flooding into your consciousness all at once, and trying to navigate our way through them in order to figure out which are more true, which are more partial, and which you resonate with the most. This presentation will help reduce that confusion for you — giving you a way to fold all of these different views and values into a greater sense of wholeness and meaning, while also giving you permission to return to some of these earlier stages in order to tend to the many concerns and anxieties that may be present for you there. It’s important, after all, to remember that none of these stages are inherently “better” or “worse” than any other. Although there are certainly healthy and unhealthy expressions at each stage, and our capacity for both complexity and compassion both increase as we move into the later stages of development, we can nonetheless also find within each of these stages a series of responses that are perfectly appropriate for the various life conditions we may find ourselves in. Sometimes the intelligences and capacities associated with earlier stages are best suited for a particular set of problems, and less suitable for other problems. Sometimes only later stages are capable of handling a certain magnitude of complexity, and other times these later stages can over-complexify certain problems and make things worse. Which means that all of these stages have their appropriate place, both out in the world and within ourselves. So join us as Beena and Susanne help us sort through all of this, taking us on an intimate 1st-person journey from the earliest stages of growth all the way to the deepest transpersonal stages of unity consciousness.

“The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.” ― Ernest Hemingway Our crisis of trust has been rapidly compounding in recent years, as the internet has delivered us into an age of aperspectival madness — an epistemic breakdown where shared reality becomes splintered into hermetically-sealed social media silos, where all enfoldment between opposing perspectives breaks down completely, and where evidence-based truths become sacrificed on the altar of narrative beliefs. “Trust” is something like an immune system for our society. It prevents our collective body from being infected by propaganda, zealotry, and social regression. Here at the tail end of 2020, it is clear that we are experiencing a crisis of truth, as well as a crisis of meaning. And underlying them both is an even deeper crisis — a crisis of trust. Trust, of course, is a paradox. We live in a highly complex and highly specialized civilization. Our daily lives depend upon us being able to trust a massive interconnected system of strangers and institutions, just to be able to put food on the table every night that won’t end up making our families sick. And yet when our fundamental trust in those same strangers and institutions begins to collapse, so do the foundations of civilization itself. When our fundamental trust in each other becomes completely dismantled, then so does our capacity to perceive and understand truth. After all, our perceptions of “truth” depend on a mutual recognition of “truthfulness” — another word for trust. And when we allow ourselves to believe that everyone is always already lying to us from every direction (other than our own preferred media silos, of course), then our reality suddenly becomes unknowable. As President Obama recently said: “If we do not have the capacity to distinguish what’s true from what’s false, then by definition the marketplace of ideas doesn’t work. And by definition our democracy doesn’t work. We are entering into an epistemological crisis.” This is a truly wicked problem. It is a tremendously complex and multivalent challenge, with causes and effects that can be tracked through all four quadrants. And like any other “wicked problem”, it is not something that can be solved in a piecemeal fashion: focus too much on any single variable and all the other variables change immediately — which means that partial solutions actually risk making things worse. Watch as Ryan and I take a deep dive into the wicked problem of social trust, looking at this meta-crisis through each of the four quadrants, as well as some key practices and perspectives that can help us restore our trust in each other, in our institutions, in ourselves, and in the grand evolutionary unfolding itself.

Watch as Ryan and Corey reflect on the results of the 2020 Presidential Election, exploring its implications for the world and within our own hearts, while also creating a space where we can begin to release some of the fears and anxieties many of us have been struggling with during these chaotic and uncertain times. What is our work going forward? How can we begin to heal the deep ruptures that have formed in our society? What sorts of personal and political shadows have emerged for us over the last few years, and how can we better manage and re-integrate those shadows? How can we learn to set our political views and identities aside, so that we can find a deeper and more fulfilling connection with each other? How do we skillfully engage with friends and family members who subscribe to unfalsifiable narrative realities such as QAnon? After years of social fragmentation and media balkanization, how can we possibly begin to put Humpty Dumpty back together again? We hope you enjoy this special post-election episode of Inhabit! Let us know what you think in the comments below.

Corey deVos and Mark Fischler discuss how best to expand and embody our most integral influences and intentions. Excerpted from the full 2-hour conversation here: https://integrallife.com/the-fierce-urgency-of-now/

In this very special episode of Inhabit, Ryan and I focus on one of the most essential elements of any Integral Life Practice — directly engaging your democratic systems and showing up to cast your vote. Watch as Ryan and I discuss the following: -Why it’s never a good idea to base our electoral decisions on the current state of the culture wars - Why it’s important to differentiate “politics” from “governance” - Why it’s important to differentiate ordinary people on the left and the right from the social holons of Democratic and GOP political parties. - Can a person’s political views be used to assess their overall development? - Can a solidly integral person be a Trump supporter? (Spoiler: of course they can.) I also offer an in-depth exploration of cynicism — how to recognize it in our own lives, and how to escape its corrosive influence. We do this by drilling down to a more fundamental polarity — the “trust but verify” polarity, which shows how trust and assumptions of good-faith should be integrated with healthy skepticism and critical thinking. But when this polarity becomes disintegrated and balkanized, it inevitably takes us into the negative poles of naïveté and cynicism. The good news is, by understanding this core polarity we can wrap some healthy guardrails around our own enactment of political reality, and catch ourselves when we feel ourselves sliding toward one of these unhealthy poles. Why is this important? “Corruption” and “cynicism” are related in many important ways. Many of us feel like our cynicism is a natural response to corruption — why should we trust a system that is so obviously rigged against us? However, the opposite is equally if not more true: it’s not so much that corruption results in cynicism, but rather cynicism creates a vacuum that gets immediately fillled with corruption. Which makes “escaping cynicism” absolutely paramount right now, as it is one of the most significant obstacles preventing so many of us from fully inhabiting this democracy, making our voices heard, and choosing the deliberately-partial actions and decisions required to move the political pendulum where we'd like to see it to go, rather than waiting for the world to catch up with us before we are willing to participate. Finally, I take a few moments to present my “3-Point Plan to Save Democracy” — the three most crucial systemic changes we need to make in the Lower-Right quadrant in order to restore healthy political enfoldment, de-escalate the culture wars, and rehabilitate our democracy. You don’t want to miss that.

Fear: it gets a bad rap in many spiritual communities. In fact, it’s often seen as anti-spiritual — “the opposite of love isn’t hate, it’s fear.” “Wherever there is another, fear arises.” And so on. All of which is absolutely true — on an absolute level. On another level, the level of ordinary, everyday relative truth, fear is a powerful motivator — and when it’s properly managed it can even be a superpower, allowing you to respond to danger with greater speed, strength, and agility.

Imagine your car breaks down on the highway. You get out to inspect the damage, and as you look up you see another car barreling down the highway right at you. In that moment, you have two choices. You can drop your fear, knowing that ultimately there is no separation between you and the speeding car. And the good news is, in just a few seconds you will be proven right. Or you can listen to that ancient feeling of dread rising in your body, and get yourself out of harm’s way just before you actually do become one with the car, smeared across the windshield. So fear is an incredibly important evolutionary defense. But when we are not fully conscious of our fear states — when we find ourselves in fear, rather than finding fear within ourselves — it robs us of our ability to respond. And when that fear begins to move through the collective it becomes an ever-present background radiation in our lives. It clouds our judgment. It makes us suspicious of other people and perspectives. It becomes an ongoing source of cynicism and despondency. It erodes our capacity to listen and empathize. Sound familiar? Welcome to life in 2020! We are surrounded by truly terrifying realities, and regardless of your own ongoing sources of fear — whether it’s COVID, climate change, your health, your employment, or culture war issues like MAGA extremism, Antifa violence, white supremacy, or cultural Marxism — these fears tend to haunt us from somewhere in the background of our consciousness, exerting a corruptive influence that can distort our lens and pollute our informational terrain. We search for a sense of certainty, some solid ground where we can find traction against our unconscious fears, often resulting in an elaborate labyrinth of half-truths, false equivalencies, and confirmation biases that cause us to overemphasize certain realities while dismissing others. Which is why Ryan and I wanted to do this episode. Because when you do not allow yourself to confront and fully own your fear, you immediately push it into your shadow, where it begins to infect and reorganize your unconscious attitudes and biases in order to protect you from some looming, unseen threat. This is how we bring natural evolutionary fear and spiritual fearlessness into alignment. You don’t need to push away your fear, neither do you need to surrender to it. All you need to do is to inhabit your fear – allow it to freely move through you, allow yourself to respond however you need to respond in the moment, and notice any interior frictions as it passes through your system so you know nothing is getting “stuck” or pushed into shadow. So we hope you enjoy this very special episode of Inhabit, and that it helps you to use your own fear as a superpower to get you more engaged, direct your skillful action, and create a better and more just world for everyone else.

Julia Ormond interviews Sebastian Siegel at the 2020 Integral European Conference about the film adaptation of "Grace and Grit". Bence Ganti facilitates with an introduction to Ken Wilber. They discuss book-to-film, acting, directing, producing, characters and set, filmming, and pivotal elements of production.

“Shadow” refers to any of the hidden allergies, addictions, biases, or blind spots that may be kicking around in our consciousness, distorting our perceptions and limiting our capacity to find genuine happiness, fulfillment, and self-transcending wisdom. Often our shadows are the result of some hidden, unintegrated piece of ourselves that we are projecting outward onto the world around us, and sometimes they are the result of internalizing shadows that are not our own, but infect our self-concept nonetheless. In both cases, we have a simple but elegant practice to help us re-integrate our shadows, what is commonly known as the “3-2-1 shadow process” — a practice that helps you to recognize your shadow in 3rd person, to relate with your shadow in 2nd person, and to finally reclaim and inhabit your shadow in your own 1st-person experience. Watch as Ryan and I explore the following questions: - How often should we practice our shadow work? - How can we keep our perceptual lenses clean and clear from shadow residue? - How can we better manage our informational terrain so it does not become distorted by ideological shadow? - How can we cultivate more “epistemic humility”, and more of the wisdom that comes from recognizing just how partial our own views and biases can be? - What are some of the common shadows we see in the larger integral community itself? - How can we bring more embodiment to our shadow practice, so it’s not just a “neck-up” exercise? - Why is it rude to make objects out of other people’s subjects? - Can we up-level “Woke culture” by holding their core values as an invitation to do our own shadow work, rather than as an excuse to self-righteously bludgeon everyone else for their shadows? - Why do spiritual communities often seem to be a breeding ground for shadow? We didn’t want this to be just another abstract discussion about the various tender parts and blind spots in our psychology, so Ryan and Corey put a bit of their own skin in the game by offering some examples of their own shadow challenges, both large and small, and how they have worked with these shadows over the years*. It is an invitation for all of us to cultivate the strength, vulnerability, and humility to bring our shadow work further into the light, and to practice our own growing capacity to manage shadow material as it emerges in real time. As I often like to say, if you are someone who is trying to shine a light on the various “collective shadows” we are all suspended in, one of the best ways to do so is to simply perform your own shadow work publicly, if only to demonstrate your capacity to discern where your personal shadow ends, and the “collective shadow” begins. We hope you enjoy the discussion! Let us know what you think in the comments below. *And if you watch really closely, you might notice another one of my own shadows that went completely unseen during this show: at multiple points in this episode, I refer to the year as 2019 (it’s 2020) and I say I am 42 years old (I am 43). What’s that all about?

Ed Kowalczyk is the lead singer/songwriter of the rock group Live, who at the time of this recording had just released their sixth studio album, Birds of Pray, and whose first single “Heaven” had already topped the Liquid Audio Download charts for digital singles. Live has had a phenomenal success, selling over 20 million albums worldwide, including two #1 albums on the Billboard charts (Throwing Copper, Secret Samadhi) and five #1 singles. Ed Kowalczyk is a pioneer in integral art, attempting to bring a spiritual edge to that most raucous of art form—rock and roll. We caught Ed on his cell phone the day before he and the band left for a six-week European tour with Bon Jovi. In this intimate discussion of the heart of a rock and roll (that actually has heart), Eddie talks about how the very essence of an authentic performance is awakening and sharing with the audience a glimpse into that one-ness that is everybody’s natural condition. If you don’t think rock and roll can do this, you haven’t heard Live….

How do we stay centered and grounded, when the ground is constantly being moved from under our feet? With so much bias, polarization, and radicalization taking place all around us, how can we prevent our own views and values from being hijacked and pushed to their extremes? When we are drowning in so much information, misinformation, conflicting narratives, and conspiracy theories, how can we prevent our own informational terrain from becoming distorted by propaganda, partial thinking, and malevolent influences? Watch as Ryan and Corey explore how Integral Practice allows us to more fully inhabit our ground by helping us bring more awareness to the most fundamental dimensions of our own lived territory: - Waking Up to the Absolute Ground of Being, the unmovable mountain at the very center of you, the groundless Ground that can never be taken away from you;
 - Understanding how the multiple stages of Growing Up allow us to see and enact the world in very different ways, preventing us from getting swept up by unfalsifiable narratives and low-resolution views;
 - How the practice of Cleaning Up allows us to recognize and reintegrate our own shadows that we might be projecting onto the world around us (lack of control, lack of certainty, suspicion of authority, etc.) as well as the cultural shadows we may have introjected, internalized, and made our own;
 - How properly identifying and integrating polarities helps prevent us from getting blown by the winds of radicalization that are pushing people toward one extreme pole or another;
 - How the Integral Sensibility allows us to more fluidly navigate this complex informational terrain with more compassion, discernment, and strategic action;
 - How the Integral View helps us replenish our optimism while also placing guardrails around disembodied and untenable idealism (“Here’s where I want to go, and I refuse to get in the car until we get there”). We are also joined by our friend Marshall Aeon, who tells us how his own Diamond Approach practice has helped him find the ground he needs to explore the complexity of our world and its many rabbit holes with curiosity, careful discernment, and integrity. We also discuss one of the central polarities and sources of conflict within the integral community — the tension between “orthodox” and “heterodox” sources of information. What is an appropriate balance to strike between “consensus reality” and “conspiracy theory”, both in terms of how we seek out new information and how we enfold that information into our overall view of the world? How can we keep an open mind, but not so open that our brain falls out completely? We hope you enjoy this fascinating discussion with Ryan Oelke, Corey deVos, and Marshall Aeon!