Holidays can be tough. For many the holiday season can be the some of the most hectic and challenging weeks of the year, as the accumulated stresses from travel, seasonal affect disorders, and various childhood wounds come to the surface. And these things often have a way of knocking us off of our game, destabilizing our practice and distracting us from our wisest self. Join Lisa and Kevin for a look at not just how to survive the holidays, but how to genuinely thrive and deepen your commitment to practice.

You can find the full 1.5-hour conversation here: https://integrallife.com/the-maturing-test-how-developed-is-the-worlds-most-advanced-ai/ We just subjected the world’s most advanced AI to the world’s most sophisticated test for human maturity. We call it the Maturing Test. Could the results transform our world? Developmental psychologists have demonstrated that a human being grows through a successive progression of increasingly complex stages of meaning-making. These stages of ego/self-identity development can be thought of as coherent structures or patterns of how the “self” of each stage organizes and navigates itself in relation to the world (e.g., think of how the 3 year old self organizes itself and its world versus the 12 year old self versus the 30 year old self, and you’ll begin to appreciate the progression of qualitatively more advanced maturity that occurs). Maturity of a given adult’s ego/self-identity is assessed through language, specifically how they reply to a set of specific sentence prompts, prompts like “A true friend…“, “My mother and I…“, “Rules are…” and a few dozen others. Using this same method, we just assessed GPT-3, the world’s most advanced sentence-generating Artificial Intelligence, having it complete sentence prompts for the Maturity Assessment Profile developed by Dr. Susanne Cook-Greuter. This test and its resulting data has been collected on hundreds of thousands of sentence replies over the course of four decades, and shows that more mature “selves” evidence a growing sophistication, self-awareness, sensitivity and perspectival fluidity as they progress to later, more complex stages of self-development. So what is the maturity level demonstrated by the world’s most advanced AI? It is impressive, promising, and thought-provoking — and in this very special discussion we reveal the results and discuss what they mean, where it may go from here, and how this might impact our world.

You can find the full 2 hour discussion here: https://integrallife.com/therapy-awakening-a-new-integration/ Keith Martin-Smith speaks with Chad Bennett, a psychotherapist and ordained Zen priest, about why our existing ideas of therapy are often limited and keep us bound inside of the therapeutic relationship, unable to learn the skills necessary to continue our own growth towards psychological wholeness. They also discuss the necessity of “Waking Up” practices as a vital part of any therapeutic practice, and how the very idea of liberation needs to be understood as awakening through the ego, not from it. It seems more and more clear that to truly awaken from suffering, a new kind of therapy and a new kind of meditation must be practiced — and that they must be done together. This talk explores how to make this possible for yourself. We hope you enjoy this wide-ranging and deep dive into Waking Up, Cleaning Up, and Growing Up. https://integrallife.com/therapy-awakening-a-new-integration/

What would it look like to re-imagine and redefine the very ways we relate to and participate in our work? In the aftermath of the great resignation, and with headlines talking of “quietly quitting,” what has become clear is that we are in the middle of a global crisis precipitated on a decade or more of rising levels of dissatisfaction with what we call “work.” And while the pandemic was the proverbial straw in this case, the fundamental issue is that we want more from our relationship with work - especially given that it is the place where we spend the majority of our waking hours each week. In this episode Lisa and Kevin speak with Kent Frazier, founder of Fully Human at Work, to understand what practice looks like in this context of our lives.

The WHAT, WHY, and HOW of Integral Practice by Integral Life

“Every moment is a bardo. Every moment is a death, and an opportunity for new life.” —Corey deVos In the Buddhist tradition, the “bardo” refers to the transitional state between lifetimes, a liminal state (or series of states) between death and birth. There are no shortage of practices designed to help us prepare for this ultimate transition — to “practice dying”, as Plato instructed his disciples to do. As Ken Wilber says, “All spiritual practice is a rehearsal—and at its best, an enactment—of death. As the mystics put it, ‘If you die before you die, then when you die, you won’t die.’ In other words, if right now you die to the separate-self sense, and discover instead your real Self which is the entire Kosmos at large, then the death of this particular bodymind is but a leaf falling from the eternal tree that you are.” However, this is not a conversation about death. It is a conversation about life. It’s about recognizing the fact that every moment is a bardo, a transition from one state of being to another state of being — and within these ubiquitous transitions there are opportunities to transcend the karmas of our conditioning, and to channel new kinds of creativity into the world. This discussion is an open-hearted celebration of transition, an appreciation of the fact that there is never any real solid ground beneath our feet, because nothing is truly solid or lasting in this manifest world. We know that, in this reality, “energy cannot be created or destroyed, only changed” — which means that only the changing is real. Creation and destruction, birth and death, are illusions arising from the temporary semi-stable patterns of organization that forever exist in their own perpetual state of transition. The only truly permanent ground we can ever hope to find is the Ground of Being itself, which never actually enters the stream of time to begin with, but nonetheless infuses and envelopes the whole of manifest reality. We hope that this conversation will help you participate more consciously with the ever-changing flow of your own life, and to find new ways to harness the creative engine at the very core of this transitional moment right now.

Watch as Dr. Keith offers a "Psychotherapy Masterclass" that helps us work with various personality types as a foundation for healing, change, and self-actualization. While intended for other psychotherapy professionals, this discussion offers valuable insight for all of us, and can be immediately applied to our personal transformational work, whatever that may be.

Find the rest of the 2-hour discussion here: https://integrallife.com/in-pursuit-of-wholeness-making-room-for-everything/ Today we are going to talk about one of the most important and central ideas in all of integral theory: holons, which are wholes that are simultaneously part of other wholes. This notion of holons — the idea that the universe is fundamentally made of whole/parts within whole/parts within whole/parts, turtles all the way up and turtles all the way down — this isn’t just important in a theoretical or philosophical sense. Understanding holons also helps us make better sense of the world that we live in, and our inner worlds as well. It’s immediately relevant to any number of culture war issues that we see these days, from abortion to immigration to vaccination to the various rights and responsibilities we have as national and global citizens. And it’s an idea that helps us recognize the many different kinds of “wholeness” we can see in the universe, and that we can pursue in our own lives — in our interiors and in our exteriors, both personally and collectively — and helps guide our own growing up, waking up, and cleaning up process. Ken introduces the topic by describing the major themes of his latest book, Making Room for Everything, recently submitted to Shambhala to be published in 2023. This new book works directly with these different kinds of wholeness, and the different ways we can pursue wholeness in our 1st-person experience, in our 2nd-person relationships, and in our 3rd-person work and environments. Watch as Ken describes how the paths of Waking Up, Growing Up, Cleaning Up, Opening Up, and Showing Up all lead us to different kinds of wholeness. Find the rest of the 2-hour discussion here: https://integrallife.com/in-pursuit-of-wholeness-making-room-for-everything/

This week I share our collective outrage and heartbreak over the shooting of the Texas schoolchildren and teachers, and manage to offer some hope that this time it will be different, that this shooting will heighten a social pain-point – unstable young men equipped with weapons of war – sufficiently to transcend political polarities. In this episode I ponder: - America’s enneatype, frontier culture, “traditionalism with guns” - Integrating the MSNBC and FOX News worldviews - Recognizing budding criminality - Matthew Yglesias’s positivity blowback - How about the first part of the second amendment? - The ever-widening circle of moral consideration - What our grandchildren will know - Blessings to all

Sometimes in our psychological development the way forward requires us to go back, to re-explore earlier stages of life to see what is distorted or left unintegrated. This is the theme of the work of my guest today, developmental psychotherapist Kim Barta. He discusses his approach to personal growth, which is based on the STAGES Model of Development created by well-known developmental theorist Terri O’Fallon (who is also Kim’s sister.). Using psychotherapeutic practices, shadow work and meditation, Kim has devised a comprehensive system of self-exploration with stopovers at every stage of development, designed to bring the gifts and powers of that stage online. Shoring up our developmental scaffolding in this way makes us able – and worthy – to grow into the higher stages of integral consciousness, which Kim and the STAGES model also beautifully illuminate. I hope you enjoy my conversation with Kim Barta! – Jeff Salzman