Everyone Is Right

Listen to the full 1.5-hour discussion here: https://integrallife.com/escaping-the-comfort-zone-motivation-shame-and-the-will-to-transform/ How do we cultivate the will to transform? How can we consciously step out of the safety of our comfort zones, and into our greater purpose and potential? Dr. Keith and Corey explore the complex psychology of motivation — the various sticks and carrots we use to get out of bed in the morning and keep ourselves moving forward in our lives, sustaining the inertia we need to push us through any number of hardships, setbacks, and growth opportunities. And of course these sources of motivation are as multifaceted as the human mind itself. We can notice interior motivations and exterior motivations, individual and collective motivations, motivations to feel more whole, motivations to feel like we are part of a greater whole, etc. — all focused, enacted, and enforced in very different ways at each stage of development. So how do we as integralists navigate and reconcile this vast array of motivations, both within us and outside of us? How can we better align ourselves with our deepest, most purposeful motivations so that we can more fully contribute our gifts to the world? Watch as Dr. Keith and Corey explore these questions, and more.

Listen to the full 1.5-hour discussion here: https://integrallife.com/how-to-build-a-conscious-community/ What Would a Genuinely Integral Spiritual Community Look Like? You may be surprised to learn one is actually being built — and launched — right now! Keith Martin-Smith talks with Dr. John Churchill about the themes in Keith’s latest book, When the Buddha Needs Therapy: shadow and awakening, the problem and promise of spiritual communities, the state-stage model as it relates to trauma and growth, narcissism and other personality disorders inside of spirituality, the power and trap of lineage, and what a fully Western version of an awakened spiritual path might look like.

Find the full 1.5 hour discussion here: https://integrallife.com/psychedelic-therapy-and-the-politics-of-consciousness/ In the recent 2022 midterm elections, Colorado joined the state of Oregon in its decriminalization of psychedelic substances for therapeutic use. Here Dr. Keith and Corey explore some of the major implications of this profound legal shift, both in terms of our overall emotional, psychological, and spiritual health, as well as our rapidly evolving “politics of consciousness” — those states of consciousness that are sanctioned by the state, versus those that are not. Watch as we take an in-depth look at the many growth opportunities being surfaced by these changing laws, and how integral concepts such as quadrants, states, and developmental stages help us better understand the effects these substances have on us, as well as the role they have played throughout history.

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.