Everyone Is Right

Watch the full discussion here: https://integrallife.com/perspectives-on-develoment-introducing-the-stages-model/ Terri O’Fallon takes us on a guided journey through her STAGES model, an integrally based development model that charts human development from infancy to the highest levels of development that humans are capable of. Terri’s research is based in the number of perspectives a person can take (1st through 7th) – and she explains how different levels of fluency with these perspectives can often cause us to talk “past” or “over” one another, and how familiarizing ourselves with these perspectives can help us stop doing that. Terri and Keith start with a brief overview of what exactly adult ego growth is, and why it matters. They also explore why adult developmental psychology — despite being part of the academic culture for more than 100 years — isn’t more understood and used by mainstream therapist and psychologists. Terri also explores how many of our culture wars are generated from conflicts between these stages — certain perspectives are able to see (and therefore respond to) social challenges that other perspectives simply cannot yet Finally, Terri spends some time unpacking her data on a 5th person perspective (mature Integral, or Turquoise) what that perspective sees, how it relates to the Wilber-Combs Lattice and to Post-Modernity (and to Integral), and how one might know for themselves what this means.

Watch the full 2-hour discussion here: https://integrallife.com/transform-the-police-a-more-integral-approach-to-law-enforcement/ Mark and Corey are joined by Chris Orrey, a retired police lieutenant with over 30 years of service with the Hayward, California Police Department, to discuss the abuse and resulting death of Tyre Nichols, who was severely beaten by five Memphis police officers after a routine traffic stop. What allowed this tragedy (and others like it) to take place, and what sorts of institutional transformation are necessary to prevent them from occurring again? We were very excited to have Chris join us for this discussion — not only because of her experience as a former police lieutenant, but also because she is leading the Integrative Policing Transformation Initiative over at the Institute of Applied Metatheory, designed to map the fuller complexity of policing in the United States and examine how a transformation toward a fuller guardian model of policing might be achieved. If you are at all interested in supporting this tremendously important and timely endeavor, we encourage you to get in touch here: https://instituteofappliedmetatheory.org/donations/integrative-policing-transformation-initiative/ One of the primary factors we discuss is how our modern Orange standards of law and justice depend on Amber enforcement agencies being healthy, trustable, and reliable — otherwise the entire system breaks down as the public looses confidence in the police’s ability to serve the community. And without this Orange-stage accountability and oversight, Amber groups often go bad fairly quickly — we don’t only see this in policing, but also in organizations such as the military, the Boy Scouts, the Catholic Church, and others. Closed-off Amber groups often tend to normalize, justify, and cover for all sorts of abuse within the group — even when that abuse is coming from a small number within the group. There is a natural Amber drive to protect the group at all costs (such as the “blue line of silence” within policing culture) which prevents real accountability from taking place, and which in turn drives more resentment and mistrust between the population and the police in general. We go on to talk about a number of other critical factors and leverage points in each of the four quadrants, including: UL (Intentional problems/solutions) * Creating more support and healing for officers (e.g. helping officers with accumulated job-related traumas), * Training greater emotional intelligence to help with empathy and  de-escalation of violence * State training to help officers better regulate and manage intense emotional and psychological states of consciousness (e.g. the natural fight or flight response) in both officers and criminal suspects)
 UR (Behavioral problems/solutions) * Managing physiological states associated with interior mental/emotional states (e.g. adrenaline, overall physical health of the officer) * Identifying multiple skillsets to deal with different kinds of confrontations and social challenges, * Recruitment strategies to attract more healthy and ethical officer candidates LL (Cultural problems/solutions) * Expanding officers' sense of "we" to include the communities they are protecting, * Restoring trust by creating more connective tissue between police and the communities they serve, * Dismantling internal "blue wall of silence" culture within police culture, LR (Systemic problems/solutions) * External social/environmental conditions (overall social violence, proliferation of guns, race and racism, etc.), * Outmoded social inertias from previous policing eras that remain with us today, * Rethinking “qualified immunity” that often prevents abusive officers from being held accountable, * Various forms of corruption and bias in justice systems, * Bringing more Orange-stage accountability to Amber-stage police organizations

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