ACTivity/ Integral Life Practice

Photo by The Phope on Unsplash.

Manila, 10 November 2021 — Why this is a good time to start cross-training your body, mind, spirit and shadow.

Story

It happened in 2010. Several threads in my life started coming together as if to weave a new tapestry. One of these threads was my newly discovered passion to coach colleagues at work with an integral approach. Another was to practice integral thinking in planning the next stage in my career. And a third was to revitalize my body, mind, and spirit in an integral way. As these threads came together, I also discovered how to do shadow work to reintegrate parts of me that had been pushed aside during the scrambles of life and work.

What this experience felt like to me was as if a number of different voices were merging together into a new song, with plenty of improvisation as we hear in jazz. The key for me was to integrate voices and experiences and move forward with those together. The trigger to this new experience for me was a book called Integral Life Practice by Terry Patten, a philosopher, critical writer, and integral coach.

Patten left life last month, and this post is my tribute to him for what I see as his greatest accomplishment. That is to take the academic work on Integral Theory by Ken Wilber, a fellow philosopher, and turn it into a comprehensive yet practical guide for leading an integral life. Patten’s book is an extraordinary guide, full of exercises that are put forward as a cross-training for the core areas of our life. It has played a key part in my journey of turning integral thinking into everyday practice. I hope that it will help you too.

Challenge

Taking up an integral life practice seems particularly important in this time where most of us are experiencing challenges in our work and personal lives from the changes brought by the Covid-19 pandemic, as well as the unprecedented climate challenge we are facing together for sustaining life on Earth with the hope for happiness and prosperity for the next generations. 

Until recently, before the pandemic that is, we were used to dividing our work and life into separate spaces and times. Living and working our way through the pandemic has caused many of these dividing lines to get blurred. This has given us new ideas and expectations for how to live our lives in a new normal, and I see that as a good thing. Yet to make this new normal work for us, and overcome the uncertainties we keep encountering along the way, it will help to have a framework that is both comprehensive and practical.

And that framework is exactly what Patten and Wilber set out to create through their partnership for Integral Life Practice. They boiled down a treasure trove of wisdom and science from the East and the West into a set of practices for our new normal of 21st-century life and leadership. Wilber has always reminded his readers and viewers that for any philosophy to be useful, it must be lived and experienced. The term used by Wilber is ‘enacted’ and that points to practice. Lots of it.

Question

Patten’s accomplishment is to make it easy for us to select our own mix of ‘cross-training’ exercises from a set of core integral life modules covering body, mind, spirit, and shadow work, supplemented by exercises from optional modules on ethics, work, communication and more. For those with little time to spare, the guide even offers a series of 1-minute modules that can be integrated easily into a busy workday. 

There is nothing directive in the book on what you should think, just a guide on how to exercise in a balanced way. Integral Life Practice can, therefore, be taken up by anyone from any background, religion, belief, or nonbelief. The term Integral means comprehensive, balanced, and inclusive, and that’s precisely what this guide is all about. 

Here is my question for you. To live your best life and grow to your potential, what framework will you use to exercise your body, mind, spirit and reintegrate your shadow? Using Integral Life Practice will turn you into a life-long learner by ‘enacting’ the world’s most comprehensive philosophy for life in the 21st-century. As a student of integral life practice, I can say that it inspires me daily.