Integral Profiles: Dr. Keith Witt

Eleanor Roosevelt once said that "poor minds discuss people, average minds discuss events, and great minds discuss ideas."  Integral minds, we might add, discuss all three. 

In the Integral Profiles series, host Jeff Salzman sits down with some of today's most notable thinkers, teachers, and leaders, discussing the many ways they are catalyzing the Integral vision in their lives, in their hearts, and in their work.  These men and women are collectively defining the leading edge of evolution in today's world, their thoughts and actions actively influencing the shape and scope of tomorrow's possibilities.

Dr. Keith Witt is a licensed psychologist and marriage family therapist who has practiced psychotherapy in Santa Barbara for over thirty-five years. He received his BA in psychology with honors from UCSB in 1973, his MA in Counseling Psychology from UCSB in 1975, and his Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from The Fielding Institute in 1982. His dissertation exploring somatic psychotherapy was entitled an investigation of the effectiveness of talking plus touching in enhancing health.

Jeff Salzman is lead teacher at Boulder Center for Integral Living as well as part of the founding circle. He is co-founder of CareerTrack Training, and has worked in adult education/transformation for twenty years. For three years Jeff worked side by side with Ken Wilber building the Integral Institute, an International center for Integral theory and application. A Divinity School dropout, he expects to graduate from the Religious Studies Department of Naropa University with a Masters Degree in Indo-Tibetan Studies. Jeff is devoted to the Integral worldview and to helping it arise in people's minds, hearts, bodies, and lives.

Neuroscience, Psychotherapy, Martial Arts, and Spirituality

Here Keith talks about how he brings an attitude of "caring intent" to almost every practice, project, and activity he engages in, infusing his life with the healing radiance of the Integral vision. He and Jeff also explore the fields of neuroscience and psychotherapy, explaining why a psychotherapist who draws upon neuroscience in the therapeutic setting wins the respect of almost everyone around him, except for the neuroscientists themselves. They go on to discuss Keith's deep commitment to martial arts, which he has been practicing since his late teens, and which has brought him to a radical new understanding of physical, energetic, and spiritual realities.

Autobiographic Narratives, Non-Attachment, and Developing Towards God 

Here Keith and Jeff discuss the substance and substrate of each of our own personal stories, which take the form of autobiographical narratives that thread through the many disparate experiences of our lives, and tie these experiences together into a cohesive sense of "self".  They explore the role of relationships—and attachment to those relationships—as important stepping stones (or perhaps chapter markers) for our sacred autobiographies, noting how healthy forms of attachment to our friends, our families, and our community can be of great service to our own growth and development.  The contrast the idea of "securely attached relationships" with the Buddhist precept of non-attachment, emphasizing how the West has tended to mistranslate "non-attachment" as "detachment"—or worse, "disassociation." 

Keith and Jeff then turn their attention to human development through distinct stages of maturity, mentioning some of the qualitative differences between Integral consciousness and earlier stages of consciousness, including a renewed awareness of (and commitment to) spiritual dimensions.  Finally, they talk about some of the many meanings of the word "God" (a concept that is simply way too large to fit into a single three-letter word), exploring 1st-, 2nd-, and 3rd-person approaches to Spirit.