Holidays can be tough. For many the holiday season can be the some of the most hectic and challenging weeks of the year. 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.
Open Yourself to Greater Freedom and Flow
Aneesah WilhelmstätterCome practice with Aneesah, using N.A.I.L. Freedom, her dynamic self-reflection tool specifically crafted to help you step into the space between stimulus and response, where you always have enough freedom to do the next right thing. This four-step alignment process can help you unshackle yourself from irrational fears, step into the flow, and flourish in all areas of your life.
Work as Practice, Practice as Work
Lisa Frost, Kevin Snorf and Kent FrazierWhat would it look like to re-imagine and redefine the very ways we relate to and participate in our work? 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
Lisa Frost and Kevin SnorfThe truth is, you’re always practicing something. What is your default practice if you are not practicing consciously?
Embody Your Ancestry
Lee MasonThe goal of this practice is to invite you to consciously embody both your unique individual ancestry and the ancestry that you share with all life. Doing this exercise can help you to feel more at home in reality and more deeply appreciate your interconnectedness with all life.
Integral Life Practice: Enough Talk, It’s Time to Live!
Terry Patten and Ken WilberTerry Patten and Ken Wilber take an in-depth look at their book Integral Life Practice: A 21st-Century Blueprint for Physical Health, Emotional Balance, Mental Clarity, and Spiritual Awakening. ILP is a highly distilled, easily customizable, and radically inclusive approach to practice, based on the most comprehensive map of human potentials we currently have.
Principles of Integral Life Practice
Forest JacksonThis article presents the state-of-the-art design elements of Integral Life Practice, which is a method of supporting personal or professional growth into greater levels of success and actualization. Integral Life Practice is guided by Integral Theory, the fundamental elements of which are briefly reviewed before the author postulates six tenets of Integral Life Practice. The flexible, modular design of Integral Life Practice is described in detail, and suggestions are given for creating integrally informed basic and advanced practices that will have a high degree of transformative efficacy.
An Introduction to Integral Life Practice
Adam LeonardIntegral Life Practice — the conscious exercise of body, mind, and spirit in self, culture, and nature — uses the AQAL Integral map to orient the many growth techniques invented by humans throughout the ages.
Zero to Awake
Jogen SalzbergJoin a multi-dimensional guided meditation and pointing-out instruction tour led by Integral Practice Leader Jogen Salzberg, Sensei through awareness in its various extra-ordinary modes. The tour encompasses the 3 Faces of Spirit through the practice of sparking Wonder, resting into Calm-Abiding, recognizing Spaciousness, orienting to Timelessness, affirming Selflessness and finally being the Clear Light Nature of Mind itself.
3-Body Workout
Integral LifeThis series of movements (sometimes called Integral Kata) is a way to contact and exercise your three bodies: physical/gross, subtle, and causal.
The Art of Practice: Forgiveness Made Easy
Barbara Hunt, Lisa Frost and Corey deVosTo authentically forgive — what Barbara describes as “the absolute refusal to hold ill will against someone for what they did or didn’t do” — can actually be tremendously challenging. Fortunately Barbara Hunt is with us to help make it simple. Watch as Barbara talks to Lisa and Corey about forgiveness as an integral “master practice” — a practice that scaffolds and supports the rest of our various waking up, growing up, cleaning up, and showing up practices.
From Languishing to Flourishing
Lee Mason and Robb SmithRobb Smith talks with Lee Mason about what an integral approach to flourishing looks like, and what we know about the science of getting out of languishing.
Getting Over Ourselves
Nomali Perera, Lisa Frost and Corey deVosNomali talks to Lisa and Corey about the many opportunities and obstacles we face in our practice, and how to deepen our commitment to our own process of waking up, growing up, cleaning up, and showing up. We follow the subtle threads of love, death, and vitality that weave through each of our practices and connect us together as a community, while reminding each other that we can only truly be ourselves if we are willing to actually get over ourselves.
Inhabit: Your Practice
Ryan Oelke and Corey deVosWhy is Integral Life Practice so important? What is truly unique about the ILP approach that other approaches are missing? How do we bring more depth, elegance, and embodiment to whatever practices we might already be engaging in? Watch as Ryan and Corey offer some practical advice to help you deepen and enrich your practice, helping you shift your attention from the integral map to an actual lived experience of the integral territory.
Unpacking the Integral Enneagram
Corey deVos and Lisa FrostWhat exactly is the Enneagram, and what makes it such a helpful tool when it comes to our ongoing growth and awakening? Watch as Lisa and Corey offer a broad introduction to the Integral Enneagram, as well as to the many Enneagram offerings we currently have available on Integral Life.
Overcoming Bias in Practice
Aneesah Wilhelmstätter, Lisa Frost and Corey deVosWhat do we do when experiences of bias arise within our practice, or even within our practice community? What is the best way to verify whether these biases are real in the first place, and overcome them when they are?
The Art of Practice: Introducing ILP
Corey deVos and Lisa FrostJoin Lisa Frost and Corey deVos in a new monthly series that will explore how to bring more depth and artistry to our Integral Life Practice — the very best and most effective practices to help you Wake Up, Grow Up, Clean Up, and Show Up in your life, your relationships, and your work in the world.
Divided Minds, Divided Societies: How ILP Can Help Heal Social Division
Robb SmithIn this compilation of highlights from Divided Minds, Divided Societies: How ILP Can Help Heal Social Division, Integral Life CEO Robb Smith’s session at our recent exhale online retreat, Robb argues that it is partly our responsibility to help others reduce their fears in a world that’s getting more complex and feels more threatening to tens of millions of people — particularly those at earlier stages of development, education and openness.
The Four Energies: Turn Your Energy Into Things That Matter
Ginny WhitelawGinny Whitelaw helps you experience the four energy patterns that show up in the human nervous system. All of us possess these four patterns, and though most of us have our favorites, all four are available to us at all times. Each is good at different things, and here you will learn what each one is good for, which ones you might use or overuse, and how you can tap into any of them at the right time in order to lead with your fullest and most authentic purpose.
Life as Practice: Karma Yoga and Awakening Service
Roger WalshAnyone who is deeply committed to contemplative practice and to cultivating the qualities it enhances—such as empathy, compassion, clarity and insight, to name only a few—will want to practice as continuously as possible. This means finding a way to use our daily activities and work as part of our practice. Fortunately, such a way is part of the world’s major religious-spiritual traditions, and it is formulated most explicitly in Hinduism as karma yoga.
From Trauma to Transcendence
Dr. Keith WittThis practice will help you cultivate the courage to face your trauma, discover an unbreakable source of resilience and empathy within yourself, and find deeper meaning in your suffering — so that you yourself can become a source of strength and healing for the rest of the world.
Overcome Frustration by Accepting What is Happening, Right Now
Integral LifeAre you angry, upset or frustrated by a situation in the world, or perhaps someone in your life? Are you having trouble accepting some circumstance in your life? Learn to address it constructively by practicing acceptance in the face of difficult feelings. This one minute practice can help you do so.
The Embodied Success Shift: A Simple Meditation to Cut Through the Hustle and Cure Your Burnout
Ryan OelkeThis 7-minute meditation is very easy to follow, and empowers you to quickly experience the shift from living outside of yourself to resting in the fullness and foundation of your body. Feel the difference between living on the surface of yourself and what’s it’s like to return within your body, to the center of your life.
The Art and Practice of Happiness
Dr. Keith Witt, Jeff Salzman and Corey deVosWatch as Dr. Keith Witt, Jeff Salzman, and Corey deVos take an in-depth look at the art of happiness, exploring some of the central perspectives and practices that can lead to a more happy, wise, and fulfilling life.
Reclaiming Your Power While Struggling With Chronic Illness
Dr. Lynn Royster FuentesLynn Fuentes offers a brief teaching about how to reclaim your power while struggling with the sense of disempowerment that often accompanies various kinds of chronic illness, whether you are dealing with your personal health issues or those of a loved one.
A New Republic of the Heart: The Art and Practice of Sacred Activism
Terry Patten and Ken WilberTerry Patten talks to Ken Wilber about his new book, A New Republic of the Heart: An Ethos for Revolutionaries, inviting us to align our “inner work” with our “outer work” and establish sacred activism as both a fundamental component of our ongoing Integral Life Practice, as well as the ultimate expression of that practice.
Sacred Activism: The Practice of Civic Engagement
Terry Patten and Corey deVosTerry, Corey, and our live viewers discuss the integral moral imperative to engage more deeply with the many systems we are governed by, and to show up more fully in a world that is getting better and better, worse and worse, faster and faster, and crying out for the sort of integral solutions that only you can begin to provide.
Customize Your Mindfulness for Resilience and Impact
Meg SalterMindfulness can feel like swimming upstream against your own mind. Yet the benefits are clear: enhanced attention, empathy, and resilience, and reduced anxiety, stress, and even insomnia. Unfortunately, too many people don’t find a practice that works for them and their daily lives. This series comes in five parts: an introduction and four follow-on sessions, each with a sample mindfulness practice based on the four primary ways of relating to the world.
The Mysterious Art of Letting Go
Craig HamiltonCraig Hamilton offers some simple pointing-out instructions to help you “let go and let God”. These practices are not designed to try to get you into any particular state of consciousness, but to liberate you from the need to have any particular state or any particular feeling to be free.
Awaken to Your True Nature
Craig HamiltonA radical new approach to spiritual practice is being born, bringing the possibility of authentic spiritual Enlightenment within reach for all of us. Craig calls it “The Practice of Direct Awakening.” And it is rapidly turning every assumption we’ve had about spiritual practice and Enlightenment on its head.
The Gift of Gratitude
Jeff Salzman and Corey deVosJeff and Corey explore one of the most powerful and universal practices available to us: the practice of gratitude. In times of peak stress, peak fear, and peak anxiety, gratitude is more important than ever. Which means that this year, perhaps more than any other year in recent memory, we could use a nice dose of gratitude to help remind ourselves of the incredible goodness, beauty, and truth that we are all surrounded by. This in turn helps us relax our cynicism, loosen our negative fixations, and make our “skin-encapsulated egos” just a little bit more porous.
The Heart of Integral Parenting
Miriam Mason Martineau, Jeff Salzman and Corey deVosOur dear friend Miriam Mason Martineau joins us to explore the exceptionally rich topic of integral parenting. It’s hard to imagine a more important, more meaningful, or more immediately fulfilling application of integral thought and practice than this one.
Finding Your Inner Home
Miriam Mason MartineauThis practice will help you discern where you are coming from within yourself in each moment — your egoic self, or your deeper essential Self — and enable you to live and relate from a place of presence and centered-ness, so that you can respond rather than react to your child.
Why Meetings Suck (And How You Can Make Them More Fun, Efficient, and Engaging)
Joanne HuntJoin us in this role-playing exercise as four colleagues undergo the first 2 minutes of a business meeting where they discuss a new project. Watch how each participant brings a dramatically different Native Perspective — or “orienting quadrant” — to the table, then get inside their heads to see how they interpret the meeting. Can you spot your own Native Perspective?
A Taste of Centering Prayer
Father Thomas KeatingCentering Prayer is a simple Christian practice that helps us to locate and take refuge in our “inner room,” consent to the presence of God-in-2nd-person, and lead us into deep prayer, devotion, and contemplation of the divine. Listen as Father Thomas offers a short guided practice of Centering Prayer.
Your Native Perspective: Better Relationships
Integral LifeThis practice will help you become more fluent with native perspectives — four fundamental ways of being, perceiving, and doing — in both yourself and in other people.
Essential Meditations: Shamatha and Vipashyana
Andrew HolecekIn this excerpt from the Okay, I’m Dead… Now What? web course, acclaimed teacher Andrew Holecek offers guided instructions for two fundamental types of meditative practices: Shamatha and Vipashyana meditations.
Aesthetic Practice: Looking at the Overlooked
Michael SchwartzMichael Schwartz offers a powerful aesthetic exercise to help you activate the various perspectives on art (including becoming aware where we are stuck in the fluidity of our perspective taking) and integrate those perspectives into a higher-order perception that will profoundly expand and deepen your aesthetic experience.
Contemplation on Death and Impermanence
Terry PattenTerry Patten offers a short guided meditation to help you reduce the existential fear, dread, and anxiety surrounding death by shifting your attention and identification to the indestructible presence at the very center of your being.
Basic Meditation Instructions
Terry PattenTerry Patten offers some very basic instructions to help you kickstart your meditation practice. He also offers an extended segment on “Integral Inquiry”, a simple but powerful technique that can deepen your ongoing practice.
Get a Feel for Integral
Integral LifeConsciously following the deepest contours of your very own nature is the foundation of any Integral Life Practice. Here you will learn how to feel these basic dimensions of your being, simply by noticing what is already present.
Full Spectrum Mindfulness: A Guided Tour
Ken WilberKen Wilber offers a blistering in-depth guided tour through his widely acclaimed Full Spectrum Mindfulness teaching, a series of simple but powerful practices to unlock your deepest sources of power, love, wisdom, and self-mastery.
Compassionate Exchange
Integral LifeCompassionate Exchange is a way to move freely through all perspectives available to you, instead of staying chronically identified with only one. In this meditative practice, we consciously and deliberately exchange self for other.
The 1-2-3 of God
Terry PattenThe 1-2-3 of God practice will help dramatically deepen your own ongoing practice by getting you in touch with each of the three fundamental dimensions of spiritual unfolding.
The 3-2-1 Shadow Process: Face It, Talk to It, Be It
Diane Musho HamiltonA crucial aspect of any integral practice is a way to be profoundly honest with ourselves about our shadow, or unconscious, or false self, or dishonesty, or disowned self. The 3-2-1 Process is a simple and effective tool for working with the shadow — any part of ourselves that we unconsciously repress or deny.
The Five Phases of Change
Mary SaundersMary Saunders explores the primordial qualities of earth, wood, fire, metal, and water as elemental energies in nature, within our bodies, and within our psyche — a model for physical health, emotional intelligence, and spiritual maturity.
Unleash Your Productivity With Power Hours
Integral LifePower hours – two-hour, highly-focused blocks of time – are one of the secrets to staying focused and productive at work, school and at home. This one technique will skyrocket your productivity.
Increase Your Erotic Polarity
Dr. Keith WittRenowned marriage and family therapist Dr. Keith Witt offers a short practice to reinvigorate your “erotic polarity” — one of the fundamental forces that sustain thriving relationships.
Cultivating Wisdom
Roger WalshIn an era drenched in data, a desire for wisdom has been reborn. Where can we go to learn about wisdom? This ILP module offers distillations of the world’s accumulated wisdom — ancient and modern, religious and scientific, philosophical and psychological.
8 Questions that Disrupt Negativity & Depression
Integral LifeDepressive symptoms are often accompanied by rumination, or persistent cycles of distorted, negative thinking that undermines your mental clarity. The good news is that with practice you can interrupt these cycles. Use these eight questions to assess the reality of your negative thinking and consider alternative possibilities.
You’re Angry! Find Your Deeper Unmet Need & Reframe Your Anger
Integral LifeAnger arises when you feel like you’ve been violated: you are interpreting some situation or behavior, whether it was done intentionally or not, as a very real violation of your deeper needs or values. It’s usually sourced in a deeper need that’s not being met. This practice is designed to help you find it.
The Koan of Chronic Illness
Dr. Lynn Royster FuentesLynn Royster Fuentes looks at the question of chronic illness as part of a koan, a puzzle you have been asked to solve, an all-encompassing and fundamental question that can be answered and re-answered as you investigate the approaches that will reduce your suffering.
What’s Beneath Your Anxiety?
Integral LifeAnxiety feels terrible, a gnawing fear that is hard to pin down and harder to shake. This activity may help you alleviate anxiety: when you can see the core fear that’s really underneath your anxiety, you loosen its hold on your emotions and feel more empowered to address it.
The Zen Leader: From Coping to Transforming
Ginny WhitelawDr. Ginny Whitelaw offers a practice that explores Zen leadership, an authentic expression of the connected Self to serve people, create value and beauty in the world and take away fear.
Death & Dying
Andrew HolecekJoin Tibetan Buddhist teacher and end of life expert Andrew Holecek as he walks you through a powerful, and life-changing, one-hour ILP coaching session to better understand death and liberate you from the false identity that keeps you trapped in the fear that your true self is anything other than timeless.
Profound Connection
Diane Musho HamiltonJoin renowned mediator Diane Hamilton in order to enhance your happiness and deepen your relationships by learning to navigate the three native perspectives that can unlock your power, passion and authenticity in every important relationship in your life.
Discover Your Enneagram Type
Helen PalmerAn extraordinary presentation to help you discover more clarity and wellbeing, with practices for each personality type delivered via a deepening understanding of your inner observer.
Real Yoga: Liberate Your Posture
Sofia DiazMost yoga programs promise to bring you more strength, more endurance, and more flexibility. Real Yoga does too, but goes several steps further, helping you cultivate these very same qualities on the inside as much as the outside. Not just in your body, but also in your heart, mind, and spirit. Sofia Diaz leads an exquisite 1-hour yoga practice, excerpted from her full Real Yoga web course.
Full Spectrum Mindfulness: The Hunger Drive
Ken WilberKen Wilber offers a taste of his Full Spectrum Mindfulness training program, focusing here on the most fundamental level of mindfulness — the hunger drive.
A Transforming Friendship With Jesus
Paul SmithPaul Smith leads you to a full-spectrum realization of God — a God who is big enough to satisfy our minds, close enough to touch our hearts, and familiar enough to easily recognize how God intersects with innermost Self.
Body Mind Moment Training
Rob McNamaraBody Mind Moment Strength Training is designed to help you integrate your workouts into your daily life with the intention of you gaining confidence in your abilities to feel fully alive and to meet the challenges the world presents. Rob’s approach (demonstrated here with his student Maria Bailey) goes way beyond normal strength training goals of developing more muscle or sculpting your body to fit into your skinny jeans, but rather is intended to guide your bodily awareness into what it means to live more completely.
Plant Plus Personalized Nutrition
Joan BorysenkoThe Plant Plus Diet Solution is a user-friendly synthesis of where nutrition is going in the 21st century. It will help you make sense of dietary confusion, give you suggestions on how to personalize your approach to food and bring the practice of mindfulness to bear on that relationship.
Loving Completely
Dr. Keith WittDr. Keith Witt offers a taste of his Loving Completely practice program, an exceptional web course that helps deepen the whole relationship by acknowledging and working with the intrinsic wholeness of human beings.
Spirituality for the Inner Skeptic
Terry PattenTerry Patten helps us explore our own inner skeptic, and suggests practices that lead us into a greater awareness of the mystery of life — whether you identify this experience in spiritual terms or not.
Integral Enlightenment
Craig HamiltonThis practice embraces the wisdom of the great meditative traditions, but also reaches forward to unleash the profound spiritual potential inherent in our recently evolved capacities for self-awareness, introspection, self-authorship and relational intimacy.
Always Already: The Brilliant Clarity of Ever-Present Awareness
Ken WilberIn this excerpt from The Eye of Spirit, Ken Wilber offers one of the most powerful (and beautiful) pieces of spiritual writing he has ever produced. This is the very first time these words have been reproduced on the web, and we invite you to share this chapter however you like.
What Is Your Native Perspective?
Integral LifeA big part of having better relationships is clear and meaningful communication. If you’re interested in improving how you communicate and listen to others, this exercise can provide you with a fresh perspective on the way you communicate and how it shapes your instinctual way of being, seeing, and doing in the world.
The Gift of Contemplation
Father Thomas Keating and Cynthia BourgeaultFather Thomas Keating offers a detailed account of the conditions that catalyzed a massive reawakening of Christian contemplative practice in the late 20th century.
Awakening Christ Consciousness
Ken WilberKen Wilber offers a special teaching to awaken Christ Consciousness within your own heart and mind, right here and right now.
Having No Head: A Pointing-Out Exercise
Ken Wilber“Keep an open mind,” we like to say, “but not so open your brain slides out.” But what happens when you open your mind so fully that you end up temporarily misplacing your entire head? Well that’s enlightenment, baby!
A Few Moments of Being
Lama Surya DasLay claim to your birthright with this short guided meditation by Lama Surya Das.
From the Big Bang to the Big Three: The Evolution of the 3 Faces of Spirit
Ken WilberKen Wilber takes us on a blistering guided tour through the evolution of the universe, describing how each of the “three faces of Spirit” has evolved from the Big Bang to this present moment.
8 Simple Lifestyle Tips to Improve Your Health and Happiness
Roger Walsh and Ken WilberRoger and Ken discuss the eight most important things you can do to transform your daily lifestyle, all of which will make a tremendous and immediate difference in your life, your relationships, and your ongoing sense of well-being.
The Feeling of Eros
Ken WilberKen Wilber offers a 30 minute guided process that will put you in direct touch with Eros — and in so doing, you’ll likely encounter the simple mistake of ascribing it source to some object outside yourself. By relaxing the contraction around your heart, you’ll experience an unbounded expansion of care, in a simple moment of non-seeking presence.
Love and Evolution
Ken WilberIn order to uncover love’s future, we need to explore love’s past. So Ken Wilber looks all the way back to the Big Bang, retracing love’s role throughout the history of evolution. Rather than just a mere human emotion, love is cast as a central driving force in the Kosmos—the force of Eros itself, pushing all of us along our inevitable return to Spirit.
Integral Mahamudra: The Mandala of Awakening
Patrick SweeneyPatrick Sweeney, the holder of the Karma Kagyü lineage, offers a powerful mahamudra teaching. The term mahamudra literally means “great seal” or “great symbol”, a body of teaching that represents the culmination and fulfillment of all the practices of the new schools of Tibetan Buddhism. Mudra refers to the fact that each phenomenon appears vividly, and maha refers to the fact that it is beyond concept, imagination, and projection.
The Three Faces of Spirit
Diane Musho HamiltonIn this practice we contemplate, think, and know about Spirit in the 3rd-person; we relate, dwell, and commune with Spirit in a 2nd-person relationship, and we meditate, feel and know ourselves as Spirit in a 1st-person apprehension of our source and substance.
10-Minute Practices to Reconnect with Spirit
Roger WalshA quick and easy way to recontact the sacred dimensions of this and every moment.