elcome to INHABIT — a monthly practice-based series with Ryan Oelke and Corey deVos, designed to help you embody your own unique expression of integral being and more fully inhabit the territory of your life, your relationships, and your world.
Integral itself can often feel like such a cognitive and intellectual pursuit. Although the map itself invites us to practice integral consciousness in our hearts and bodies as much as our minds, we often tend to lead with our heads, and it can take a great deal of practice and rewiring of our lifestyles before we really feel like we are beginning to embody our own fullest integral power. It’s not hard to find ourselves stuck in the endless abstractions of our own mental models, which can limit our fullest possible expression of integral consciousness. Adding to the challenge, Integral is coming of age during the era of social media, where the dominant mode of discourse is often so disembodied and sometimes even dehumanizing.
This is why Ryan and Corey are doing this show — to help create more embodied practice, more embodied relating, and more embodied methods of showing up as fully as you can in order to make a positive dent in this world. Every month Ryan will lead us in guided practice to help strengthen the link between your mind and your body, between your knowledge and your wisdom, between your being and your doing. All so you can show up as the super-charged integral powerhouse you know you are.
We want you to be a regular part of this show. Each episode, we will take questions from our viewers, giving you an opportunity to share the fruits of your practice with the rest of us, as well as receive guidance around areas you find particularly challenging. So we invite you to join the live discussions as often as you can, and to offer us feedback whenever you feel like you have something you want to share. And be sure to let us know what you think in the comments below.
In the meantime, please enjoy this special inaugural episode of INHABIT with Ryan Oelke and Corey deVos!
Links mentioned in this episode
Previous Episodes of Inhabit
Inhabit: Your Bardo
September 15, 2022 
Inhabit: Your Speech
About Ryan Oelke
Ryan Oelke is a co-founder of Buddhist Geeks and founder of Awakening in Life. He has an MSEd in counseling psychology and is contemplative teacher of awakening, healing, and embodiment. He has 18 years experience in meditation, particularly in the Tibetan Buddhist and Dzogchen lineages, he is a Buddhist Geeks teacher, and is a fully certified teacher in Judith Blackstone’s Realization Process. Ryan teaches meditation and a way of living dedicated to revealing natural presence and awakening in each moment of our lives, regardless of how it appears to us. He lives in the beautiful mountains of Asheville, NC with his partner Alyssa and stepdaughter Fiona.
About Corey deVos
Corey W. deVos is Editor-in-Chief of Integral Life, as well as Managing Editor of KenWilber.com. He has worked for Integral Institute/Integal Life since Spring of 2003, and has been a student of integral theory and practice since 1996. Corey is also a professional woodworker, and many of his artworks can be found in his VisionLogix art gallery.
Hey everyone, I just wanted to post a quick note to reiterate that we very much want you guys to be a part of this ongoing show. So if you have any feedback, questions, personal challenges, or topics of interest that you would like us to cover, please let us know!
Great show Corey and Ryan, I have been looking for a show like this for a while emerging out of Integral Life. Good timing. The collective and individual explorations of inhabiting and deinhabiting, the arriving practice, and mirror website… staying simple amidst the Integral Meta-theory… was wonderful. A great beginning for this show. I look forward to future episodes, the practices and explorations.
Question: Can you follow up the practice next show with how you might take the arriving practice into a next step after you have settled into doing that for a while in your life?
Hi guys, just wanted to say thanks for the show. I really like this idea of ‘inhabiting’. It’s so important to ground, be embodied, be at home in the body but I know in my own life I can be so much in my head, with so many ideas and concepts from so many different inputs that I end up, well, kind of ‘un-inhabited’. I have to call myself back home to myself, come back to this body, these senses, this breath in this moment but there can be a resistance to this because I’m enjoying the mental buzz. Also, I think Ryan mentioned spiritual bypassing at one point and something I’ve seen in myself and others is a tendency to want to stay with the ‘highs’ of spiritual practice and intellectual stimulation and not deal with the up and down nature of ordinary embodied existence. I think this can be a particular danger on the path for people whose ‘embodied life’ here on Planet Earth has been painful and traumatic, with the ‘detachment’ becoming dissociation – hence the importance of the never-ending shadow work. Thanks again guys, I look forward to future discussions. This is my first post on here so I hope I’m posting in the right place and not breaking any rules
I finally have had the opportunity to listen to this podcast. I think you are right on about the idea behind it. I can’t tell you how many times I have heard that Integral “takes place above the neck”. I also liked the www.inamirror.com idea. To be critical, I am not a fan of guided meditations on podcasts or videos. As you skipped over the Integral basics because the assumption is most people listening have these already, I would hope or think the same thing for some meditation practice.
I will put on my list to listen to the next segment before suggesting any questions. Thanks!
Thanks for the feedback
We’ll likely stick with some sort of guided practice in each episode for the moment as we’ve also heard people appreciate it, but we’ll also be sure to remind folks that they can skip ahead if they’re listening to it later. We might also experiment with putting it at the end vs. the beginning. Also, we’re hoping the practice bits will build through each episode, have more context, whereas the first two episodes were fairly foundational/beginner, and so experienced practitioners definitely might have preferred skipping over that 
In any case, we’ll definitely keep checking in to see how people are feeling about that. Even if we end up not having any guided practice, we very much want to be at least toeing that line or we won’t accomplish the goal of the podcast 