arting is such sweet sorrow! In this final episode of Diane and Corey’s first season of Integral Justice, we take a look at our past year of episodes together — the major themes we explored, the insights we gleaned, and the space we shared with our community.

Diane will be turning her attention to a new podcast with co-host Gabe Wilson (stay tuned!), and will be replaced by our very good friend Mark Fischler for Season 2 of IJW. In the meantime, Diane and I wanted to dedicate a special episode to look back on the time that we’ve spent together, and to look forward to all the exciting projects and collaborations that are coming down the line. It’s a tremendously touching episode, allowing both Diane and I to express our heartfelt love and gratitude for each other.

I also take a few moments to summarize some of the major lessons that I’ve learned while doing the show with Diane — wisdoms that I very much want to take with me into the next season with Mark. Those wisdoms include:

• Genuine social transformation must begin on a personal level. We need to do the work to develop our own skills and clean up our own house and heart before we can try to clean up our neighborhoods and nations.
• We are all in this together. Social Justice requires collective action, which itself requires deep empathy, deep listening, curiosity, and connection. So many of our conflicts result from people talking across each other, rather than actually enfolding with each other – all made worse by social media, which forces us to compete for attention. We need to work to bring more health to our communities and networks, to try to close the widening gaps between people, and to bring more compassion and discernment to our conversations so that we can get as many as possible to pull the reins in the same direction.
• The power of practice. Integral Social Justice is a praxis, not a belief or an idea. It’s about doing the work to wake up, grow up, clean up, and show up more fully in our own lives, so that we can in turn help society do the same. We need to engage more deeply in our own individual practice, while also practicing together as a community in order to create the right harmonics, the right containers, and the right contradictions to begin moving the integral social justice project forward.
• A new hope. It’s easy to get lost in cynicism and despondency. But as you have pointed out many times over the last year, we already have everything we need to rise to these challenges. We have the technologies, we have the science, we have the strategies. All we are missing is the political will to execute — but this will is continuing to emerge as we continue to deepen our practice, as we congeal as a community who can begin to exert real influence in the world, and as these life conditions become more and more disruptive to our lives and our society.
• We have an amazing community that is only beginning to recognize their own power. The integral community over the last 15 years or so has moved through some of the major stages Ken often describes — from a state of fusion, where everything existed under a single roof, to a state of differentiation and entrepreneurship that helped expand the influence of the integral project and seed the world with newer, bigger, better ideas. And I think we are now ready to take that next leap — from differentiation to integration. Because if we don’t, “differentiation” becomes ‘dissociation”, which is a pattern I am increasingly noticing within integral circles in recent months and years. But the leadership coming from people like Diane has helped many of us to get back on the path to integration, and we can see it in the people who have shown up for this very show every month.

It has been such a tremendous honor doing this show with Diane over the last 13 months, and greatly look forward to seeing what new territories I will exploring with Mark in the months to come!

If you enjoy this episode, be sure to check out more episodes of Integral Justice Warrior. Watch them all for only $1!