Four Keys to Integral Living
Less Integral Talk, More Integral Action
Integral, in its current state, contains several inherently abstract parts. In the history of man, integral1 is a new way of understanding the world, and modern philosophers and researchers are still trying to help us flesh out and comprehend this relatively young framework. This is an absolutely necessary and welcome part of the evolutionary process toward becoming integral as a global society. There’s a lot to take into account, because nothing is considered unimportant.
Many can become caught in this very mental, theoretical, and non-experiential mode of approach, and this leaves out the best part of this progressive way of living. To help move people toward the experience of integral, I have come up with these keys to living an integral life.
Four Keys to Integral Living
- Attention. This means not only paying attention, but also being attentive. Hearing, seeing, and sensing all parts of a situation in your life and the world, clearly and without judgement, will assist you in making successful decisions. Being able to holistically and integrally take action beings with holistic and integral attention.
- Meditation. A daily practice of meditation supports you in present-moment awareness and understanding your own internal psychological processes. The benefits can be seen and felt beyond the increase in patience, creativity, and alert attention by improvement in the stress responses of the body and other reductions in the negative effects of living in the third dimension.
- Seeing Shadows. We all have pieces of ourselves which we have projected and disowned, and it is often these unconscious piece of ourselves which cause us to react to situations before we are able to approach them with objectivity and clarity. There are several techniques that one can use to recognize and re-integrate lost shadow parts, but my favorite is the 3-2-1 process developed by the Integral Institute. You can read more about it in this interview with Diane Hamilton.
- Learn. The best way you can understand the world integrally is to learn the world integrally. Make informed decisions based on the best information you can find. Understand integral concepts such as Spiral Dynamics and AQAL which are frameworks under the integral umbrella which help tremendously in understanding the variations in human thought that may seem to collide on the surface, yet altogether form necessary and complete parts of an entire system.
For a more complete understanding of integral and how to live it, I recommend the following websites:
- The Integral Institute
- Holons News
- Integral Naked
- Integral Options Café
- Lead Coach: Integral Leadership Review
- What is Enlightenment?
1. Very briefly, I will explain what integral is, to the best of my knowledge (which is ever-changing). Integral, highly simplified, is a way of looking at the world holistically. One main part is an understanding and acceptance that every area of study is performed from its own perspective, and that the results are applicable mainly to that perspective. To have a complete view of any ‘thing’ in this world, we should be able to hold that just because something is true from one perspective, that does not mean that results from another perspective correlate to that. They can live together as parts of one whole.
As an example, the human brain can be studied externally, revealing that when a person is asked to experience a thought or emotion, certain specific brain-wave patterns can register on an EEG. This is an external, ‘third-person’ or ‘it’ experience of the body. However, if one is asked to describe what they are internally experiencing during this process, that is an ‘internal’ or ‘I’ experience of the body. These are two perspectives which describe parts of the whole ‘brain’ experience. A non-integral view would often try to prove that one is absolutely caused or completely correlated by the other. An integral perspective would understand that these are results from two different perspectives which cannot be collapsed into each other so easily. Though they certainly appear to have some interrelation, they do not necessarily explain each other, and cannot be fully claimed as being the same.
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