Terry Patten – The Integral Soul Journey

Our practice becomes truly integral when we enact it every day, not as a dutiful burden, but as a natural expression of love and attraction. An evolutionary practice is about coming alive, growing, awakening, not about re-enacting rote habits that look outwardly like “spiritual practice.” So we will go to the roots. We’ll establish an authentic basis for making agreements to break our unhealthy habits and to build enlivening ones that we can practice every day. That basis is a felt loving relationship with the mysterious source of grace. So we will come together with each other to strengthen and refresh our ability to contact the Mystery, the source of our inspiration for practice.

Because practice is paradoxical, we will clarify a whole series of important integral distinctions that will help keep our practice from the common traps that result in subtle stuckness, numbness or abstraction. These key distinctions are what enables integral practitioners to be relaxed, loose and spontaneous, and also grounded and focused, even while our hearts are continually re-ignited by love and inspiration. Most importantly, we will make sure we understand the framework of integral insights that ground our evolutionary practice, and we will distinguish the two primary dimensions of that practice, liberating our energy and attention not just for our awakening into Spirit but also for our deep journey into relationship with our Soul.

During these 4 sessions, you’ll:

• Awaken into a life of ongoing loving contact with the Mystery of Existence.
• Learn the easiest and most basic form of a daily practice that will immediately change the dynamics of your everyday life – a simple morning practice ritual incorporating movement and stillness.
• Discover the simple keys that enable you to not only do spiritual practices but to live your whole life as practice.
• Contact a strong, clear source of inner toughness and discipline that frees you from the endless push-pull between inner parental voices and rebellious impulses.
• Discover the virtuous tantric cycle: how waking up liberates awareness for plunging deep, which in turn liberates energy for waking up.
• Understand the clear philosophical foundations that make sense of truly Integral Soul Work.

Our love relationship with the Mystery has a universal quality, but it also has a very personal side. We are each living an incomplete story we can become willing to face fully, and then to bring to a wholesome resolution and a new beginning. We must consent to become the hero of our own lives, but, paradoxically, this is not something we can do via effort. Every hero’s journey involves a call (a contact with our true identity, our soul nature) and then a series of encounters with allies and challenges. It also requires a journey to the underworld for a battle with our nemesis. We can’t do that superficially; it requires letting go of who we have come to know ourselves to be, and facing the fearsome monsters that are most intimidating.

What has marginalized our soul is not just the system and consumer culture, or even politics and media – even our intellectual and spiritual identities are at play. So we will set the stage for a profound letting go, and an existential confrontation that opens us to the presence of the part of us that has been waiting to be lived. We will open into relationship with the deepest dimensions of ourselves, and the soul trauma that makes it so hard for us to trust the process of our own lives. Out of that, we will find our way to the existential depth from which it becomes authentic to invite our soul to claim all of us. We will create the rituals through which we can invite a new and truly sacred phase of our lives to begin.

During these 3 sessions, you’ll:

• Discover how transcendental spirituality is no substitute for your relationship to your soul.
• Open your heart to contact with the deepest source of your unique character and purpose.
• Learn to listen and to ask: cultivating a profound ongoing silent prayerful feeling-dialogue with your soul.
• Discover the transformational power of a deep lifelong sacred relationship with your soul.

A sacred relationship with your soul cannot be developed via a method or technique. It is an elusive living relationship, and it has existed all our lives. It takes a momentous leap for the soul to replace the conventional ego as the center of our experience. Thus, we will come together in a way that will support each of us in finding our own unique way to initiate and cultivate this sacred relationship, to allow it to grow and blossom at deeper levels, and to become the organizing, harmonizing principle of our whole lives.

Each soul has its own unique shape and mood and character and requirements, and it dwells, like a wild animal, at the margins of the civilized world that our conventional minds have tamed and think we know. And each moment in the journey of the soul is unique. So we will join together to wade, step by step, into the deep waters where our soul can progressively reveal itself and guide us. We will explore the sacred art of dwelling in the presence of our soul, of waiting and listening with true openness and humility, so each of us can discern the strangely familiar true voice of our soul.

During these 5 sessions, you’ll:

• Learn to discern the voice of your soul or daemon amidst the cacophony of “pretender voices.”
• Develop the existential seriousness necessary to wait in silence as long as it takes to discern your soul’s authentic voice and character.
• Learn to engage the art of living a life that cultivates a real relationship with your unique soul, while growing in health in an integral fashion.
• Establish a profound, growing, intimate love-relationship with the deepest dimensions of your being.
• Learn how to live from your soul, and to nurture, sustain and deepen that soul life over weeks, months and years.
• Connect to the deepest source of creative power that lies at the very core of your soul.

Our souls have deep reasons for having drawn us right here, right now; purposes that are only revealed to us on “soul time.” The drama of our life reveals its hidden logic only to the patient, watchful heart. And yet it is not just a matter of discovery. We’re co-participants in the revelation of the soul; our choices matter, at the deepest level. Your soul is the deepest part of your unique character, and yet your character is always evolving, based on your choices. So we have good reasons to pay close attention to the unfolding plot of our soul life – the story is not already written. A sacred drama is unfolding.

We are in many ways the luckiest, most privileged people to have ever lived, and yet we face some of the most bewildering and morally important challenges. Why were you called into your unique place in this gorgeous turbulent world at this wonderful and terrible time in human history and evolution? What are the special contributions you were called here to make?

During these 4 sessions, you’ll:

• Develop an ongoing dialogue through which your soul’s purpose is revealed to you, then refined, clarified and allowed to mature.
• Evolve in your loving relationship and transparency to all that is greater than yourself.
• Learn how to live your soul’s purpose in mutuality – in deep connection with other souls.
• Become a participant in a larger, deep, invisible community of souls and become able to participate intimately with them when opportunities arise.
• Conspire with the larger forces that are currently engineering our evolutionary synchronicity, allowing them to animate your unique role in the drama of our time.

The world-famous Integral philosopher in conversation with Terry Patten about the philosophical basis for Integral spiritual practice and the relationship of Integral Soul Work and Integral Non-Duality. Ken and Terry will examine how practitioners can deepen their practice by engaging with the subtle animating information and energy dynamics that play such an important role in the unfolding of our lives.

Ken Wilber is the most widely translated academic writer in America, with 25 books, translated into some 30 foreign languages. Ken is an internationally acknowledged leader and the preeminent scholar of the Integral stage of human development and is widely regarded as the “Einstein of consciousness.”

The Divine Lover takes a unique form in every spiritual journey. So it is a practice to discover the current form and full aliveness of the Inner Beloved and Lover in your life. Explore the profound art and rapture contacted by kindling the sacred fire of Divine Romance. Learn what it is to be courted by your Divine Lover, to court your Soul’s Beloved, and how profoundly this can transform your emotional life.

Sally Kempton is known and loved for her ability to transmit meditative states and create transformative shifts in others. A former monk in an Indian order, she teaches internationally and was the author of the Yoga Journal column, Wisdom, for many years. Sally has a deeply mature understanding of the interface between deep spirituality and self-actualized living. She herself lives the path she teaches. Her books, Meditation for the Love of It and Awakening Shakti: The Transformative Power of the Goddesses of Yoga, have become classics – and have revolutionized thousands of people’s experience of their inner life.

Emergence is not just an abstract impersonal process. Even the ancient Greeks could sense that the soul is drawn forward towards its unique destiny. They called it the telos of the daemon. Today, we use terms like the “strange attractor” to describe the forces that pull us from beyond. But there are also profound evolutionary impulses that well up in us, as if from below. In our soul journey, truly novel capacities, opportunities, allies and destinies sometimes emerge. What are these dynamics? What is the deep nature, the soul of emergence itself?

Barbara Marx Hubbard is a visionary, social innovator and evolutionary thinker who believes that global change happens when we work collectively and selflessly for the greater good. As a prolific author and educator, Barbara has written seven books on social and planetary evolution. She has produced, hosted and contributed to countless documentaries seen by millions of people around the world. In conjunction with The Shift Network, Barbara co-produced the worldwide “Birth 2012” multi-media event that was seen as an historic turning point in exposing the social, spiritual, scientific and technological potential in humanity.

A tantric embrace of opposites is the essence of the soul journey and also its destination. Our soul travels into the presence of what cannot be known conceptually, but only through an ordeal, a journey, in which we are plunged into the soul’s “primary colors,” experiences that seem dynamically opposite and contradictory. The soul travels through darkness and light, agony and joy, birth and death, passion and tranquility, love and grief, hope and despair, courage and submission. In this dance of opposites, the soul comes more and more to experience a secret unity that is God.

Andrew Harvey is an author, speaker and founder/director of the Institute of Sacred Activism, an international organization focused on inviting concerned people to take up the challenge of our contemporary global crises by becoming inspired, effective and practical agents of institutional and systemic change, in order to create peace and sustainability. He has written and edited over 30 books and received many awards, including the Benjamin Franklin Award and the Mind Body Spirit Award.