Living the Integral Heart by Terry Patten

Life is often teaching us the importance of “showing up” 100% in every moment, beyond physical, emotional and spiritual contractions – but this is much easier said than done. In the first session, we will set a sacred container and come face to face with the powerful opportunity to choose to join together in a sacred community of practice dedicated to taking 100% responsibility for our own experience during this 7-part journey. Through a series of experiential processes and epiphanies, we will support each other in inviting forward our deepest integral heart. We will allow that integral heart intelligence to become not just the power source of our inspiration, but also the creative author of our most important life choices.

Discover the deeper esoteric meaning of “showing up” in your life and relationships, and why integral spirituality is anything but an escape.

• Explore the nature of authentic commitment and identify what stands in the way of your next level of commitment to being fully alive, conscious and powerful.
• Learn to enact commitment and vulnerability right now, and truly show up for your sacred relationship with yourself.
• Learn the 2 essential practices you can do to bring this alive in your daily life.
• Activate the 5 primary faculties of the heart’s unique intelligence.
• Practice the yoga of bringing it all together in the alchemy of the integral heart.

In this module, we will explore the art of opening (and always re-opening) an unobstructed heart connection with divine grace. We’ll engage the art of bridging the profound splits created by our personal and collective traumas – dividing our minds from our hearts and our sense of self from our inherent, natural, loving relationship with God. We’ll connect directly with our inner skeptics, integrating our doubting minds as we dare to break the ultimate taboo, and actually open an intimate channel of connection to the universal source of grace, good luck and gratitude. Then we’ll reboot a potent universal spiritual practice, accessing the power of “the simplicity on the other side of complexity.”

• Learn how to relate to all 3 integral “faces” of God, and sense directly how each one can be ultimate, sacred and ever-new.
• Directly grasp the evidence-based reasoning (beyond metaphysical belief) for opening your heart to the universal “giver” of everything we tend to take for granted.
• Befriend the skeptical inner critic and help him or her serve a greater good.
• Activate the hard-wired neural pathways that fire in both peak performance and ecstatic devotional love.
• Awaken from the belief patterns that tend to divide your intelligent discernment from your passionate spiritual feeling.
• Wake up to the psychophysics of grace (aka “good luck”), and learn to align with it.
• Perform a ritual opening of your emotional connection with the mysterious “Divine” source of all happy accidents and every unearned benefit.

Feeling and intelligence are two words for, or facets of, a single capacity. In this session we will tune in to the unexplored territory of feeling and the incredibly sensitive instrument of our precious human body-mind. You’ll learn the key principles of how to use your subtle feelings, sensations and emotions as a source of information and guidance. When your understandings crystallize into a felt-sense, you can sync up with your whole body intelligence and move spontaneously. You’ll open up into the higher octaves of positive feeling – from acceptance to pleasure and enjoyment and into joy ecstasy and bliss. Finally, you’ll develop the art of navigating the full-spectrum of life experience as a yoga of feeling.

• Discover the difference between reacting to what is felt and allowing yourself to feel through it.
• Discover the transformational yogic dimensions of enjoying pleasure consciously.
• Open the heart to fundamental equanimity and freedom amidst discomfort, threat, pain and loss.
• Track the way that errors of reasoning, careless mistakes, weakness of will and emotional insensitivity all have a common root that we can learn to feel directly.
• Learn to pay attention to your heart as a sensitive instrument registering extremely subtle contractions in your total energy field.
• Discover how profound happiness and peace can coexist with experiences of insecurity, anger, sorrow, fear and shame.
• Discover how the yoga of feeling can actually shift the subtle energy patterns surrounding you – affecting the quality of what you magnetize into your life.

The integral heart is a powerful force of intention and creativity – flowing directly from the marriage of the inner feminine and inner masculine natures. This is nothing like the hyper-masculine will that exaggerates our separation from the flow of life. In this session, we will encounter a series of powerful distinctions and exercises that will enable us to connect with the deep roots of our tenderness and toughness, the foundational care that powers an integrated will. It creates powerfully from love rather than ego. It’s rooted in an existential stand that sources our greatest power.

• Examine the different “places” from which choice and intention can arise in your being and the way they color your exercise of will.
• Explore the subtle dynamics of the fear, resentment and judgment spread by our culture’s universal victim psychology and how it affects you and everyone.
• Find your fundamental “yes” to life and how it can express itself through your projects and work.
• Discover how you can directly connect your personal happiness to your service to the health of the whole.
• Tap into the power of the authentic connection you already have to a “value gravity” that transcends and yet includes your personal interests.
• Discover why your opportunity to choose and commit is not a challenging responsibility but the very essence of the creative opportunity of every moment of living.
• Discover a more fundamental source for the power of your will.
• Bring organic discipline to your choices about diet and exercise and time management.

The mystery of the present moment is so obvious, so profoundly deep and powerfully wondrous, and yet so elusive. The art of awakened living is the art of waking up with fresh eyes, in “beginner’s mind,” and rediscovering this living moment, letting go into it and letting it live us. Then, life is endlessly creative, an unfolding miracle. But this is not something “you” can “do.” It’s an art – a dance we can only do with a highly skilled partner – that same unpredictability alive in the ever-present Mystery. In this session, we will get a feel for the art of integrating everything we’ve already explored in the instant-to-instant dance of living.

• Viscerally connect up the gladness of your grateful heart, recognizing it as the essence of your awareness and identity.
• Befriend yourself and your personal hopes and fears from the perspective of divine freedom.
• Know the nature of your covenant with the Mystery, give it your conscious assent, and tap into the empowering grace that is always flowing from it.
• Experience “being lived” by the Divine Mystery, and strengthen the neural and energetic pathways of trusting that Source.
• Experience the subtle energetic principles embodied by the “crucifixion” and the “resurrection,” and let them transform your relationship to experience.

We will bring the ever-present dance of our personal awakening into relationship with one another. In mutuality, a field of “We-Space” is created when our consciousness opens into undefended contact with the consciousness of another person. This field becomes intelligent in a way that is much more than the sum of the parts – and that intelligence holds remarkable potentials. It can grow and develop, and it can function as a container and channel for the transmission of awakening.

• Discover the field of intelligence that emerges from the “space between” when you are able to meet, and be met by, a practitioner of integral heart intelligence.
• Explore the territory of this “awakened We-Space” with other sincere explorers.
• Let the wisdom of the We draw you into a higher level of your own intelligence.
• Train to develop the capacity to engage a social experiment in sincere trustability and trusting mutuality.
• Understand and honor the venerable ancient principle of transmission and lineage, while freeing yourself from bondage to what no longer serves.
• Help enact the turning of an evolutionary “corner” from the old feudal model of spiritual culture to a network of enlightened intelligence.
• Learn to apply your heart intelligence to day-to-day relationships in a way that brings clarity, luminosity and love.

To really “get real” with each other amidst the challenges of our time, we must become capable of sharing deep tantric paradox. This means relaxing and rejoicing in gratitude – with lightheartedness – while simultaneously getting very serious about effectively addressing the sobering challenges of our time. Our blessedly wonderful and terrible times represent a profound koan, an impossible riddle that we must resolve, an infinitely deep question that undoes our mind and reconfigures our consciousness. We will enter into the territory of daring and learning from a new level of evolutionary friendship and responsibility.

• Join others in facing and intelligently feeling into the overwhelming challenges and amazing opportunities of responsible adulthood in a world in crisis.
• Discover the liberating intensity of standing together, heart-to-heart with other evolutionaries who are letting this koan transform their consciousness.
• Choose truth over hypocrisy, face the hypocrisy of aspiring to a virtue beyond you, confess it and discover new levels of honest evolutionary friendship.
• Find the strength and sanity and ground to defy the voices that are telling us that it’s grandiose and impractical to take our utopian impulse seriously.
• Initiate a new trajectory of your personal growth, that of mutual awakening and “being the change” together with others.