Integral Life Practice (eBook)

From Chapter 2: What Is Integral Life Practice?

Whatever your motivation, the intention to begin, renew, or deepen a practice is a wonderful first step. But once you've made that choice, how do you follow through with it? Thirty years of experience have shown us that your practice will turn to mush without a framework for organizing it. An Integral framework can help you make sense of the many options available to you, providing ultimate flexibility and inclusiveness, so you can most fully and deeply honor your intentions and fulfill your potentials.

A Radically Inclusive Approach

The Integral Life Practice framework allows for maximum flexibility. It's not a program you must follow uncritically, humorlessly, and perhaps even with a sense of superiority, until you're enlightened, more successful, better looking, and someday hopefully perfect. It gives you a set of tools for designing a unique and personalized practice, in whatever form works best for you right
now, with the understanding that what works best will change over time.

The 'Integral' part of ILP is that it is radically inclusive. To be this, it draws on a conceptual map called AQAL (which stands for 'All Quadrants, All Levels'—,we'll get deeper into this in a moment). AQAL (pronounced ah-qwul) is a theory of everything, a way of comprehending life and reality in very broad yet precise terms. AQAL is a map of consciousness, the Kosmos, and human development, at every level and in every dimension that presents itself.

Technically speaking, AQAL is a map of maps, or a meta-theory that incorporates the core truths from hundreds of other theories. It organizes the profound insights of the spiritual traditions, philosophy, modern science, developmental psychology, and many other disciplines, into a coherent whole. AQAL accounts for the many perspectives that great thinkers, teachers, and researchers have brought to our understanding of self and world.

But it doesn't stop there, because AQAL is also intuitive—,it describes the terrain of your own awareness. You don't need hi-tech equipment or an advanced degree to enjoy the benefits of an AQAL-informed perspective. All you need is to bring a new kind of awareness to your lived experience.

It's similar to learning a second language. At the beginning, it may feel a little awkward as you're memorizing new vocabulary and fumbling with new ways of expressing yourself. In time, however, you discover that the more you apply the new grammar to real life situations, the easier it becomes to remember and use it, even if you still instinctively think in your native language and translate to the second.

With practice, you begin to think in the new language with greater ease and mastery. Eventually, you even begin to dream in the new language. And you haven't lost your old language, you've only become bilingual. The more fluent you become, the more the language infuses your being and becomes a part of who you are. Soon the words effortlessly flow from your lips and you're able to communicate with different kinds of people in totally new ways. Your world has expanded to include new horizons that you may have never thought possible.

Integral Life Practice Is 'Powered by AQAL'

Because AQAL attempts to map the Kosmos itself, ILP engages nearly every aspect of our lives. As you embark on an Integral Life Practice you will learn to hold more perspectives, and to do so more freely and flexibly, exercising every...