Notes from the Field / March 2011
Mexico from an Economic Miracle to Potential Failed State
Roberto Bonilla N.
The problems we confront are not due to our failures, but to our previous success
Don E. Beck, PhD
“We do not deserve this country,” a young businessman said to Dr. Don Beck back in April 2007, when we (Dr. Don Beck, Karina Eichner and I) started the whole country transformational project recently named Orchestrating Mexico. The young and wealthy businessman referred to the long period of …
Notes from the Field / March 2011
“Big Society” Lacks the Leadership Skills to Make It Happen
Nick Shannon
With much fanfare, the UK prime minister David Cameron recently relaunched the Conservative party’s flagship policy called “Big Society”. Up to now, the UK public have struggled to get their minds around exactly what the “Big Society” means, and the idea has frequently been ridiculed in the UK tabloid press[i]. In essence, the idea behind the policy is that “big government” in the form of centrally controlled public …
Notes from the Field / March 2011
Emerging Integral Approaches at a Large Land Development Project in the Netherlands
Machiel Doorn
This paper discusses the development and implementation of an integral sustainability framework, inspired by Cradle to Cradle principles, at a large land development project and horticultural show in the Netherlands. It provides hands-on, real-world accounts and discusses novel monitoring and reporting methods that have been co-developed to account for the complexity of this cutting-edge project.
Introduction
The Floriade is a large world horticulture exhibition that …
Notes from the Field / March 2011
The Integral Leadership Panel at Fielding Graduate University
Sergej van Middendorp
This January, at Fielding Graduate University’s winter session, Jerry Snow facilitated the integral leadership panel. In this session, a group of doctoral students and alumni gathered around Russ Volckmann, Clint Fuhs, Aliki Nicolaides, Nancy Wallis, and Anne Acosta to listen to and discuss their integral leadership research and practice.
The session started with participants thinking about their current, pressing questions with regard to integral leadership by answering what they …
Notes from the Field / March 2011
Integral Spiritual Experience
Barbara Alexander
“You know an authentically pleasurable experience by its aftertaste” says my friend Marc Gafni, one of the key architects of Integral Spiritual Experience 2. He and his partners certainly produced an authentically pleasurable experience. More than two months later, the aftertaste, rich and challenging, remains with me.
Integral Spiritual Experience, (ISE 2) was a mega retreat held over New Year’s at the Asilomar Conference Center on California’s magnificent central coast. Three organizations devoted to human …
Notes from the Field / March 2011
Evolving States and Stages of Consciousness
Venita Ramirez, Geoff Fitch and Terri O’Fallon
How do people develop? What do the later stages of consciousness look like? Are there methods and practices we can employ to facilitate the process? Robert Kegan (1994), Suzanne Cook-Greuter (2002) and others have contributed a great deal to the field of adult development in recent years. Still, we have much more to learn. For example, until now, we haven’t really known what it takes to help …
Notes from the Field / March 2011
The Spiral Dance of Spiritual Growth: Navigating the Whitewater of Individuation and Belonging
(and a poem by Brianna Schlesinger)
Michael Stern
When I arrived home in New York City back in September, my number one priority was to find the NYC Integral community and get involved. One of the first places my search led me to was One Spirit Learning Alliance. I recently enrolled in the Integral Mentors and Ministers program there, and my first experience as a student was …
Notes from the Field / January 2011
Robin Reinach
On the eve of winter, Integral New York examined empathy and “the miracle of we.” Gilles Herrada led twenty-four Ken Wilber Meet Up participants in exploring questions such as: How important is empathy to Integral theory? How does empathy look through the lens of the four quadrants? And how do we each experience and act (or not act) on empathy in our daily lives?
As New Yorkers, we began by acknowledging our ambivalent responses to homeless people and …
Notes from the Field / January 2011
Oliver Ngodo
Saturday December 11, 2010, AIDEN held its first International conference in the main auditorium of One Sky, the Canadian Institute of Sustainable Living, in Calabar, the capital city of Nigeria’s South-South state of Cross River. This event elicited free-flowing expressions of joy and fulfillment from participants – the reality of AIDEN is a dream fulfilled. The conference featured opening ceremony, plenary sessions and general assembly. In attendance were top Cross River State Government and Calabar Municipal Council officials, …
Notes from the Field / January 2011
Matthew Rich
During my time working in India in 2010 I became increasingly interested in the work of Sri Aurobindo. I had obviously encountered Aurobindo’s name through my readings of Ken Wilber and thought that I had familiarized with a lot of his key ideas (in retrospect I don’t think that this was the case at all). When I got to India however it quickly dawned on me that there was a textual richness to Aurobindo’s work that I could …