At IEC 2025 we heard many voices exploring how transformation unfolds in the face of our global metacrises. Two perspectives seemed to mirror and amplify each other: Karen O’Brien’s invitation to see ourselves as fractals of change and my own exploration of AQtivating Soul Power for cities in crisis. Though spoken in different idioms, [...]
Microcosm in Service to Gaia What distinguishes Ecovillage Findhorn is not just its longevity or its reputation as a pioneering eco-village. What makes it truly significant is its ongoing evolution into a regenerative learning community — a microcosm of what human settlements could become in service to Gaia. Miniature Whole Systems When I [...]
What if Cities are Gaia’s Organs? What if cities are more than just built environments? What if they are living organs within Gaia — expressing her consciousness through our human systems? At Ecovillage Findhorn, this idea is not metaphorical for me; it is a guiding principle for how I understand our place in the [...]
What makes a place truly hospitable to the soul? At Ecovillage Findhorn, this phrase has become a touchstone. It describes not only how people feel when they arrive, but also how the community organizes itself around deeper values: Beauty, Truth, and Goodness. Gift from Soil and Soul The phrase was gifted to the [...]
From the Personal to the Planetary Ecovillage Findhorn may be a small community, yet the frameworks it draws upon — Integral Theory, Spiral Dynamics, and systems thinking — are designed to scale consciousness from the personal to the planetary. Fractal Patterns of Development Over the course of my career, nurturing human systems, I [...]
The Integral City GPS image is the central guiding metaphor to use for navigating the 5 Sets of Integral City Intelligences. This is more dynamic and systemic than the quadrant model alone, as it shows relational flow, directionality, and the evolutionary propulsion of the city as a living system. Let's explore the GPS structure in [...]
This is an invitation, to explore this page: https://integralcity.com/voices-intelligences/, which outlines the 12 Intelligences of the Integral City across four quadrants: (Upper Left: Individual-Interior, Upper Right: Individual-Exterior, Lower Left: Collective-Interior, Lower Right: Collective-Exterior). Notice how deeply these Intelligences align with Beauty, Truth, and Goodness. Let’s explore how these Intelligences connect cities to their Souls [...]
Just as Christiane Seuhs-Schoeller had been invited to open Integral European Conference 2025, she was also invited to close it. And she did so with this beautiful poem. The Matriarch's Call.
This year’s Integral City Award is to an ecosystem with three sub-systems each of which and all together are demonstrating Integral City Intelligences. The first subsystem is Neighbourhood Parliaments – now often know as Neighbourhood Democracy or Neighborocracy. The second is Children’s Parliaments. The third sub-system is SONEC. Let’s consider the “organs” in [...]
This newsletter is published quarterly using a cycle of perspectives on the Integral City viewed from: Planet, People, Place and Power. The theme of this issue is People. The unusual and captivating hero of this book is the city. Not an inert mass of buildings, but a collective, a hive, a holarchy that [...]