Terry Patten dialogues with Dr. Peter Levine about the 3rd and 4th wave of psychotherapy. (Read Terry's blog and listen to the dialog here.) They talk about “Creating Health In a Traumatized Society” in a way that links the insights of human brain development and compassion. This has fascinating implications for the Integral City. Dr. Levine [...]
Because communities and cities are emergents and artefacts of human life, they are outcomes of the brains that have created them. The meshworks in them seem to be fractal patterns that emerge at all scales of human systems. We can better understand how cities work and evolve by recognizing that their communities reflect evolving capacities to [...]
Health emerges because the structures we have created sustain us through relatively stable times and life conditions. When these structures have built-in flexibility they are also resilient and create the conditions for an energetic city. This means that my bio-physical self can respond to the changes in my environment and access to energy, including other [...]
Our senses are our biological evidence gathering mechanisms. They gather the data that stimulate both automatic behavior (like eye blinking, flinching, sneezing, gagging) and intentional behavior. Intentional behavior involves choice and therefore consciousness. A city without intelligence sufficient to its complexity is a city that has lost touch with its senses. A senseless or sense [...]
Outer intelligence is the biological "It" space of the citizen — the space where the body acts and behaves. Behaviors demonstrate our inner intelligence in action. Demographics are key determinants of our intentional, cultural and social capacities, because they represent the bodies through which our intentions, cultures and systems are delivered. If we want to understand [...]
This blog is the third prologue for a keynote at the FreshOutlook Feb. 27, 2012 Building SustainABLE Communities Conference. Integral City is a new paradigm for looking at cities that reveals its bio-psycho-cultural-structural evolutionary intelligences. These twelve intelligences cluster into five capacities and are organized into an Integral City Compass that provides direction and alignment [...]
Designing healthcare systems that serve the wellbeing of Integral City 2.0 begins with remembering "health" comes from the same root as the word "whole". Healthcare in the human hive is based on the principles of Life and Evolution . Wholistic healthcare systems are rooted in natural science and embody values and cultural intentions. Principles that contribute to appropriate [...]
How do you engage Collective Shadow? How do you design a process for sustainability leaders to address the shadow of self, of the group and of the planet? That was a question that we asked ourselves during the Embody Integral Sustainability inquiry during August 2011 at Venwoude, Netherlands. Behind our questions we found support from [...]
Congratulations to Barrett Brown who just defended his dissertation on Leadership for Sustainability. Barrett designed an integral methodology to study integrally-informed leaders working in sustainability. His Findings differentiate amongst leaders who work on the system (Strategists), with the system (Alchemists) and as the system (Ironists). This research illuminates the path of both consciousness and action as [...]
Dr. Clare Graves(1) (and many researchers since) proposed that human values systems emerged in alternating stages of Individualistic expression and Collectivist embrace. He had the insight to propose that evidence would be found in the biological domains (as well as psychological and social) long before technology like fMRI scanning had been invented. Graves proposition is fundamental to [...]