How do you feel about your coworkers? Are they your friends? Your best friends? Do you do your best to keep your work life and your social life separate and distinct? One of the reasons I became a Life & Career Coach was to work with people that I love more. I wanted to blur the lines between friendship and work and see what kind of beautiful mess I could create.

How does your developmental stage impact who you choose as a partner? What skills are needed to co-create healthy, sustainable love relationships? How does your sexual selection process and mate choices impact families, neighborhoods, communities, societies and the world at large? How about the environment or the economy? What does all of this tell us about our authentic evolutionary purpose and how we can discover it? What are the benefits of knowing this purpose?

Shadow work reduces our emotional suffering and enables us to see ourselves and others in a more realistic, undistorted way. Liberated zest for life and increased empathy are inevitable side effects.

Why is a meditation practice so hard to stick to? Do you ever tell people you meditate even though you rarely if ever actually do it? For that matter, is meditation even “worth it?” What’s so great about it, anyway? If you’re anything like me, you think about these questions a lot. As curious thinkers and, ideally, doers, who have stepped into integral waters, we encounter plenty of advanced spiritual teachers encouraging us to embrace a sustained spiritual practice.

This past Monday I hosted another Integral Meetup. Our local hero Gilles Herrada presented a preview of his (then) upcoming presentation at the Integral Theory Conference. If you don’t know Gilles, aside from being a former leader of the Meetup with me, he is the recently published author of The Missing Myth: A New Vision on Same Sex Love, a book that asks questions such as: “If homosexual behavior is an aberration from the standpoint of reproduction, why is it widespread among humans, primates, and a myriad of other animal species, and why has it been favored by evolution?”

Traditionally, rites of passage are the ceremonial rituals surrounding the transition from one life stage into another. Birth, childhood to adolescence/adulthood, marriage, childbirth, adulthood to elderhood, secret society initiations, and death are some longstanding examples from indigenous communities.

Do you remember being conceived? How about being born? Or the time in your mothers womb? Even if you can’t call forth specific memories might your cells or your morphogenic field hold the imprints of this time? If so, how could this be impacting your life, your decisions and your experience of the world today?

This month we will look at how holding an integral perspective impacts our relationship to sex. Few things are guaranteed to exist through every stage of development. So far, sex is one of them. Clearly we have sex for a wide number of reasons. Even if technology someday changes the way we reproduce, it’s looking like a safe bet that we will continue to have sex. But many questions of how, why and with whom remain.

This month we will look at how holding an integral perspective impacts our relationship to money. Throughout the ages money has been imbued with all manner of value. We live in a world where money is required for the vast majority of our activities and endeavors.

An integral approach to the ethics of eating means considering everything from personal well being to tribal connectivity to planetary ecology to economic feasibility when making food choices. Food is one area where we do not have a clear scientific consensus on best practices.

For our next Integral conversation, we choose to tackle a delicate topic—the survival of surgical ritualistic practices that involve cutting a piece of an infant’s or child’s body, such as the circumcision of (baby) boys and girls. Let’s see where the Integral approach leads us.

I will be leading a discussion on drugs at the next NYC Ken Wilber Meetup. We will be exploring drugs and drug use through the lens of Integral Philosophy.