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.

I have been involved in the Integral community here in NYC for many years, but last year, while I was off living on a mountain for a year I got to know the Asheville, NC community in well. It was great to see how another sangha has coalesced around Ken Wilber’s work, make new friends and take part in both their discussions and practice group. One of those new friends is Terry Poling, the president of Integral Leadership in Action or ILIA.

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.

Integral New York (disclosure: I am an organizer) hosted Alexander Belser for a presentation and discussion titled “Taking Mushrooms Before Dying: Psychedelic-Assisted Psychotherapy”. Belser and his research team at New York University are part of a small group of scientists who, in recent years, have gotten government approval to conduct studies on the potential health effects of psilocybin, the active compound in “magic mushrooms”. Currently, psychedelic mushrooms are a schedule 1 drug. This makes them the most illegal of all drugs.

Charles Eisenstein has written an important book for our time: Sacred Economics: Money, Gift and Community in an age of Transition. In the hopes of inspiring potential readers and informing the rest, I would like to offer a brief summary and commentary on four key ideas contained in his work. I highly recommend you investigate further. Whether or not one agrees with Eisenstein’s ideas is second to the fact that these are the conversations we need to be having.

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.

When said book happens to be about a Zen master hedonist with an incredibly checkered past who was has spent time in prison, modeling on a runway, made millions manufacturing LSD for people such as the Grateful Dead, is deeply versed in integral theory, friends with Ken Wilber, an abuse survivor, yogi, true iconoclast and by all accounts a fearless seeker who consistently refused to accept setbacks as a limiting factor along his journey; I’m enthralled.

One of the decisions that we all make many times a day is whether or not to eat animal products. Clearly an integral approach to this topic becomes very complicated very quickly. For each of us this means considering everything from personal well being to tribal connectivity to the planetary ecology to economic feasibility. I am truly interested in hearing a myriad of perspectives on this topic.

How do you feel about the state of the world today? Do you have hope for the future? Are you enamored with the present? What kind of momentum are you aware of? Do you think that your awareness has any effect on what is happening in the world? How about in your life? How about your mood?

My basic premise is that many in the Integral community, but also in spiritually awake communities at large, seem to have an allergy to for profit business. There is a shadow that lurks in many that leaves them expressing a sense of distrust with those who are running large corporations and also a hesitance to engage the world in a way that will earn them wealth.

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.

Being a holistic health counselor trained at IIN guarantees that one is bringing their awareness to these and many other ways in which food is an integral part of the complex web of our lives. Our relationships, our careers, exercise, spirituality, our environment, society, all of these things must be taken into account if we are to truly understand our cravings and how they can be sated.

Nutrition has always struck me as a gap in the Integral world. I think that Joshua Rosenthal has stepped up to fill that void.