The San Francisco Bay Area is fast becoming a (r)Evolutionary and integral spirituality epicenter. Many events are happening to educate all who care to learn about an open source, (r)evolutionary integral spirituality worldview and the vastness of its expressions. These community gatherings explored in part how do the local and international integral organizations and individuals who are so lovingly and artfully working towards living an integral spirituality lifestyle find and mutually support one another?
In this spirit of questioning and expanding the open source, integral spirituality community, Integrative Spirituality has hosted a number of very successful, collaborative, fun and inspiring spirit-filled events and cruises since 2005. See the links below for descriptions and photos of just a few of the many of them for which we have had the time to post photos.
JFK University reception and cruise for Integral Theory Students
Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS) Partnership Summit cruise
Bay Area Integral Daylong After Event
Esalen and ITP Honoring Cruise
Integral Community Cruise
Integral Community Cruise
Bay Area Integral Gathering
JFK University reception and cruise for Integral Theory Students
IS recently honored about twenty students and faculty from John F. Kennedy University’s Integral Studies Department, hosting them for a Sunday afternoon cruise aboard our i-Boat. This remarkable group is a part (that is, a social holon lacking a central monad, to be integrally precise) of the world’s first accredited Integral Theory Certificate, and Masters and PhD programs. JFKU’s innovative department was launched in 2004 in partnership with Integral University and heralds an exciting new era of integral higher education. Senior staff in attendance from Integral Institute included Bert Parlee and Terry Patten. JFKU’s Integral Studies Department Chair, Sean Esbjorn-Hargens, gave an opening welcome to the assembled group, as did IS executive director Lawrence Wollersheim, who invited the students to consider the vital role of integral religion and spirituality in their integral education. See More Photos Here.
Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS) Partnership Summit cruise
Integrative Spirituality was an enthused participant at the “Partnership Summit” organized by the Institute for Noetic Sciences and held September 25-27. The special assembly met to seek ways to empower an alliance of organizations with similar spiritual and sustainability goals. According to the convener Stephen Dinan, many organizations in this space face an acutely resource-challenged environment, and yet their systems are redundant or competitive with other organizations who share the same goals. As a remedy, the alliance is seeking, for example, a structure akin to United Way so that people may contribute to many such organizations together. Other ideas examined by the participants ranged from joint awareness campaigns in the media to simply sharing mailing lists. Invitees at the summit included the Alliance for a New Humanity, Bioneers, Peace Alliance, the Ella Baker Center, the Omega Institute, Pachamama Alliance, Planetwork, Social Venture Network, Unity, Tikkun/Network of Spiritual Progressives, Youth for Environmental Sanity, AGNT, Steriling Alliance, and Integrative Spirituality. On the third day of the event, the participants engaged in a cruise on the i-Boat sponsored by Integrative Spirituality, where they celebrated their first steps toward cooperation.
See More Photos here.
Bay Area Integral Daylong After Event
As yet another a sign of the Bay Area’s shift toward integral consciousness, three regional integral organizations held large gatherings on the same day on June 24—and then coalesced as a single community that evening at a well-attended regional “after party.” That day, about 60 people attended the San Francisco Bay Area Integral's day-long educational event that included talks on integral theory and integral politics, plus demonstrations of integral practices, held at the One Taste urban retreat center in San Francisco. Bert Parlee, the vice president and chief of staff at Integral Institute, gave a talk about “Integral Intelligence” and Byron Belitsos, coauthor of One WorldDemocracy, spoke about the integral approach to global governance. Practice sessions included Qigong (Mark Johnson), Tonglen (Sue Stephenson), the use of sound for healing and altered states (Estara), and Open Space group-process work. The day-long was produced by Camille Nowell, Lev Woolf, and Bruce Kunkel and others at Bay Area Integral, and cosponsored by Integrative Spirituality. But there was more: Also on June 24, the Integral Transformative Practice (ITP) community held a large summer gathering drawing from their five local practice groups; and a major educational event was also held by the What is Enlightenment (WIE) community that includes students of Andrew Cohen.
For the evening event, the folks at IS (Integral Spirituality) hosted a community-wide party aboard the Creative Spirit (a.k.a. the I-boat)—our floating event center docked in Sausalito—as our way of supporting the rapidly expanding Bay Area Integral Commons. The party was graced with attendees streaming in from all three of these integral communities as well as by many other friends from around the region.
“If you have not yet experienced an I-boat event,” said IS executive director Lawrence Wollersheim, “please plan to join us for new events coming up in the fall. Many of our events are designed to enhance your social awareness of the integral movement, but our ultimate aim is to build the Commons throughout the region and the world through a cooperative approach to developing and disseminating the integral vision—especially integral spirituality.”
See More Photos here.
Esalen and ITP Honoring Cruise
As a way of marking the forthcoming publication of a new book from University of Chicago Press(Esalen; America and The Religion of No Religion), that provides a definitive and scholarly history of Esalen Institute, and to honor Michael Murphy and George Leonard for founding Integral Transformative Practice (ITP), we hosted a gathering on the I-boat of Esalen founder Michael Murphy, the new book’s author, Jeff Kripal, and many luminaries from the human potential movement who have taught at Esalen. Among those who made the cruise where Mike Murphy; transpersonal psychology pioneer Stan Grof, Richard Tarnas (author of The Passion of the Western Mind and Psyche and Cosmos); former CIIS president Robert McDermott; emeritus consciousness researcher Charles Tart; ITP pioneers Annie Leonard and Barry Robbins; and the research director of the Institute for Noetic Sciences, Marilyn Schlitz, among many others.
See More Photos here.
Integral Community Cruises – May and June 2006
In the spirit of questioning and expanding the Integral community and commons, Integrative Spirituality hosted 2 very successful full, fun and inspiring cruises on May 28 and June 4, around the San Francisco Bay on our floating event center, ‘The Creative Spirit’, a.k.a. the ‘i-boat. These cruises were specifically created to bring together some of the diverse Bay area integral opinion leaders, students, teachers, volunteers and friends so that we can physically meet and connect, share our unique expressions of how we are furthering the integral worldview in our own lives and those of others, and to find new and fun ways to collaborate and expand this emerging integral community on both spiritual and secular levels.
The two days were absolutely San Francisco postcard perfect as we caught the sunset facing the Golden Gate with the lights of the city just starting to come up behind us. After boarding and brief introductions, Lawrence Wollersheim, the IS Executive Director, welcomed newcomers and old friends to enjoy the views, the food and the connections to be made. Each cruise had uniquely different visitors which allowed for more cross pollenization and fertilization between various organizations being represented. Among the cruisers, there were representatives from Bay Area Integral, The Cultural Integration Fellowship (CIF), California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS), John F. Kennedy University, Integral Transformative Practice (ITP), Integral Life Practice (ILP) and the Integral Institute (II).
Of course, no gathering on the ‘i-boat’ would be complete without musical merrymaking and dancing. We have a special thank you to Bruce Kunkel(www.kunkelandharris.com) and to David Serotkin(www.davidserotkin.com) for their stellar guitar jam, and to Steve Purple Haze(www.djpurple.com) for spinning the i-tunes for our dancing pleasure.
Please click on links below to see more pictures from these 2 cruises.
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