Pacific Integral

Creating the Field for Mutual Evolution and Belonging

Abigail Lynam — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 18:08:10 GMT

This article is part 7 of our exploration of the Seven Facets of Awakened Wholeness, an ecology of practices emerging from Pacific Integral’s two decades of work in transformative change and collective unfolding. Throughout the year, we’ve been offering films, articles, conversations, and live workshops for each facet. We’re currently exploring the territory of collective life.

Join our upcoming workshop on Collective Emergence: Creating the Field for Mutual Evolution on September 17th at 1pm Pacific.

Film by

“When you are transformed the world will be transformed, for you are the world and the world is you.”

— Gospel of Mary Magdalene

We Human Beings are Deeply Relational

We are born of relationships, and we exist in and depend on a web of relationships. It doesn’t always feel that way, given all the cultural conditioning, familial shaping, isolation, fragmentation, and wounding present in our relational and collective life. But we are deeply interdependent and intersubjective; our sense of separation is an illusion. We exist in a relational ecology we can open and deepen into, and ultimately rest in.

What does contemplating this evoke in you?

Does it feel relieving and inviting, or does it feel binding?

Simply notice what feelings or sensations are present — any longing, avoidance, or grief.

What do you yearn for in collective life? What gets in the way? What do you sense is possible?

Relaxing our sense of being a separate self can be liberating, but it can also feel threatening. This is part of the paradox of the I and the We – it can often feel like we can have one or the other, the group or oneself. But in fact, we need both to be fully sovereign and fully expressed. Our individual wholeness is interdependent with our collective wholeness.

In a culture already struggling with fragmentation, loneliness, and the breakdown of its systems, being wholehearted, open, and vulnerable can feel frightening — and in some settings, genuinely risky. There is another paradox here: that we need boundaries to be fully available and in relationship with ourselves, each other, and the world as it is. We need to know where our no’s and yes’s are, so that we can say yes to the deeper embrace. This involves both preserving and releasing our sense of self. And it calls for humility, gentleness, patience, and boldness in a time between worlds.

As someone who has often felt alienated, isolated, and somewhat unsafe in human realms, while feeling a deep belonging with the more-than-human world, it has been a journey to relax into the recognition of our interbeing – to truly feel the embrace of belonging in group life. This discovery has been life-giving, life-liberating, and continues to deepen and offer its gifts. An important part of building my capacity for relational wholeness and group life has involved practicing truthfulness, expressing boundaries, and recognizing and asking for what I need in relationships. Earlier on, it required more, not less, of my “self.” Learning how to stay connected with myself and my own ground while remaining in relationship has been central to my growth. The more I learned to set boundaries around what was and wasn’t okay in relational life, the more I trusted myself to do it when needed. And with that trust, I found I could relax my boundaries when they weren’t needed so much. Instead of existing on the edge of groups – never fully in nor out – I could jump in and adjust as needed. This is what liberates belonging, and the sovereignty of the self.

One of the discoveries I feel in awe of, and to which I’ve dedicated my life’s work, is that healthy, whole, awake collectives can be deeply healing and awakening for individuals. We need each other – concretely, subtly, and causally. Concretely, we need each other for survival and our physical, embodied needs. Subtly, we need each other for companionship, for love, as mirrors and feedback, to discover who we are through each other’s eyes. And most subtly of all — we can help anchor and reflect the true depths of who we are in our essence — awareness itself, open unbounded, loving and free. A collective that embodies and enacts love and truthfulness, that integrates the sovereignty and uniqueness of individuals without contradiction, and that finds unity through diversity, is a powerful force for healing, transformation, and awakening.

This is what calls collective individuation, a phrase he uses in Katie Teague’s film Living in the Metacrisis. It is culture building — an essential part of generating a world where diversity doesn’t fracture unity but deepens it. It is medicine for a fragmented world. It helps us know that something different, something deeper and more whole, is truly possible.

The Alchemy of Collective Life

When a collective, and its individuals, develop trust, safety, and the capacity for difference, complexity, and intensity — and cultivate the tools to return to presence after absence and repair after conflict — that collective can become a space of healing, growth, and alchemy.

A collective with this level of depth and coherence is truly greater than the sum of its parts. It can metabolize and support far more than an individual, or a few people, can hold alone. The collective field becomes a place of depth, of witnessing, of healing — where individuals can bring in pain and grief and integrate shadow in ways that are alchemizing, like water turning to wine, or immense pressure producing diamonds. The collective can be an alchemizing, awakening body for the individual — and the individual’s own depth, presence, and practice can do the same for the collective. Neither happens without the other; they co-emerge.

More recently, I’ve been noticing this especially around grief and other big, often-repressed emotions like anger. In the modern Western world, there’s a tendency to privatize grief, to tend to it behind closed doors. My mother lost her father when she was twelve, but she never saw her own mother cry — except once, when she accidentally opened the door to her mother’s bedroom and found her in tears. I’ve always wondered what that taught my mother about her own feelings and needs, and about what should and shouldn’t be expressed in the company of others.

What I witness in our work with individuals and collectives is that as a group’s field deepens in trust, truthfulness, and intimacy, people become able to bring in and express much deeper grief, anger, or shame, and to let it be held, supported, and witnessed without needing to close down or hide it. This has a profound healing and liberatory function: the movement and expression of these feelings lets them be transmuted into their wisdom essence — anger becoming a constructive force for change, grief and sadness becoming a source of acceptance and deep love. One person opening and healing this way becomes an opening and a healing for us all — a pathway to deeper intimacy, resilience, and shared strength.

This is one example among many — grief transmuted into love, anger into constructive fire, isolation made whole in the presence of others, and collective creativity and wisdom liberated. When we deepen our individual and collective potential in these ways, water becomes wine. We learn to truly be with and for each other, and to become a transformative and liberatory force in our world.

Ways to Engage

This month is one facet of seven we’ve been exploring throughout 2026: Integration, Complexity Capacity, Intimacy & Relationships, Awakening, Embodiment, Soul Expression, Collective. These represent an ecology of interconnected territories of human development and transformation. You can learn more about these territories here.

Attend the Open Workshop

Collective Emergence: Creating the Field for Mutual Evolution

September 17th @ 1:00 PM Pacific.

An exploration of the capacities for love and truthfulness that let a group hold both individuals and their unfolding together. You’ll practice what it takes to build a field that can meet what’s real and stay open to what wants to emerge between us, capacities you can carry into any collective you belong to. This is the last workshop in our monthly series on the Seven Facets.

Listen to the Podcast Conversation

Abigail and Geoff join Layman Pascal on the Integral Stage Podcast for a wide-ranging conversation about collective life. They explore how autonomy and communion can grow together rather than compete and what it takes for a group to work honestly with its own shadow.

Generating Transformative Change (GTC)

An intimate cohort-based personal & leadership development program

Begins in October (Early Bird Registration Ends September 7th)

For over 20 years across three continents GTC has developed into one of the most powerful, awakening, and mature developmental journeys available today. It is a cohort-based container designed to liberate your capacity to show up more fully as yourself and catalyze transformation in the systems and communities you touch. The hybrid in-person and online program unfolds through four residential retreats on Whidbey Island near Seattle, WA across nine months from October through July.

To learn more and apply visit www.pacificintegral.com/gtc

Being Loved Through Difficulty

Dechen Ellen — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 20:56:45 GMT

During this past year’s GTC journey, I had the wonderful opportunity to get to know Bruce Campbell. Bruce, like so many of the people who are called to GTC, is a deep spiritual practitioner who has spent his professional life putting compassion into action.

Bruce has practiced for 20 years in the Plum Village tradition of Thich Nhat Hanh, and holds a deep sense that we must fundamentally change the systems we live in if we are to create more just and sustainable societies. In his work as a lawyer and as a community member, Bruce actively supports innovative projects that are seeking to establish new economic and social paradigms.

When I sat down with Bruce, it had been just over a month since we wrapped up our journey with Owl. (In GTC, each cohort gets a nickname – this year’s were Owl and Raven.) I wanted to hear what stood out to Bruce most about the journey, and what he was carrying forward.

I hope you enjoy this conversation. Here are my five favorite moments of the interview:

How shadow work in GTC revealed previously unseen aspects of Bruce:

“The work we did around what I came to understand as shadow work was very powerful for me. We were given a set of practices and tools to be able to see myself in more complete ways — through the eyes of my cohort members. That helped both to see some of these hidden shadow elements in myself, and also to see the light. Our darkness can be hidden from ourselves, but sometimes it’s just as hard to see our own gifts, what we can offer the world in a positive sense. Some of that was illuminated for me in really powerful ways.”

The power of offering our Being, not just our Doing:

“I grew up being recognized largely for what I could offer materially — what I could do, accomplish, create, build. What got emphasized more in the group at GTC were these other ways I can show up for people — emotional, spiritual — ways that are more about our quality of being than what we’re doing.”

How the chance to “work it out in real time” makes GTC different from therapy:

“In therapy, you’re having a one-on-one dialogue with someone who only knows you through what you share in that fifty minutes. It can be somewhat abstract for both the person and the therapist … In GTC, you’re put in an environment where some of the scary stuff ends up being enacted or triggered. That’s part of what makes it hard — being in the group environment would evoke things, and I’d be experiencing difficult emotions in real time. But what’s powerful about GTC is that instead of having a difficult experience and then trying to recall it with a therapist two weeks later, it’s on display in the moment — and there’s an opportunity to work it out in real time with a group of people who I learned had both the capacity to process it with me and the capacity to offer tremendous love and support. That included facilitators who are extraordinarily skilled at offering that support professionally, and peer support from a group of people who also have real capacity to be there for one another.”

How the Owl cohort became a place to be loved through difficulty:

“Owl became a place I could walk through a lot of very difficult experiences, and then have this powerful experience of feeling supported and loved through them. It became a place where I got to experience what healthy, supportive, loving relationship can look like. That’s maybe the most powerful piece of it — the experience of being loved through these transformative, sometimes difficult experiences.”

What it’s been like to live more authentically since GTC:

“What I discovered was that I’d developed an ability to present a very different outside than my inside – … based on trying to achieve certain outcomes, or on presenting myself in a way that’s felt safe. When I try to make the outside reflect more of the inside, people can be surprised by it. Not everyone is accustomed to seeing the inside — a lot of people are more comfortable with interaction that’s a little more superficial. … But the experiences I’ve had sharing myself differently with groups involve feeling vulnerability, feeling fear, feeling uncomfortable and exposed when I’m showing the inside — but then feeling met there by some people in these different environments. What I’m finding is that even outside of GTC, I can show myself in a fuller expression, and there are people who will meet me there. The outcome is that I feel emboldened to share more of myself and show up more authentically, and it deepens my relationships — we start operating on a deeper, more authentic level.”

About Dechen Ellen McSweeney

McSweeney joined the faculty of GTC this year, having gone through the program herself as a participant and apprentice facilitator before stepping into faculty role. She is a teacher, facilitator, psychotherapist, writer, and musician living in Washington, DC. Dechen is the founder of The Nectary: a relational monastery, research-lab, and pop-up school which supports emerging spiritual teachers to collaborate more deeply and bring their offerings to a wider community of learners. She writes regularly at her own Substack, Incarnate.

Learn More About GTC

Generating Transformative Change (GTC) is Pacific Integral’s nine-month cohort-based program in personal and leadership development, offered for more than 20 years across 35 cohorts on three continents. The next cohort is currently forming. If you're curious whether GTC might be part of your own path schedule a conversation with one of our faculty.

Schedule a Conversation

Film: Soul Expression - What Wants to Emerge Through You

Pacific Integral — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 19:26:32 GMT

This is the sixth film in our Seven Facets of Awakened Wholeness series, an ecology of practices emerging from two decades of work in transformative change and collective unfolding.

Somewhere in you there’s a faint dream, a quiet whisper about something particular you are given to and here to give. Soul expression is the recognition that you are both a unique individual and an inseparable part of the larger wholeness awakening to itself through countless forms. What’s yours to bring into the world isn’t something you construct. It’s something you discover in the unfolding of your life.

Join us for a free workshop on Soul Expression on July 30th at 1pm PDT:

Film by

Being Love's Means

Geoff Fitch — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 15:31:40 GMT

This article is part 6 of our ongoing exploration of the Seven Facets of Awakened Wholeness, an ecology of practices emerging from two decades of work in transformative change and collective unfolding. Throughout the year, we’re offering films, articles, conversations, and live workshops for each facet. We’re currently exploring the territory of Soul Expression.

Join our workshop on Soul Expression: What Wants to Emerge Through You on July 30th.

Film by Tucker Walsh

Being Love’s Means

You and I are love’s means.
This moment is our offering.
We will die fully given,
Or we will die ungiven,
Still waiting.

- David Deida

Take a moment to consider the stark call to offer ourselves as love’s means. What does this evoke in you? Most of us, to some degree, live a life rooted in separateness and fear. We seek to accumulate, reject, protect, avoid, contain. If we are successful, we might call this the good life. But underneath that holding on is the illusion that we can protect ourselves from the reality of our vulnerability. The parts of ourselves rooted in this separateness might feel fear in the face of this invitation to become love’s means. In a moment when this fear relaxes, love flows.

As we awaken, we become progressively more transparent to a deeper reality. We come to see this view of separateness as something we learned, something that is culturally reinforced, ultimately empty. The deeper ground is open and free. The deeper truth is that there is no meaningful separateness and that as we loosen our grip on what we are protecting, the limitless abundance of this sacred reality becomes available to us.

As we let this understanding take root in our mind, heart, and body, our singular life takes on an entirely different meaning. This embodiment is a birth, perhaps we could say a kind of rebirth or a completion of our incarnation. We can fully embrace this life as it is given, joyfully. Seeing this, it is simply clear that “you and I are love’s means.” There is nothing to fear. As this realization grows in us, this offering as love’s means, through our unique gifts and context in this life, becomes our soul’s expression.

We begin to see this deeper impulse of the soul’s expression as the doorway to our true nature opens and we examine and integrate the internalized shadow and unexamined constructions of our separateness. There is a sense of something deeper calling us, a sense of the possibility of a life of purpose. At the same time we may be mired in the struggle of the mind, culture, and social conditions of separateness. How do we live a life of meaning and purpose? Our restlessness becomes more aligned with the evolutionary restlessness of the universe. This shapes what we are reaching for. There is a sense of calling, of a desire to be of benefit.

As we awaken and see ourselves as the deeper ground of being, the sense of striving to realize one’s purpose begins to relax and transform. This process may include periods of feeling disconnected from a sense of purpose or agency as we contact and align with the deeper paradoxical truth that our embodiment, expression, and service are both personal and an emanation of wholeness itself. When this happens, the heart of service is more alive than ever, but is no longer dependent on one’s personal story.

The movement arises as an expression of this deeper wholeness, coming alive as you. We are still love’s means. The heart is seen as love itself. As we relax out of the agitation of our striving, we come to realize that “this moment is our offering.” The story of this expression unfolds every moment of your offering. This expression paradoxically becomes more deeply personal and unique while also more profoundly impersonal and universal. The deeper truth and care emanating through your particular uniqueness, unfolding.

Soul Expression

Soul expression emerges from this recognition that you are both a unique individual expression and an inseparable part of the larger wholeness that is awakening to itself through countless forms. The essence of this expression is care and service. As you recognize yourself as an emanation of the greater whole, something unique and particular that you’re here for begins to reveal itself. This isn’t something you construct—it’s something you discover in the unfolding of your life.

Ultimately the path to discovering your soul expression is to follow the movement of life through you—to discover yourself as already being given to something–a way to be of benefit, to care. You may not know exactly what it is. Sometimes you can see the path in hindsight, or you can see the threads you’re carrying through from earlier parts of life, but it is not always possible or easy to clearly see it in the moment.

Understanding that your soul’s expression is something given, not something you construct, becomes important. It’s something to actually face and confront and let into your body and live into. Any ‘yes’ you orient to in life also requires a ‘no’. As you find that deeper current you’re really given to, it invites and necessitates discerning wisdom—saying ‘no’ to all the things you can no longer give your energy to so that you’re in alignment and can prioritize the very thing that is yours to do and be.

Soul expression invites you to explore how your unique essence wants to become more fully realized while serving something greater than your individual will. It’s about partnering with the evolutionary impulse itself—moving from willfulness to willingness, from forcing outcomes to following what wants to emerge through you.

The Journey Home

We can imagine that this journey to a life lived as love’s offering might progress through a series of stages, like a hero’s journey. As I look back on my life, I can interpret it in this way. But as I’ve experienced this journey it has been much more circuitous, mysterious, and at times, confusing. Our life is less like a linear progression through space and time, as it is an already complete whole, growing circuitously, sprouting and saturating the ground, an ecology of becoming, making and remaking itself backwards and forwards through time.

Once that calling of the soul began to speak to me, I had years of struggling with it, trying to make sense of it in the context of my life, afraid of it, longing for it. At first, it came in so subtly, I could hardly find words that had any weight to them. I had awakenings and visions that spoke to me of a deeper reality I wanted to serve. I had a profound impulse to help people. That’s mostly what I knew at first. I had periods where I could no longer hold onto my self protection and saw my life reorder itself to allow for its expression. Parts of me not trusting it, long after I had let it lead my life. There were many re-formations and reinterpretations, and shifts in the way I made sense of it all. Ultimately, I came to see even the soul as a form of separateness that along with my personal self could be a vehicle for the greater unfolding of wisdom and love.

Our Soul Expression can resonate through our life like a sacred sound, an ostinato holding the different movements of our unfolding. It can be felt as a longing in the heart that seems to have no object, looking for something to land on. Allow that sound to be the sound of the universe, that longing to be boundless love.

Then, right now, do something you are moved to do that is of benefit. That act is the movement of compassion. It is your art. Allow that compassion to flower over time, and guide you towards its ends. Learn to trust it, step by step. Cultivate the conditions in your life, the support, the resources, the community, that are needed. Include yourself in its offering. Dare to let it speak through your life.

Ways to Engage

This month is one facet of seven we’re exploring through 2026: Integration, Complexity Capacity, Intimacy & Relationships, Awakening, Embodiment, Soul Expression, Collective. These represent an ecology of interconnected territories of human development and transformation. You can learn more about these territories here.

Each month, we’re going deep into one facet through live open workshops, short films, podcast conversations, and articles.

Subscribe now

Attend the Open Workshop

Soul Expression: What Wants to Emerge Through You

On Thursday, July 30 at 1:00pm Pacific, we’re gathering to explore the difference between purpose as destination and purpose as emergence. Discover what it means to partner with what wants to come through you rather than forcing outcomes from personal will. Learn to follow the movement of life rather than constructing it.

Listen to the Podcast Episode

Listen to our conversation with Layman Pascal on the Integral Stage Podcast, where Abigail and I explore this territory of soul expression in depth.

Fully Inhabiting Life

Abigail Lynam — Fri, 15 May 2026 15:15:18 GMT

This article is part 5 of our ongoing exploration of the Seven Facets of Awakened Wholeness, an ecology of practices emerging from two decades of work in transformative change and collective unfolding. Throughout the year, we’re offering films, articles, conversations, and live workshops for each facet. We’re currently exploring the territory of Embodiment.

Join our workshop on Embodiment: Living as the Truth We Are on June 11.

Film by

The Path of Incarnation

“You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves”

— Mary Oliver

Embodiment is the path of incarnation, of fully inhabiting life. It is the bridge between the transcendent and the immanent, between the vastness of our true nature and the exquisite specificity of this life, this body, this moment. It is where awakening meets the world.

To embody is to say yes to life as it is. This doesn’t mean losing agency and choice. By coming out of resistance or self-protection into full relationship with what is, we liberate the energy bound up in that resistance, which can then move toward discerning action. Embodiment goes deeper than physical presence — it’s about landing here as you, in this life, in your own truth: discovering what you’re here for and agreeing to be here completely.

My own journey into embodiment has been one of the more challenging and transformative pathways of my personal evolution. Our most confounding territory so often bears the deepest gifts — a recognition that offers hope and courage to turn toward what feels most in the shadows. I offer my own story here to illustrate what one journey through resistance into a deeper yes to life looks like, and to normalize that opening suppressed emotions like anger and fear can be profoundly liberating.

A Journey Home

I am shaped by the patterning of an Enneagram type 9, the “peacemaker.” Type 9s tend to merge with others and their environment to avoid conflict and maintain inner peace. To achieve this, they vacate the body — becoming diffuse, foggy, or absent from their own physical experience. The body is there, but the self doesn’t fully inhabit it: a kind of chronic, low-grade dissociation. People shaped by the 9 can have a hard time locating themselves, making it hard for others to feel or find them. Naranjo, one of the Enneagram’s developers, called this self-forgetting the foundation of all the fixations — shaping every type.

Earlier in life I couldn’t quite locate myself, my own needs or feelings. Paradoxically I would hide away from others to “find” myself, which compounded the isolation. Gratefully, I related deeply with nature and the larger body of the earth — feeling my emotions more readily through grief for planetary issues or the suffering of others. This led me to deep work in ecology and social change, including teaching for a land-based university program where I lived outside and slept directly on the earth for nearly ten years. It was deeply grounding, but I was still not quite inhabiting myself. I overrode my own boundaries, lost myself in others’ needs, and drove myself to burnout. I felt a deep belonging with the cosmos, but I needed to undertake a journey back to myself that felt as far away as the moon.

Coming back meant pulling my attention inward, encountering what had been hidden and suppressed, and rediscovering my own ground, boundaries, and needs. This was a long, slow, sometimes arduous pathway home. But I had guides along the way — sometimes in the form of direct support, and other times through the provocative challenge of isolation, lost relationships, and burnout.

A primary practice that supported me was Core Energetics. Core Energetics is a somatic-psychological approach integrating body, emotion, mind, and spirit. It holds that life energy is inherently healthy, and that psychological suffering arises when that energy becomes blocked or armored. The work is to open these holding patterns, liberate the flow, and to learn how we disconnect our energy and expression from our deepest self. Core Energetics helped me encounter and open suppressed anger, hurt, fear, and controlling patterns — and to come out of hiding into a deeper truthfulness.

Coming Out of Hiding

Opening my anger has been profoundly enlivening — not against another, but as a life-affirming force. At first it was terrifying; I feared how destructive it might be. Surprisingly, opening it made me less destructive because I could be more direct. It dissolved what was on top of the anger (control, withholding) and what lay beneath it (grief, vulnerability, pleasure, love). Over time, keeping this energy moving doesn’t require large cathartic movements — it can happen more quietly through truth-telling, naming conflict as it arises, expressing needs, setting boundaries, and somatic practices like dance and breathwork. Although sometimes a good roar is exactly what is called for.

Coming out of hiding involved sharing secrets cloaked in shame. The secrets themselves mattered less than the hiding — which kept me separate, afraid, and alone. Opening into deeper truthfulness has brought more love than I could have imagined and helps me trust myself and life more fully. Telling the truth releases the energy held in hiding or resistance, and opens a deeper interdependence with others that reduces the burden of navigating things solo.

Through this journey, I have also opened embodied cognition — knowing things in my body before the mind has made sense of them. For example, one time with a group of people at an event, I felt a sudden nervousness in my body without knowing why. The next thing that happened is that I expressed some honest feedback about something that I was uncomfortable with. My body knew that I was going to speak truthfully before my mind did. And the outcome of it was the person felt grateful for the honesty and relational contact, rather than being met with silence or avoided. Now I can more easily discern what is true through the sensational field of my body in ways that are more direct than thinking things through. Overall, there is a deeper trust in life, an easier flow of life energy, a vitality, and a deeper release into the ground of true nature.

The Invitation to Incarnate More Fully

What in your own journey of embodiment is beckoning? Take a few breaths and notice what feels true in your own experience right now. What wants to be embraced more fully? Remember: you are still being born. Each moment is an invitation to incarnate more fully, to open what has been hidden or suppressed, to open to the joyful aliveness of our embodied being, and to awaken into who we truly are.

So much becomes available when we step toward a fuller embrace of ourselves and life as it is. The encounter with what lies underneath is not always easy — but these so-called demons reveal their true essence and gifts when met with loving truthfulness.

Be with what is.... and Letting go...

Forget about enlightenment

Sit down wherever you are

And listen to the wind singing in your veins.

Feel the love, the longing, the fear in your bones.

Open your heart to who you are, right now,

Not who you would like to be,

Not the saint you are striving to become,

But the being right here before you, inside you, around you.

All of you is holy.

You are already more and less

than whatever you can know.

Breathe out,

Touch in,

Let go.

— John Welwood

Ways to Engage

Each month, we’re going deep into one facet through live open workshops, short films, podcast conversations, and articles.

Subscribe to follow the series.

Subscribe now

Attend the Open Workshop

Embodiment: Living as the Truth We Are

On Thursday, June 11 at 1:00pm Pacific, we’re gathering to explore what it means to come alive in the body. We’ll work with the patterns that structure the flow of life through you. We’ll practice entering into deeper relationship with truth, acknowledging what you know, what wants to express itself through you, and what you're actually here to do.

Listen to the Podcast Episode

Listen to our Conversation with on the Integral Stage Podcast, where Geoff and I explore this territory of embodiment in depth.

Now Enrolling

Generating Transformative Change (GTC)

We’re currently forming the next cohort for GTC North America, which begins in October. GTC is a 9-month intimate journey of personal and collective developmental unfolding that liberates your capacity to show up more fully as yourself and catalyze transformation in the systems and communities you touch.

GTC unfolds through four residential retreats across nine months from October through July. Each retreat creates space to explore new territory, work with emerging edges, and deepen into what's becoming possible. Between retreats you bring your learning and intentions into life and community, and continue engagement through online sessions, individual and group practice, and developmental coaching.

GTC retreats are held on Whidbey Island, Washington - about an hour from Seattle.

Learn More & Apply

Film: Embodiment - Saying Yes to Life

Pacific Integral — Fri, 15 May 2026 15:08:59 GMT

This is the fifth film in our Seven Facets of Awakened Wholeness series, an ecology of practices emerging from two decades of work in transformative change and collective unfolding.

Embodiment is about coming into incarnation—fully inhabiting this life, this body, this moment. It's about coming down and into the body, contacting the ground, and saying yes to what's here. What a gift to have this body, to be an expression of awareness living itself through human form.

Join us for a free workshop Thursday, June 11 at 1pm PDT, where we’ll explore what it means to come alive in the body. We’ll practice entering into deeper relationship with truth, acknowledging what you know, what wants to express itself through you, and what you’re actually here to do.

Film Directed by

Film: Awakening - The Path of Freedom

Pacific Integral — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 16:26:26 GMT

This month, as part of our series on the Seven Facets of Awakened Wholeness, we’re exploring Awakening.

There’s a myth that awakening takes a long time, that freedom belongs to some distant future or to someone other than who you are right now. And yet this ground of awakened awareness has been here every moment of your life. Always right here.

Awakening is about recognizing what’s been present all along and clearing what obscures what’s already whole.

This is the fourth film in our Seven Facets of Awakened Wholeness series—seven interconnected dimensions of human development and transformation.

Join us for a open workshop on April 23 at 1:00pm PDT. An embodied practice space where we will touch into the unchanging ground that has been here every moment of your life.

Film Directed by

Being in the World, and Free

Geoff Fitch — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 16:42:14 GMT

This article is part of our ongoing exploration of the Seven Facets of Awakened Wholeness. Each month through July, we’re offering films, articles, conversations, and live workshops for each facet. April’s territory is Awakening: the path of freedom that is our birthright.

Join us for a free workshop on Awakening on April 23.

What Is Unchanging

Take a moment right now and reflect on how much has changed over the course of your life. The world has changed immensely. You have changed. The way you think and feel, the stories you tell about yourself, others, and the world — these have changed. This thing you call the body is constantly changing. Everything is in constant change. If it seems not to change, we can say it is in motion. Everything is in motion.

Now — pause and take a breath. Notice what is unchanging.

There is something that has been there every moment of your life. Always right here. Take your time right now to locate it.

It’s not your thoughts or ideas or stories — these come and go. It’s not even the sense of “me.” You lose that when you are absorbed in an experience or when you sleep at night. It’s not time or space, your sense of which is constantly shifting. Notice what is unchanging, what has always been with you.

What did that short turn of attention open for you? Don’t analyze it or even label it. Simply notice in your direct experience what appeared when you took a moment to recognize what is always right here.

In these kinds of moments we turn away from the ordinary dream of reality — from everything we grasp: our stories, our fleeting experiences, our sense of self and other, the narrative of our life, and all of the objects we carry around with us. In turning away from that, we are turning away or seeing through everything we ordinarily identify with, everything we reach toward to confirm our own existence.

In turning away, we can momentarily touch the deeper essence of what we are — that which is unchanging. It is the very thing you can rely upon. Your true existence. As we do this, we paradoxically find ourselves more deeply in contact with what this reality really is.

Our essence is a wide open, unbounded, free, non-dual, effortless awareness. This awareness is beyond any conception we can have of it — so even these words fall short.

To realize the potential of awakening, that recognition of our most profound nature must be seen, cultivated, and embodied in all of our moments. Realizing this awareness is the deepest gift we can receive in this life — allowing it to transform us, to enlighten us, and to become a gift to everyone in our world.

Noise and Signal

There is a lot written and said these days about awakening - some of it is contradictory and confounding: It’s profoundly important. It’s not all it’s cracked up to be. There are pitfalls and dangers. There are risks of spiritual narcissism and bypassing. It is more possible than ever. We need to awaken before it’s too late. It’s too late for awakening. Psychedelics are ushering in a new era of awakening — or they lead to new experiences but not necessarily awakening. Awakening takes lifetimes. It happens in an instant. It’s something specific. It’s not what you think it is.

While the various traditions of mysticism and spiritual growth point to unique ways of seeing and manifesting our awakening, something is central to all of them. They all tell a fundamental story of human experience:

What we take to be the normal, everyday experience of life in the world is a kind of fundamental illusion. This illusion is the root cause of our suffering. When we dispel this illusion — when we awaken from it — we discover the deeper truth of reality. Waking up from this illusion is our liberation. Our fundamental freedom is not found in changing our world. It is in seeing its true nature.

Awakening Within the Seven Facets

The path of awakening is central to the mature fruition of our innate potential, as expressed by the seven facets of awakened wholeness — an integral view of our becoming. While each of the seven facets addresses a particular dimension of human unfolding — integration, complexity, intimacy, relationship, collective life, expression, and leadership — the path of awakening is singular and essential.

“You must be somebody before you can be nobody.” — Jack Engler, Buddhist Psychologist

I sometimes think that if you followed any path to its complete fruition, it would lead to all of the others. I think this is true of awakening as well. Ultimately all of life is our teacher.

In practice, however, each of the seven facet is a mirror into an aspect of ourselves and our culture that requires its own unique attention and care. Awakening without attention to our trauma and shadow, without developing our capacities and relationships, without understanding the systems and cultures in which we are embedded, and without developing the complexity of our consciousness, can actually be harmful.

More deeply, what Jack Engler is pointing to is that the nature of our existence is to forget our true nature. It is critical to develop ourselves as incarnate beings — to learn how to exist in and navigate the world as it is, to be of deepest benefit, to make contributions, and to develop our ethics and our sense of mutual care. As we grow, we develop the skills and capacities needed to be of benefit in the world at this time. Through awakening, we learn to see through all of that — to cultivate the deeper freedom that is our essence. We learn to see what reality truly is, while remaining fully present to its challenges and to how it appears to others.

To be of deepest benefit, we learn to be fully in this world, to be of it, but not caught by it.

Taking It Seriously

Yes, there are pitfalls, and spiritual awakening is not appropriate for everyone. But if you have recognized the deeper awareness at the heart of your existence — or if you have an intuition of it, or if you have received teachings and encouragement — then your work is to take it seriously.

Beyond awakening lies the potential for the full fruition of enlightenment: the realization of the profound sacredness, unconditioned purity, and compassionate intelligence at the heart of our existence. Its ultimate measure is our conduct in the world — and, eventually, the vibrancy of all dimensions of ourselves and our society, our world, our relationship to each other and to nature.

Awakening brings us into deeper intimacy and contact with reality. It opens a deepening recognition of the perfection at the heart of existence and inspires compassionate action to help that become manifest. The potential is that we human beings could be a positive force on this planet. We could be a sanctifying presence for this world.

Ways to Engage

Each month, we’re going deep into one facet through live open workshops, short films, podcast conversations, and articles.

Attend the Open Workshop

On Thursday, April 23 at 1:00pm Pacific, we’re gathering to explore what becomes possible when you open to the reality that awakening is your birthright. This will be an embodied practice space where we will touch into the unchanging ground that has been here every moment of your life. Can’t make it live? The recording will be available.

Watch the Film

Leading Through Emergence

This spring, May 7 – June 25, we’re offering Leading Through Emergence, a live 8-week online program for anyone wanting to meet breakdown from a deeper ground and participate with what wants to emerge.

Learn More & Apply

New Film on Intimacy & Relationship: Being With and For Each Other

Pacific Integral — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 18:04:46 GMT

This month, as part of our series on the Seven Facets of Awakened Wholeness, we’re exploring Intimacy & Relationship.

The longing to belong, to be truly seen and known, lives at the heart of what it means to be human. At the same time, our deepest challenges lie in the heart of intimacy. Our wounds and shadows are formed in relationship.

So relationship is both the context for our wounding and the vessel for our awakening. We co-create each other and have the potential to co-liberate one another.

At the heart of this work is cultivating our capacity for healthy relationship. All the other facets of awakened wholeness depend deeply on our healthy, open, awakened and free connection with each other. We are in this together in a very profound way.

Join us for a free workshop on March 26 at 1pm PDT. We’ll explore what becomes possible when we cultivate the willingness to be deeply present with and for each other.

Film Directed by

Effortless Intimacy

Abigail Lynam — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 23:05:18 GMT

This article is part of our ongoing exploration of the Seven Facets of Awakened Wholeness. Each month from January through July, we're offering films, articles, conversations, and live workshops for each facet. March's territory is Intimacy & Relationship: both the context for our wounding and the vessel for our awakening.

Join us for a free workshop on Intimacy & Relationship on March 26.

“We are one, after all, you and I. Together we suffer, together exist, and forever will recreate each other.”

Teilhard de Chardin

Relationship with ourselves, each other, all of life, and the inseparable and ever-present ground of being (awakened wholeness) – is what can support us to more fully realize our human potential and generate flourishing futures for all of life. It might also be the very threshold of our collective evolution as a species.

We co-create each other and have the potential to co-liberate one another. This endeavor of relating, of coming into a deeper intimacy with what is – not what we wish were so, but what already is, is a pathway for human wholeness, awakening, and culture/world building.

We truly need each other to help us recognize and become more of the whole of who we are, and through this we can orient towards the challenges we face with a more networked and interconnected resilience and collective intelligence.

“A group of wise people, tethered through intimacy, is the most powerful problem-solving system in the universe.”

Bonnitta Roy

If we take the view that each of us is an expression of the whole, an embodiment of spirit in a multiplicity of utter uniqueness – then we can orient towards a shared endeavor of collective awakening and collective flourishing.

Awakening isn’t and never was an individual pursuit. As each node of the web of humanity awakens to its true nature, we can fully embody that awakening in how we relate with each other and vice versa. This can take the form of an effortless intimacy, a resting in relatedness that allows for and supports agency and communion, union and differentiation, full acceptance of how things are and compassionate action in response to suffering.

All the ways that we aren’t able to fully embody that, are further opportunities for healing, growth and liberation. They point us to that which calls for deeper love and truthfulness – a slowing down and really being with what is, and an integration and healing of patterns of relating that aren’t serving us. It also calls for cultivating the skills and capacities needed to engage in this kind of relating.

Luminous Porosity

In the midst of a meditation retreat some years back, I had a vision of humans as a porous structure emanating (and receiving) the light of spirit. Each of us was a node or jewel in Indra’s net, reflecting all the other nodes in all directions. In the vision I saw that as we navigate life, through the fundamental vulnerability of being a human in a body encountering pain in a fractured world, that the luminous porosity dimmed or was blocked over time.

The vision was of something like a beautifully carved clay human figure with a lattice of openings, some of which were blocked with the accumulation of pain and in an effort at self-protection. I saw the healing and awakening journey as one of unblocking the pores – releasing what had accumulated and was obscuring the light of our true nature.

This has been very true in my own life journey. Early in life I learned to hide from others which was essentially hiding from myself and my own needs and vulnerabilities, and ultimately also became a hiding from or not recognizing true nature. Our relationship with all that is, is reflected in how we relate with ourselves and each other.

I also had some shaping experiences (such as moving a lot internationally in the first 14 years of life, and then ultimately going to boarding school which I experienced as a loss of family) which made it harder for me to trust others. I trusted nature more than people. All of this manifested in social isolation. My healing and growth involved reaching through the isolation, revealing myself, risking vulnerability, discovering my needs in and for relationships and learning that I could truly lean on and trust others.

One of the ways hiding manifested in my life was through a secret addiction to smoking. Finding the courage to work through the shame and hiding and let loved ones know, helped me discover and receive the love and acceptance that was waiting under the cover of shame. After that, quitting, while challenging, was so much more in reach. This was a profound example of dissolving the barrier to love and discovering it was there all along just waiting to be let in.

Resting in the Interrelatedness of All of Life

Healing and awakening in relationship has been profoundly liberating and life giving, so much so that this has become the territory of my life’s work. And my relational healing and growth has opened into what I now call effortless intimacy, or a resting in non-separation, the interrelatedness of all of life. This includes the fundamental vulnerability and sometimes tender awkwardness of simply being human.

The harm we experience in life occurs in relationship and so can the healing and liberation. By staying present with ourselves and others, we can co-create forms of relating that support a natural unfolding of the awakening process. We truly can walk each other home.

“The circle is strengthened not by perfection, but by the way we return to each other after absence.”

Parker Palmer

But doing so requires skill and capacity development in addition to repatterning our maps of what it means to be in relationship that we internalized from family and the culture. We need to learn the skills of relating, including how to communicate with each other, how to listen to each other, how to integrate and navigate conflict, how to support differentiation and navigate differences, how to set healthy boundaries and recognize and ask for what we need, etc. This kind of relational work calls for vulnerability – to risk revealing ourselves and being receptive to other’s experience of us. And it calls for an openness to allow the process of relationship to unfold. It invites curiosity, compassion for self and others, humility and self-responsibility.

“Conflict is the spirit of the relationship asking itself to deepen.”

Malidoma Patrice Somé

There are three dimensions of relationship that we can attend to. At the foundational level, we are working with the patterns formed in early life that shape our experience of self in relationship. At the subtle level, we are developing more complex and nuanced ways of relating. At the non-dual level we are recognizing the universal nature of our relatedness and belonging.

At the foundational level we attend to:

Attachment and our ability to form bonds
Differentiation – the ability to stay grounded in the face of difference and intensity
Cultivating what we call ‘real relationship’ – to get involved in each other’s lives, to show up for each other, and to be there in times of need.
Grounding and working with the nervous system

At the subtle level we can:

Work with our multiple parts including bringing awareness and compassion to exiled parts
Cultivate capacities for complexity and engaging with multiple perspectives
Practice owning our projections and releasing introjections
Cultivate awareness of cultural/systemic currents in relationship
Co-create developmental and transformative relationships and collectives - being with and for each other

At the nondual level we can:

Recognize a deep relatedness of everything
See through reactivity and personality patterning to the deeper ground of a prior unity
Engage with radical acceptance, awakening and embodiment
Cultivate transcendent trust, love, equanimity, truthfulness, and sense of abundance or possibility as we navigate life and the world’s challenges
Cultivate collective coherence that helps us to orient towards the emergence of generative and life-giving future potentials

Through all of this we can cultivate capacities to lean towards, not away from, the inevitable challenges that arise in relationship, and recognize that conflict itself is an opportunity for a deeper wholeness. We can also clear our own seeing of ourselves and each other so that we become mirrors to one another of true essence. This helps us create the relational foundations of new forms of culture and more fully realize relationship as the territory of awakening and emergence.

“New human potentials only manifest in the context of new forms of relationship … Can we place our individual love stories within the larger love story of the universe itself?”

Zak Stein

Ways to Engage

Each month, we’re going deep into one facet through live open workshops, short films, podcast conversations, and articles.

Attend the Open Workshop

On Thursday, March 26 at 1:00pm Pacific, we’re gathering to practice intimacy and relationship together. This will be an embodied practice space—an opportunity to explore what becomes possible when we cultivate the willingness to be truly present with others, developing both the subtle capacities for differentiated relating and the concrete engagement of showing up together. Can’t make it live? The recording will be available.

Watch the Film

The Intimacy & Relationship film on premiers on YouTube on Tuesday March 10. Geoff and Abigail explore relationship as both the context for our wounding and the vessel for our healing—examining how we develop the concrete skills and subtle capacities needed to lean toward each other when difficulty arises.

Subscribe to Our YouTube Channel

Listen to the Podcast

We’re diving in with Layman Pascal on the Integral Stage Podcast to explore Intimacy & Relationship in depth. Geoff, Abigail, and Layman explore conflict as deepening, boundaries as intimacy, and what it means to differentiate in order to come closer together. The next episode drops this week.

Subscribe to Integral Stage Podcast

Leading Through Emergence

This spring, May 7 – June 25, we're offering Leading Through Emergence, a live 8-week online program for anyone navigating the threshold between dissolution and becoming. It's a practice in learning to meet breakdown from a deeper ground and participate with what wants to emerge.

Learn More & Apply

Navigating a Time Between

Pacific Integral — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 16:24:39 GMT

It’s easy to feel overwhelmed by the pace and complexity of change and breakdown happening in the world. Crisis and disorder are converging across political, ecological, social, economic, and personal scales. Some call it a metacrisis. Others call it a time between worlds–a liminal space between dissolution and becoming.

In the face of this, many of us feel called to enact our care and contribution in the world, however grand or small—in our work, in our communities, in our parenting, in our art. Motivated by a vision for a more beautiful, just, and flourishing way of existence that deep down in our hearts we know is possible.

But how can we follow this impulse in a time that seems complex and overwhelming? How can we cultivate the capacities to meet this moment together?

Maybe you feel this in your own life–the gap between what you sense is needed and what you feel able to offer. Maybe a part of you just turns away from what is happening. You sense a longing for a deeper way to be with this time of dissolution and transformation.

If you’ve reached this threshold, you’re probably not just looking for more tools and practices. You’re asking a different question entirely:

How can we be with what’s happening? How do we participate in what wants to emerge? What is this moment not just asking us to do but asking us to be?

Dissolution is Only Half of the Story

We believe there is something profound happening beneath the surface turbulence, a kind of remembering that’s trying to surface through the cracks of what’s breaking down.

It seems we have collectively dreamed ourselves separate—from each other, from nature, from the unfolding of life itself. And you could say this separation has created much of what we now struggle against. But as the forms built on that foundation crack open, we’re being invited into a different relationship with reality altogether.

Not through transcending what’s difficult or by finding the perfect strategy. But by learning to be present with and move with what’s actually unfolding, including the not-knowing, the uncertainty, the vulnerability of being in-between.

When we’re willing to acknowledge dissolution, in ourselves, in the world, and to learn to rest in it without rushing to solve it, we can begin to sense what’s actually trying to move through us. This is about developing an entirely different capacity: the capacity to participate in the process of emergence itself and sense what wants to take form before it has clear shape.

When we cultivate this capacity both individually and collectively, we meet this moment with more grace, intelligence, creativity, and compassion.

Engaging the Moment from Awakened Wholeness

For twenty years at Pacific Integral, we’ve been exploring what it means to engage transformation from this deeper ground—not transformation as something we do to ourselves or the world, but as a living process we learn to participate with.

What we’ve discovered is that when people begin to access this deeper ground, a different kind of capacity becomes available. This is not a skill to be learned, but a way of being to be cultivated. We call this capacity leading through emergence - a practice of engaging the future from awakened wholeness.

Leading through emergence is a participatory practice of being in a deep relationship with life as it unfolds. It’s learning to sense what wants to move through us individually and collectively, and to midwife that into being without forcing it into forms dictated by our expectations or fears.

This isn’t an abstract idea, but an intimate lived experience. It shows up in how you navigate a difficult conversation, how you sense what’s needed in a complex situation, how you access creativity when you’re depleted, how you stay present when everything in you wants to collapse or control. It’s the quality of presence you bring that allows something genuinely novel to emerge in yourself, in your relationships, in the systems you’re part of.

But how do we cultivate this capacity?

Releasing into Trust

Engaging in emergence requires a shift from willfulness to willingness, to release a particular kind of control so that we might activate a more participatory way of creating with and as the unfolding of life itself.

This release happens with a shift in awareness, widening our view to a way of seeing the world that includes and integrates our differences, to see through the illusion of our separateness.

From this wider awareness, we come to embrace a deeper unfolding wholeness, a wholeness that’s always already present, before we fragment it with our stories and constructs.

An Invitation to a Shift in Being

This spring we’re offering an 8-week journey into cultivating the capacities to engage this moment from this deeper ground.

Leading Through Emergence is an experiential, transformative container designed to support these three essential shifts in being:

Cultivating the trust to move with life’s unfolding rather than against it
Embodying the capacity to see the world through a wider lens
Remembering the wholeness that exists beneath our fragmentation

You’ll develop these capacities through direct practice—something you feel in your body, apply in your relationships, and enact in the contexts that matter most to you.

The program includes weekly practice sessions where we work directly with what arises in the moment, small group containers for deeper inquiry and mutual reflection, and guided practices you can return to throughout the week. Everything is designed to support you in developing your own creative engagement with the emerging future—not to give you answers, but to help you access the wisdom that’s already present when you know how to listen.

Each week opens a different facet of this practice:

Week 1: Awakening to What’s Already Present (May 7): The ground of awareness where emergence happens, and how this presence itself becomes our foundation.
Week 2: Embodying Connection in a Fragmented World (May 14): Maturing our capacity to deepen intimacy in the midst of the intensity of our times.
Week 3: Seeing Beyond Limiting Perspectives (May 21): Developing capacity for the complexity this moment asks of us.
Week 4: Expanding Your Capacity for Care and Action (May 28): Learning to meet what matters while honoring our limits.
Week 5: Integration Session (June 4): Reflect on insights, deepen your practice, and connect with your small group.
Week 6: Integrating Shadow and Healing Fragmentation (June 11): Including what we’ve pushed away or disowned.
Week 7: Accessing the Wisdom Between Us (June 18): Collective intelligence as lived practice.
Week 8: The Generative Power of Joy (June 25): Moving with the unfolding as joy and play.

Who This Is For

This work is for anyone who feels the call to participate in this moment differently. You sense the potential for a greater freedom, creativity, belonging, and joyful engagement with a time of great disorder and potential.

We’re looking for people who:

Feel the invitation to wholeness beyond the crisis
Are already sensing something trying to emerge but need support to trust it
Recognize that not-knowing is where freedom begins
Seek like-hearted companionship for this journey
Can commit to showing up fully for the practice

Maybe you guide teams or support clients. Maybe you’re raising children or tending land. Maybe you’re creating art or building community or simply showing up where life has placed you. Whatever your context, if you sense there’s a different quality of engagement available, a way of being that might allow something new to move through you, this practice is for you.

The program begins in May 2026. We’re currently building the cohort.

Program Features

What’s included: This isn’t a passive learning experience—it’s a lived inquiry that invites your full participation. The program includes:

Live Practice Sessions: Weekly 2-hour calls where we engage in experiential practices, reflection, and coaching under the guidance of our core faculty. These sessions create a field where transformation happens in real time.
Learning Content: Weekly videos introducing key concepts and perspectives that inform each week’s practice, allowing you to absorb ideas at your own pace before our live sessions.
Practice Guides: Recorded practices and written guides supporting your ongoing application between sessions, helping you integrate insights into daily life.
Practice Groups: A consistent small group throughout the program, creating a container of trust where you can practice with greater vulnerability and receive personalized feedback.
Real-world Application: Throughout the program, you’ll apply what you’re learning to 1-2 areas of your life or work that matters most to you, ensuring the learning translates to tangible impact.
Online Community: An online space where faculty and participants can continue discussions, share reflections, and support each other between sessions.

Apply to Join

We’re accepting a dedicated cohort of participants ready to commit fully to the practice. Sessions are held live on Thursdays, 4:00–6:00pm PDT, May 7 – June 25. If you sense this is the right moment and this is the right container, we invite you to apply. The application takes 5–7 minutes.

Apply Now

Program Details

May 7–June 25, 2026
Thursdays, 4:00-6:00pm PT
8 weekly sessions

Investment

Early Registration: $600 (or $206/month × 3)
Regular Registration (after April 7): $800 or ($275/month × 3)

We have a limited number of scholarship spots available for those experiencing financial constraints. If cost is a barrier to participation, please email us directly at hello@pacificintegral.com to discuss options.

P.S. For the past five years we offered this work in a program called Emergent Leadership. However, leading, as we understand it, isn’t about position, a role, or an identity. It’s about our capacity to generate new ways of being, relating, and functioning. We have renamed, reframed, and evolved the offering to emphasize the process of engaging with emergence.

Film: Complexity Capacity

Tucker Walsh — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 21:19:57 GMT

This month we’re exploring Complexity Capacity as part of our Seven Facets of Awakened Wholeness series. Each month we’re offering a film, reflections, and a live workshop exploring one facet.

Today we’re releasing the Complexity Capacity film. We hope you’ll join us for an open workshop on Feb 27th to explore this territory experientially.

Free Workshop on Feb 27th

Complexity capacity refers to the ways we grow and mature over the course of our lives, how we develop widening circles of identity, care, and responsibility. This developmental journey isn’t just cognitive. It’s about becoming more intimate with reality - engaging the world and one another with more effectiveness, skillfulness, humility, and courage.

In this film, and explore what complexity capacity is, how it develops, and why the goal isn’t to have “more” complexity but to be as whole and capable as we can be wherever we are in our unfolding.

Directed by .

Widening Our View

Geoff Fitch — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 17:36:36 GMT

This is part of our ongoing exploration of the Seven Facets of Awakened Wholeness. Each month from January through July, we’re offering a film, written reflections, and a live practice opportunity for each facet.

February’s territory is Complexity Capacity: our ability to hold paradox, see from multiple perspectives and widen our circles of identity, care, and responsibility. Join us for practice on February 27.

"The capacity to hold paradox is the capacity to hold the living truth."
– Robert Kegan

We are seeing in a profoundly vivid way what it looks like for human society to fracture. We are fracturing along fault lines, lines of difference which have become so magnified that the earth moves beneath us and separates us across a chasm.

In the practice of integration, we explore how to include more of ourselves into our consciousness and identity. But when we include all of this, what is the greater view that we can take? How can we understand and engage with it from a wider view? Growing our capacity for complexity, activates a seeing of the world that accounts for, integrates, and finds a deeper whole across these fault lines.

Think back to a time when you were absolutely certain about something, when the world seemed clear-cut and obvious. Perhaps it was a political view, a judgment about someone, or a belief about how things should be. Then life happened. You met someone who challenged your assumptions. You experienced something that didn’t fit your categories. You traveled somewhere that showed you a different way of being. What was once black and white revealed shades of gray, then colors you didn’t even know existed.

"It is not that we have to bring the separate parts of the world together. The task is to recognize that they were never separate."
– David Bohm

Widening Circles of Identity, Care, and Responsibility

This is the journey of growing complexity capacity, the understanding of which is rooted in theories of adult development, how our perspective evolves to encompass greater spans of identity, care and responsibility.

We begin with concrete certainties, a self-centric view where our needs and perspective feel like the whole world. We grow to understand ourselves as social beings, recognizing that others have different experiences and needs. We differentiate further, discovering our own minds, our own agency, our capacity to think and choose. We begin to see contexts and perspectives, and recognize subjectivity and social construction - that culture, history, and circumstance shape how we and others perceive reality. We also recognize the self has diverse internal perspectives and shadows and that understanding requires authentic introspection and exploration in community.

Eventually we may discover the constructed nature of language, thought, and even the self we take ourselves to be and a deeper awareness that permeates and illuminates all these territories of consciousness, even the sense of time and space in which they seem to emerge.

A Paradox at the Heart of Complexity

Seeing the world with more complex perspectives does not make things more complicated, indeed it is quite the opposite. The world seems complicated when we can’t make sense of its complexity.

If you have ever gazed at a stereogram, a 3D image encoded in a 2D graphic, you’ve had the experience of staring at something that looks like a random field of patterns only to see an image emerge from it when we look with just the right relaxation, attention, and focus. Having the capacity for varying degrees of complexity and depth allows us to move through the world, with agility and responsiveness, seeing through the randomness to the patterns and deeper simplicity.

"To enter the presence of multiplicity is to enter a condition of humility."
– Terrence Deacon

When we develop greater complexity capacity, we bring a greater diversity of ways to see the world. Our differing views on the world each have a unique function and value. We find more of the structures of mind in ourselves and honor the value and vitality of different ways of seeing and constructing the world.

In its essence, growing our capacity for complexity is about becoming more intimate with reality in its diversity. It’s about reaching through our wholeness to the infinite particularity it is expressed through. It allows us to respond to our concerns with more effectiveness, skillfulness, humility, and courage. It is the ability to stay present with reality in all of its multiplicity and to contact the world more directly.

And paradoxically, this expanded capacity often leads us back to simplicity. Not the simple certainty we started with, but a simplicity that has passed through complexity and emerged on the other side. The simplicity of presence. Of basic goodness. Of love that doesn’t require understanding everything. Growing complexity means growing wisdom, which means greater comfort with ambiguity and uncertainty and the limitations of what we can know.

Cultivating the Capacity for Complexity

Our capacity grows through experience and practice, through exposure to difference, through the willingness to have our certainties disturbed. Here are some ways to cultivate it:

Seek out perspectives that challenge yours, not to debate but to understand. Read books by authors from different cultures, different political orientations, different life experiences. Notice where you feel reactive and get curious about that reaction.
When you find yourself in conflict, practice asking “What might their experience be? How can their view make sense?” This doesn’t mean you agree, but it exercises your capacity to see from multiple vantage points. What is a view in which both of your experiences makes sense?
Travel if you can, not as a tourist but as someone genuinely interested in how life works differently elsewhere. If you can’t travel physically, travel through relationship. Get to know someone deeply who comes from a very different background than yours. Go on a pilgrimage to deeply understand another’s world.
Notice when you’re collapsing complexity into simplistic either/or thinking. We all do it, especially under stress. When you catch yourself, pause and let your mind and heart settle between the two sides. And look for the relationship between the two.
Practice holding paradox in your body. Breathe into the discomfort of not-knowing. Let your nervous system become familiar with safety in uncertainty.

This capacity does not develop in isolation. One of the richest and most important contexts for practice is in our collective life. It is in relationship, family and early experiences of community where we learned to polarize between us and them, between me and you, and between me and us. Early in life we develop maps of these territories and can carry these simple binaries with us throughout life, until we see through them and grow in our capacities.

Ultimately we can grow to recognize there is a greater whole beyond all of the polarities, where each of us and all of us can flourish in a greater being. In this movement, we can develop a culture that makes space for all of our diversity while attuning to our deep commonality and essential resonances.

We can live in the recognition that we are all in this together, that we were ultimately never separate, even as we are seeing something different and telling a different story about the world.

Ways to Engage

Each month, we’re going deep into one facet through:

Live open workshops where we practice together in real time
Short films that transmits the essence of that territory
Podcast conversations with Layman Pascal where we explore each facet in depth
Articles like this one, offering both understanding and practice

Open Workshop: Practice with Us

On Friday, February 27 at 1:00pm Pacific, we’re gathering to practice complexity capacity together. This will be an embodied practice space, an opportunity to explore what it means to hold paradox, to widen your view, and to discover the simplicity on the other side of complexity. Can’t make it live? The recording will be available.

Watch the Film

Watch the Complexity Capacity film on YouTube. Geoff and Abigail explore how our capacity to navigate complexity is fundamentally a capacity for intimacy with reality. Geoff and Abigail speak to the developmental journey of widening circles, the paradox at the heart of complexity, and why this work happens in relationship.

Subscribe to Our Youtube Channel

Listen to the Podcast

We’re diving in with on the Integral Stage Podcast to explore Complexity Capacity in depth. The episode drops next week.

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Integration: A Film

Pacific Integral — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 00:47:12 GMT

We're releasing our film on Integration today. It's a short meditation on what it means to welcome the parts of ourselves and the world we've kept at a distance. On turning toward what is difficult to face. To discover that the energy we've spent in avoidance can become the very aliveness we've been seeking.

Continue Exploring Integration

Read Abigail’s piece: Welcoming All of Ourselves: Integration as Recognition
A practice, reflection, and invitation to turn toward what doesn’t want to be seen.

Practice with us: Join Geoff and Abigail for a live workshop on Integration on Thursday, January 29 at 1:00pm Pacific. Register here.

About This Series

This film is part of the Seven Facets of Awakened Wholeness series, exploring seven interconnected territories of transformation through films, reflections, and live practices throughout 2026.

Films Directed by

Welcoming All of Ourselves

Abigail Lynam — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 21:03:13 GMT

This piece is part of our exploration of the Seven Facets of Awakened Wholeness. Seven interconnected territories of human development and transformation. Throughout this year we’re offering a film, reflections, and live practices for each facet.

This month, we’re exploring Integration: the practice of welcoming all parts and dimensions of ourselves, others, and the world. We invite you to join us for a live workshop on January 29.

What follows is both a teaching and a practice. May it serve your own homecoming.

"Our progress is not measured by the amount of inventions we create...but by the amount of the world that we are able to re-integrate and recognize as ourselves."

– Satprem in "Sri Aurobindo or The Adventure of Consciousness"

Integration as Recognition: A Practice

Pause for a moment. Allow your breath to deepen, rest into the embrace of gravity, lengthen your spine and feel the dignity of your presence, and notice how your awareness is wide and deep.

Take a few breaths here and notice what is at the edge of your awareness that seeks to be integrated, to be recognized as part of your experience, part of you. What wants your attention that you have been avoiding, if only subtly so. Invite whatever that is to move in a little closer. Meet it with love and curiosity and see what wants be re-integrated or recognized as inherently part of who you are. What opens as you engage with this? Who or what are you now?

Turning Towards and/or Turning Away

Integration can feel like a homecoming, like a release into our already present wholeness.

It can also feel like something we prefer to avoid. It can be painful to witness and reveal that which we have kept hidden and pretended wasn’t us. These aspects of ourselves (for example, anger) can be so painful or intolerable to ourselves or others, that we can send them into the shadows and project them onto others. We see it everywhere in the world, it can be easy to point our finger at, but not right here, not as a part of ourselves. Even the thought of trying to locate that quality or behavior that I recoil from in another in myself, can turn my stomach or have me want to turn away.

Integration is not about eliminating or fixing aspects of ourselves, but about allowing what was split off, rejected, or projected to be consciously held within awareness and welcomed home.

Through the process of projection, we contribute to the fracturing in the world. In the face of fear, we might separate ourselves from another or a group of humans and see them as the source of the challenges that we’re facing instead of being able to recognize that we’re all implicated. It shows up as blaming or distancing ourselves from others, which is a distancing from that very experience in ourselves.

And yet, not everything we distance from is ours to integrate. Integration also involves differentiation. This includes discerning what isn’t you that you have taken in from the world such as stories or beliefs about yourself (this often shows up as the critic), or behavior patterns you have adopted from others. This differentiation prepares the ground for a deeper integration.

The Fire of Alchemy

The impulse to recoil is an avoidance of embracing the difficult feeling – feelings of fear, disgust, anger, deep pain, sadness, irritation, derision etc. These feelings which can be hard to tolerate, become a portal into our own liberation. We are imprisoned, not by the difficult feelings, but by our avoidance of them.

We can lovingly and firmly take ourselves by the hand and step into the flames of embracing and integrating, feeling the fire of alchemy – burning off the resistance and discovering what remains. What we discover is our own wholeness and the gifts that were buried underneath the hiding. And we learn to experience and express these fundamental human emotions (and needs) not in indirect or reactive ways, but on behalf of life, for vitality and a greater good.

In my own journey of unfolding, I discovered the gift of unacknowledged and under expressed anger – as a source of my own vitality, and as a recognition of unexpressed boundaries and needs. Having grown up with a father who expressed an abundance of anger, I couldn’t locate anger in myself well into my 30’s. But it was there - it was just coming out in irritations, judgements, cynicism, unhappiness, and efforts to control or manage others. Rediscovering and owning my anger has been humbling (scary at times) but also so liberating. It has helped me to discover and express my truths, my agency, my power and own all of that directly as a force for good, while at the same time minimizing its unhealthy and harmful expressions.

I have also discovered the courage that underlies fear and the way fear itself points me towards what I care most deeply about. I think of it now as a neon sign that says - come this way. And I am discovering the way doubt points me towards a deeper source of knowing – that without doubt I might have abandoned the inquiry or questions too soon. Each of these emotions are something I deeply wanted to be rid of, but learning to befriend them, to own the impact of the indirect expression or projection of them on others, has helped me to welcome them as allies. What I thought was a problem to fix, became a gift that revealed itself over time.

Try it now: Turn towards what doesn’t want to be seen in yourself, welcome it, and own it (take responsibility for its impact on others through the sideways or indirect expression or judgement and rejection of others) and in receiving this aspect of who you are, notice what it transforms into. What are its wisdom qualities? And if it’s scary, too vulnerable or overwhelming to do so on your own, invite a trusted friend (or seek professional help) to support and be with you as you step into this transformative fire.

From Problem to Ally

Not feeling and seeing these parts of ourselves has a protective function. Earlier in life we needed this protection. However, there is a point where the protection becomes an outdated habit pattern that keeps us small or hidden. Or we are unconscious of the way our reactive expressions are harming others or we simply can’t stop ourselves from repeating the same patterns over again. And its true - we can’t stop ourselves through will power or retribution alone. This isn’t about fixing yourself or “cleaning up your mess” it’s about embracing our wholeness and in so doing healing and liberating what was hidden or suppressed. Sometimes, all we are ready for is to take a single step towards these aspects of ourselves, to begin to befriend them.

This is a paradoxical process, because we tend to think if we reveal these aspects of ourselves to others, we will be shunned, shamed or rejected. But more often, we are afraid to feel them ourselves. Our loved ones often experience relief when what had gone unnamed gets named. Just as ultimately, we will feel the relief as well – the liberation of truthfulness, even if we feel humble or tender in the recognition. And paradoxically, we will discover our own innate wholeness that has been here all along, waiting for our recognition of it.

A Collective Healing

Every act of healing and integration is a healing and integration for all of life. And the healing and wholeness that is revealed goes forwards and backwards through time. It occurs at both the level of the individual and at the level of the collective, including working with collective shadow and discovering the wholeness of us.

And we need each other to discover our blind spots and shadow and also to heal them. What was formed in relationship needs to and can be healed in relationship.

What ‘problems’ are waiting to be recognized as gifts or allies in your own life? What emotions and experiences are waiting for you to embrace as a portal to the awakened wholeness that you already are? What more of the world can you recognize as yourself through courageous inclusion?

Exploring Integration Together

This piece is part of a larger body of work we’re sharing throughout 2026, exploring what we’re calling the Seven Facets of Awakened Wholeness.

These seven facets—Integration, Complexity Capacity, Intimacy & Relationships, Awakening, Embodiment, Soul Expression, and Collective—represent interconnected territories of human development and transformation. They’re not a linear path or a hierarchy. They’re dimensions of wholeness that interrelate and inform each other, each pointing toward the same ground: our already-present awakened wholeness. You can read more about the Seven Facets framework here:

Each month, we’re going deep into one facet through:

A short film that transmits the essence of that territory
Written reflections like this one, offering both understanding and practice
A live open workshop where we practice together in real time

Open Workshop: Practice Integration With Us

On Thursday, January 29 at 1:00pm Pacific, Geoff Fitch and Abigail Lynam will be holding a live workshop on integration. This will be an embodied practice space. An opportunity to turn toward what wants your attention, to work with real-time experience, and to discover what opens when we meet ourselves and each other with love and curiosity.

The recording will be available afterward for those who can’t join live.

Watch the Integration Film

We’re also releasing a short film meditation on integration on January 12, exploring what it means to welcome all of ourselves. Geoff and Abigail speak to the paradox of absolute and relative wholeness, the relationship between suffering and gift, and why this work requires both courage and community.

Stay Connected

If you’d like to continue exploring these territories with us:

Each month through July 2026, we’ll be exploring a different facet together. Next month we’re exploring Complexity Capacity: our ability to hold paradox, navigate complexity, and widen our circles of identity, care, and responsibility.

The Seven Facets of Awakened Wholeness

Pacific Integral — Tue, 25 Nov 2025 00:43:14 GMT

We recently announced a film and workshop series on a living framework for development we call The Seven Facets of Awakened Wholeness. This framework is living in that it is emerging from our over twenty years of work in the alchemical journey of our own own unfolding. This model began to crystallize two years ago, when we took a retreat to step back from our work, to reflect on the essence of what we’ve been learning. What emerged is a holistic approach to development that is rooted in non-duality and a paradoxical understanding of our innate wholeness.

We are in a time between worlds, rife with threat and potential—a time when cultivating our wisdom and capacities is essential to realize a new possibility for human culture. Awakening to our innate nature and interconnectedness can be the ground of this emergence.

This model describes seven dimensions of unfolding essential to this work. We start with the Ground of Awakened Wholeness—the recognition that nothing is wrong, nothing is missing. What is present now is free, awake, sacred, whole in its absolute nature. So we engage in practice while also simply allowing this unfolding to occur, making space for it to naturally liberate.

While some of these facets will seem to have more of an individual orientation (e.g., awakening and embodiment), others will seem to have more of a collective dimension (e.g., intimacy and relationship and collective). It’s better to see that all of these are both aspects of individual and collective unfoldment. We wake up together. Intimacy with other begins with intimacy with self.

These seven facets are deeply related, with unique interconnections and dynamics between them, ultimately interpenetrating each other. Each one of these facets contains entire worlds of practice, lineage, and potential. We’ll be exploring each of these in depth over the next eight months, beginning with a film and workshop on each facet. These offerings will provide both contemplative practices and practical tools for engaging with each dimension of this living framework. We invite you to join us on this journey of awakening and unfolding. You can see a full list of the upcoming workshops here.

Integration

Integration is the process of deep inclusivity. To integrate, we must first differentiate. Inclusion also includes exclusion. It means having everything here in its own truth and authenticity in its own place. It’s a deep welcome to what’s been suppressed, what’s been held in shadows, what’s been marginalized. Not merely to be present in difference but to be also present in unity. This is the realm of individual and collective shadow work. This shows up as a sincere, vulnerable inquiry into the stories and patterns we create about ourselves and each other, a welcome to parts of ourselves and each other that have been hidden or suppressed.

Complexity

Growing our capacity for greater complexity means growing our consciousness to see and account for more of reality. It means cultivating wider circles of identity, care, and responsibility. This is the area that Wilber called growing up. It’s also an area that’s often the most confusing for people to understand. This arises when we see how we have become polarized in ourselves and between each other, between ideas, between different aspects of our experience. It’s about expanding our view to include both sides, to see them as a whole. It’s not about making ourselves more complicated. When our own inner complexity aligns with the outer complexity we’re dealing with, we can see through to simplicity. It allows for a release of what’s complicated and the movement that wants to unfold to happen.

Intimacy & Relationship

None of this is abstract. It’s deeply personal. The deeper we want to go with this work, the more intense it becomes interpersonally. Many efforts to wake up, grow up, and show up break down as relationship breaks down. Capacity for deeper intimacy also depends on capacity for deeper real relationship. Beyond we-space experiences, we need to be able to cultivate relationship with each other by getting more deeply involved in each other’s lives. Being able to create great relationships that are free and open and clear where we can tolerate our differences, communicate authentically, and be in the present moment with each other. This is the circulatory system of a new culture. This is the work of intimacy and relationship.

Awakening

True liberation happens when we recognize the prior condition of our true nature, which we refer to as awakened wholeness. This is the path of awakening. Our essence is a nature that is boundless, timeless, non-dual, an unbounded wholeness that is awake, free, and recognizes this reality as profoundly sacred. This is the beginning, middle, and end of these seven facets. As we awaken, the other six facets, our expression of ourselves in this world, is seen as a joyous unfolding of all of relative reality.

This unbounded being is present right here, as you read these words. Take a moment before you read on.

Embodiment

And we are human. We incarnate in this life. This particular life that is given to us, is meant to be embodied.

This means that we learn to meet ourselves from a place of radical self-acceptance. We also embrace and welcome all the dimensions of our own life force energy expressed through our body in its rainbow of forms. The awareness of the movement of this energy is experience as pleasure, even bliss. This is embodying the truth of our incarnation.

This truth is our life as it’s given to us. Embodiment also means saying yes to life. It means saying yes to your life, agreeing to be here as you in this time and place in this culture, with your karma, with your opportunities, challenges, desires, with what life has given you to handle. For some of us, it is completing the process of birth, fully arriving here in this life. We make a deep and humble choice to be here in our fullness.

Soul Expression & Service

Part of this fulness is that we are here to offer something. As David Deida said, “Our life is Love’s means.” The deeper we awaken and embody, the deeper we realize that we are here to make a contribution to this world.

This is both an intentional practice and a realization. As we do our work, it is important to hold the world in our hearts. This means to hold our relationships, our communities, the people we touch, ultimately, all beings. This deeper intention animates our work but it is also a realization as you come to know yourself more deeply.

We find that each one of us has in our hearts or in our soul a unique impulse to express oneself in the world. To offer oneself, one’s life as art to the world, as service. We have seen that this sense of purpose has its own unfolding. It’s not something we construct in our minds, it’s something we discover over time and as we discover it we discover that what we want wants something of us. This deeper intention is asking us to engage in our own development, our own cultivation of this offering in the world. So this work is both spiritual and practical.

Collective

We discovered that in order for this work to sustain and deepen itself over time, we need to do all of this work at the level of the collective. When I say the word collective, it probably brings to mind a group, family, or community. What we really mean here is something that we don’t have a good word for because in our own mental models of collective are often embedded with an idea that the collective is set in conflict with the individual.

At some level, the question is often: “Is this the place where I can be? Will I be heard? Will I be understood? Can I flourish here?” We might imagine a similar question if the collective could speak: “Can I exist with this set of individuals? Will they tolerate being able to be together in order for this WE to exist?”

What we must cultivate at all levels of humanity is a greater complexity and integration of our collective being, a kind of meta-collective that allows the collective to completely flourish in the presence of the diversity of each of our individuality. A world where each of us as individuals can flourish and be together in difference without alienating from each other or suppressing each other. This work goes beyond the work of relationship to creating new social and cultural forms. This is a re-encountering and enlivening a new kind of tribe. We experience this as a profound realization of belonging.

Exhale

Yes, exhale. It is good to remember this is just another human story about human beings relating, human becoming. All stories that can be profoundly helpful, liberating, but they are ultimately just stories. This recognition is to see both the emptiness and fullness of what we’re saying here and, really, of everything all together.

Listen for the truth in this—it’s the only thing that will benefit you. You can let go of the rest, and even if you let go of the truth, it will eventually find you anyway.

We live in a time of profound transformation. The stories that we tell about this matter, but also this unfolding, is beyond our stories. What is deeper than the stories is the intention to bring truth, goodness, and beauty during our lifetimes and the profound wisdom that is already animating our unfolding. That during this time between worlds, we practice to do something to add more love, more clarity, to be a vehicle of benefit in this world.

We have to wake up from the essential delusion of our separateness, to the deeper ground of Awakened Wholeness. We also need to heal ourselves, see as much of the world as we can, to learn how to be in good relationship with each other, to accept the gift of our incarnation, to offer ourselves to each other, and to create a new world together, starting with our families, teams and tribes we are connected with.

An Ongoing Experiment

Geoff Fitch — Tue, 25 Nov 2025 00:37:40 GMT

Early on at Pacific Integral, we had two influences that deeply shaped how our work unfolded over the years. The first was Ken Wilber’s integral view and the notion of integral practice, which was a way to engage in our own development from the perspective of the holistic view that Ken enacted through his integral model.

To engage with our unfolding wasn’t just a matter of developing as leaders or spiritually or psychologically; it was a more complete affair. This was expressed through Ken’s pithy wake up, grow up, clean up, and show up, and so on. While Integral Theory takes less prominence in our work now, it lives on in spirit as an inquiry into what it is to embrace as much of reality as possible as we engage in our own unfolding.

The second influence was an orientation to a kind of process of emergence, which sprang out of our exploration of Otto Scharmer’s Theory U. We came to refer to our work as an ongoing experiment, so we were always learning and questioning and evolving what we were doing, seeing it as an inquiry into what it is really for human beings to develop. This meant we couldn’t merely apply existing models or approaches. We had to discover what wanted to emerge the ongoing process of engagement with ourselves and our participants.

This has been a deep and intimate process as designers and facilitators. It’s been a collective process. We’ve been in a creative engagement with each other and with many amazing people over the years with our gifts and differences and deeply authentic engagement with these questions.

For over 20 years, we’ve worked intimately with small cohorts of practitioners over months at a time. We come together in person over that time in the equivalent of over two years in residential retreats. We’ve engaged in our own research, doing developmental assessments and tracking people’s growth in a variety of ways over time through the programs and afterward. We have practiced, theorized, written, and learned together.

Our own expression of this integral view of development, the Seven Facets of Awakened Wholeness captures what we have learned, to this point in this journey.

Being and Becoming

There is a polarity at the heart of our work, which you might call the “dance of being and becoming.” This is an ordinary part of human experience in which we find our motivations for both attainment and happiness. Both of these dimensions function quite differently.

As we engage in our own development, we can get drawn into the striving for accomplishment, the reaching for growth, for realization. This is one aspect of our existence as we are unfolding into greater wholeness.

But if we merely orient towards this aspect, it can alienate us from what’s here right now. At the same time, there is a truth that what we need is actually right here, right now. Deeper happiness is found through relationship in the present moment. The ultimate relationship is with our true nature.

We borrow the metaphor of ground, path, and fruition from Tibetan Buddhism, which points to the aspect that what we are seeking is actually right here, it’s just obscured. There is another way in which we are on a path towards something, and when we arrive at that something, we’ve found that we were there all along.

We hold our work in a ground which we refer to as Awakened Wholeness - the already present absolute perfection and completeness of who we are. When we engage to evolve or to grow, we start from this. So, in subtle and important ways, we’re not setting ourselves against ourselves towards a future that’s off at a distance.

This is a recognition of what is sometimes called absolute and relative reality. Absolute reality being arrived at by seeing through the illusion of separation to our deeper enlightened nature reveals the wholeness, the sacredness, the completeness, the freedom of what’s already here. Relative reality refers to the manifest reality of things as they are which are unfolding in space and time, as our own lives and relationships.

Deep Inclusivity

The integral vision is, in its essence, a move towards deep inclusivity, and this ethic has flourished in our own hearts over the years. This is a kind of complex inclusivity. It isn’t a flat land. It also includes discernment and natural hierarchy.

In our work, although we draw on specific lineages which have been profound teachers for us, we hold to the extent possible and embrace whoever and whatever is present. Our cohorts often include diversity of religion, of culture, and, yes, even political and philosophical diversity. Even more importantly we hold an embrace for whatever is arising in ourselves and each other to welcome it, be with it, let it unfold and be transformed or included.

In a time of deep polarization, this kind of integrative intention is profoundly important. We often imagine in some sense this is what needs to happen for our little planet to simply find a way to live together in relative wholeness. Our participants often share that what we are cultivating is the medicine that the world needs right now. This isn’t easy work but it’s profoundly important.

Relationship & Collective

What this engagement birthed was a deep understanding that relationship is at the heart of the work. You might see a progression here from engaging with our unfolding development, to realizing and acknowledging what we truly need is already present in this moment, to something deeper that arises in the relational space between us. As some have said, the next Buddha may be the Sangha. This may be an expression of our cultural moment. Or it may be in the edge of our developmental unfolding. But this has seemed deeply true to us.

One way this has shown up in our work is to grapple with the paradox at the heart of “I” and “we,” which is that our individual and collective unfolding are mutually dependent on each other. It’s us as individuals who create the culture through which us as collectives liberate ourselves. How do we mutually co-evolve and co-liberate ourselves individually and collectively? What kind of tribe can we have in which we are all individually recognized and free, yet collectively coherent and resonant with each other? How can we see the same world with our hearts even as we describe it with different languages? This is a profoundly important question and inquiry we’ve been engaging with.

Alchemical Journeys

The process of this unfolding is often not just a slow evolution into new capacities, but can be a transformative journey and an alchemical process. These kinds of journeys are described in many ways through different metaphors, like the Hero’s Journey, or the Seasons, or through Otto Scharmer’s theory of descending to deeper layers of awareness, until we let go into the Ground of Being and allow a new insight to arrive to transform us. Whether an awakening or a significant developmental shift, or a realization of one’s deep soul purpose, or profound external life changes that shape us, these transformative passages can take us into places of dissolution and reformation.

A relationship with these alchemical journeys has been at the heart of our work, as in our Generating Transformative Change program. We work with people in small groups and individuals over months at a time. Sometimes for years. This process can be deep and intensive. It is not without risk, but let’s be honest, this kind of alchemical process is what humanity seems to be going through now. Of course it is naturally reflected in our individual lives and communities. Learning to journey into and through the darkness together is what we need.

This is what we have been learning. It’s what deep communities of practice are for. It’s what we need committed relationship for. We are bound up in this together. We need to learn how to navigate this transformative time, this time between worlds, and it starts by navigating this together in our own lives.

Seven Facets of Awakened Wholeness

The Seven Facets of Awakened Wholeness describes seven important dimensions of our unfolding. This model emerged as part of our own ongoing alchemical journey, when two years ago we took time to reflect on the evolution of our work and what we have been learning.

This work is rooted in Ground of Awakened Wholeness - the recognition that there is nothing wrong; there is nothing missing. What is present now is free, awake, sacred, whole, in its absolute nature. As we Become, we ground in our innate Being.

This journey has been a conversation. As we listen to and deeply learn from each other, from the profound lineages we are connected with, ultimately from life itself. This has been a collective journey with so many important friends who have contributed to our learning, including many participants in our programs. As I often say, “We do this together.”

The Seven Facets of Awakened Wholeness

Pacific Integral — Wed, 19 Nov 2025 23:36:40 GMT

Last summer, Abigail and I stepped back to reflect on over twenty years of this work. We weren’t trying to create anything new. We were simply attempting to clarify what had already been revealing itself through the practice, through patterns we kept seeing emerge with over 1,000 participants across three continents.

We asked: What are the actual dimensions of transformation that keep showing up as essential in people’s unfolding?

Seven facets became clear. Awakening. Integration. Complexity capacity. Embodiment. Soul expression. Intimacy and relationship. Collective.

But what struck us most was how these dimensions interrelate and reveal each other. How awakening without integration creates bypassing. How complexity thinking can become detached from embodied presence. How profound realization in one area can shadow blindspots in another.

They’re not separate paths. They’re facets of a single unfolding.

And underneath it all: we’re already whole. The work isn’t about becoming something we’re not. It’s about recognizing and embodying what’s already here, even in the midst of fragmentation.

Today, we’re releasing the first film in this series.

In this 4-minute film, we introduce the Seven Facets of Awakened Wholeness and explore the ground that holds it all. It’s an invitation into the territory we’ll be journeying through together over the next eight months.

The Journey Ahead

Beginning in December, we’re offering free monthly workshops to explore each facet experientially. Each film will be paired with a live 90-minute workshop where we gather to work with the territory through guided practice, collective inquiry, and authentic connection.

Workshop Calendar:

December 9 & 11: The Ground of Awakened Wholeness
January 29: Integration
February 27: Complexity Capacity
March 26: Intimacy & Relationships
April 23: Awakening
May 28: Embodiment
June 25: Soul Expression
July 30: Collective

Starting in December

Our first workshop, “The Ground of Awakened Wholeness,” will be offered twice to accommodate different time zones:

December 9, 2025
9:00 AM - 10:30 AM Pacific

December 11, 2025
4:00 PM - 5:30 PM Pacific

In this 90-minute session, we’ll orient to the seven facets model and explore the ground that holds it all. Whether you’re joining for the full series or exploring what calls to you, this initial workshop offers context for working with your development as an integrated whole.

Recordings will be made available to those who register.

Then in January, we release the Integration film and gather for our first facet-specific workshop. Each month through July, one film and one workshop exploring a single dimension of awakened wholeness.

You’re welcome to join us for the full journey or drop in for the facets that call to you. All workshops are free and open.

Subscribe to the series to receive each film as it’s released, workshop reminders, and reflections on the journey.

Subscribe to the series

P.S. Feel free to share this with anyone you think would be inspired by this work. These workshops are open to everyone.

Walking Each Other Home

Tucker Walsh — Fri, 12 Sep 2025 17:32:37 GMT

Dear friends,

We're so excited and proud to share with you the first video in our upcoming film series, "Walking Each Other Home."

For years, people have asked us to explain what we actually do, what this work is really about. We've written papers, created frameworks, tried various ways of capturing something that often feels more lived than described. It's been challenging, honestly—how do you put language to the felt experience of transformation, of coming home to yourself in relationship with others, and our world?

This work has always been emerging through us rather than just from us. Each person who's entered this field with us has brought their questions, their longings, their particular way of wrestling with what it means to be human in these times. And somehow, through all that collective inquiry and practice, something coherent has begun to reveal itself—a kind of pathway, an ecology of practices that we're calling Awakened Wholeness.

Over the last year, through the generous support of the NoVo Foundation, we had the opportunity to work with Tucker Walsh (one of our GTC graduates and faculty, and an Emmy Award-winning documentary filmmaker) to create something different. Not another explanation, but an invitation. A short film that transmits the felt-sense and essence of what this work is about.

Tucker brought his artistry and his deep understanding of this work to capture the heart and essence of it in a beautiful way. The film includes moments from our annual Community Gathering on Whidbey Island this past August, and it feels like a true expression of what we're actually up to together.

Watch here: “Walking Each Other Home”

This is the first of a series of 10 films that we'll be rolling out in the coming weeks focusing on the Seven Facets of Awakened Wholeness model. Stay tuned!

Subscribe now

We'd love to hear about what it stirs in you. This work continues to evolve through the people it calls, and we want to know how it's landing and living in you.

With gratitude for your presence in this unfolding,
Geoff & Abigail

P.S. If you feel moved to share this with others who might resonate with this message, please do. The film is meant to travel!

You can find & share the film on: