Terry Patten – Living the Integral Heart

Have you wondered how to go beyond abstract or even heartwarming spirituality to the radical awakening and reunion of body, mind and soul?

Are you ready to open to whole-body wisdom, communion with the Divine and a life that is truly integrated and complete?

And do you suspect that the “master key” lies in the heart?

You’re not alone. In fact, virtually all of us on a spiritual path have been deeply moved by the unconditional love that we witness in history’s great saints and sages, who almost universally are depicted as masters of the heart.

The awakened heart’s essential expression – avast, unconditional, sacred love – is what we all most deeply appreciate, are most attracted to and aspire to become. It’s the sign of true spiritual maturity.

Science is now increasingly confirming our spiritual traditions, showing us that there is something akin to a brain within the heart. The heart also emits a powerful electromagnetic field that synchronizes our body as well as affects those around us.

When our brain is coherently entrained to the heart, we are more at peace, focused and intuitive. We feel others more empathically and relate more authentically.

In other words, leading-edge science is showing that our heart’s deeper intelligence is very real – and VERY important for our health, our relationships, our work and our larger sense of meaning.

The challenge is that after continual exposure to the war and mayhem of humanity via the daily news – plus our own share of personal trauma, heartbreak and loss – most of us tend to guard our hearts against hurt, and struggle to imagine trusting our heart intelligence and making a radical choice to live as love.

The truth is that it is quite difficult in the modern world to build the capacity to live with an open, integrated and empowered heart. That’s why we so deeply revere history’s great teachers of the heart: They have been rare.

However, we’re now in a unique moment in history, having access to the full initiatory power of every major wisdom lineage combined with modern science, philosophy and practice. And our crisis creates space for a birth. We have the opportunity to begin a real democratization of heart mastery and a behind-the-scenes mass movement of love.

Can you imagine the power that you could unleash toheal, evolve and liberate our world from its suffering if you were able to step into your heart’s full sacred power?

Can you imagine how different your life would be if you could truly live AS love?

Your life would be magnetic, inspiring and empowered, as well as blessed with fulfilling relationships.

It is truly a grand vision. But how do you do it?

Practices of gratitude, compassion – and even advanced practices like Tibetan Tonglen – can help in the opening of the heart. To really access the full depth and breadth of the heart’s power, though, requires something more… something that integrates the best of our spiritual, intellectual and scientific traditions with day-to-day practices to keep you centered, open and connected with the feeling intelligence that is always present.

In short, it takes a truly integral approach – one that honors and integrates all the streams of wisdom as one coherent whole.

And that is what integral visionary Terry Patten is uniquely qualified to provide you in the Living the Integral Heart program: both a map and a set of practices that marry body, mind and soul with the deep wisdom of the heart. He has developed an actual “yoga” for building consistent heart intelligence.

Terry offers you a path of the integral heart that is both grounded and ecstatic, discerning and generous, powerful and humble.

The Path of the Integral Heart

During the Living the Integral Heart training, Terry will empower you to make a radical shift to living from your heart’s full intelligence.

As you do, you will gain access to your natural innocence, sincerely live your truth “out loud” and activate your higher intuition. You’ll come to respond to your life challenges with wholehearted love and wisdom. And you’ll learn to go beyond the typical ebbs and flows of love to a steadier state of ever-growing, omnipresent, unconditional love.

As you deepen on the path of the integral heart, you’ll ignite the full capacity of your heart to love radically, intelligently and unconditionally.

You’ll begin to understand HOW spiritual pioneers – from Jesus to Ramana Maharshi – have opened the sacred, alchemical capacities that include and transcend the biology of the heart.

You’ll see how your heart is a hidden portal to radical awakening that can then infuse and transform everything that you do.

You’ll learn how to pass through this portal with authentic humility, patience, wisdom and skill – developing a new capacity for what some mystics call “feeling intelligence.” This feeling intelligence involves knowing all of the dimensions of love in all the areas of your life…from the blissful sublime to the heart-breaking.

The intelligent, integral heart is your access point for awakening your divine humanity. It is your gateway to conscious evolution – functioning as the actual integrator of body, mind, spirit… and the larger field of global and cosmic intelligence.

To awaken this profound depth of the heart’s intelligence, though, is a radical matter – far deeper than mere sweet emotions. It honors and integrates your mental intelligence, rather than giving preference to feeling over mental clarity. It also means being very, very honest with yourself.

For example, in our public culture, people rarely speak courageously about the universal, existential experience of loneliness. Much of society is devoted to avoiding difficult feelings. So it’s no wonder that we rarely talk honestly about loneliness… or about dying and our fear of death… or about the profound matter of learning to love.

This tends to keep our capacity to contact the heart’s innate knowingness at a superficial level.

As you learn how to activate your “integral heart,” you mobilize a new form of intelligence in your life – one that gives you access to more clarity and more empathy at the same time.

You begin to feel Truth in a whole-bodied, visceral way. You learn to navigate complex situations by moving spontaneously with more clarity and greater sensitivity.

And you begin to experience an ecstatic current of divine presence pouring through your body and mind in a way that makes you magnetic to what you most want to create in your life, and what “It” wants to create with and through you.

When your integral heart is fully activated, it is like plugging into the universal electrical grid… the lights just “come on.” And you can shine that light with compassion on a world in need of healing love and compassionate wisdom.

Transform with an Experienced Guide

During the 7 modules of the Living the Integral Heart program, you’ll be blessed with the fruits of Terry’s four decades of advanced mystical, intellectual and embodied investigation into the higher reaches of the heart’s intelligence and capacity for love.

Terry worked closely with the Institute of HeartMath, leading the team that developed their first heart-rate variability device. He also worked with philosopher Ken Wilber to translate his brilliant integral theory (used at the highest levels of business and government) into a truly Integral Life Practice, and co-wrote the source text for Integral Practice.

Even more importantly, he embodies 40 years of wisdom as a serious student and teacher of authentic spirituality. Terry’s synthesis is unique and transcends the usual head versus heart polarization, to create an integrated, holistic path of synergy.He will lead you toward a kind of holographic integrity, a coming together of your whole being – which is what he means by the “integral heart.”

This program will be highly experiential and focused on cultivating the practices that bring your integral heart alive – not just for a moment – but for the rest of your life. If you practice these disciplines, you will experience your feeling life come alive in a wholly new way that is deeply fulfilling.

During the program, you’ll:

• Unleash the deeper intelligence of your heart.
• Discover a ground of happiness that allows you to be an active co-author in the world rather than retreating away (into silence, etc.).
• Develop a daily Integral Heart Practice that activates and brings together all dimensions of your being.
• Dissolve the false (and unhelpful) dichotomy between your head and heart.
• Liberate your mental intelligence in service to heart intelligence.
• Open the heart to fundamental equanimity and freedom amidst discomfort, threat, pain and loss.
• Deepen your understanding of your unique gift and purpose.
• Become more fully available to your relationships, enriching them in very real ways.
• Access a higher level of inspiration and energy.
• Open up into the higher octaves of positive feeling, from peace and acceptance to pleasure and enjoyment, and into joy, ecstasy and bliss.
• Go beyond the false negation of desire to self actualize and benefit the world.
• Receive a scientific and mystical understanding of why the heart is the source of such rich intelligence.
• Better understand how you can contribute to the larger “revolution of love.”

What You’ll Discover in These 7 Modules

In this 7-session transformational journey, Terry will guide you through a series of insights, exercises, challenges and choices that will draw you into a very deep place within yourself where you may open your heart in a radical way that will profoundly affect your whole life.

Each contemplation and training session will build harmoniously upon the next, so that you’ll develop a complete, holistic understanding of the practices, tools and principles you’ll need to sustain your commitment to something bigger than yourself that is actually changing your inner life and attracting a higher quality of connection with others and opportunities in your life.

You’ll also experience the joy and support of committing to an evolutionary community based on love. They will help you metabolize old stories and traumas as well as encourage you in stepping forth as a pioneer of what is possible. Having brothers and sisters on the journey is a profoundly important component of accessing the deeper realities of the heart.

This course is designed to function as a transformational alchemical event that will actually enable you to shift the “set points” of the animating energetics of your life, at the very source – the integral heart.

Module 1: Showing Up 100%

The Alchemy of Total Vulnerability & Commitment

Life is often teaching us the importance of “showing up” 100% in every moment, beyond physical, emotional and spiritual contractions – but this is much easier said than done. In the first session, we will set a sacred container and come face to face with the powerful opportunity to choose to join together in a sacred community of practice dedicated to taking 100% responsibility for our own experience during this 7-part journey. Through a series of experiential processes and epiphanies, we will support each other in inviting forward our deepest integral heart. We will allow that integral heart intelligence to become not just the power source of our inspiration, but also the creative author of our most important life choices.

Discover the deeper esoteric meaning of “showing up” in your life and relationships, and why integral spirituality is anything but an escape.

• Explore the nature of authentic commitment and identify what stands in the way of your next level of commitment to being fully alive, conscious and powerful.
• Learn to enact commitment and vulnerability right now, and truly show up for your sacred relationship with yourself.
• Learn the 2 essential practices you can do to bring this alive in your daily life.
• Activate the 5 primary faculties of the heart’s unique intelligence.
• Practice the yoga of bringing it all together in the alchemy of the integral heart.

Module 2: Opening to Divine Grace

The Path of Ecstasy, Heartbreak & Wonder

In this module, we will explore the art of opening (and always re-opening) an unobstructed heart connection with divine grace. We’ll engage the art of bridging the profound splits created by our personal and collective traumas – dividing our minds from our hearts and our sense of self from our inherent, natural, loving relationship with God. We’ll connect directly with our inner skeptics, integrating our doubting minds as we dare to break the ultimate taboo, and actually open an intimate channel of connection to the universal source of grace, good luck and gratitude. Then we’ll reboot a potent universal spiritual practice, accessing the power of “the simplicity on the other side of complexity.”

• Learn how to relate to all 3 integral “faces” of God, and sense directly how each one can be ultimate, sacred and ever-new.
• Directly grasp the evidence-based reasoning (beyond metaphysical belief) for opening your heart to the universal “giver” of everything we tend to take for granted.
• Befriend the skeptical inner critic and help him or her serve a greater good.
• Activate the hard-wired neural pathways that fire in both peak performance and ecstatic devotional love.
• Awaken from the belief patterns that tend to divide your intelligent discernment from your passionate spiritual feeling.
• Wake up to the psychophysics of grace (aka “good luck”), and learn to align with it.
• Perform a ritual opening of your emotional connection with the mysterious “Divine” source of all happy accidents and every unearned benefit.

Module 3: Expanding Your Intelligence Through the Yoga of Feeling

Daring to Embrace Everything

Feeling and intelligence are two words for, or facets of, a single capacity. In this session we will tune in to the unexplored territory of feeling and the incredibly sensitive instrument of our precious human body-mind. You’ll learn the key principles of how to use your subtle feelings, sensations and emotions as a source of information and guidance. When your understandings crystallize into a felt-sense, you can sync up with your whole body intelligence and move spontaneously. You’ll open up into the higher octaves of positive feeling – from acceptance to pleasure and enjoyment and into joy ecstasy and bliss. Finally, you’ll develop the art of navigating the full-spectrum of life experience as a yoga of feeling.

• Discover the difference between reacting to what is felt and allowing yourself to feel through it.
• Discover the transformational yogic dimensions of enjoying pleasure consciously.
• Open the heart to fundamental equanimity and freedom amidst discomfort, threat, pain and loss.
• Track the way that errors of reasoning, careless mistakes, weakness of will and emotional insensitivity all have a common root that we can learn to feel directly.
• Learn to pay attention to your heart as a sensitive instrument registering extremely subtle contractions in your total energy field.
• Discover how profound happiness and peace can coexist with experiences of insecurity, anger, sorrow, fear and shame.
• Discover how the yoga of feeling can actually shift the subtle energy patterns surrounding you – affecting the quality of what you magnetize into your life.

Module 4: Expressing the Higher Octave of Your Will

Powering Your Intentions with Joy

The integral heart is a powerful force of intention and creativity – flowing directly from the marriage of the inner feminine and inner masculine natures. This is nothing like the hyper-masculine will that exaggerates our separation from the flow of life. In this session, we will encounter a series of powerful distinctions and exercises that will enable us to connect with the deep roots of our tenderness and toughness, the foundational care that powers an integrated will. It creates powerfully from love rather than ego. It’s rooted in an existential stand that sources our greatest power.

• Examine the different “places” from which choice and intention can arise in your being and the way they color your exercise of will.
• Explore the subtle dynamics of the fear, resentment and judgment spread by our culture’s universal victim psychology and how it affects you and everyone.
• Find your fundamental “yes” to life and how it can express itself through your projects and work.
• Discover how you can directly connect your personal happiness to your service to the health of the whole.
• Tap into the power of the authentic connection you already have to a “value gravity” that transcends and yet includes your personal interests.
• Discover why your opportunity to choose and commit is not a challenging responsibility but the very essence of the creative opportunity of every moment of living.
• Discover a more fundamental source for the power of your will.
• Bring organic discipline to your choices about diet and exercise and time management.

Module 5: Surrendering to Being Lived by the Mystery

Becoming a Vehicle for Evolution

The mystery of the present moment is so obvious, so profoundly deep and powerfully wondrous, and yet so elusive. The art of awakened living is the art of waking up with fresh eyes, in “beginner’s mind,” and rediscovering this living moment, letting go into it and letting it live us. Then, life is endlessly creative, an unfolding miracle. But this is not something “you” can “do.” It’s an art – a dance we can only do with a highly skilled partner – that same unpredictability alive in the ever-present Mystery. In this session, we will get a feel for the art of integrating everything we’ve already explored in the instant-to-instant dance of living.

• Viscerally connect up the gladness of your grateful heart, recognizing it as the essence of your awareness and identity.
• Befriend yourself and your personal hopes and fears from the perspective of divine freedom.
• Know the nature of your covenant with the Mystery, give it your conscious assent, and tap into the empowering grace that is always flowing from it.
• Experience “being lived” by the Divine Mystery, and strengthen the neural and energetic pathways of trusting that Source.
• Experience the subtle energetic principles embodied by the “crucifixion” and the “resurrection,” and let them transform your relationship to experience.

Module 6: Dancing into the Miracle of Mutuality & Grace-Filled Community

The Power of We

We will bring the ever-present dance of our personal awakening into relationship with one another. In mutuality, a field of “We-Space” is created when our consciousness opens into undefended contact with the consciousness of another person. This field becomes intelligent in a way that is much more than the sum of the parts – and that intelligence holds remarkable potentials. It can grow and develop, and it can function as a container and channel for the transmission of awakening.

• Discover the field of intelligence that emerges from the “space between” when you are able to meet, and be met by, a practitioner of integral heart intelligence.
• Explore the territory of this “awakened We-Space” with other sincere explorers.
• Let the wisdom of the We draw you into a higher level of your own intelligence.
• Train to develop the capacity to engage a social experiment in sincere trustability and trusting mutuality.
• Understand and honor the venerable ancient principle of transmission and lineage, while freeing yourself from bondage to what no longer serves.
• Help enact the turning of an evolutionary “corner” from the old feudal model of spiritual culture to a network of enlightened intelligence.
• Learn to apply your heart intelligence to day-to-day relationships in a way that brings clarity, luminosity and love.

Module 7: Transforming the World Through the Integral Heart

Integrating Your Full Being in Awakened Living

To really “get real” with each other amidst the challenges of our time, we must become capable of sharing deep tantric paradox. This means relaxing and rejoicing in gratitude – with lightheartedness – while simultaneously getting very serious about effectively addressing the sobering challenges of our time. Our blessedly wonderful and terrible times represent a profound koan, an impossible riddle that we must resolve, an infinitely deep question that undoes our mind and reconfigures our consciousness. We will enter into the territory of daring and learning from a new level of evolutionary friendship and responsibility.

• Join others in facing and intelligently feeling into the overwhelming challenges and amazing opportunities of responsible adulthood in a world in crisis.
• Discover the liberating intensity of standing together, heart-to-heart with other evolutionaries who are letting this koan transform their consciousness.
• Choose truth over hypocrisy, face the hypocrisy of aspiring to a virtue beyond you, confess it and discover new levels of honest evolutionary friendship.
• Find the strength and sanity and ground to defy the voices that are telling us that it’s grandiose and impractical to take our utopian impulse seriously.
• Initiate a new trajectory of your personal growth, that of mutual awakening and “being the change” together with others.