Gary Hawke of Integral London was good enough to arrange and lead two hours of Integral Life Practice last week up at The Open Centre. Integral Life Practice is exercise in the widest possible sense and along with George Leonard’s Integral Tranformative Practice is the closest thing I know to Holistics – the integrally informed exercise class I lead in Brighton.
On the whole I really like what I’ve experienced of ILP. The emphasis on balanced integral exercise and long-term practice over quick fixes is right up my street. I like how the meditative and shadow elements were integrated – these aspects are ahead of what I do in Holistics but I’m stealing fast 😉
So would I recommend Integral Life Practice? To someone who was bored of press-ups yes definitely! To someone looking for real depth perhaps…Here are my niggles:
The gross (regular bodily) domain of the exercises wasn’t as well informed as I’d like. As someone who’s studied aikido for 11 years – on which many of the gross exercises were based – I’m not impressed by this aspect of ILP. What it looked like at times is a mess robbed by strongly cognitive geeks who really didn’t know their ass from their Achilles, and squashed an impression of various arts into a form that they THOUGHT works. A wider point here is that it may encourage us to become the proverbial Jack of all trades, and could loose so much depth at the expense of breadth as to become a waste of time.
Another niggle is that I’d like to see Integral Life Practice’s ITP lineage acknowledged. I hosted ITP President Pam Kramer last year and see clearly that ITP is in large part the base for Integral Life Practice, they just chnaged one letter a bit! 🙂
They were also instructions in the class that I couldn’t operationalise and language I found annoying. How does one “notice the suchness” and “release to infinity” exactly? Also, I wonder if discussing subtle and causal phenomena as “bodies” adds clarity? Could I kick Ken Wilber’s causal arse for example? If not, it ain’t a body in my language!
I want to highlight that all I’ve said is just the whining of conesseiur and that Integral Life Practice, and Gary’s class are definitely something I recommend as tools for growth. In fact I’ve already used a ball-awareness-game he finished the session with, so imitation and flattery and all that.
Here’s a link to Upcoming ILP book on Terry Patten’s site.
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So What? Integral exercise is the way forward. ILP is good, but not perfect.
Integral folks So What? Practice makes real.