Terry Patten – Beyond Awakening
Integral Spiritual Practice also reflects a focus on the active transformation of feeling.
As I taught thousands of people I observed that it is really at the level of feeling that people tend to be most stuck. It is the compensatory patterns in our feeling life that most tend to hold back awareness and growth. Awakened intelligence feels freely.
And awakened feeling is highly intelligent. What people most need to awaken from is the attenuation or numbing of feeling-intelligence, because they’re subtly, and often invisibly anxious or resentful or irritable or long-suffering.
Integral Spiritual Practice is a comprehensive context of helping people identify the simple practical steps that are doable in a busy contemporary life that can awaken them into everything that you see in Integral Life Practice, but in a way that is more organic and embodied. It can actually accompany you through the profound, alchemical and even tantric processes of awakening and enlivening across the decades of practice that a full human life involves.
Omtimes: Is there still place for the “guru” in today’s world?
Terry: There’s are great deal of controversy over the role of the guru today. Some claim that the age of the guru is over. My relationship with my guru was profoundly transformational and put me in touch with something miraculous and unaccountable.
So I can never treat with disrespect the role of a true guru.
However, when one has a guru it’s easy to relate to that guru-type teacher childishly and that kind of childish obedience is obsolete. A new kind of personal responsibility is absolutely a necessary part of everyone’s spiritual life in this day and age.
