Spiral Dynamics Integral

I became interested in what’s called the Integral Movement because of the comprehensiveness and all-inclusiveness of it.  The idea that there are as many truths as there are individuals is an amazing thought.  I loved how the Integral movement framed it into a meaningful way, such that I have ways of looking thru the windowpanes or lenses, of my individual self, my collective self, my interior and exterior, and these four lenses have helped me to make sense with the world.

I’ve become more involved with an aspect of the movement over the last seven years called Spiral Dynamics Integral.  What attracted me to it was after years and years of studying psychology, it was the first system of understanding human beings I found that mashed the conditions of one’s life, the dynamics, what’s going on with one’s life, with the capacities and the powers of one’s adaptability or adaptive intelligences.  These two in a double helix model, wound around each other shows someone how they can act and adapt, cope, with the conditions of their life.

So as we develop and learn, we have capacities that allow us to do well in the world but those very capacities eventually reach their limit.  When they start to reach their limit for how their life conditions and the context that they live in then more problems begin to be created.  And what I found especially attractive with that was the problems were the source to the next growth.  So even from where a person is when some dissonance and discomfort and problems begin to happen, that is a chance for a leap to another level of understanding, being, existing and connecting.  And this appears to be a never-ending quest, a never ending cycle, so what happens is, we’re constantly becoming and there’s a pathway that’s open for us to become many selves during the life cycle.

Ultimately, Spiral Dynamics and the Integral movement help one to identify those many selves, or the many ‘me’s, and helps so that you can understand them.