Integral Relationship Practice
A Manual for Singles, Couples, Helping Professionals, and Group Facilitators
“This is a brilliant book about Integral relationships, particularly in their practice form. I know of no book that does this in a better or more thorough form. It definitely has my highest recommendation!”
The Religion of Tomorrow
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If you purchase the book, you receive a link to all worksheets, images, videos, music, PowerPoint's and PDF's.
In this book, I make the argument that we need to move beyond the ideologies of conservatism and liberalism towards holonism that transcends and includes collectivism and indvidualism to create a better world and peaceful and sustainable future for humanity through the theory and experiential exercises that are outlined in the 26 practice modules.
Ten Integral Relationship Practice Core Tenets
Love is unconditional, relationships are not.
Humans are not social atoms but social beings.
We can only practice our simultaneous wholeness and partialness at all levels of our being in intimate love relationships.
The more we learn to love ourselves, the more we need to learn to love others. Anything else leads to uneven development.
If we want to contribute to creating a peaceful and sustainable future for all humanity, we need to begin by co-creating a peaceful and sustainable love relationship with one person.
If we want to raise consciousness on the planet, we also need to raise conscious children.
It takes two partners to co-create an embodied love relationship, but only one to end it.
We can only heal our relationship wounds in relationships.
Humans are happiest when they are in healthy relationships and live on purpose.
Healthy love relationships don’t just happen, the skills must be learned.
Experience without theory is blind, but theory without experience is mere intellectual play.
~ Immanuel Kant ~
This manual contains 26 pratice modules for singles and couples who are not only interested in the theory of Integral Relationships as outlined in my previous two books, Integral Relationships: A Manual for Men and Sex Purpose Love: Couples in Integral Relationships Creating a Better World, but also in the deep understanding that can only be gained through embodied practices and experiences. It is for those who realize that for us to become fully human means to develop the capacity to be simultaneously whole in ourselves AND part of healthy, sustainable love relationships and nuclear families, who then form the foundation for thriving communities and flourishing societies. And it is for those who understand that cultural and biological evolution are intertwined—that we need to raise conscious children if we want to raise consciousness on the planet to create a better world and a peaceful, sustainable future for humanity.
This manual is also intended for helping professionals who want to support their clients in co-creating healthy love relationships, and for group facilitators who feel called to lead events, workshops, and trainings in which the participants sharpen their relationships skills together with others in their local communities through experiential exercises. My wish for all readers is that they co-create Integral Relationships and inspire and teach others so that the Integral Relationship vision can ripple out into the world and make it a better place.
Introduction
In an Integral Relationship, partners learn, heal, grow, and awaken together and share a purpose that makes the world a better place.
In the context of relationships, the term integral means to differentiate the essential dimensions of our human being and relating, and to integrate them into a functional whole in co-created healthy, sustainable love relationships.
As a useful metaphor to understand this integration, consider the essential dimensions of a flourishing garden, such as soil, water, air, seeds, trees, light, shade, insects, fertilizers, structures, paths, etc., that need to be brought into a functional whole for the plants to thrive and realize their full growth potentials. Neglecting any of these essential or necessary dimensions would lead to dysfunction and, ultimately, the withering of the whole.
The same is true for healthy love relationships and, consequently, for our families, communities, societies, and humanity. We need to have knowledge and experience of all our essential human dimensions and how they interact with each other so that we can realize our full potentials in the context of our love relationships.
The 14 essential dimensions of an Integral Relationship, as outlined and illustrated in Figure 1 (below), allow singles and couples to achieve the following:
- Become aware, connect, and co-create in all four dimensions of their being and relating.
- Identify eight levels of consciousness development to learn, heal, and grow together with an equal and opposite partner.
- Communicate with each other at their shared level of consciousness so that both are heard and understood, thus able to reach agreement on how to best meet both of their needs.
- Understand biological and gender differences of males/men and females/women in order to a) end the gender wars through understanding and compassion, and b) return to love and romance for those who went down the infamous Fear-Shame spiral that ultimately leads to relationship crashes.
- Balance and harmonize their healthy feminine and masculine polarities to maintain their simultaneous wholeness and partialness in their relationships and to create synergy and sexual passion.
- Awaken together through the five state-stages of spiritual development.
- Co-create a healthy, exciting, and rewarding sex life by healing and growing towards sacred and tantric sexuality.
- Understand their anima/animus complex to co-create a healthy love relationship at stages three or five.
- Become aware of various personality types in order to understand and accept different fundamental human needs, preferences, passions, virtues, and drives that guide each partner’s thoughts and behaviors.
- Move towards earned secure attachment through creating a coherent narrative and healing their childhood trauma and attachment wounds.
- Own the emotional reactions to their partner’s reality instead of blaming him or her and making demands, consequently healing their underlying false identities in order to move towards undefended love.
- Create compassion and healthy boundaries when they are attracted to or in a love relationship with a highly seductive, complex, and challenging partner who may display symptoms of personality disorders.
- Awaken to their biological, transformational, and transcendental purpose and define, find/attract/invite, identify, and choose a soulmate who shares their passion, purpose, vision, and mission.
- Co-create a deeply rewarding love relationship with their soulmate through intimacy, passion, and commitment in all four dimensions of their being, at the level of the seven chakras, by balancing and harmonizing healthy feminine and masculine polarities in the four dimensions of their being to make the world a better place.
These 14 essential dimensions of an Integral Relationship are further divided into the 26 practice modules that are described in detail in the manual. They were developed, tested, refined, and validated between 2011 and 2022 in over 600 experiential Integral Relationship live workshops and online training sessions with monogamous and non-monogamous heterosexual, same-sex, and gender fluid singles, couples, helping professionals, teachers, and workshop leaders of all adult ages from over 40 countries in the East and West. The universality of their experiences around love relationships, despite their cultural, gender, sexual, and age differences, was striking.
Each of the 26 practice modules has the same structure:
| 1. A general description of the module. |
| 2. A short introduction to the theory that underlies the exercises. |
| 3. The purpose and practical application of each module. |
| 4. Detailed descriptions of the exercises. |
| 5. Worksheets for the exercises. |
| 6. Follow-up questions for the practitioners. |
| 7. Additional information, resources, book references, and tinyurl links to websites for a deeper understanding of the module. |
| 8. Descriptions of suggested movies that depict the modules. |
The knowledge and practices that are offered in this manual allow you and your date or partner, your clients, and/or the participants in your groups, workshops, and trainings to understand and embody the 14 essential dimensions of an Integral Relationship to co-create healthy, lasting love relationships in which equal and opposite partners realize their fullest human potentials through sharing their biological purpose (including raising children, if possible); their transformational purpose of ongoing learning, healing, growing, and awakening; and their transcendental purpose of creating more goodness, truth, beauty, and functioning in the world by maintaining their simultaneous wholeness and partialness through balancing and harmonizing their healthy feminine and masculine polarities in the four dimensions of their being and relating along their seven chakras in the safe container of intimacy, passion and commitment as shown below.
Module 26 provides eight philosophical arguments for why Integral Relationships matter not only for your own well-being but also for addressing the wicked problems that humanity is facing. Recognize that all functional systems are created by wholes who are parts of larger wholes, like whole humans who are parts of healthy couples, who are parts of functional families, who are parts of thriving communities, who are parts of successful societies/nations, who are parts of a peaceful and sustainable world and future of humanity.
The manual concludes with the My Path to an Integral Soulmate Relationship exercise.
