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http://www.experienceintegral.org/newsletter/newsletter-experience-integral-autumn-2010/

Executive Summary - Happy Autumn Newsletter

Autumn is traditionally the season of harvesting and that is certainly what we are doing at Experience Integral.

A new core-team member fell into our basket like a tasty apple falls off a tree. Her name is Lauren, she has the same birthday as founder Anouk and brings big vision with a passion for practical application of integral and meta-studies in education and sustainability initiatives. Our transformation into Experience Integral 2.0 is well on its way.

Experience Integral has received EU funding to visit Findhorn and attend the BIONEERS Europe conference starting 29 October 2010. We will of course report back to you about the insights and connections made.

Enjoy this newsletter that for the first time was truly a team effort! There's lots of great tips and events mentioned there. Please save the date of FEB 13, 2011 to celebrate with us the second birthday of Experience Integral on the third community day :-).

Warm regards from the whole team, 

Foreno, Rik, Lauren, Miriam and Anouk

We're looking back at a beautiful Experience Integral Community Gathering last September 11th in the Amsterdam Public Library.

Some 20 of you came to listen, to talk, to meet, to inspire and be inspired, to laugh and eat. We had a full program with talks and activities and a very nice diner together to end the day with.

Since we're dedicated to publishing as much material as we can to support your development, we have created a video page on which you can view some of the presentations of the day.

By the way, we're looking for a better camera and microphone. If you want to support this, you can make a donation with the button on the video page.

We would like to introduce and welcome Lauren as new member of the Experience Integral team. This is her own account on how and why she joined the team:

"Hello to the wider Experience Integral Community!

After becoming fast friends with Anouk through several Integral, trans-disciplinary events we both attended, we realized how well our passions and visions were aligned, and also how well our styles compliment each other. When we found out we shared the same birthday, there was really nothing left to wonder about, and we started planning the future together! What truly excites me about working with Experience Integral is the chance to bring intuitive, embodied approaches together with integrative and critical big-pictures through work which is fueled by the intention to increase well-being for all life. After all, what else is there? There is nothing more exciting to me than collaborating with others who have vision, love, and tremendous integrity" read more about Lauren

Make the Leadership Shift from Sustainability to SustainAgility

Spend eight months with 20 sustainability veterans and pioneers deepening your consciousness and learning to cultivate superior sustainability results.

Starting February 2010, dates to be announced shortly. Offered in The HUBs in Amsterdam by Barrett Brown and Anouk Brack and in Rotterdam and Brussels by Caroline Depuydt. Brussels course will start in November under the name of Integral Leadership for Sustainable Development. 

Get a glimpse of the added value of this course: all resources from this years "Conscious Leadership for Sustainability" course are available for FREE DOWNLOAD on our website. Enjoy all the good stuff. Even more coming soon :-)

Read more http://www.experienceintegral.org/events/sustainability-course/.

View all our recommended events in our calendar on http://www.experienceintegral.org/events/. If you know about an exciting event that should be in our calendar, let us know by replying to this email or fill in a contact form.

In preparation for the Integral Spiritual Experience 2 coming December currently there's the Future of love teleseries. Join a group of distinguished spiritual luminaries for this leading-edge exploration into the Future of Love and Evololutionary Integral Relationships. There are weekly conversations and you can listen to the previous interviews.

For the people who are interested in new ways to do business and deal with capitalism the free on-line Enlightened Business seminar from 25-29 October might be of interest: http://enlightenedbusinesssummit.com/

Related to the business side and the marketing of ideas the e-book on evolutionary marketing written by thoughtlead offers some great insights how to market your ideas. The e-book can be downloaded at the site of thoughtlead: http://thoughtlead.com/

In the book section an interesting read is: Leading change towards Sustainability by Bob Doppelt. This book takes a systems perspective on sustainability initiatives in business, government and civil society. After describing the 7 sustainability blunders that are most often made and their solutions, the author introduces the wheel of change toward sustainability. The book provides a very practical and concise summary for sustainable change agents.

The Ecology of Education: Learning and playing with integral approaches to sustainability - Reflections on the Seminar Integral Education & Ecology of Next Step Integral, written by Anouk Brack.

What images come to mind when you think back at your time in higher education? What were the classes like? What moments do you recall feeling inspired? What kind of experiences do you remember killed your enthusiasm very effectively?

In this article I will reflect on the new emerging field of integral studies and its application to education. To make it come alive I will briefly describe what was integral about the design of a seminar I attended this summer on integral education and ecology. I will focus on the used process and methods of the seminar and how that helped offer a more integral learning experience than your average scientific conference. Lastly I will translate that to recommendations for teachers in our Dutch higher educational settings. Go here for the full text.

Do you remember when you where young, playing with wooden blocks, stacking them on top of each other, creating a big tower? The way we do architecture is more often than not very much like that: we pour layers of concrete, stacking them like our wooden blocks trying to reach for the skies. We have used this strategy for a long time, building our pyramids and medieval castles with heavy stone blocks. It is in fact so common that it is hard to imagine doing it any other way.

Yet, there are disadvantages to this approach. Firstly, the resulting structures are very heavy because we mainly add strength by way of adding weight, all of it being concrete. Furthermore, structures made this way have a tendency of collapsing. The wooden tower of our youth functions as an example, images of earthquake sites illustrate it as well. Especially the combination of shaky and heavy is a very unfortunate one in architecture.

As an alternative, think of a weight suspended on a thread. When disturbed, it always comes back to it's initial position, pointing to the center of the earth. Something that hangs down is a lot more stable that something standing up! If we could hang down our buildings from the top they wouldn't collapse when disturbed they would simply reallign themselves in their original position, how cool would that be?

A way of accomplishing this has been develloped by Buckminster Fuller some 50 years ago. The technology is called tensegrity and consists of poles and ropes, connected in such a way that the poles don't touch each other, but are suspended in a web of tensed ropes. The dynamics of a tensegrity structure resembles the surface of an inflated balloon in which local disturbancies are distributed and damped.

If we use tensegrity structures to provide a framework for our archtecture, we can create buildings that are lighter, cheaper and stabilize themselves. Instead of the traditional "Building upwards as a battle against gravity" we will be "Building Down"!

Building Down is the first of 7 Essential Mindshifts, follow this project online at 7essentialmindshifts.wordpress.com

We appreciate it if you suggest this newsletter to your friends and colleagues interested in integral, education, embodied leadership and/or sustainability. Thanx!

Click here to subscribe to our monthly newsletter with inspiring resources and (international) integral events.

We want to share and multiply information and inspiration on integral leadership for sustainability; If you have resources to be added to our website, feel free to send them to anouk at experienceintegral.org.

by Buckminister Fuller found in the great book "Green Business" by Gil Friend from Natural Logic, Inc.

"If you are in a shipwreck and all the lifeboats are gone, a pianotop ... that comes along makes a fortuitous life preserver, but this is not to say that the best way to design a life preserver is in the form of a piano top. I think that we are clinging to a great many pianotops in accepting yesterday's fortuitous contrivings."

Now's your chance to provide us with your favorite wise, loving,strange or funny quotes! Submit your favorite quotes through the contact form. If we use it in the newsletter you will receive a 10% discount on the next Experience Integral event you attend. :-)