Below you will find short descriptions of the following videos as well as links to them:
What is Integral Deep Listening?
An Overview of Integral Deep Listening
Welcome to Our Integral Salon!
Why Become an IDL Coach?
Why Become and IDL Practitioner?
How is Integral Deep Listening a Transpersonal Practice?
IDL is a Self-Development Methodology: Varieties of Self-Development
IDL is a Self-Development Methodology: States, Lines, and Stages
What is Your Life Compass?
Integral Deep Listening is a Yoga
Integral Deep Listening is a DREAM Yoga: Are Dreams Illusory or Real?
Ten Benefits of Dreaming
Ten Benefits of Dreamworking
Problematic Aspects of Dreamwork – And How IDL Avoids Them
Integral Deep Listening is a DREAM Yoga: How Our Worldview Creates Our Reality
Integral Deep Listening is a DREAM Yoga: Our Different States of Consciousness
Integral Deep Listening is a DREAM Yoga: Transpersonal States are NOT Transpersonal STAGES
Integral Deep Listening is a DREAM Yoga: The Importance of Empiricism
Integral Deep Listening is a DREAM Yoga: The Worldview of IDL
Integral Deep Listening is a DREAM Yoga: The Ethical Foundations of Integral Deep Listening
What Is Integral Deep Listening (IDL)?
Far more than an effective means of dream interpretation, nightmare elimination, anxiety reduction, and treatment for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Integral Deep Listening (IDL) provides a way to compensate for your familial and socio-cultural scripting, which largely has created your identity while insuring your life is a product of the prevailing zeitgeist, values, norms, beliefs, habits, ideologies, hopes, fears, and dreams. IDL provides tools for breaking out of your socially-conditioned identity while giving you regular, predictable access to transpersonal states of consciousness and emerging potentials that point you toward your own unique life compass. Information about IDL can be found at IntegralDeepListening.Com, DreamYoga.com, and at Friends of IDL on Facebook.
An Overview of Integral Deep Listening
Integral Deep Listening is a form of Dream Yoga that has ten major components:
1) Freeing yourself from your childhood and social scripting,
2) Escaping the Drama Triangle in the three realms of relationships, thinking, and dreaming,
3) Recognizing and neutralizing your cognitive distortions and biases,
4) SMART goal setting,
5) Learning assertiveness,
6) Enhanced problem solving with triangulation,
7) Interviewing dream characters and the personifications of your life issues,
8) Pranayama,
9) Meditation,
10) The IDL statement of Intent.
These are elements of the IDL Coaching, Practitioner, and Trainer Certification Programs.
Welcome to Our Integral Salon!
Integral Deep Listening Integral Salons are free two hour video conferencing calls on Dream Yoga and healing, balancing, and transforming life issues important to you. More information can be found on Facebook at “Integral Deep Listening” and at “Friends of IDL,” as well as at IntegralDeepListening.Com.
Why Become an IDL Coach?
Coaches, in general, teach adaptive strategies, such as, how to organize your space and life; how to be on time; how to set goals; how to reach the goals you set; how to problem-solve; how to get and use the support and accountability you need to succeed; how to create a plan for success and stick to it; how to work with others to accomplish a common goal.
IDL coaches also teach adaptive strategies. The difference is that for regular coaches, these adaptive strategies are designed to attain priorities set by ourselves. We have some practical goal we wish to attain, like dealing with our procrastination, losing weight, exercising, or accomplishing some task and use a coach to give us direction, help motivate us, and stick to a plan with its deadlines. This is important and useful, but generally assumes that our waking priorities reflect, or are in alignment with, those of our own innate life compass. However, our priorities may not reflect those which are wanting to be born within us, that reflect our fullness, as the pattern of an oak in an acorn, a full-grown wolf in a pup, or an eagle in a chicken coup. If an acorn tries all its life to become a pine tree, will it be happy? Will it be fulfilled? If a wolf puppy tries to be a chihuahua because it is raised with chihuahuas, will it be happy? Will it be fulfilled? Will an eagle raised as a chicken and that thinks it is a chicken be happy? Is ignorance bliss? Will it be fulfilled or will it be a misfit, out of place in the barnyard, trying to peck for food when it is by nature a soaring raptor?
Why Become an IDL Practitioner?
IDL Practitioners frame their work as a transpersonal yoga anchored in mutual respect and multi-perspectivalism. IDL Practitioners are envisioned as individuals who take a professional level interest in IDL. They don’t have to be psychotherapists in order to weave IDL into their life’s work. IDL Practitioners are interested in defining themselves and their work as something broader than self-development, psychotherapy, or mental health work. Learn the skill sets for an IDL Coach.
How is Integral Deep Listening a Transpersonal Practice?
Becoming dream houses, cars, robbers, and toilet brushes is, on the face of it, absurd. By “absurd,” I mean irrational, pointless, and ridiculous, something the Mad Hatter or the March Hare in Alice in Wonderland might recommend. This absurdity has the advantage of having us not take ourselves or our life dramas so seriously, which means that we objectify instead of personalizing them. On the other hand, what are we to make of it when something of astounding clarity, relevance, and functionality comes out of the mouth of a wombat or spit on a sidewalk? What is absurd, pointless, ridiculous, or irrational about perspectives, regardless of their appearance or source, that provide breakthrough realizations that improve our lives? It is in this regard that Integral Deep Listening is a transpersonal practice:
IDL is a Self-Development Methodology 1: Varieties of Self-Development
There are three varieties of self-development: remedial, adaptational, and transpersonal. Remedial is the realm of psychotherapy and IDL Practitioners. Adaptational is the realm of coaching and IDL Coaches and Practitioners. Transpersonal is the realm of transpersonal state access and experiential multi-perspectivalisms, including IDL Coaches and Practitioners.
IDL is a Self-Development Methodology 2: States, Lines, and Stages
Because transpersonal states, such as varieties of mysticism and near death experiences are accessible at all stages of development, in contrast to what is commonly assumed, they do not indicate higher stage development. Stage to stage development, that is, from pre, mid-, and late prepersonal and personal, into the transpersonal, is dependent on the balanced development of at least three core lines: cognition, the self-system, and the moral line. If one of these lines is fixated or regressed in its development, overall development from stage to stage cannot occur, although an individual may be a non-dual meditator or a gifted transmitter of transpersonal awareness. IDL addresses this reality by focusing on balanced development based on triangulation: the consultation of external sources, subjective sources of objectivity, that is, interviewed dream characters and personifications of life issues, and one’s own common sense, rather than the quest for “enlightenment,” which history has shown has generally led to imbalanced development, leading to dysfunction, major deficiencies, and collapse.
“Life Compass” is a concept derived from the comments, over decades, of interviewed dream characters and personifications of life issues, both of myself and others whom I have interviewed. It is not a metaphysical concept, a priori axiom, religious dogma, or spiritual principle like say, “dharma” is for Hinduism and Buddhism. The concept of “life compass” is a hypothetical construct that may or may not exist. It’s not an ontological reality but more of a process and possibility that is pointed toward by multiple recommendations by multiple interviewed emerging potentials. It can be compared to a gyroscope on a satellite that keeps it oriented in space by spinning on its own self-generated center of energy. Hurricanes and tornadoes do something similar. The vibratory fields of molecules, atoms, and quarks are other examples. In other words, “life compass” is meant to refer to a purely naturalistic reality, not a metaphysical, religious, or spiritual one.
IDL is A Yoga
Yogas are physical, mental, or transpersonal disciplines that unite us with experiences of the sacred. Integral Deep Listening is a yoga that uses interviewing dream characters and the personifications of life issues that are central to your life in order to access your emerging potentials and align your priorities with those of your own unique life compass.
IDL is a DREAM Yoga: Are Dreams Illusory or Real?
Dreams have a great deal to teach us about the illusoriness of life and waking life has a great deal to teach us about the reality of dreams! In this video we discuss the interdependence of dreaming and waking, of subjectivity and objectivity, and how a balanced life needs to be built on the foundation of a transformational transpersonal yoga that integrates these two critical states of our life experience.
Ten Benefits of Dreaming
This short video describes ten benefits of dreaming and cites noted research studies that confirm those benefits.
The ten benefits are:
1: Memory consolidation
2: Emotional processing
3: Problem-solving and creativity
4: Learning and skill enhancement
5: Emotional regulation
6: Brain development and plasticity
7: Simulation and preparation
8: Enhanced problem-solving during sleep
9: Inspiration for art and innovation
10: Mental health benefits
Ten Benefits of Dreamworking
This short video provides examples of research regarding ten different benefits of dreamworking.
These benefits are:
1) Self-awareness
2) Emotional healing
3) Problem-Solving and Decision-making
4) Enhanced creativity
5) Stress reduction
6) Improved sleep quality
7) Spiritual growth
8) Personal development
9) Enhanced intuition
10) Positive behavioral changes
Problematic Aspects of Dreamwork – And How IDL Avoids them
The interviewing of dream characters and the personifications of life issues, such as the “knife” of a knife-like pain in your side, is one of ten modalities of Integral Deep Listening, a form of Dream Yoga. Not shadow work or gestalt, IDL interviewing avoids many of the problematic aspects of most dreamwork. The ten that are discussed in this video are:
1) Subjectivity
2) Lack of scientific validation
3) Memory and recall bias
4) Symbolic complexity
5) Incomplete information
6) Limited therapeutic focus
7) Ethical considerations
8) Cultural and personal biases
9) Not suitable for everyone
10) Integration with other therapies
How Our Worldview Creates Our Reality
Whether we think dreams are illusory, real, both or neither; whether we regard our waking lives as real, illusory, both, or neither, impacts how we approach life. Integral Deep Listening finds merit in all these positions and its practices reflect that worldview.
Our Different States of Consciousness
What are the differences among waking, dreaming, deep sleep, and non-dual turiya? What is the relationship between how the dreaming and deep sleep states are described in classical Hindu and contemporary spirituality, on the one hand, and science, on the other? How does that affect how Integral Deep Listening approaches them? This is the third in a series of videos on IDL as a dream yoga.
Transpersonal States are NOT Transpersonal Stages
Once one understands what a yoga is and is not, what a DREAM yoga is and is not, and the various varieties of states, it’s time to understand the difference between state access and stable developmental stage acquisition. The reason this distinction is important for IDL is that it does not make claims of higher stage development but rather demonstrates that regular, ongoing access to transpersonal states through IDL interviewing and other aspects of IDL that get self and the Self out of the way, generates stability, balance, and access to the priorities of one’s own unique life compass.
The Importance of Empiricism
Integral Deep Listening recognizes that for any investigation of states, including the dream state, that is going to include an integral life practice or yoga, to stand the tests of time, it must address all four quadrants of holons. This means that it not only must respect interior personal and mystical experience and interpretations thereof, but also the findings of empirical science, and reconcile these dimensions where they disagree. This short video attempts to lay out the basis on which IDL attempts to do so.
With the background of the previous introductory videos, it’s time to explain what it means that Integral Deep Listening is not simply multi-perspectival but is a variety of experiential multi-perspectivalism. In addition, it is important to understand what it means to say it is “polycentric,” or “cosmocentric” rather than psychologically geocentric or heliocentric. These distinctions grow out of IDL interviewing and create a framework for understanding all of the various integral life practices of IDL.
The Ethical Foundations of IDL
We generally don’t associate ethics with dreams and dreaming. However, the interviewing of multiple intrasocial perspectives creates a context that requires not only respect, but a reciprocity of respect in mutual relationships. It also presents the necessity of the consideration of trustworthiness and empathy regarding interior and collective relationships. The implications of the demonstration and evolution of respect, reciprocity, trust, and empathy in the interior collective dimensions of holons is profound, because it allows for the balancing and development of both individual and collective holons in ways that did not previously exist when these possibilities were not recognized or ignored.