Awaken Your Soul, Transform Our World

In our essential 12-session course, you’ll journey from overwhelm to clarity about the threats facing our societies, psyches and planet. Then, you’ll discover the deep joy and unshakeable purpose in realizing your unique role in a world you love.

Choose Heroism, not Powerlessness

Years from now, many of us will reflect on how we showed up in response to our civilizational challenges.

What will you say? Will you hide from the question, saying the problems were too big—or yourself too small? Will you be able to say you engaged wholeheartedly and gave your deepest contribution? 

No matter how challenging and complex our situation is, we can realize that we are the lucky ones. We get to be here, alive at this time, and each of us has a role to play in creating new human and planetary conditions. 

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See Beyond the Crises

In the course, you’ll explore our global “meta-crisis” in all its aspects—environmental, economic, political, and cultural—from an all-encompassing perspective. Then, it frames our crises and opportunities as challenges to us, now, personally—in ways that penetrate our usual abstractions and avoidance. We learn that the future of our very life-support systems utterly dependent on the very heart, intelligence, tenderness, and courage of our ways of being.

Ultimately, the course inspires us to our own potential for heroic goodness, which is latent in every human heart. We discover the connections between personal growth, relationships, conversations, and a new, inclusive vision of community, public service and cultural transformation. And we each move forward with clarity about how our unique heartbreak and genius can catalyze our most creative and joyful action in the world.

Embody Your Soul’s Vision

Step by step, in 12 sessions, you’ll journey through the best-selling book—A New Republic of the Heart—to learn, practice, and integrate its insights into a new foundation for your way of being in our world.

In each session,  you’ll listen to a new chapter read by the author, watch him teach and respond to questions in video recordings, and explore session guides with deepening questions and practices.

Ultimately, you will cultivate a profound relationship to “what time it is” on our planet and break through any “learned helplessness” into true empowerment. You will connect practically with your blessed opportunity to “be the change” — in ways that are deeply personal and that serve our evolutionary future.

 

 

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Start the Self-Guided Journey Now

Access the Course Instantly and Go at Your Pace

Immerse yourself in the way that fits your learning style — with streaming and downloadable media, designed and tested practices and community conversation. 

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13 Audio Recordings

Experience 16+ hours of Terry’s groundbreaking book read aloud by the author.

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12 Interactive Guides

Break through to an embodied understanding with hundreds of crafted questions & practices. 

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14 Video Recordings

Access 14 hrs of video Q&A sessions, where Terry’s insights shine brighter than ever.

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Online Course Forum

Make new connections with a community of brother-sisters inspired to “be the change.”

A Detailed Preview of Each Session

Explore Some of the Shifts You’ll Be Experiencing

Session One:

Our Wicked Predicament and the Consensus Trance

      Overview

  • Take an unflinching look at our evolutionary crisis from the current state of the planet to why we might be “the lucky ones”
  • Examine the “wickedness” of our problems and how humans are hardwired to miss, ignore, or deny them
  • Explore the difference between “radical hope” and “false hope” and how an orientation to wholeness transcends despair 
  • Learn what it takes to counteract a digital age that reverse-engineers our neurological hardwiring and hijacks our attention
  • Understand how the pressures of our unprecedented times can strengthen your capacities and  relationships

    Session Two:

    Translating Heartbreak Into Action

     

          Overview

    • Learn how to transform grief and heartbreak into joy, gratitude, and contribution
    • Explore how “inner work” and “outer work” are complementary and dependent and redefine “activism” 
    • Acknowledge the “terrible truths” of our situation while opening to the “wonderful secret” that fuels our action
    • Synthesize personal and interpersonal practice with the outer work of creative service, civic engagement and ecological living
    • Start to cultivate a liberating relationship to our chaotic times that’s both clear-eyed and joyous

    Session Three:

    Wholeness and Fragmentation

     

          Overview

    • Examine the nature of reality as undivided wholeness and that nothing can ultimately threaten you from this orientation
    • Explore the paradox of wholeness in the face of the threats, fragmentation and dysfunction we see all around us
    • Awaken to your role as a creative participant in a larger natural process capable of self-transformation and healing
    • Embrace a radical practice of wholeness  that can translate into effective activism and heal our planetary life-support system
    • Learn what’s needed to sustain the positive contributions you’ve already made or plan to make — for the long haul

    Session Four:

    The Evolutionary Perspective

     

          Overview

    • Step back and take in a broad, evolutionary perspective that reveals the larger personal & collective patterns of our moment
    • Discover why it can take extreme evolutionary tension to ignite spurts of progress and how we appear to be at such a moment
    • Consider how blind faith that “evolution will find a way” could have negative, far-reaching consequences.
    • Learn how evolution’s method of “differentiation and integration” counters our global crisis of “doom and gloom”
    • Open to your blessed opportunity to “be the change” with others and clarify consequential steps for auspicious change

    Session Five:

    The Integral Revolution

     

          Overview

    • Explore the implications of the fundamental integral tenet that every one of our crises and responses is “both true and partial”
    • Clarify how insights of the 3 predominant cultural worldviews (premodern, modern & postmodern) can help address our crises
    • Understand how today’s worldviews are shaping perception and attitudes, as well as how they are interacting and clashing
    • Examine how an integral theory’s approach to change can enrich the ways we act, organize, and reach across cultural barriers
    • Learn how the integral perspective of “transcend and include” helps us make sense of the polarized views dominating our news

    Session Six:

    Life as Practice

          Overview

    • Explore what it means to “practice” in all aspects of our lives, spiritually, emotionally, psychologically and culturally
    • Engage an spiritual practice grounded in the awakening of free consciousness and love and the realization that life lives us
    • Deepen your realization of the wholeness of your true nature, so it can make you a more effective agent of change
    • Learn how to stabilize the transformative effects of psychological insights and energy shifts that tend to fade over time
    • Cultivate both self-forgiveness and the ability to take responsibility for your inevitable lapses as a practitioner

    Session Seven:

    The New Stories of Our Souls

     

          Overview

    • Open to the paradox of discovering your unique genius even as you awaken to your true nature of Wholeness
    • Explore mythic stories, archetypes and metaphors to engage the adventure of “soul work” and manifest your deepest purpose
    • See how your unique contribution is vital to us facing our global predicament and how you might be holding yourself back
    • Explore how our collective cultural stories can either uplift or suppress us, and the power we have to shift these narratives
    • Discover the power of “yin leadership” and the feminine dimensions of the maturity and courage our planet needs

    Session Eight:

    Awakening Into Evolutionary Activism

     

          Overview

    • Reimagine “revolution” in a world of fragmentation and how holistic  activism creates “whole-system change”
    • Explore and integrate the three dimensions of 1) in-the-system, 2) against-the-system , and 3) around-the-system activism
    • Examine the holistic synergies that are expressed in specific, real-world evolutionary activist projects
    • Understand the nature and nuances of integral, evolutionary, and transpartisan approaches to activism
    • Open to following your heartbreak and your genius in tangible next steps

    Session Nine:

    A New Tribalism and a New Republic of the Heart

     

          Overview

    • Learn about the new discoveries and powerful synergies being activated by “communities of practice” around the world
    • Understand how participating in such communities can challenge our denial and break the “consensus trance”
    • Explore how deep mutual support and collective creativity can catalyze the innovation we need globally and locally
    • Embrace the shift from from “me to we” as you recognize that our wild time is really a collective spiritual initiation
    • Learn how to co-create a community of practice & awakening that can stand as a moral center in larger movements

    Session Ten:

    Conversations That Matter

     

          Overview

    • Examine why it’s so maddeningly hard for people to have real conversations about the things that matter most
    • Understand the nature of generative conversations and the structures and shared agreements that nurture them
    • Identify the vital conversations happening within (but often not between) 3 groups: innovatorsecologistsevolutionaries
    • Connect with the “epistemic humility” needed to transcend polarized positions and superficial dialogue
    • Learn interpersonal practices that can guide your authentic participation in “conversations that matter”

    Session Eleven:

    It’s Not Too Late, and It Never Will Be

     

          Overview

    • Consider the ways trust manifests — trust in our evolution, trust in wholeness and trust in possibilities we can’t imagine
    • Become anchored beyond apocalyptic fear and unrealistic optimism, seeing our crisis as a collective spiritual initiation
    • Begin to show up more fully in a world that is getting better and better and worse and worse, faster and faster
    • Dissolve the “civic paralysis” of feeling inadequate to our world’s enormous and hyper-complex problems
    • Learn how ordinary folks are precisely the heroes that are called for in this challenging time

    Session Twelve:

    Getting Real and Staying Real

     

          Overview

    • Reaffirm “what time it is” on the planet, acknowledging what we fear and emerging joyful and energized
    • Bear witness to the countless good projects around the world and affirm our power and our right to create lives of meaning 
    • Learn how even in times of suppressive cultural environments, we can rely upon the innate goodness of others
    • Reconnect to our grief and heartbreak as catalysts for joy and contribution 
    • Tap into the power of collective “we-space,” remembering it’s needed to sustain our journey into our evolutionary future

    Meet Your Teacher

    Terry Patten

    After 15 years of spiritual discipline in a monastic setting, Terry Patten joined Integral Institute in 2004, where he worked closely with Ken Wilber to develop Integral Life Practice and co-author the book Integral Life Practice: A 21st-Century Blueprint for Physical Health, Emotional Balance, Mental Clarity, and Spiritual Awakening. For more than a decade, Terry created Integral trainings for thousands around the world, including Integral Spiritual Practice, Living the Integral Heart and Integral Soul Journey. He also founded the Bay Area Integral nonprofit and community.

    In recent years, Terry became an influential voice for facing our global crises through the marriage of spiritual practice and activism. He authored A New Republic of the Heart and founded a nonprofit of the same name to educate spiritual practitioners and change agents in “holistic social transformation.” 

    Terry passed away in 2021. He considered A New Republic of the Heart to be a culmination of his 50 years of spiritual practice, committed activism, teaching and, of course, always learning.

    Terry Patten Teacher Integral Spiritual Practice

    Praise for A New Republic of the Heart

    “Terry’s work on Integral Spirituality and Practice is superb, just superb, and highly recommended. After you get tired of fragmented and broken approaches to spiritual development, try a super-holistic approach and see the immediate difference.”

    Ken Wilber, Founder of Integral Theory

    “Patten clarifies how our wicked problems require us to grow, personally and collectively—showing how our political and ecological problems are also personal and interpersonal. He helps us go beyond debate, one-upsmanship, and other non-communication, to talk and listen in new ways. ”

    Joan Blades, Co-Founder of MoveOn.org

    “Humanity is at a critical turning point—and this is THE manual for all who want to meet this moment as the historical call to action that it is […] A step-by-step blueprint for catalyzing whole-system change from the inside out, Terry shows us the way to rise into our personal and collective destiny.”

    Claire Zammit, Ph.D, Founder of FemininePower.com

    “Terry Patten has woven together strands from evolutionary neuroscience, deep ecology, integral theory, and spiritual wisdom to offer a practical path forward out of humanity’s current morass. This book shows us how to integrate personal and political practice, transforming both our lives and our world. It’s fascinating, fast-moving, and heartfelt.

    Rick Hanson, Ph.D., author of Buddha’s Brain

    Sign Up and Start Today

    We invite you to begin your self-paced journey today. If you are not satisfied with the course for any reason, you may request a refund within 7 days of purchase.