A Guide to Spiritually Inspired Social Transformation
In this 12-session course, you’ll take an unflinching look at the threats to our societies, psyches and world — and discover the unique role you play in benefiting our planet.
What time is it on the planet?
Our collective moment is calling us to look directly at our critical evolutionary crisis, both its perils and promises—and to ultimately understand why we just might be “the lucky ones.”
No matter how challenging and complex our situation is, we get to be here, alive at this time, and each of us have a role to play in transformaing civilization and planetary life. It’s game time on Planet Earth. We each have a unique role to play in transforming civilization and planetary life.
Getting Real
A New Republic of the Heart Course explores 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.
Being the Change
In this 12-session course, you’ll journey through the best-selling book, A New Republic of the Heart: An Ethos for Revolutionaries by Terry Patten. In each session, you’ll listen to a new chapter read by the author, watch him teach and respond to questions in a video Q&A recording, and explore a written session guide with deepening questions and practices that support you to truly engage it at the level of your embodied awakened consciousness.
Along the way, you’ll cultivate a deeper relationship to “what time it is” on our planet. What if we face our fears together? Could we emerge more joyful and energized to create positive change than ever before?
Why not just read the book? True transformation happens when intellectual understanding is embodied and integrated at the deepest levels of our being. Step-by-step, you’ll walk through learning, practicing, and integrating this powerful synthesis and gain insight about how you can get the benefit you want.
You’ll break through our cultural “learned helplessness” and connect practically with your blessed opportunity to “be the change,” with many others, that can serve our evolutionary future.
A Self-Guided, Engaging Experience
Access the Course Anytime and At Your Own Pace
Immerse yourself in the way that fits your learning style — with streaming and downloadable media, designed and tested practices and community conversation.
13 Audio Recordings
Experience 16+ hours of Terry’s groundbreaking book read aloud by the author.
12 Interactive Guides
Break through to an embodied understanding with hundreds of crafted questions & practices.
14 Video Recordings
Access 14 hrs of video Q&A sessions, where Terry’s insights shine brighter than ever.
Online Course Forum
Make new connections with a community of brother-sisters inspired to “be the change.”
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.
Praise for A New Republic of the Heart
What You’ll Discover in the Sessions
Preview the Key Insights & 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: innovators, ecologists & evolutionaries
- 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
Special Offer Celebrating Terry Patten’s Life
In honor of the 3-year anniversary of Terry’s passing and in celebration of his teaching legacy, we’re offering the NRTH course for 30% off. We hope you’ll benefit from the course and the savings!
Member Price
For members of our practice community contributing monthly donations- Access to All Course Materials Forever
- Community Member Discount of $150 Off
- Online Community Forum to Discuss the Course with Others
NRTH Course 30% Off
$75 Off – Ends Dec. 10th- Access to All Course Materials Forever
- Limited-Time Launch Discount of $50 Off
- Online Community Forum to Discuss the Course with Others
Standard Price
Available Anytime- *Some supporters prefer to pay full price to financially support to our mission. You are welcome to select this standard price plan if you’d like. Thank you!
Still Have Questions about A New Republic of the Heart Course?
Contact us with your questions or schedule a 15-minute consultation to learn more.