Feeling into Teal Shadows
Jordan Myska Allen
Jordan Myska Allen is a partner in Circling Europe, created CircleAnywhere.com, the first daily, online Circling practice community, and pioneered bringing Surrendered Leadership into businesses. He published the highly endorsed novel A Beautiful Apocalypse, a zombie adventure inspired by Integral Theory, and is a PhilosophyCenter Certified Life Coach.
Meet Jordan on the following workshops at IEC 2018:
- Circling & Integral Altitudes, Thursday 24th, 16:45-18:00, room Ibiza I.
- Circling & Integral Altitudes, with John Thompson, Saturday 26th, 12:00-14:00 Play Room
- Circling and Surrendered Leadership, with John Thompson, Saturday 26th, 16:45-18:00, room Catalonia.
About Jordan in his unique style:
My name’s Jordan, and I’m a 31 year Texas integral fan and author of the well-endorsed and decidedly millennial integral zombie roadtrip novel “A Beautiful Apocalypse.” What people know me most most for though—aside from the fact that my eyes disappear when I smile, and I smile often—is leading a global movement of transformational practice with my best buddies and business partners through our company “Circling Europe.”
when Integral first blew my mind 🤯…
Ok, to get us started, think of a time when you discovered something from Integral Theory that blew your mind—maybe it was when Ken postulated that the laws of physics are just cosmic grooves that could theoretically be altered via Supermind. Or maybe it was when Suzanne Cook-Greuter told you, the youngest person at the integral conference, that the young integral explorers of yesteryear partied much harder. Challenge taken Suzanne; find me in the sauna 😛
Now, if you’re anything like me, you wanted to tell everyone about how world-changing this new Integral insight is. But when you tried, they mostly didn’t give a flying f*ck. At best, they’d humor you and then give you some counter-argument that you immediately dismissed as “too orange” or “too green” to have much validity and then you harrumphed off into your lonely integral tower to find solace in the dusty b-sides of the original Integral Naked. Ouch.
And, if you’re anything like me, this lonely period has been transcended (*and included, of course) by a movement from the heart into a deeper engagement with the world. This is what happened to me when the-entity-that-is-the-Circling-lineage whispered to my soul, “Jordan, this is yours. Face your deepest suffering with eyes wide open, hold others to the same fire, remember to love both of you, and have fun.”
Facing our deepest suffering with eyes 👀 wide open
Of course you probably didn’t find it through Circling. Maybe it was another “we-space” practice. Maybe it was through consulting, coaching, counseling, teaching, or leading an Integral church or community; but you stopped trying to evangelize Integral; you stopped trying to use it to change the world and you started to let it use you, to let the world change you. You stopped asking “How can I bring Integral to evolve the world?” and started asking “What is evolution bringing through/as me?” You let Integral distinctions inform your looking and guide your in-the-moment navigation of the infinity of undifferentiated experience.
This is getting pretty heady, so let’s talk about sex for a moment.
Integral and Sex 🍆🌷
Sex is a great example of one of the biggest mistakes Integralists can make. Imagine you’re in bed, naked, your lips are inches away from someone you’re deeply attracted to and you can feel their gentle breath. Your body is electric with anticipation as your partner awaits, drawing out your excitement, teasing… then suddenly they start talking about how they forgot to include the Lower Right Quadrant in their awareness of this moment which is probably because they’re projecting their enneagram type’s primordial wound onto you…
Yeah, that feeling. :/ …
Let integral inform you big time. I believe it is an absolute must. Right view. But our work in the world is to shine our unique brilliance and let Integral inform that. That’s what Circling is about, Surrendered Leadership, and even the map I’ve made of seeing we-space practices through the lens of altitudes: You’ve got a divine fire burning in your Being, begging to play with the world of form. Circling is about getting intimate with this fire and finding out how it can best be shared with others. The fire is not a thing, its a process, an interaction, whose radiance can be fanned or squashed by the skillful use of the wood and air and rocks that shape and create it. Similarly our bodies and emotions and personalities and awarenesses can squelch the divine fire of our body-heart-mind-moments, or they can facilitate it becoming a bonfire—a guiding light for the goodness and beauty and truth that eros is pulling us toward and agape is embracing.
What is Circling for? 🔬Why Bother?
Circling and Surrendered Leadership are not the tools for getting intimate with the levels, though they do facilitate that nicely. They are the tools for shifting the way we construct our experience of reality—from static to dynamic, from dead to alive, from a collection of problems to a collection of lessons, from a jungle to a classroom, from theory to living wisdom, from laughable attempts to control fate to the surrender that includes our deepest passions and most courageous actions.
They help us learn how to move toward our most pressing challenges instead of away. They reveal the intelligence organizing every expression of every relationship so we can see love or a call for love in everyone.
At the conference John Thompson and I will be leading a few sessions exploring different aspects of Circling and Surrendered Leadership, weaving in their relationship with Integral Theory, drawing meaningful-but-arbitrary boundaries around an infinite heart; allowing these distinctions and explorations to reveal how deeply the entirety of existence and each of its parts have always been allies of evolution, that our most powerful choice is how much we surrender to that beautiful kosmic flow.
(For more specificity on one of the sessions and how it relates to Integral Theory and We Space Practices, check out this article: http://circlingeurope.com/2017/09/circling-integral-altitudes/ )
With Love,
The IEC team
https://www.integraleuropeanconference.com