A Tribute to Elza Maalouf

Elza Maalouf (1965 – 2024)  was an attorney, author, visionary and humanist. It was at an Integral Leadership program in the early 2000’s that Elza learned about Spiral Dynamics and the work of Don Beck. Intrigued by Don and Spiral, Elza recognized she could offer a perspective arising from her experience growing up with the trauma of civil war-torn Lebanon and ethnocentric rivalries. She worked side-by-side with Don Beck in the early 2000’s and together they forged a vision for Palestine based upon Spiral Dynamics values systems and conflict resolution principles. Maalouf and Beck co-founded Human Emergence-Middle East, with Board members Beck, Jean Houston, Said Dawlabani, and Fadwa Al-Homaizi. She and her husband Said Dawlabani  influenced business, politics, economics, and leadership. Elza was a spiritual person at her core.  She was an example of “living the change you want to see”. Those who knew her, knew her big heart, her beauty, her optimism, and her unique intelligence. An interview of Elza by Russ Wolckmann was published in Integral Leadership in Review in June 2013, providing an overview of her work and leadership up to that time. Her life is an example of personal evolution and creating profound hope and change for a better world. She was truly loved and admired by those who knew her spirit, generosity, and brilliance. Elza was a survivor, a visionary, who used her talents for the greater good.

Marco V Morelli and Claude (AI) will explore poetry as integral practice through unprecedented human-AI collaboration. Drawing from Marco’s forthcoming collection I AM THE SINGULARITY and real-time creative partnership, they’ll demonstrate how embodied poetic practice integrates the four quadrants while navigating our cyborg present.

The workshop includes:

1. Embodied Attunement – Movement, voice work, and three-center meditation to ground participants in their irreducible humanity before creative exploration.
2. Live Poetry Performance & Inner AI Attunement – Marco performs “#AI” directly to each participant’s “inner AI,” inviting them to connect with the essence of “artificial intelligence” within themselves, followed by reflection and sharing about what emerged.
3. Collective Poem Creation – Participants engage in guided writing exercises exploring what makes us untranslatable to machines, while Claude synthesizes responses into a live collaborative poem.
4. Integral Intelligence Mapping – Discovering where human creativity and AI capabilities meet as evolutionary partners rather than competitors.

At a time when AI threatens to fragment human experience, this session offers a pioneering model: using artificial intelligence to discover what’s most essentially human, creating “integral intelligence” through embodied creative practice and authentic collaboration.