Terry Patten

Bio & resources

There has been much talk in the West about the “spiritual but not religious” generation. But what does it really mean to be a seeker of spiritual truth at a moment in history when all the mystical scriptures, religious revelations, and secret teachings of time immemorial are not hidden but rather are categorized, digitized, “blogetized,” “twitterized,” and organized by Google’s omnipresent virtual mind? Indeed, it seems as if seeking today is more about sifting, sorting, and surfing, about separating the truly profound from the merely informative. In this new world of ones and zeroes, we need more than spiritual guides. We also need spiritual gatekeepers, those who can help us venture into the whirlwind of information and emerge with clarity, direction, and purpose.

Integral Life Practice (ILP), developed by spiritual practitioner, teacher, and coach Terry Patten (in close collaboration with his co-authors, philosopher Ken Wilber, scholar Marco Morelli, and educator Adam Leonard) aspires to be exactly this kind of twenty-first-century gatekeeper. Its cutting-edge methods are outlined in a new book titled Integral Life Practice: A 21st-Century Blueprint for Physical Health, Emotional Balance, Mental Clarity, and Spiritual Awakening. Developed under the umbrella of Wilber’s integral philosophy, which is itself a powerful approach to organizing and integrating the world’s many knowledge systems, ILP was designed with a singular purpose—to bring the deepest insights of the East and West together and make them relevant for individuals seeking to live a more enlightened life. “Integral Life Practice is Integral—which means comprehensive, whole, and balanced,” writes Patten in the introduction. “It’s a synthesis of the ‘best of the best’ that our traditions have to offer, combined with the most state-of-the-art transformational techniques.” It is surely a bold claim, but after perusing the nearly three hundred and fifty pages of well-organized and carefully chosen practices for cultivating mind, body, and spirit, one begins to appreciate the impressive achievement of these integrally minded authors.

Patten is well suited to be the spokesperson for ILP, as he himself is no stranger to higher human potentials or the serious work it takes to achieve them. Indeed, he has been actively pursuing transformation since the early 1970s, beginning with his time as a student of the recently deceased American spiritual teacher Adi Da. Da pushed his students hard, and while Patten would eventually leave the community in the 1980s, the insights he gained over the many years of rigorous practice and experiential inquiry became the foundation for his later work as writer, entrepreneur, and teacher.

In the 1990s, Patten turned his attention to business, but he never lost track of the spiritual dimension. He moved to Marin County, California (where he still resides), and participated in the local Integral Transformative Practice (ITP) group founded and facilitated by two legendary figures in the human potential movement, Michael Murphy and George Leonard. This northern California ITP group was one of the first to actively pursue an experimental synthesis of practices and to conduct scientific research into the nature of transformative practices and their effects. The success of their endeavor helped inspire Wilber, Patten, and others to join together to develop their own synthetic system, and a decade later Integral Life Practice was born.

With the 2008 release of Integral Life Practice, Patten is rapidly becoming a teacher and integral leader in his own right, and interest in ILP is growing. But the self-described “radically inclusive” nature of this new system presents new challenges as well. For example, how does a system of practices with such wide-ranging breadth still maintain the depth essential for real transformation? Can the do-it-yourself nature of ILP provide the structure and discipline needed to make practice truly effective? I recently visited Patten at his home in the golden rolling hills just a few miles north of San Francisco and asked him to share with me his vision of leading-edge spiritual practice at the dawn of the information age.