Integral Transformative Practice (ITP)
Practice, Principles, and Promise
By Peter Friedberg

One of the most salutary things about the last three decades is the extraordinary amount of research that has gone into the exploration and practice of human potentials. Pioneered by world-renowned Esalen Institute, this research is one of the most profound contributions to the well-being of humanity that one could imagine.

What is equally exciting, and perhaps even more important, is that the results of these intense investigations have increasingly been brought together into synergistic packages, known generically as Integral Transformative Practices, which are proving to be the most effective means of human transformation yet devised.

Leaders in this field are, of course, Michael Murphy and George Leonard, and it is a pleasure to be associated with them and their extraordinary work, which, in my mind, is the culmination of the human potential movement itself. Count me as a grateful supporter and practitioner of this important work.
— Ken Wilber, author of
Sex, Ecology, Spirituality

Esalen's chairman Michael Murphy and its president George Leonard had been friends, colleagues, and intellectual soul mates for nearly thirty years, yet the two men had never conducted a class together. By the close of 1991, this was about to change. As the year drew to an end, Murphy was putting the finishing touches on The Future of the Body, his exhaustive study of extraordinary human capacities and metanormal experiences, and Leonard had just published Mastery, a paean to the benefits of long-term practice. Their work had led them to a point where they wanted to try out their ideas togetherÑto see if people with busy lives could transform themselves for the better with long-term practice.

And so in January of 1992, Murphy and Leonard convened an experimental class in what they called Integral Transformative Practice (ITP). That class, which met once a week for two years, generated material, inspiration, and the extraordinary results for their coauthored The Life We Are Given: A Long-Term Program for Realizing the Potential of Body, Mind, Heart, and Soul. Since that time, the world has witnessed the launching of an ITP website, www.itp-life.com; a videotape, The Tao of Practice; several large-scale university experiments (including a Sonoma State study with university students that produced remarkable results, and a Stanford study with senior citizens); and ITP groups around the globe ("The sun never sets on the ITP Kata," Leonard has said, only half-joking).

Now Murphy and Leonard, along with Annie Styron Leonard and Barry Robbins, are bringing ITP back home to Esalen. During one unprecedented weekend, March 5-7, the entire Esalen property will be devoted to ITP. Specialized sessions will be held in Esalen's four major meeting rooms, each offering a different aspect of ITP. The Friday and Saturday night sessions will bring all participants together for practice, discussion, networking, and celebration. In addition, there will be a five-day workshop offered April 25-30 for those interested in furthering their ITP training and starting their own ITP group.

The Practice

Integral Transformative Practice is a comprehensive, systematic, holistic approach to personal transformation. It was created as a daily practice intended to tap our latent capacities so that we may, to borrow a familiar phrase, "be all that we can be." At the heart of the ITP practice is a series of mind-body-spirit exercises called a Kata (Japanese for "form," or series of movements). A succession of movements, rotations, stretches, twists, contractions, and relaxations, the ITP Kata does not require a lot of time; at a relaxed pace, it can be performed in forty minutes. Drawn from hatha yoga, martial arts, modern exercise physiology, Progressive Relaxation, visualization research, and witness meditation, the Kata is designed to:

• Balance and center body and psyche
• Provide an overall warm-up, raising the heartbeat, increasing blood flow, and sending heat to all parts of the body
• Articulate nearly every joint, enhancing lubrication of the synovial joints (such as shoulder, ankle, or knee, which are surrounded by fluid-filled capsules)
• Provide stretches to increase flexibility in all major muscle groups
• Provide three essential strength exercises
• Offer a complete set of Progressive Relaxation exercises
• Enhance the capacity for deep, rhythmic breathing
• Apply transformational imaging and affirmations, utilizing the power of intentionality to effect positive changes in body and psyche
• Enhance the experience of the ten-minute concluding meditation

The affirmations are not just "New Year's resolutions." The Life We Are Given contains a statistical breakdown which directly correlates the success of realizing the affirmations with a participant's degree of focus and commitment to the practice. It is this correlation that helped to produce the book's many stories of radical transformation of body and being.

The Principles

ITP is based on a set of powerfully persuasive principles. These principles, along with the impressive results compiled in The Life We Are Given, provide a strong argument for the most resistant of would-be practitioners. Some of the principles (excerpted verbatim from Leonard and Murphy's book) are:

• Most of us realize just a fraction of our human potential. We live only part of the life we are given.
• The culture we inhabit reinforces only some of our latent capacities while neglecting or suppressing others.
• Most, if not all, human attributes can give rise to extraordinary versions of themselves, either spontaneously or through transformative practice.
• Extraordinary attributes, when seen as a whole, point toward a more powerful and luminous human nature.
• A widespread realization of extraordinary attributes might lead to an epochal evolutionary turn analogous to the rise of life from inorganic matter and of humankind from its hominid ancestors.
• To last, extraordinary attributes must be cultivated. For a many-sided realization of extraordinary attributes, for integral transformation, we need a practice that embraces body, mind, heart, and soul.
• Enduring transformative practices are comprised of several identifiable activities, or transformative modalities, such as disciplined self-observation, visualization of desired capacities, focused surrender to emergent capacities, and elicitation of the "relaxation response." Integral practices incorporate these modalities to produce a balanced development of our entire nature.
• These modalities operate in everyday life to some extent, whether or not we are engaged in a formal practice. In other words, all of us practice on a daily basis, albeit in a fragmented, largely unconscious manner. Integral practiceÉaims to make our fragmented practices conscious, creative, and coherent and harness them for health and growth.
• To last and to be successful, integral practice must be engaged primarily for its own sake, without obsession with ends and results. Its practitioners do best when they learn to enjoy the rewards of long-term, diligent practice.
• The grace-laden nature of extraordinary attributes, and the sublimity, power, and beauty they reveal, strongly suggest thatÉthe world's primary tendency is to manifest great goods that are hidden in it. That tendency inclines us toward extraordinary life, which can best be realized through integral practices.

The Promise

ITP is not a quick-fix approach. There are no "three easy steps" to fitness, health, or enlightenment, no lightning bolts waiting to vivify us with Shaktipat. In fact, it is our search for short cuts and climactic experiences that has helped engender not only today's pandemic self-destructive and addictive behavior but also the pervasive disillusionment with the very idea of positive human transformation. Long-term change requires long-term practice. And such practice can produce results that appear nothing short of magical. Integral Transformative Practice is a long-term practice designed to best align the whole person with the "sublimity, power, and beauty in the stuff of the universe."

—Peter Friedberg
Esalen Catalog Editor

At the Stanford Center for Research in Disease Prevention we recently finished a three-year investigation into the ITP model and its effect on three cohorts of senior citizens. The first two groups included people who expressed an interest in improving their health and well-being while the third group was comprised of patients diagnosed with atrial arrhythmias, or irregular heartbeats. Each group met for a year and was facilitated by a psychologist practiced in the methods of Integral Transformative Practice. The 150-minute weekly meetings included group practice of the ITP Kata, group sharing, a lecture on some aspect of health and instruction in the development and use of affirmations. The participants were assessed for improvement in quality of life, emotional well-being, cognitive functioning, and physical health, at the beginning and the end of the year of practice. Only the data on cognitive functioning has been completed to date. The results show that at the end of the year the ITP participants demonstrated measurable gains in reaction time, short- and long-term memory, reasoning ability, and global cognitive processing.

—Frederic Luskin, Ph.D.
SAGE Project Director