Integral Work Anyone?

Unapologetically, I am going to be quite idealistic over the course of the next few weeks. I want to explore what a thoroughly 'integral-working situation' might look/feel like. I want to dream a little here. I want to explore. And that is precisely what I am intent on doing: seeing if I might not be able to divine the depths of a decidedly integral working environment.

Let's begin with the theory behind the concept of the 'integral.' First, let's quote the primary authourity on these matters, namely one Ken Wilber. He writes in his journal cum book, One Taste that,

"There are many ways to explain 'integral' or 'holistic.' The most common is that it is an approach that attempts to include and integrate matter, body, mind, soul, and spirit."

Does Mr. Wilber not mean to suggest that the 'Integral Approach' is one that seeks to honour, as well as engage actively, the full totality of our being on all the levels upon which that being (or Being) is expressed? Which we might also suggest is merely another way of saying that the 'Integral Approach' is one that seeks to do justice to the fullness of our humanity in both its immanent and its transcendent aspects.

Applied to work we already have a sense of how it is that certain 'working-situations' only engage us in a partial manner. I am sure we have each experienced 'mind-numbing' work that is tedious in the extreme. There is also work that only engages us as material beings--i.e., as matter, as a body. Such work also seems to have a detri-mental effect over the long run. The other dimensions of our Being atrophy. Mind gets dull. Soul goes dormant. Spirit gets dissociated. We literally can 'go numb' in those critical areas that make us fully human. Hence we become in-human or sub-human as a result of the 'working-situation' that does not engage us in an integral manner.

Those dis-engaged dimensions (soul, spirit, mind--as well as the body for those working in excessively mental environments such as those we see more and more in the age of the Information Revolution) can also raise a ruckus within us; as expressed in various symptoms we might call instances of pathology. That which is not actively engaged at work--in our labours--can manifest elsewhere. Not unlike a child, if we do not actively attend to every plane/dimension/level of our Being we could well experience ourselves being made to attend to them by their acting out in ways that appear to be destructive.

That is why exploring the full-range of implications of what 'Integral Work' might look like is so very important. After all, if we don't work in an 'intergally-informed environment' then we are working in a partial one. Which is an environment that is bound to be debilitating in time. Maybe not today. But somewhere down the road 'partial-work' cripples us.

And perhaps even more importantly don't we all want to be able to 'show up fully' at work and not have to live out the tired scenario where we are only partly there... and partly elsewhere... dissociated in the moment... precisely because the working-situation itself is not totally engaging?