THE FIVE QUADRANTS:
With current technology, we live in a global village. Cultures + information are synthesizing at crazy rates. It has many effects and it’s not something we can easily control, at least not in the old ways. Amidst all that, I want to share one incredible effect.
New communities, ways of living, and bodies of work are emerging. A new emphasis is arising on embodiment. It turns out the body is a very complex terrain, with many worlds and ecosystems within it. It’s a big ship to steer. In order to get out of the addictive-avoidant habits of being stuck in the head + driven by unconscious reactions, we needed a vast array of tools and wisdoms. We needed new paradigms in order to maturely enter the somatic and emotional deep terrain. In the last 40 years, there is an ever-deepening synthesis of previously isolated developmental paths. There is a synthesis happening with so many worlds, people, and bodies of work: depth psychology and psycho-analysis, religious + spiritual cosmologies + practices, psychedelic healing and shamanic journeying, trauma + somatic work, self-development skills, creative arts + expression, and so many more. All synthesizing + becoming much more than the sum of their parts. It is a great re-membering right now.
Call it what you like: multi-path integration, regenerative wholeness, or integral development. In small growing communities around the world, culture is essentially digesting + embodying vast arrays of ‘ways to live, feel, relate, see, and know.’ We are beginning to get more comfortable with navigating paradox and holding contradictory wisdoms + approaches on all levels within us: deep in the body, emotions, core survival strategies, ancestral memory, mind, relational-body, work life, experience with the world, soul-levels, and higher. In the light of many views, knots are being seen + unravelled. Huge blind spots revealed. Biases exposed. We can become more and more whole. It invites a patience and falling in love more with the process than the destination. The fruits are real, and it gets easier as it goes. We can become more and more whole, like never before, and it’s so rewarding.
What is multi-path integration and wholeness all about? It’s a process of self-discovery and embodiment, not simply a set of distinctions, methods, and paradigms. It’s where the rubber meets the road. In our actual somatic inner space, we open up the hood of our car, learn the ways of our own operating, embrace them, and deep shifts happen. Healing happens organically. Wholeness happens. This is the kind of work we do in a one-on-one session of mindfulness-based assisted self-discovery. In the process, we are gently exploring what’s present in the moment. We are tracking mindfully what’s true in our body. We are able to safely uncover our actual blind spots, relational ecosystems, and deep strategies. These are the deep causal layers that unconsciously hold us back in relationships or projects. Using new wisdoms and skills, we embrace, soul-retrieve, and re-contextualize what was a previously unconscious self-replicating loop. This opens new paradigms. It’s liberating. It’s an embodied journey, where our life transforms.
As we discover this is possible, we get less and less satisfied with settling for just a journey in the head. It isn’t about hiding inside our old avoidances. We learn how to be loving, gentle, and patient with ourselves to take the journey into the body, into the core survival strategies and family constellations, into the unconscious beliefs held in the depths that relate with the familial. We learn to treat ourselves with skillfulness, self-love, patience, compassion, and self-forgiveness. As we do this, addictions and avoidances can gradually fall away. They were expressions of our unmet pain. As our roots go deeper, our branches reach higher into new worlds, even deep experiences of wholeness, and multi-dimensional cosmologies. New richer more nourishing ways of relationship become available. In this way, we become, in all areas of our life, the embodiment of our next deepest lesson. This is true ‘learning.’ And the learning continues.
It’s about making the path a lot easier. You don’t need to get your coat snagged on every doorway you walk through or step in a ditch around every new corner. The maps for ‘What is reality?’ get upgraded. The practices and ways of life get tons of vital context. This is where introducing the 5 Quadrants comes in. It’s one way of seeing some of the different crucial aspects of development, so we don’t get too one-sided. It’s an easy-to-reference supportive model. The patient loving journey of bringing it into the body + life is in some ways easier than it can look. Our curiousity and natural passion for life continues to awaken, and the new paradigms attract us on their own.
A very simple core framework to avoid bypassing & keep on hand at all times is:
5 QUADRANTS: WAKE UP, GROW UP, CLEAN UP, SHOW UP, CONNECT UP
Wake Up (meditative, consciousness, liberative, emptiness, enlightenment, radical freedom)
Grow up (full accountability & responsibility for our lives & decisions, moral, virtue, values, integrity, rites of passage, archetypes, understanding many perspectives)
Clean Up (shadow integration, trauma, unconscious repressed material, emotional work, body, breathwork)
Show Up (purpose, expression, leadership, creativity, service, work/vocation/calling)
Connect Up (relational, connection, listening, communication, secure attachment, authenticity, boundaries, needs, polarity, tribe)
Above quadrants revised from a Ken Wilber - Integral Theory model
“What if you could go from kindergarten level personal growth to college level, graduate level or mastery level personal growth? When you get to those levels, you start getting obsessed with Ken Wilber’s work.” ~ Vishen Lakhiani - CEO of MindValley
As I mentioned above, many different disciplines of ‘human development’ have been isolated for hundreds or thousands of years. In one-on-one sessions, we are integrating and finding pathways to open up these many different quadrants within us. It happens naturally, organically, as we safely explore whatever is alive for us in any area of our life and connect the threads of how that interweaves with any somatic patterns. In the organic process of exploring and soul-retrieval that happens, entirely new doors open up. The 5-quadrant model of synthesis and integration is built into the work I do. We naturally travel throughout the 5-quadrants in the exploration process. We find new distinctions, heal emotional wounds and patterns, receive insights, work and relationships are invigorated, and new choices arise as we work together. It’s a path of discovery.
On a larger level, this same integration is happening around all the world between these isolated practices, approaches, communities, and philosophies. Without the interconnectivity of modern communication, history is a story of very isolated approaches. A few isolated deep thinkers here or there forging ideas and writing books for the culture. Religious and spiritual communities hiding in monasteries or ashrams in the mountains. These modern branded islands around this modality, this skillset, this approach, this teacher’s work, this practice, this community. These different thought-camps often can seem to be at odds with eachother, vying for superiority or influence. But they’re all trying to support different aspects of the same bigger picture.
IT’S A FUNNY THING...
Emotional release & trauma work people condemning meditation communities as disembodied bypassers.
Western psycho-analytic and depth psychology communities refuse + judge the woo-woo eastern mysticism that unbeknownst to them inspired the founders of their tradition.
Meditation communities often condemning the world, their desires, & most of all the other camps & basically everything as passing and unreal.
Inspired self-development communities, who are developing their healthy ego, seeking 'success' condemn depth psychology and emotional release work as being lost in tunnels of endless introspection.
And finally, relational communities see all the go-getters, the always-in-process trauma-work people, and the detached enlightenment people...and they just want to give everyone a big hug and be like, "WTF guys, all you really want is connection and love."
Everyone has a piece of the truth. And it CAN be integrated in our own experience. All these aspects of our life are like streams flowing into rivers into the ocean. The ocean is the integration of knowing how to navigate our whole system and embodying that familiarity on many levels: emotionally, mentally, financially, physically, morally, relationally, creatively, vocationally, and spiritually. The 5 Quadrants model is just a simple reminder to not become one-sided:
Wake Up, Grow Up, Clean Up, Show Up, Connect Up.
In one way of looking, the world is just a giant laboratory for growth or lack thereof. It’s easy to only see part of the picture. On the path, it’s all too common to end up being just one of the blind men in the famous “Blind men & the Elephant” parable:
A group of blind men heard that a strange animal, called an elephant, had been brought to the town, but none of them were aware of its shape and form. Out of curiosity, they said: "We must inspect and know it by touch, of which we are capable". So, they sought it out, and when they found it they groped about it. The first person, whose hand landed on the trunk, said, "This being is like a thick snake". For another one whose hand reached its ear, it seemed like a kind of fan. As for another person, whose hand was upon its leg, said, the elephant is a pillar like a tree-trunk. The blind man who placed his hand upon its side said the elephant, "is a wall". Another who felt its tail, described it as a rope. The last felt its tusk, stating the elephant is that which is hard, smooth and like a spear.
In some versions of the story, they begin to quarrel about their different perspectives and come to blows. In other versions, they reconcile their different perspectives and resolve a bigger truth from their shared truths. This is what each of us does in our own body as we explore our inner terrain, integrate our parts, heal our family constellations, ground our spirit and soul, navigate our knowing and intuition, and embrace the path of integration.