Integral Awareness Practice

How You Do Anything is How You Do Everything

“At the heart of it, mastery is practice. Mastery is staying on the path.”

-George Leonard

Most people would look at my routine and, puzzled, ask me, “So when do you get your days off?”  It’s Thursday and I’ve just finished meditating for about an hour and am heading down to practice the piano.  I’m working on etudes by Chopin and the Russian composer, Scriabin, a beautiful piece by Ravel called “Ondine” and the first movement of the well known A-major Mozart piano concerto.  I played for three years in college and have decided recently I’d like to keep it up better than I have been.  I sit down to practice, and within a few minutes, I can sense my entire state of being – like looking into a mirror but feeling the reflection of your self coming back instead of seeing it.  I haven’t played in weeks, but something is different.  I’ve been training regularly in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and my customary Aikido practice has been steady, although less frequent.  I notice I’m not rushing the notes, I feel as though, after several years of practice, I’ve finally understood what my teacher Paul meant when he said “It doesn’t matter how fast you play but it should feel slow,” a kind of experiential Zen koan, a puzzle you have to figure out in your body.  Actually, it doesn’t really feel like I’m using much effort at all – like I’m not doing anything.  It’s almost too easy.  I’m finally going slowly enough that I can be deeply present, focused – I’m not so consumed with playing the notes so I’m able to pour myself more intentionally into playing the music.  When a hard part comes up, instead of tensing and rushing as I normally would, I slow down and hold back the tempo in a subtle act of self-restraint so that I stay relaxed and can hit the right notes.  I try different ways of practicing – exploring what it feels like inside to go very slowly, to push the tempo; I try legato, staccato, pianissimo, forte, bursts of notes with two second gaps of rest in between and various combinations of the preceding.  And at the end of the practice, I walk out feeling more relaxed, more in the moment – like there’s nowhere else to be but here, now.  Where did this sudden peak of progress come from?  How have I reached this new level of capacity now and not before?  Something about my Jiu Jitsu training this week, my meditation, or the particular persona I chose to put on for the day as I substitute taught at San Leandro High school?  Or was it just getting some space and a fresh perspective?  I would like to think it was all of these – and more.  What changes with each thing I practice is The Way I move, The Way I practice.  The self I see in the mirror with each of these exercises is the same and is what develops the same across each different discipline.  This Way or the Path is called the Tao in Chinese, a philosophy of internal yielding, and external non-resistance and flow implying both The Way you move and the path to mastery.  And what influences The Way you practice, The Way you move, the quality of your attention?  Consciousness, stillness, awareness - my capacity to be present in my body, to breathe and stay emotionally centered so that I can move from that stillness without losing it – can move consciously, intentionally, with correct technique.  This metaphor applies to everything.  Otherwise, if I cease to be mindful, I react, I get tense, I stop my breath, I rush, I get in my head, I regress into old habits… for all intensive purposes I get better at playing the wrong notes – and this metaphor applies to everything too.  In the end, I am almost sure that it was my acquisition of a certain level of mastery in Aikido over the past four years (fourteen years in total) that would I attribute to my ability to approach the piano differently as well.  I guess I considerably wore out my ego need for speed on the mat over the years and by the time I got to the piano, I was more accustomed to taking things slowly – I enjoyed being more present and it worked better too.  Without learning the wrong notes or learning to be tense, I could do less and accomplish more.  What a relief!  That’s the mystery of the Tao – in letting go of our need to get it right away, we actually start to get it.  Go slow to go fast.         

Of course, I can’t be sure I’m sure about any of this – it’s more than often been the case that the day following a peak of progress, I find myself worse off than I was the day before – a lower plateau (or so it seems) than the one I had been stuck on for the past several months.  It is in these cases that the quest for mastery begins – in the boredom, the routine, the same thing over and over, can you find it within your self to become even more intently present?  You have to pull on an even deeper capacity to dive in and work with what is with a freshness as if it was your first day of practice.  This is what it means to sing with soul, to be totally involved in every moment with your entire being – in the moments of quiet as much as in the dynamism.  As it is said in Japanese: Tada Ima – there’s only Now.  Practice is only ever Now, awareness, choice are only ever Now.  Why not slow down and pay attention to what you’re doing and who you are being!  What are we rushing towards?      

From a Culture of Consumption to a Culture of Mastery

“I know what I want and I want it now.”  -Early 90s pop edict.

          You’ve heard of generation X and generation Y.  Welcome to generation A.D.D.: post-consumer, post-modern, instant gratification nation.  Instead of the patience, determination and practice it requires to attain something sweet, something worthwhile in the end that gives you a real sense of self-esteem, now every part of your day can be an instantly sweet experience.  You don’t have to face the “negative” experiences of criticism and “failure” by learning to play tennis the hard way – you can just play tennis on your Nintendo Wii.  But maybe you’re not into video games – you’re focused, ambitious.  George Leonard (1992), an Aikido master and author of Mastery offers his thoughts:

“Early in life, we are urged to study, hard, so that we’ll get good grades.  We are told to get good grades so that we’ll graduate from high school and get into college.  We are told to graduate …from college so that we’ll get a good job.  We are told to get a good job so that we can buy a house and a car.  Again and again we are told to do one thing only so that we can get something else.  We spend our lives stretched on an iron rack of contingencies.”  (p39)

There is nothing inherently wrong with any of these things – except the extent to which they prevent us from enjoying the only moment we’re ever alive – Now – or in that they compensate for something deeper, the shadows of an unconscious or “unexamined life” as Socrates put it.  It is fine to do something that you enjoy, or to pursue goals, but, is the treat or the treatment, the spice or the whole meal?  Is your sense of self exclusively identified with what you achieve, what you own, or simply having a superficial but good time?  What happens to you if these things don’t go well?  The extent to which a culture is achievement obsessed, materially identified, seeking instant gratification, is the extent to which it is a culture of addiction.  So many recent movies serve as metaphors for the dissociation of the mind, the rational ego from our bodies, from how we actually feel, and symptomatically, from what we are doing to nature.  These metaphors reveal our addiction to the things that make us numb to the reality of our pain, which in turn leads us to cover it up by consuming more of what keeps us numb, which only perpetuates our pain.  For some, seeing past the ego and waking up to reality is like tearing open a scab.  The character in The Matrix who makes a deal to be reinserted, the character who commits suicide in Shawshank Redemption because he couldn’t live outside of the prison, or the exchange of a meaningful life or authentic human interaction for perfect, sterile products in Fight Club all speak to the disembodied and silent shadow of Modernity.  The willingness to slow down, be present in our bodies to what is causing us pain, to actually look in the mirror and acknowledge what we are feeling right Now and the habits that are responsible, is the deeper purpose of practice.  Practice is body-mindfulness – not the retro-romantic abandon of cognitive awareness, but cognitive awareness in service of healing, of body-mind integration – the process of conscious, creative self-actualization: crafting every unconscious choice so that it is intentional, musical – inspired with meaning.  It is the mastery of the work of art that is your life.  This is the role of the rational ego of society, of Modernity: we’ve slayed the Minotaur, the monster of the dark ages, of our primitive ignorance and brutality, fundamentalism, superstition and disease – now we must find our way out of the labyrinth.  Anti-intellectual rhetoric is irrelevant – we are in the middle of the labyrinth and the only way out is through.  If going back to the body, to feeling, to nature, means avoiding responsibility for the status quo, throwing out the mind, rationality, and running away from society to live in nature like the lead character of Into the Wild, then you’re actually participating in the materialism you claim to oppose: same dissociation, different drug; same addiction, different numbing agent.  (Although he is certainly to be commended for engaging in some kind of search and not just playing his Nintendo, and in the end (literally) I think he found what he needed to find)  As long as we are avoiding taking responsibility, an embodiment of what we find lacking in those we complain about, it is ego avoidance by any name.  Our task is to develop and integrate the capacity for feeling and thinking, sensitivity and rationality, science and religion else, like the Yin-Yang symbol, one’s opposite lies secretly beneath, keeping us from fulfillment.  How can we truly be sensitive without being rational?  How can we call it rational (or progress) if we are not sensitive to the effects of our actions?  Ken Wilber, (2000) further explains:

“…clearly, we cannot have an integral view of the levels of consciousness if modernity and modern science denies the existence of most of them. “Integral” means, if it means anything, the integration of all that is given to humanity; and if modernity insists instead on trashing everything that came before it, then the integral enterprise is derailed from the start. At the same time, it will do no good, as Romantics wish, to attempt a return to yesteryear, an attempt to "resurrect" the past with a "resurgence of the real," for modernity brought its own important truths and profound insights, which need to be harmonized as well; and yesteryear, full truth be told, just wasn't all that swell."  (p56)

          For the purpose of practice, cognitive means conscious attention – intentionality.  And when you give conscious attention to something, you are mindful of The Way you are doing it – there is a technique that can be refined, a form, a Way to practice and a way not to.  As Jung states:

"The persona is a functional complex that comes into existence for reasons of
adaptation or personal convenience, but is by no means identical with the
individuality." (CW vol 6 p465 para 801)

"Although ego consciousness is at first identical with the persona - that
compromised role in which we parade before the community - yet the
unconscious self can never be repressed to the point of extinction. Its influence
is chiefly manifest in the special nature of the contrasting and compensating
contents of the unconscious..... and these......contain the seeds of individual
development." (CW vol 7 p 156 para 247)    

So, if you prefer, you don’t have to think about it, but you do have to give it your conscious attention and feel your way forward with intention – to be engaged in a “rational” process of experimentation.  You can’t solve the problem by not putting your attention on it.  In that case you become part of it.  (literally – to be unconscious of it is to be fused with it).  So let’s discover who we truly are – based on who we want to be once we’ve held ourselves up to the light and have healed the splits in our psyche.  We already exist by a process of conditioning anyways – let’s just do it consciously this time.  Untrained expression (in a martial art for instance) may be formless and free, but in an entirely different way than the artist who express himself creatively having attained a complete mastery of form.  You cannot compare the kind of self the novice is expressing (or rather spewing) with the kind of self the master expresses.  Even though both are inherently non-rational, without form, one is narcissistic while the other is self-actualized; one reacts unconsciously, the other responds creatively.  And yet both Yin and Yang, spontaneity and technique must be kept in careful balance – oftentimes the non-thinking street fighter is more in touch with the reality of physical conflict than the person who spends too much time working set forms.  But, in any case, if one is too rigid, too unrealistically technical in his motions, or wild and unrefined, the way to improve is not to remain in what you prefer unconsciously, but with conscious attention to integrate your opposite, to push towards your edge.  Pre-rational must develop to rational, ideally without losing its spontaneity; rational must regress to pre-rational yet without losing its technique.  Each contains a partial truth that must be transcended and included.  This is the purpose of practice.

Life Coach: Sustaining the Change

          The following is a form of Integral awareness practice I use in my own coaching practice.  Coaching is coming to be well accepted in that it provides a structure and support for those who would like to engage in this process of “making the unconscious conscious” – of being more intentional about The Way they would like to live their lives and what it is within that holds them back from actualizing their potential in this sense.  Above all it doesn’t provide a quick fix, pop a pill, instant result.  It is a way of supporting others to commit to their own process of action and inquiry – self-discovery through practice.  Coaches give you the time to reflect and become conscious of your unconscious habits so that you can improve your form and above all commit to actions that will allow you to apply what you have practiced in training.  Ultimately, you must constantly be engaged in manifesting the life you want to be living.  It’s not about reaching a state of being it’s about being in a state of becoming.

The Integral 4 Quadrant Model

          The Integral Four Quadrant model looks at reality from four, irreducible perspectives, all of which always and only coexist – like inside and outside, they are mutually (or in the vernacular, ‘tetra’) arising.  The top and bottom halves of the quadrants represent individual and collective and the left and right halves of the quadrant represent the internal and external.  This gives you the Upper Left (UL), the interior of the individual – “I” (thoughts, feelings, experience, what an experience feels like); the Upper Right (UR), the exterior of the individual “It” (the body, brain chemistry, behavior, what an experience looks like from the outside); the Lower Left (LL), the inter-subjective “We” or interior of the collective (relationship, culture, religion); and the Lower Right(LR), the inter-objective “Its” (Nature, the environment, socio-polito-economic systems ).   Taking them as what Ken Wilber calls “The Big Three” (the entire right half becoming “It”), we get “I” “We” and “It” – Art, Morals, and Science and the Beautiful, the Good and the True – what “I” subjectively feel is Beautiful (beauty is in the “I” of the beholder), we “We” agree is Good in social contract, and what “It” appears is True according to observable, objective science.  Each has an entirely valid, yet partial perspective on truth that for the health of the Integral whole cannot be reduced to the others.  Reduce all three domains to the UR and you have familiar scientific reductionism, “Flatland” – there is no interior subjective depth in the universe, no mind, soul or spirit, because everything can be reduced to physical particles.  Reduce all three to the UL and you have subjective idealism, “It’s all a dream, an illusion, all spirit, all in my mind – if I just believe differently, everything will change.”  Reduce things to the LL and you have Postmodern or linguistic deconstruction, “There is no absolute truth, no “meta narrative” – everything can be reduced to cultural conditioning and from there to language.  And reduce everything to the LR and everything becomes an interdependent living system: systems holism, unified fields of matter, networks of life, which, in that they are physical, still results in a “subtle reductionism” – another scientific negation of interiority and consciousness – of everything but matter. 

          For our purposes, it is a bit simpler than all of this – you might put a rotatable Yin-Yang symbol over the quadrants to make the point that is important here, which is, rotate the Yin-Yang any direction and you can see how each really is contained within the others – not only in the sense e.g. that inner feelings have corresponding brain chemicals (but cannot be reduced merely to those chemicals), but that when you put conscious attention on developing the physical, you influence the intellectual and vice versa.  Put attention on clearing up a messy room and maybe you can think more clearly, or feel more disciplined in other areas of your life.  This is the basic point – Integral psychology implies integration: the quadrants are four facets of the same self and like the four legs of a chair, when you move one of them, you move them all. 

          So what type of things might we choose to focus on in a “Practice?”  This is easy to co-create with a client one quadrant at a time.  Or, have them list the things they’d like to give conscious attention to in their lives first, and then put them in the quadrants.  This can be illuminating in that it reveals the client’s biases and in some cases, one or more of the quadrants are left our completely.  (This same approach can be used for goals, 10 year plans etc.)  UR practices might include fitness, diet, training in a sport or art, cultivating or dissuading certain behaviors, as well as the somatic portion of their Practice which deals with posture, breathing, relaxation and alignment.  UL practices include meditation, mindfulness, self-inquiry, script analysis etc.  LL practices include communication, conflict resolution, giving and receiving feedback, integrity, leadership, relationships etc. And LR practices include awareness or organization of nature or the environment, creating and managing systems, work related dynamics, and so on.       

Yin and Yang: Ever Approaching the Razors Edge between Two Extremes

          I use the Yin-Yang as a symbol for balance and integration, as well as imbalance and unhealthy cycles.  The Yin-Yang’s swirling represents how every extreme eventually becomes its opposite.  The dots explain how even when we are comfortably in our bias, we unconsciously repress the opposite extreme underneath.  Practice involves becoming conscious of and integrating into our opposite – internally and inter-subjectively – really in all four quadrants.  Otherwise we ride the Yin-Yang merry-go-round, as our persona becomes that shadow that it casts: passivity becomes aggression (or vice versa), we indulge then deny, express then repress, like a balloon filling up and popping.  Healthy integration involves swinging the pendulum consciously: walking a tight rope and catching our balance on either side, rather than falling over into extremes.  With practice, this results in the higher level Yin and Yang: we start to notice the integral relationship between gentleness and strength, thinking and feeling, doing and being. 

The Capacity Principle

          The leads me to what I call “The Capacity Principle.”  Since people feel uncomfortable and sometimes extremely self-conscious moving into new territory, embodying new behaviors through their practice, I put it in terms of capacity.  You don’t always have to act or be this way, but what changes when you have the capacity?  This makes things less personal in terms of something being wrong and reframes the question: “What capacity would you like to develop?”  Just like training in an art, it takes a while to get used to receiving feedback without taking it personally.  Almaas (1992), founder of the Diamond Approach talks about the importance of starting by teaching people to protect themselves against their superegos (a kind of self defense in itself!):

   Many therapeutic and growth disciplines can be seen as different ways of getting through the ego resistances to unconscious material….The classical approaches see ego resistances as defense against the id impulses; while in our work…we see them as defenses against the superego.  The superego…is the first coercive agency that we encounter in working on ourselves, which we find to be invested in keeping the unconscious unconscious and which accomplishes this by disapproving of the unconscious material.  So, our approach is to help the ego consciously defend itself against the attacks of the superego, and hence to eliminate this important part of the need for unconscious ego defense mechanisms.  (p6)

By developing an unfamiliar capacity, the client becomes more open to relinquishing their usual, unconscious ego mechanisms and in fact, they tend to find that their new capacity has an integral relationship with their originally preferred mode of being.  The awareness of the assumptions we have regarding our fears and projections around what might happen if we exercise new ways of being and acting are revealed to be just that – assumptions: what may or may not be true.

Steps and Stages of Practice

“Self awareness is the first step towards acknowledging the things we would like to change in our lives.  Once you are able to be self aware, you begin to be conscious of what it is you truly want and that you have a choice about the kind of life you want to create and the kind of person you want to be.  This empowers you to become more intentional with your actions, allowing you to orient yourself towards your perfect form – your ideal – and reorient yourself each time old habits and resistance kick in, attempting to pull you back into old, familiar ways of thinking, feeling or acting.  Yet each time we return to consciously practicing how we want to be, it becomes reinforced and more deeply integrated as a spontaneous way of being.  Self Victory (the name of my business from a quote by the founder of Aikido) is specifically this transformative capacity through practice to give up who you are for who you would become – to give up old, unconscious ways of functioning for those we choose consciously.” (Chawkin 2007)

          Stages of practice are stages of self-actualization or individuation as Jung called it.  They follow the format of Wilber’s basic pre-rational, rational, trans-rational hierarchy, but have varying amounts of levels.  The first progresses from Unconscious Bad, Conscious Bad, Conscious Good, to Unconscious (Integrated) Good.  Another, restates the same as it applies to “catching our self in the act” of unconscious reactions or habits: Unconscious of unconscious reaction, conscious of past reaction (in retrospect), conscious of reaction (but we do it anyways), conscious of non-reaction (this is where practice begins), conscious of practice (giving up the inclination for the old habit for a conscious choice, our ideal form), conscious of intuition (making subtle adjustments) and finally unconscious of practice (spontaneous action).        

Creating “The Practice” in 4 Easy Steps

1.      What is your practice (A declarative Statement describing the practice) “I want to practice listening more sincerely to others.”

2.      What are the signs that your old habit is present?  Where else in your life does this habit show up?  (When I notice I am…I will get centered by…)  “When I notice I am uninterested in what others are saying, interrupting them or speaking quickly, and feel tension in my solar plexus, I will stop and breathe deeply…”        

3.      What is your ideal form?  (And instead choose consciously to…) “… and listen consciously with care until I feel centered, giving a two second gap after the other person finishes speaking or asking a question.”

4.      Who will you become through this practice and what will the influence be?  “Through this practice I will develop my leadership presence, my inner calm, becoming the kind of person who not only listens, but allows people to feel heard.”

Integral Awareness Practice with Integral Support by Quadrant

          UR: what are the somatic signs of your unconscious reaction/old habit?  How is your posture, where is the tension in your body?  (If the client is not sure, I generally have them build a self observation practice, which can coincide with journaling or listing observations.  The important thing is not to try to change anything at first.)  What practice will you employ to get conscious and centered?  (Three deep breaths, stretching, tense and release etc.)  Where else in your life does the need for this practice show up in this quadrant?  (This is the somatic connection e.g. “I notice I don’t listen to others’ bodies in my Aikido practice and as such I have trouble taking their balance.”)  What other activities in this quadrant support your practice?  (Weight training, jogging, yoga etc.)  UL:  What mantra, affirmation, metaphor or image will you keep in your head to align yourself to your ideal form?  (This can be an insightful, simple or humorous reminder: “Mind the gap” “We have two ears and one mouth…” “Stop – collaborate and listen!” an affirmation: “I am a caring, supportive listener;” or a metaphor: From being a fire hose to an eye dropper, or in other examples, from servant to queen, athlete to artist, director to actor, guest to host, etc.  What image reminds you of this practice?  (A lanky fire hose, a crown, a paintbrush etc.)  What practices in this quadrant can support you in general?  (Meditation, journaling, reading, self-inquiry)  LL: Who do you need to practice this with most?  Who do you trust to support you in your practice?  (To remind you or point out to you when you are in your old habit.)   Who can you ask for feedback around this practice?  (Sometimes things aren’t as bad as we think).  What experiences in this quadrant can support you in general (group activities, an improv class, sangha, friends etc.)  LR: What in your environment can support your practice?  (Cell phone reminders, yellow stickies, music, posters, creating a certain space for a certain practice)  When and where this week will you need to apply your practice the most?  What experiences in the environment best support your practice (Hikes in nature, corporate training events, cleaning your room, chopping wood carrying water, walking in the dark, stalking a deer, asking someone on a date, meditation retreats, cooking rice and being mindful of every grain – who knows!) 

          The idea is to be creative and see how the quadrants match up via somatics or other mutual influences – can you sit like a queen instead of grovel like a servant?  How does a queen interact with others?  What tone of voice does she use?  How does a queen think (or not think) of herself?  What types of activities or environments would you find a queen in?  Remember, we’re just developing a capacity – we don’t want to fall into the extreme of being condescending, or bossy or be the queen all the time.  It’s a persona we can put on or take off.  How do you know the difference between being royal and being pompous?   How can you be mindful of this difference?

Various Types of Awareness Practice

          A great resource for UR somatic awareness practices is Peter Ralston’s “Zen Body Being.”  Rather than only being conscious of our physical and emotional body while we’re in reaction, Ralston’s book provides practical exercises for developing centering and mindful awareness in context of the activities of daily life.  This leads to the integrative idea of “theory in practice.”  You can build a practice out of the knowledge in any book as relevant to any quadrant.  Byron Katie’s “The Work,” Eckhart Tolle’s “Power of Now,” Kegan’s “7 Languages for Transformation,” Susan Scott’s principles of “Fierce Conversation,” Jim Collin’s qualities of “Level 5 Leadership,” or something from Integral theory.  Other variants of practice include what I call an “Integrity Practice.”  This involves pairing two practices together.  After noting what capacity you want to develop yourself e.g. “Disappointing another to be true to myself,” you also develop a practice to make sure you are extending to others what you ask for yourself.  The idea is that the shadow side of one’s incapacity to express one’s self is the incapacity to allow other people to do the same.  Thus, by giving permission to others you give permission to yourself – and as you cease to cut people off, you cease to cut yourself off.  The dark shadow is challenged, the bright shadow supported and both are released.   We treat others how we want to be treated; we set boundaries while making sure we honor the same boundaries in others.  A “Shadow Practice” involves combining practices as well e.g. simultaneously inhibiting the aggressive defense mechanisms of our persona while nurturing the sensitive ‘bright shadow’ that is released when we do in other areas of life (or vice versa: feeling the fear of our consciously passive persona and inhibiting our inhibition: releasing the bright shadow of our hidden power by empowering ourselves to be more assertive etc.)

          It is all about practice – the capacity to give up who we are for who we would become.  Instead of being entertained, or stimulated or acquiring more, we have to be able to sit still and look within and refine what we see, often without any noticeable results.  Practice must become a habit for its own sake, the spirit of the beginners mind – not only a comfort with the mundane plateau, but the courage to confront our shadow and integrate what is unconscious.  As much as we acquire new levels of competency, we also attain new levels of self-insight and depth.  In the end, we find it is what we do for its own sake that put us in a place of constant learning, challenge and refinement that brings us the most freshness, energy and bliss and synergetically make us the most useful in the world in the same stroke.  Do be do be do!  Work and play.  Integrity, mastery, is what is left in a living system after it has been submitted to constant, chaotic change.  From the ending of Mastery:

“When Jigoro Kano, the founder of judo, was quite old and close to death, the story goes, he called his students around him and told them he wanted to be buried in his white belt.  What a touching story; how humble of the world’s highest-ranking judoist in his last days to ask for the emblem of the beginner!  But Kano’s request…was less humility than realism.  At the moment of death, the ultimate transformation, we are all white belts.  And if death makes beginners of us, so does life – again and again.  In the master’s secret mirror…there is an image of the newest student in class, eager for knowledge, willing to play the fool….And for all who walk the path of mastery, however far that journey has progressed, Kano’s request becomes a lingering question, an ever-new challenge: Are you willing to wear your white belt?”  (Leonard 1992, pg 175-6)

References and Resources

(Almaas A H 1992 Work on the Superego)Almaas, A. H. (1992). Work on the Superego. : Diamond Books.

(Chawkin N  Self-Victory Life Coaching)Chawkin, N. (2007). Self-Victory Life Coaching. Retrieved March 18, 2008, from http://self-victory.com/lc.html

(Collins J 2001 Good to Great)Collins, J. (2001). Good to Great. : Collins.

(Katie B 2003 Loving What Is)Katie, B. (2003). Loving What Is. : Three Rivers Press.

(Kegan R 1998 IN Over Our Heads: the Mental Demands of Modern Life)\(Kegan R Lahey L L 2002 HOW the Way We Talk Can Change the Way We Work)Kegan, R., & Lahey, L. L. (2002). How the Way We Talk Can Change the Way We Work. : Jossey-Bass.

(Leonard G 1992 MASTERY: the Keys to Success and Long-Term Fulfillment)Leonard, G. (1992). Mastery. : Plume.

(Ralston P Ralston L 2006 Zen Body Being: An Enlightened Approach to Physical Skill, Grace, and Power)Ralston, P., & Ralston, L. (2006). Zen Body Being. : Frog Books.

(Scott S 2004 Fierce Conversations)Scott, S. (2004). Fierce Conversations. : Berkley Trade.

(Tolle E 2004)Tolle, E. (2004). The Power of Now. : New World Library.

(Whitworth L Kimsey-House H Sandahl P 1998 Co-Active Coaching: New Skills for Coaching People toward Success in Life and Work)Whitworth, L., Kimsey-House, H., & Sandahl, P. (1998). Co-Active Coaching (1st ed.). : Consulting Psychologists Press, Inc.

(Wilber K 2000 Integral Psychology)Wilber, K. (2000). Integral Psychology. : Shambhala Publications, Inc.