Inhabit: Your Speech

What are the unique challenges that prevent you from inhabiting your most authentic and embodied voice, and how can integral thought and practice help us to overcome those challenges — in our society, in our communities, and in our own consciousness?

Ryan and Corey begin by taking a look at some of the central cultural, technological, and behavioral challenges that take us further away from our most authentic expression, wonderfully illuminated by Jonathan Haidt’s recent article, “Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid”. We were both very excited about Jonathan’s piece, which deeply resonates with so many of the critical themes we’ve explored in the Inhabit series over the months and years.

In his article, Haidt identifies three primary factors that bind society together — social capital (extensive social networks with high levels of trust), strong institutions, and shared stories. He then explores how each of these became so compromised in our civilization, and suggests some possible interventions (what I often call “enfoldment mechanisms”) in order to get things moving in the right direction again:

“We must harden democratic institutions so that they can withstand chronic anger and mistrust, reform social media so that it becomes less socially corrosive, and better prepare the next generation for democratic citizenship in this new age.” —Jonathan Haidt

In our conversation, Ryan and I try to pick up where Jonathan left off, suggesting that we actually need to install these sorts of enfoldment mechanisms in our own interior operating systems, as much as in our exterior/collective operating systems. In other words, we cannot transform these systems “out there” unless we work to transform our own consciousness and communities “in here”. How do we do so?

Ryan and I try to answer this question by looking at two fundamental lines of development — the intrapersonal line (how we relate to ourselves), and the interpersonal line (how we relate to each other).

We begin with the intrapersonal, distilling some timeless wisdom from two different spiritual lineages — the notion of “Right Speech” in Buddhism, and the Quaker practice of “letting your next words come from your highest Self” — two complementary micro-practices that can help us to better align ourselves with our own inner source of wisdom and compassion, to communicate with greater authenticity, and to bring as much conscious embodiment to our online engagements as we unconsciously do when we are face-to-face.

Next we take a look at our interpersonal capacities, and how we can use Integral ideas to facilitate more healthy and rewarding community experiences. When I was interviewing Stefan Schultz for our Journalism in the Disinformation Age discussion, he included some different strategies that each developmental stage uses for what he calls their “conference culture”, which Ryan and I unpack in this episode. All of us have likely seen each of these strategies playing out in our various online community spaces, and therefore may be helpful to make some of these nested subjects into objects in order to create more shared agreement around the sorts of standards we want to hold ourselves to when interacting with each other.