ITPI Winter Newsletter 2017

Dear Friends,

Are you ready to feel the love? Take a few breaths and notice what's stirring in your heart. I invite you to bring a loved one into your consciousness. Become aware of your heart once more. How are you feeling now? This is one way you can practice cultivating the power of love.

At our conference this past fall, The Science and Practice of the Extraordinary, In the Name of Love, we featured the theme of evolutionary love . Our community is lit up by this exploration through new practices and conversation about how we can hold one another in our fullest flowering. Enjoy the articles related to love and the practice of the extraordinary in this issue. We dedicate this newsletter to the power of love and its capacity to heal and help us to flourish.

We will take great delight in seeing you at our events in 2017, including Mastery in the Heartland beginning in February, where love, learning and a heartfelt community will certainly take center stage!

May you be blessed with a year filled with joy, peace

and love,

Pam Kramer

Evolutionary Love

by Christina Grote, ITPI Board Chair

I first heard the phrase "evolutionary love" at a workshop given by Adam Crabtree in 2012. This talk was Pam Kramer's brainchild, her leap of faith as both Adam and the topic were unfamiliar to the ITP community. Adam is an author, practicing psychotherapist in Toronto and a member of The Esalen Center for Theory and Research's Core of Discovery. At that talk and subsequent workshop, he explored the topic of evolutionary love, as presented by Charles Sanders Peirce in The Monist, written in 1893. Peirce is arguably one of America's greatest philosophers although most Americans have never heard of him. Adam has continued to develop Peirce's ideas and is currently working on a book on the topic.

Human Potential and Evolutionary Love

by Adam Crabtree, CTR scholar and author

Over the past sixty years, we have witnessed the striking development of innovative means for spiritual exploration and development. These remarkably effective techniques were devised to actualize our spiritual, mental, and physical potentials. This is what was happening everywhere in the human potential movement, now so familiar to us. The ultimate goal of this movement was to discover ways to contribute to the advance of human evolution. When we study the history of this remarkable project, we can see that virtually all of these approaches involved the induction of some form of trance.

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ITP Stands for Love

by Pam Kramer, ITPI President

Anthropologist and author Rachel Carson wrote in one of her letters to her dear friend, Dorothy Freeman:

"...one's capacity to give love grows with the exercise of it, so perhaps the more love

we have received, the more we are able to absorb and

in that sense no one ever

has enough."

In our ITP community, there are countless ways we practice giving and receiving love. As we engage in practice, attention is placed on cultivating connection to oneself, another and the group. So it is with love, as we hold ourselves and one another in the highest state of the realization of our potentials. This act of love infuses the giver and receiver with a greater, more expansive and felt sense of his or her divinity and limitless capacity for inner and outer expression.

Love

recognizes no barriers.

It jumps hurdles, leaps fences,

penetrates walls to arrive at its

destination full of hope.

- Maya Angelou

Coincidences? I think not!

by Rich Sigberman, ITP Mastery member

They keep happening. Those "coincidences" that we shrug off as nothing more. As we increase our awareness through practice, we seem to spot special powers (called siddhis ) surfacing more and more.

A while ago at Mastery, while we were sharing in a circle, at the moment a fellow practitioner spoke the word "be," my eyes happened to glance down at her socks (she wears great socks, colorful and fun) which had a pattern of bumble bees on them. I love it when the visuals and the words come together like that.

Dabblers: Go Deep!
by Tim Cleary, ITP Mastery teacher and

co-leader of ITP San Rafael

It's the New Year! Many of us are excited because this is the year that we've decided to finally learn how to __________ (fill in blank). Paddle board? Speak French? Play chess? Most of us have had this experience before already ... and most of us, at some time or another, have crashed and burned. As George Leonard points out in Mastery we tend to hit a plateau that feels endlessly long and insurmountable, the exact opposite of the initial excitement and growth we experienced in the early stages of this endeavor. And, unfortunately, many of us interpret this seeming setback as a sign that this activity just isn't for us - we don't have enough natural talent; it's not as much fun as we thought it would be; it's just not INTERESTING enough. At this point there is a tendency to look in another direction for something that WILL sustain our interest. We become what George referred to as a "dabbler."

Spotlight on Isabelle Goldie

ITP France co-leader

How did you become involved in ITP?

I live in Pessac, near Bordeaux, France. On August 28, 2015, Pam Kramer and Rich Sigberman came to Bordeaux and gave us a workshop of introduction to the ITP Program. There were six of us. We started by doing the kata all together, then worked on a few LET exercises and, after Pam explained a few things, we started thinking about our affirmations.

What do you appreciate about the practice?

I immediately loved it. As I used to practice yoga, I felt at ease with the kata at once. I particularly enjoyed the relaxation time.

During one of the LET exercises, I was in the middle of a center composed by the other people. At some point, I received so much good energy from the group; I felt I was in a warm, red energetic field. I think I remember Pam talking about an energetic pyramid. It felt delicious and very much energizing...

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