Dear Friends,
Here in Northern California, we are graced with an early spring (mind-boggling as it is) and enjoying blossoms everywhere. For those under the deep chill of the season, we send warmth and sunlight your way.
In this winter issue, we focus on "the budding limbs and organs of our supernature," as Michael Murphy describes our supernormal capacities in
The Future of the Body
and other works. Our practice aims to prepare us for the awakening of our evolutionary journey. What signs are you spotting which reflect more awakening within you? Intuition or greater empathy perhaps? And how about evolutionary love, for starters?
Enjoy what our writers have to say about our evolving nature and come experience some of your own flowering at our ITPI conference,
Adventures in Human Possibility
, May 18 - 20, at Asilomar Conference Grounds, right on the Pacific Coast, in Pacific Grove, CA.
Visualize yourself there on the beach and notice how you now feel in body, mind, heart and soul. May you feel relaxed and lit up, all at once. As human beings, we may soon discover that supernormal is actually our new normal!
With joy and wonder,
Pamela Kramer,
ITPI President
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Supernormal Capacities - It's in our DNA
by Roger Kenneth Marsh
ITP Mastery Teacher, GLEE Co-leader
Supernormal Capacities are in the DNA of ITP. To see this you don't have to look any further than The Life We Are Given and the two group experiments run in 1992 and 1993. For each of these cycles the participants included in their affirmations one metanormal one that represented "human functioning that in some respect radically surpasses the functioning typical of most people living today."
However, when it comes to developing supernormal capacities today, a somewhat surprising yet common question circling the larger ITP community of practitioners is WHY? Why should I do want this further expression of myself? It's a good question, and one that we should all consider.
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Affirmations
by Rich Sigberman
ITP Mastery and ITP San Rafael group member
Lio, our comic strip friend, has the right idea in consulting
The Power of Positive Thinking, a kissing cousin of what we call affirmations. Yet, in the second panel, he apparently did not reach his desired goal - snow! Why didn't it work?
Aren't affirmations simply thinking about a desired outcome, goal or change over and over until it happens? Isn't this the same thing as positive thinking? That is a common misconception, but it also has a grain of truth.
In ITP, we do create a phrase in the present tense to repeat to ourselves as often as we wish. We want to literally embody that state, feel it in our body. We do this with the support of a community. And, most important, we also strategize ways to support our growth to make it happen. Using the present tense helps us feel that it is so. Community support is where we draw strength and encouragement. Strategizing active steps in the direction of our affirmation is the roadmap to our transformed state.
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Create a Different Picture
by George Leonard
ITP Co-founder & President Emeritus Esalen Institute
"How much easier is it to take refuge in our essential helplessness then take responsibility for our godlike powers! Here, too, our picture of reality shapes our attitude and actions. When we see the body as a structure of heavy, intractable meat and bones, all we can do is cut it or drug it or otherwise manipulate it from the outside. But let us create a different picture and see the body as rhythm and emptiness, as elegant, ethereal fields of waves joined in innumerable feedback loops to maintain a relatively stable structure.
Thoughts and feelings can set off sympathetic vibrations in this structure; the deeper intentionality can produce transformation in in days, hours, sometimes and minutes. No longer are we concerned with questions of "inside" or "outside, " for these limiting categories do not exist in the realm of pulsing waves. Each body completes the universe and is involved in the universal evolutio
n."
- George Leonard, The Silent Pulse
For the Love of ITP on March 29!
Join us to celebrate and honor the spirit of George Leonard at
For the Love of ITP
, a gala event to benefit ITP International on March 29, 6:30 - 9 pm, at Falkirk Cultural Center, San Rafael, CA. Stay tuned for further details and tickets.
Click here to listen to George share his reflections on Balancing and Centering.
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Towards a Larger Earth
by Christina Grote & Pamela Kramer
ITPI Board Chair & ITPI President
This article is an excerpt from the book,
edited by Emanuel Kuntzelman and Dustin DiPerna.
Humanity and the cosmos are united in common purpose, drawn by an ineffable pull, to bring forth the beauty and goodness embedded within. In this chapter we will explore the prospect that there are supernormal capacities within us, as yet undiscovered or undeveloped, and that these latent capacities express a natural evolutionary progression, that, if realized, could ultimately result in an evolutionary leap for humanity. By consciously aligning ourselves and engaging with this universal seeking through the cultivation of our latent capacities, we are fulfilling our evolutionary purpose. Even our most basic desires to be better parents or lovers, more competent in our professions, or even to make a better lasagna, contain the seeds of this self surpassing, our deepest yearnings towards an extraordinary life.
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Lessons from Morihei Ueshiba, O Sensei
Founder of Aikido,
The Way of Harmony with the Universe
All the principles of heaven and earth are living inside you.
Life itself is truth, and this will never change. Everything in heaven and earth breathes. Breath is the thread that ties
creation together.
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Everyone has a spirit that can be refined, a body that can be trained in some manner, a suitable path to follow. You are
here to realize your inner divinity and manifest your
innate enlightenment.
Study how water flows in a valley stream, smoothly and freely between the rocks. Also learn from holy books and wise people. Everything - even mountains, rivers, plants and trees - should be your teacher.
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The Emergence of
Evolutionary Panentheism
by Michael Murphy
ITP Co-founder & Co-founder Esalen Institute
In the early eighteenth century, Isaac Newton, the most famous scientist of his day, supported the claim of Archbishop James Ussher, the Anglican Primate of All Ireland, that by various means it could be calculated that the world was created by God on Sunday, October 23, 4004 B.C. Newton's assent to this proposition may surprise us, but he wasn't alone among prominent thinkers in believing that the Earth was only a few thousand years old.
Within decades, though, this foreshortened perspective became increasingly untenable for thinking people. Astronomy, geology, biology, and other fields began to show that the history of our planet and the universe stretched back not for thousands but for millions of years. This recognition of our world's great age, which by 1800 had been accepted by scientists and philosophers as diverse as Lamarck and Immanuel Kant, comprises one of history's swiftest and most fundamental alterations of worldview among intellectual elites.
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All About Practice
A Principal's Letter to the Student Community
by Barbara Brown, The Marin School Principal &
Mastery & ITP San Rafael member
Lately I have been thinking about practice. What constitutes a practice? Some people talk about their yoga practice or their meditation practice. Others talk about their career as a practice. For example, you often hear doctors talk about their medical practices, and lawyers talk about their legal practices. Athletes talk about practice as the activity that prepares them for the game. When an athlete learns and repeats a skill regularly, he or she becomes proficient, and eventually an expert in that sport. For actors, rehearsals are their practice, and the performance is the main event. Most musicians and athletes agree that the one way (and perhaps the only way) that you get better is through consistent practice. And students very often learn through practice in different subjects.
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Spotlight on Tom Lewis
ITP Mastery member
How did you become involved in ITP?
I discovered ITP at the Golf in the Kingdom tournament through my long time friend Bruce Nelson. My first glimpse of ITP was in the mid- 90's when Bruce asked if I might consider a special study group with George Leonard and Michael Murphy. Life took me in another direction at the time, though I always wanted to meet Michael Murphy and visit Esalen Institute. Years later, Bruce invited me to an ITP golf tournament. I had no idea what ITP was at the time. As it turns out, it was one of the most important experiences of my life. I learned that Michael would be at the event, so I brought my copy of Golf in the Kingdom for him to sign. I was thrilled! Not only that, my foursome won the tournament and the prize was...you guessed it, lunch with Michael Murphy! The practice continues and I feel whole, complete and hungry for more self-discovery and learning all over again. In life we call this Coming Around Full Circle.
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Mastery Cycle 10
Out-of-town participants, attend a session, one weekend per month through June 2018
Aikido of Tamalpais,
Corte Madera, CA
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The Practice of Connection
ITP Workshop
with Pamela Kramer
& Rachel Hamilton
DoubleTree Warren Place
Tulsa, OK
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Navigating the Road
to Renewal Workshop
April 13 - 15, 2018
The Whitehall,
Houston, TX
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Save the Date
For the Love of ITP
Benefit Gala
March 29, 2018
Falkirk Cultural Center
San Rafael, CA
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ITPI Conference 2018
Adventures in
Human Possibility:
The Heart of ITP
May 18 - 20, 2018
Asilomar Conference Grounds,
Pacific Grove, CA
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Save the Date
Annual GLEE Meeting
After the ITPI Conference
May 20, 2018
Asilomar Conference Grounds
Pacific Grove, CA
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ITP International Presents
8th Annual
Golf in the Kingdom
at TPC Harding Park
Home of the 2020
PGA Championship
October 1, 2018
San Francisco, CA
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"
Perhaps we'll never know how far the path can go, how much a human being can truly achieve, until we realize that the ultimate reward is not a gold medal but the path itself."
- George Leonard
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