Integral Incubator Diary: Arrival in Boulder

Jeff Salzman

This week I'm at Integral Incubator in Boulder, Colorado, to create the marketing plan for my book. The Incubator is a working retreat for those who want an intense jumpstart on a personal project. It is led by Jeff Salzman, a founder of Ken Wilber's Integral Institute, and will include one afternoon with Wilber.

Nomali Perera

My flight from DC arrived in time for me to catch just the last hour of an optional Introduction to Integral. I missed four of the five aspects: quadrants, lines, types, and states--arriving for half the final piece on levels of development. Naomi Perera of Boulder Integral co-led, making big-screen presentations from YouTube of songs typifying each level. Jeff ended by saying the "second tier" levels permit us to re-integrate values we may have left behind, including magic from the "magenta" level. "In a sense, miracles once again become possible," he said.

Adorning the wall of the Boulder Integral meeting room were pictures and bios of the 20-some people I'll be sharing my week with. I went to dinner at Cheesecake Factory on Pearl Street with three of them:

• A personal coach from Vancouver 
• JackieBergman: a Swedish engineer whose wife runs a Wilber Meetup in Stockholm and who focuses on the choice between love and fear in leadership training that he does for engineers. He says the problem in the Scandinavian countries is that everyone is a philosopher but no one wants to walk the talk, and thus he is interested in the Transformational Practice Group I belong to.
• Victoria Blackwood from Maine here to develop a strategic plan for developing leadership in a multicultural context at the Maritime university she works for. She's an Episcopalian-turned-Buddhist who seeks to express Christ Consciousness in her daily life.

I can't wait to meet the rest of my new friends tomorrow: Day 1