From the beginning, Integral Transformative Practice™ has been dedicated to the realization of our awesome potential abilities.  This series of short essays focuses on the development and unrealized possibilities of the human brain and the potentialities of the human body, emotions, and spirit.

Essays by George Leonard

• Part One — An Outsized, Outrageous Organ — We were 12 billion years or more in the making, our body the stuff of stars, our mind a mystery. We were born for learning, for journeying through inconceivable new worlds, destination unknown. We started in Africa beneath the trees and out across the open spaces at a time when there were no words, then traveled far and wide to light this world with speech and fire. From the beginning, we were extraordinary. Read the essay>
  
  
• Part Two — How Human Sexuality Helped Created Our Large Brain — In less than five million years, starting with our ancestors, the Australopithecines, the hominid brain was to triple in size. Such explosive brain development was itself a risky evolutionary gamble. Our brain is an extremely greedy organ. Every minute, enough blood must be pumped through it to equal its own weight. Any animal with a disproportionately large brain has to find considerably more food to feed itself and its offspring than do other animals of the same size and weight. The need for even ten percent more food than a competing species in the wild might mean extinction. Why and how did such an organ evolve? Read the essay>
  
  
• Part Three — The Wimps of the Wild? — In our ITP practice, we often employ the body as a wise and sensitive teacher, skillfully helping us achieve the awesome potential in every aspect of our being, even in our ability to sense emotional states. But there is also the body simply as a physical entity through which we meet, influence, and are influenced by the physical world. It is here that we often tend to underestimate our own potential skill and power. Read the essay>
  
  
• Part Four — Speculations on Our Emotional Potential

  Ever since Michael Murphy and I conceived of Integral Transformative Practice™ in 1991, we’ve called it “a long-term program for realizing the potential of body, mind, heart, and soul.” Thus far in these Chronicles, I’ve written about the potentials of mind and body. Now we come to the human “heart” or emotions, a subject that might seem too ambiguous or even ethereal to be addressed in terms of potential. Read the essay>