Fully Committed (to integral living, working and art-making)

This week I completed a survey covering my last year of graduate study at California Institute of Integral Studies. The primary crux of this survey asked how much of my experience aligned with the school's Seven Commitments:

CIIS is committed to the facilitation of integral learning. Paramount to this are its Seven Commitments:

1. Practice integral approaches to learning and research - The University strives to facilitate the integration of body-mind-spirit. It values the intellectual, emotional, spiritual, imaginal, creative, somatic, and social dimensions of human potentiality. Committed to studies and practices that cross traditional disciplinary boundaries, CIIS emphasizes dynamic systems understanding and integrative learning. 

2. Affirm spirituality - The University is committed to studies and practices of multiple spiritual and wisdom traditions and to their expression and embodiment throughout the university community. While no one tradition is shared by all, the importance of the spiritual dimension of life is affirmed. 
 
3. Commit to diversity and inclusion - Promoting a dialogue of difference, the University is committed to reflecting the diversity of the world's peoples, cultures, and spiritual traditions. At CIIS, inclusion means consciously welcoming the contributions of all people to academic scholarship and multiple ways of knowing. CIIS embraces intellectual, cultural, and spiritual traditions that further the effectiveness of emancipatory movements, such as feminism, and social and political liberation. 

4. Foster multiple ways of learning and teaching - The University honors many learning modalities and ways of knowing, providing a rigorous and transformative education across all learning approaches. CIIS welcomes experiential, collaborative, embodied, artistic, participatory, and other modes of learning and knowing into the classroom, believing that they deepen and enrich the learning experience. 
  
5. Advocate sustainability and social justice - CIIS is committed to exploring and promoting knowledge and practices that affirm human solidarity with the entire Earth community. Recognizing that business as usual threatens the integrity of life itself on a planetary scale and perpetuates structures of oppression on a large portion of the human population, CIIS strives to generate creative alternatives leading to a just and flourishing world. 

6. Support community - Community at CIIS is founded upon core values that affirm shared understandings and differences, scholarly efforts, and compassionate action. Such community is a vital part of the University's aspiration to provide an effective, visionary, and nurturing environment for integral education. CIIS is committed to providing a welcoming community for all people. 

7. Strive for an integral and innovative governance - The University recognizes the significance of a mode of governance that would eliminate, or at least reduce, the polarities and fragmentation that typically plague organizations. The commitment to integral governance aims to inspire holistic organizational interaction among all members of its community. This commitment stands among the seven as a constant challenge and encouragement to try new forms, procedures, criteria, and language that reflect a more progressive and collaborative decision-making process.

My school's mascot, a symbol: "The Sri Yantra, the symbol of the California Institute of Integral Studies, comes from India. A yantra, in the Indian tradition, is a literally a "device" for spiritual advancement." *

This moment of invited reflection got me to review these core commitments at this institute of learning I love and miss. Reviewing these got me to think, what are my core commitments? How much does my daily life, writing practice and artistry align with these Seven Commitments? How much do I strive to uplift these ideals through my work and each moment on earth? 

This present inquiry will keep me reviewing these in the near future and beyond, in order to discover how I can integrate these actions into my aesthetic and creative tenets, and to see what other personal core commitments I might uncover.

How about you? Do you have core commitments in your life, work and creative dailyness? What might those be? I'm interested. Feel free to share.

​XOXO 

* (from photo) To learn more about the Sri Yantra, as I just did, go HERE.