Integral Profiles: Susanne Cook-Greuter

Dr. Susanne Cook-Greuter, one of the integral movement's pre-eminent scholars, sits down with host Jeff Salzman to discuss her life, her work, and her thoughts about the emergence of integral consciousness around the world....

Eleanor Roosevelt once said that "poor minds discuss people, average minds discuss events, and great minds discuss ideas." Integral minds, we might add, discuss all three.

In the Integral Profiles series, host Jeff Salzman sits down with some of today's most notable thinkers, teachers, and leaders, discussing the many ways they are catalyzing the Integral vision in their lives, in their hearts, and in their work. These men and women are collectively defining the leading edge of evolution in today's world, their thoughts and actions actively influencing the shape and scope of tomorrow's possibilities.

I had the pleasure of getting to know Susanne during this past 2009/2010 Integral Spiritual Experience conference in Asilomar, CA. While working the event, each staff member and volunteer was assigned to a particular teacher, and it was our responsibility to ensure that everyone had everything that they needed to get through the week, and knew where they were supposed to be at any given time on Asilomar's beautiful, sprawling campus. As fate would have it, I was assigned to Susanne Cook-Greuter.
And I have to say, I fell in love.

One of my favorite memories with Susanne was walking the California beach with her. It was about six in the morning. Now, I am very much a night person (it's always early-bird hunting season in my bedroom) and though I would ordinarily be quick to describe this as an "ungodly hour"—on this day, it was anything but. Susanne was teaching a class in Nature Mysticism, which itself reminded me of one of the reasons I love this integral movement so much: here was one of our sharpest and most important scholars—a woman with such impressive academic credentials she has already flown 60,000 miles in just six months, teaching at various Integral conferences all around the world—and here she was, teaching a bunch of seekers how to look at a flower. That is, she was showing us how to find God in every moment, shining through each unique expression of the ordinary.

How miraculous, that we can so take these everyday miracles for granted, that we can walk on God's own face without ever noticing how sacred the ground beneath our feet truly is—whether it's a sandy beach, a concrete sidewalk, or a linoleum floor.

As we walked the beach together (I had not even seen the ocean in over seven years, having been landlocked in Colorado for most of the past decade with very little opportunity to travel) Susanne helped me to see it, hear it, touch and taste and smell it more deeply than I could have ever imagined. So deeply in fact, that for a moment I could recognize that I was not really experiencing anything at all—that is, I was not the center of this experience.

It felt as though the ocean was seeing itself, hearing its own yawns and roars, breathing its own salty sensuality.

I was just a convenient window through which something infinitely greater than myself could momentarily glimpse its own impossible beauty.

As I remember, it was shortly thereafter that the handle to Susanne's walking stick snapped off in her hand. I felt my experience immediately contract, yanked back into my skin—fully rejuvenated and ready to serve. Fixing that walking stick became a personal mission for me, handed down from on high, representing the most direct way I could express my love and devotion to the world, to the sea, and to Susanne. I felt a overflowing gratitude for Susanne, having helped to show me the undeniable miracle of the ocean; and I was determined to try to return the favor via the undeniable miracle of duct tape.

One of the things Susanne talks about in this video is how easy it can be for us to become stuck in our language—that is, more often than not our greatest limitations come directly from the stories we repeatedly tell ourselves, and simply finding new ways to tell these stories can release us from many of our self-imposed restrictions. As Susanne was asking me about my own life and background, she noticed me repeating the same story two or three times—which had to do with some lingering insecurities about my own education, regret that I never pursued a more academic path to integral, and fear that my own career might be limited by the lack of fancy letters after my name. Susanne was quick to call me on all this, reminding me of the extraordinary path I am already walking, and helped me make a fairly dramatic shift in the way I talk about myself, my career, and my story. As a gift, she gave me a beautiful nautilus shell she had found in South Africa (which you can see in the video image above), with a little folded-up note tucked inside.

The note eventually fell out of the shell after dodging my curious probing fingers for two or three days. What it said shall remain my own secret, but I will say that Susanne offered me a powerful linguistic reframe, helping to trigger a cascade of psycho-spiritual dominos that eventually led to a radical breakdown/breakthrough just a couple days later—a deeply intimate experience of my own Unique Self, my own Unique Shadow, and my own Unique Gifts, which continues to ripple and reverberate through me six months later.

Hanging out with Susanne Cook-Greuter that week is one of the most precious memories i've collected since being part of this movement, and I feel indebted to her grace, her wisdom, and her undying love for the natural world. For all these reasons, I am extremely excited to publish this interview, and I am sure that when you are finished watching, you will feel the same way I do about this wonderful woman....

Text by Corey deVos