Integral Edge: Waking Up Was the Easy Part @IntegralNaked

Uploaded May 2026 | Updated September 2026, 1 week ago

Waking up was supposed to fix everything. So why did it fall apart?
Zen priest and former psychotherapist Chad Bennett sits down with Keith Martin-Smith to dismantle one of the most seductive ideas in spiritual life: that if you just awaken deeply enough, the rest of you will sort itself out. It won't. Enlightenment doesn't clean up after you.

In this conversation, two old Dharma brothers explore why waking up, growing up, and cleaning up have to be practiced as a single braid — not three separate projects. They get into why telling someone they're whole when they feel broken only makes it worse, what a "frozen part" of you is actually guarding, why most people don't try hard enough, and what it really means to befriend your own experience in a culture that's forgotten how to be friends.

Equal parts teaching, live practice, and the easy warmth of genuine friendship.

In this episode:

- Why awakening collapses without integration
- The two-part meditation Chad guides live on the call
- Including your experience vs. indulging it
- "Most people don't try hard enough" — the right kind of effort
- What is a friend? (and why so few people can answer)

---

Free Email Course on Building Your Integral Life: integrl.link/course
Our website: integrl.link/site
Participate in our daily Integral Life Practice sessions: integrl.link/calendar
Follow our news on Facebook: integrl.link/fb
Integral thoughts on Twitter: integrl.link/tw

Integral Edge: Waking Up Was the Easy Part

“I Was Enraged”: When Ken Wilber Discovered the Ego’s Trap

Time Travel Therapy: Heal Your Inner Child (and Future Self) Now

How to Integrate Opposing Views on Free Speech (Featuring Destiny)

Solving the Metacrisis with Integral Thinking

The Science of Waking Up (And the One Thing AI Will Never Be Able To Do)

$The Faces of X: Making Peace with the Culture Wars Watch the full 1 hour 45 minute discussion here: https://integrallife.com/the-faces-of-x-making-peace-with-the-culture-war/ We live in a strange time. We carry the entire world around with us in our pocket, our social media feeds flooding us every day with more perspectives than we know what to do with. Yet rather than this incredible interconnectivity helping us to expand our perspective, understand each other better, and bring people closer together, it seems to be having the opposite effect. Our minds have become more entrenched and polarized than ever, our culture more fractured and fragmented, and we seem to be burning more bridges between us than are being built. As a result, conversations are breaking down. Empathy is breaking down. Our capacity to enfold with each other is breaking down. The spaces between us have become colonized by social media algorithms that exploit our cognitive biases and directly influence what we perceive, how we think, and how we view each other. And the results have been disastrous. We see these corrosive effects just about everywhere we look — in our politics, in our media, and sometimes even here in our own integral community. Many think this state of affairs only has one outcome: increasing conflict, which some fear may even spiral into civil war. But my guest today, Stephanie Lepp, is pointing us toward a different path — where all of this polarization and fragmentation represents an opportunity to rekindle our connections, to deepen and expand our meaning making, and to reinvent the lost art of conversation. In her Faces of X media project, Stephanie is role modeling a different kind of discourse, one that is based on mutual respect, good faith, humility, and genuine curiosity in other perspectives — all of which have become such scarce resources in today’s attention age. This incredibly well-produced video series is doing something truly extraordinary, and something that is deeply resonant with the integral heart — encouraging us to reach across the divide, and to open ourselves up to new points of view without compromising our own deeply held principles and dignities. There is an important aspect of Growing Up here, allowing us to take greater, deeper, more comprehensive perspectives that are more aligned with our developmental capacities. And perhaps more importantly, Faces of X also invites us to some critical Cleaning Up, helping us to notice that all of the conflicts that we are seeing “out there” are really taking place “in here” — in our own minds, in our own consciousness, in our own relationships with each other — allowing us to re-integrate the disowned pieces of ourselves that are driving so many of these culture war conflicts. There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy, and in our mental models of reality — and Faces of X can help show each of us what we might be missing. Learn more about the Faces of X project here: https://www.facesofx.org$

A Developmental Understanding of Complex Adaptive Systems