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The Home of Evolutioneers

George Leonard and Michael Murphy, Futurist Artist of the Month, July/August 2005

George Leonard and Michael Murphy were was voted by the members and visitors of Universe Spirit as our July/August Futurist Artist of the month for their creation of a practice called Integrative Transformative Practice (ITP) and for their individual contributions to the Human potential movement.

After many years experience in various forms of transformative processes, human potential pioneers George Leonard and Michael Murphy have created a long-term practice for busy people involving mind, body, heart, and soul, a practice that produces positive change in practically everyone who follows it.

Integral Transformative Practice (ITP) grew from a two-year experimental class in human transformation conducted by Leonard and Murphy, beginning in 1992. The class met for two hours on Saturday mornings and also held overnight retreats. The Saturday classes included group support, discussion of assigned readings, transformative work in Leonard Energy Training (LET), and a 40-minute mind-body-spirit series of exercises called the ITP Kata. In addition to meeting every Saturday as a group, the fifty participants in the experimental class agreed to follow The Eight ITP Commitments.

George Leonard

A pioneer in the field of human potential, George Leonard is author of twelve books, including The Transformation, The Ultimate Athlete, and Mastery. During his seventeen years as senior editor for Look magazine, he won an unprecedented number of national awards for education writing, and during the 1980s produced annual Ultimate Fitness sections for Esquire as well as numerous articles on a wide variety of subjects in such magazines as Esquire, Harper's, Atlantic, New York, Saturday Review, and The Nation.

Leonard holds a fifth-degree black belt in aikido, and is co-owner of a martial arts school in Mill Valley, California. He is founder of Leonard Energy Training (LET), a transformative practice inspired by aikido, which he introduced to some 50,000 people in the U.S. and abroad. He is a past-president of the Association of Humanistic Psychology, and currently serves as president of Esalen Institute.

A native of Georgia, Leonard received a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of North Carolina and Doctor of Humanities degrees from Lewis and Clark College and John F. Kennedy University. He served with the U.S. Air Force as a combat pilot in the South Pacific during World War II and as an intelligence officer and magazine editor during the Korean war. His adventures along the human frontiers of the 1960s are described in his 1988 memoir, Walking on the Edge of the World. His latest book, The Way of Aikido: Life Lessons from an American Sensei, was published by Dutton in June 1999.

Other notable books by George Leonard include:

Education and Ecstasy: With "The Great School Reform Hoax"

Adventures in Monogamy: Exploring the Creative Possibilities of Love, Sexuality and Commitment

The Silent Pulse: A Search for the Perfect Rhythm that Exists in Each of Us

The End of Sex: Erotic Love After the Sexual Revolution

Michael Murphy

Michael Murphy is co-founder and Chairman of the Board of the Esalen Institute and author of four novels: Golf in the Kingdom, The Kingdom of Shivas Irons, Jacob Atabet, and An End to Ordinary History. His non-fiction works, in addition to The Life We Are Given, include In the Zone, an anthology of extraordinary sports experiences, co-authored with Rhea White, The Physical and Psychological Effects of Meditation, co-authored with Steve Donovan, and The Future of the Body: Explorations Into the Further Evolution of Human Nature. Golf in the Kingdom is still a bestseller thirty-two years after it was published. It has spawned the Shivas Irons Society, a non-profit organization with members in the 50 states and 20 countries.

Murphy was born in Salinas, California, graduated from Stanford University, and lived for a year at the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in Pondicherry, India. In 1980, he helped initiate Esalen's Soviet-American Exchange Program, which was a premiere diplomacy vehicle for citizen-to-citizen relations, and which played a significant role in breaking down the barriers between the Russian and American peoples. In 1990, Boris Yeltsin's first visit to the U.S. was initiated by the Institute.

Esalen, the world's most famous growth center, is also a ground-breaking research site. Preparatory work for The Future of the Body began in 1977 with the building of an archive of more than 10,000 studies of exceptional human functioning. The archive has been donated to the Stanford University Medical School.

During his forty-two year involvement in the human potential movement, Murphy and his work have been profiled in the New Yorker and featured in many magazines and journals worldwide.

For more information on George and Michael’s work together, visit www.itp-life.com

 

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