IST × Tso
Integral Self Therapy provides the psychological framework for the Awareness Lab. Tso brings that framework into an experiential environment — and begins to explore what happens when experience can be observed through multiple lenses.
The framework
Developed by Dr. Shyam K. Bhat, MD, psychiatrist and psychotherapist, Integral Self Therapy has evolved through more than two decades of clinical practice, study and integration across psychotherapy, medicine and contemplative traditions.
There is no single psychological self operating in every moment.
Different versions of us emerge in different contexts — at work, in intimacy, in conflict, in solitude, when frightened, when rejected, when loved.
These selves are adaptive and partial. Suffering can arise when they become rigid, conflicted, disowned, or mistaken for the whole of who we are.
The question
Integration
Encounter, differentiate and integrate the selves we carry — understanding what each protects, what it needs, how it developed and what capacities it contains.
Transcendence
Experience a self fully while recognising that it is not the entirety of who we are.
You cannot transcend what you refuse to encounter.
IST × Tso
Tso takes the psychological framework into an experiential setting.
Participants deliberately pay attention to how they experience themselves — through their bodies, emotions, relationships, thoughts, memories and different states of mind. Around this sits movement, bodywork, breathwork, nature, solitude, shared meals, conversation and ordinary residential life.
The technology reads what the psychological process surfaces — not the other way around.
The Tso layer
The aim is not to make technology the authority on someone’s inner life.
Wearable data cannot tell us that someone is anxious, ashamed or integrated. The person remains the primary source of knowledge about their own experience. Technology is there to illuminate patterns that may otherwise be difficult to see.
The larger question
Tso is exploring whether richer information across subjective experience, behaviour, relationship, context and physiology can help a person and practitioner better understand what might actually help next.
One residency will not answer that.
The first experiment is simply to find out whether there is enough signal to make the question worth pursuing.
Clinical direction
Psychiatrist · Psychotherapist · Developer of Integral Self Therapy
Important distinction
Integral Self Therapy is the intellectual property of Dr. Shyam K. Bhat and is applied here under a limited licence for this residency. The Awareness Lab is not an Integral Self Therapy programme, and Tso does not offer training, certification or accreditation in Integral Self Therapy.
