Twice a year, Chosei Zen organizes a week of extensive meditation education called sesshin. It’s the first time Justin has finished such an education, and a few days later he was exhausted. His legs were swollen, his back hurt, and his brain was looking for a way out. , and yet the sesshin is far from over. At first, he only thought that he was suffering, but as he felt the other people around him more deeply, he can feel that they were also suffering. Something about him changed, where he sought to “sit” harder for others, so that they can simply meditate better. The more he focused on helping others, the more full of life he felt. At the end of the week, he described the sesshin as a “fantastic experience. “
What happened to Justin is available to all leaders, that is, to everyone who is committed to making a positive difference. It doesn’t require intense meditation, it’s a reliable accelerator, but it springs from a sense of connection to something bigger than ours on our skin. As we viscerally revel in a more fully engaged self, we naturally put ourselves at the service of everything we feel a part of. In the outdoor world, the result is more supportive, inclusive and regenerative responses to the demanding situations we face and the aspirations we seek. The result for us is also regenerative: greater power and delights that we could even call “fantastic”.
This is a pressing factor for today’s leaders, because our degree of linkage has a lot to do with us functioning from an extractive mindset, which exacerbates the social, political and environmental disorder in which we are located, or from a regenerative mentality, which cares about other people, the planet and the future. The extractive mindset is our story and continues to shape our systems, establishments and business models. It extracts what it needs from the land or society, treating environmental or social consequences as “externalities. “Treat other people as “others” who can be used and abused. This is the war of mentalities, racism, capitalism, the glaring inequalities in health, wealth and education, the climate crisis and the collapse of biodiversity. It destroys the very situations that sustain human life and, like it or not, we are the generations that will have to deal with its consequences.
However, the extractive mindset is not necessarily intended to be ruthless and is an herbal component of all of us. It occurs through cumulative stages of progression of our less mature self, well-characterized stages in Ken Wilber’s integral theory, condensed for our desires into the five steps described below. While everyone would say it’s connected to something, that’s connected to what fits at each stage, with a tipping point where our power moves. Exploring those five degrees of connection shows how this tipping point happens.
Ego-centered: It takes a child a few years to shape an ego boundary, but once he does, he defines a self, separate from others. The task of the ego is to keep that self alive and eventually satisfy its desires for a higher point. of love and belonging, strength and self-realization. This point is an indispensable component of all of us, however, if it is not moderated through a broader sense of connection, it will seek out “Number 1” and extract from others what it wants.
In leadership, this egocentric level has an exaggerated sense of self-independence, importance, and control. In relationships, this tends to be transactional and selfish.
Ethnocentric: No child survives without human relationships, and our first sense of connection or belonging is with our family. It is the prototype of many teams that we will feel hooked on as we grow into our adult lives, from our gender, race and religion, to sports, political parties, professions, teams, organizations and countries. Within those intertwined teams, we draw identity and sense of belonging, and we will do things to serve them, even in charge of non-public expenses. or sacrifices. What characterizes this level, however, is a boundary between who is on the teams we identify with and who is not, and the “disruptive” or extractive nature of how we treat them. 5,000 years ago, and according to Wilber, about a third of today’s adults work primarily at this level.
Examples of this level of ethnocentric leadership come with hiring in one’s own image, loyalty to the organization before justice, facts, or truth, or the cash price of a component of the organization at the expense of the entire. History has shown that this level has the potential for cruelty to those who “others,” while Americans in the organization would still feel smart serving something bigger than themselves, a dark illusion, in fact.
Rational, head-centered: In the expanding child, as exposure increases beyond his circle of relatives and language and logic take root, a level of rationality is reached in which cognitive connections to facts, facts, and abstractions such as democratic values or the legislation of nature can be identified. It’s a very smart level where we notice things, push clinical boundaries, build new technologies, expand new business models, and calculate cost-benefit ratios. This level emerged about three hundred years ago and is “rational self-control. “interest” budgeted through Adam Smith, informing capitalism to this day. Globally, about a third of adults are basically functioning at this level.
Examples of this rational level of leadership are the norm, as it is incorporated into MBA programs, business models, and popular business practices. What makes this level extractive is that it also draws a line between what it includes intellectually and what it ignores. For example, if it considers nature as an inanimate object to be used, ignores any contrary data and conceives a legal formula that does not grant any right to nature. If you consider science purely objective, you ignore the role of the collector and consciousness (and one hundred years of quantum physics), and imagine a global where things exist in themselves, than in relation. This step puts us squarely in our heads, largely ignoring the body, and imagines that the partial fact he sees is the total – some other dark illusion.
Flexibility, flow, heart-centered: As the child or adult continues to develop, a reintegration occurs with what has been cut or ignored. Just as we can close our eyes once (or do it again) in a scary part of a movie. To decrease its intensity, the brain also disconnects from feelings and physical impulses to decrease its intensity. This separation between the brain and the frame is at its peak in the rational stage. As we feel more in the frame and more skillfully handle feelings and impulses. , we also perceive the greatest others and our relationships deepen. Less reflected image and more feelings, we adapt to a wider diversity of energies – we become more susceptible – and we resonate more and more with flexion and life as reciprocal relationships. Let’s call this heart-centered connection. It expresses the healing force of love.
This healing has worked its way into leadership over the past 30 to 50 years through increased attention to emotional intelligence, collective engagement and leadership, the neuroscience of dating, mindfulness-based stress reduction, embodied leadership and diversity, equity and inclusion. The more our hearts have grown, the more we see what was left of the systems created through our (collective) leader in terms of caring for people, the planet, and the future. The more we recognize and reconnect with the wisdom of indigenous traditions that have never thought of nature as inanimate or the outdoor individual of a constellation of reciprocal dating. It is from this greater degree of connection that we can guess and believe the desired futures, biological solutions, and regenerative pathways that honor this more global fact and make us evolve as people.
Unity consciousness, focused on Hara: For those who interact in a deeper non-secular formation, the enjoyment of connection becomes limitless, which is called samadhi in the yoga and zen traditions. At the beginning of my Zen training, don’t forget an instructor who patted his abdomen and said, “Think with this spirit,” and then pointed to his head, “Not with this one. “Japanese, he was in the middle of our Zen tradition, but I think he spoke metaphorically. Now I know more. Hara is the deepest, slowest, and highest solid breath the frame is capable of, which leads to samadhi. It is the midpoint of strength (as in sports and martial arts) and creativity (as in birth) and has a direct link with the brain, which can its chatter (as neuroscience has shown). It is also a center of intuition, a wisdom of life, which begins to expand even before the ego separates.
When leadership is proposed from this consciousness of unity, that is, Zen leadership, it relaxes and becomes fearless, reconciling the paradoxical physical and non-secular nature of the human being. We are a specific constellation of relationships with specific gifts and also the total picture. We rightly lose our fear; instead of obsessively protecting a transient physical life, we resort to the optimal use of that life. We are better able to harness connected wisdom; in a sense, we consult ourselves. We are better able to create a boom in the outside world because our inner world is booming. To enact unitary consciousness, it will have to be deeper than head-based beliefs, even deeper than feelings felt through the heart. This demands the maximum total integration of our non-secular (i. e. energetic) nature with our physical body, from the maximum sensitive of the head to the base of the hara, or what would be called in yoga the chakra from the crown to the root.
The physical practices for making these paintings come with deep and ancient traditions, such as yoga, meditation, and martial arts, as well as a proliferation of fashionable modalities, such as integral frame paintings, somatic experience exercises, trauma, and tension (TRE), and integral exercises.
In a sense, raising our degree of connection is the bread and butter; as long as we live in an ever-changing setting in an ever-changing world, there are new paintings to make. But in a sense, as Justin experienced, it can take place in a matter of days. The turning point occurs when we get out of our head and feel in our frame, when we stop thinking about ourselves in our skin and begin to feel others and the life around us. This is not only the key to our maximum regenerative leadership, but also our maximum productive. possibility to thrive as other people and as a person.