Re-wilding: The Heart of an Unbridled Existence
Throughout history, there has been a drastic cost for the revolutionaries who expressed free-thinking, challenged the status quo, sought freedom from enslavement, shared innovative forms of creativity, or honed their spiritual power and psychic abilities were often ridiculed, shamed, or shunned from society.
Those who embraced the potency of their inner authority and wild selves posed as a threat against those who sought to control and domesticate the masses. Many of them were innocently accused, slandered and banished because of their power, wisdom, and capacity to stand tall and in opposition to a growing fleet of greed-based agendas driven by systems driven by power-over.
It was common for persecutory tactics to be used by some political and religious institutions of the time as a means of silencing, punishing, or eliminating these people entirely.
When we embody our life force and personal power, we become a wild and impactful force of nature, no different than an earthquake, blazing wildfire or tsunami.
When we’re focused and on-purpose, our creative energy spills forth as a catalytic agent of love, inclusivity, innovation, and evolution.
Often there are internal and external interferences that create a wedge between who we know ourselves to be (i.e. god, divine source, Self) versus when we’re in survival mode and triggered.
Understanding our cultural inheritance of domestication & disembodiment
Over millennia, humanity has been indoctrinated to seek freedom and validation externally instead of internally — thus forcing us to forfeit, or disregard, an intimate relationship with the sensitive and attuned instruments of our whole-being wisdom.
Hierarchical systems have blatantly and silently imposed order and control through disempowering and marginalizing messaging about our worthiness, sinfulness and imperfections.
These power-over systems have successfully driven aspects of our primal nature and wildness underground and replaced it with prescriptive, conventional and standardized social norms.
We have inherited a collective story of fear, judgment towards differences and shame for our needs, desires and confusion.
Before we can verbally speak, we are inundated by propaganda designed to reinforce disempowering messages such as, “You’re not enough. You’re too much. Your voice doesn’t matter. Your needs are a burden. I know what’s good for you better than you do, so just do as I say or showing emotions is a weakness.”
As a result, some of us have lost connection to an inherent trust in the various channels of our whole-being -- such as our intuition, body sensations and emotions which have instead been replaced with logic and reason.
We’ve been conditioned to fear surrendering into the unknown also known as, “I don’t know” which thrusts some of us into a driving addiction to control, command and force life to go according to our personal agenda. We’ve been taught that we have to fight hard and push relentlessly to will our way into what we want.
Most of us have not been taught the art of deep listening, letting go and surrendering our will as we wait patiently for the next piece of clarity or action step to reveal itself -- from a quiet and centered space within us, rather than fear and panic.
We are wild creatures in a world echoing solicitously seducing messaging that seek to tame, shame and box us in.
Each one of us bravely reclaiming our Wild Power are called to cut, tear, and shred the boxes that confine and suffocate us.
To counter the impacts of this phenomenon of domestication and disembodiment we must learn how to re-wild ourselves and to embody the fullness of who we are by building a partnership with our whole-being wisdom.
In this article…
We’re going to explore revolutionary leadership as a heroic journey of re-wilding and jailbreak.
We’ll investigate three antidotes to support the process of re-wilding:
Embracing your primal wiring — engaging your reactivity and defensiveness compassion and personal responsibility.
Befriending your shadows — The art of welcoming everything by integrating exiled or wounded parts of yourself home.
Reclaiming whole-being wisdom — developing a relationship with your sixth sense, somatic intelligence, intuition, heart wisdom and gut feelings.
Let’s get started…
What does it mean to re-wild?
Wildness can be mistaken as self-serving, neglectful and not concerned with how one’s actions impact the whole. This isn’t wild, this is conditioned blindness.
Any individual, team, or sub-culture driven by recklessness and greed suffer from a fragmentation from their essential and whole self – so in part, they have traded their wild nature and for a fear-based filtered version of who their fullest expression of Self.
To be wild is to integrate the wholeness of who we are from the top-down and bottom-up – from spirit to mind to heart to earth and back up again. This becomes an open-hearted care for the whole from the inside-out.
To re-wild is to remember the fullness of who we are.
Re-wilding is a path of unifying and welcoming any exiled part of ourselves back home into the center of our heart and whole-being.
Embracing our primal wiring and human allows us to see through the distracting charade of over-identification with our self-images and personas rather than resting back into the core of our essence and being.
How often do you reject parts of yourself in order to maintain a particular self-image, such as the strong-silent rock, the people-pleaser, the caretaker, the entertainer, the high-achiever, the generous-giver, the rescuer, the hero, and so on?
These expressions are not wrong — but if we’re overly identified with an idealized role of who we think we need to be for others to love and accept us, then these ego structures become a barrier to our wild, authentic, and essential self.
When we give our inner authority away to external sources it’s easy to forget who we are. As a result, we may slip into a trance of identifying with limited versions of ourselves or idealizations of who we think we should be.
For modern day human, the matrix of social and cultural conditioning is one of the most painful forms of separation, isolation and self-aggression.
Our wildness has been thwarted by persuasive messages that cause compliance, compartmentalization and conformity. This phenomenon sets in motion a compulsion to orient externally as a means to measure our worthiness, lovability and safety.
Unfortunately, this process causes personal fragmentation through banishing any part of ourselves that we fear will not fit into the prescribed boxes of success, status, power, attractiveness and worthiness.
A common example of how this plays out in our culture is through the hyper-glorification of intellect and reason over intuition and other non-linear and non-rational forms of intelligence.
If you’re like me, you may have learned to lock away superpowers of sensory intelligence communicated from your gut instincts, heart wisdom or your spontaneous whole-body knowings that ring a clear bell of truth inside because they were not measurable -- or frankly, judged as weird or crazy. Your intelligence was marginalized in those moments. Maybe it even caused you to betray yourself to ensure safety and belonging.
To be wild is to be free. But free of what, exactly?
To be wild it to be untethered by habits, beliefs and perceptions of reality that fragment us into states of fear, scarcity and greed.
Each time we welcome home an exiled aspect of ourselves we reclaim another piece of our power -- and we strengthen our sense of wholeness.
Re-wilding starts with the commitment to ‘know thyself.’ This includes revealing, and taking ownership for, our unique and exquisite gifts as well as our inherited patterns of defensiveness, shame, and indoctrination.
When we intentionally expand our self-awareness, we activate the x-ray vision needed to scan for the banished parts of ourselves.
Identifying our habitual and reactive ways of operating is a key ingredient needed to dismantle unwanted forms of domestication.
Cultivating self-awareness, self-compassion and our self-abiding power all play a critical role in helping us to remember our wild and mysterious self.
The process of re-wilding is rooted in the present moment.
It’s an emergent and dynamic way of being — not one based on conceptual ideations from the past or projected into the future.
And, this is where it can get tricky because our conditioned self and any residue of trauma has parts of us operating in the past and future – it’s part of being human.
Self-inquiry questions like these help to bring us home.
What have you learned about who, what, and how you should behave in order to be enough? To be loved? To feel enough? To avoid criticism?
What does it mean for you to live a life that lights your heart and soul on fire with passion and purpose?
What risks do you need to take to make this possible?
What voices, beliefs and narratives hold you back?
“Coming home to our primal center is a heroic journey of re-wilding ourselves back home into our most undefended, compassionate, expansive and creative self.”
Three antidotes to fan the flames of reclaiming your Wild Power
Let’s investigate three antidotes to support the process of re-wilding:
1. Embracing your primal wiring — engaging your reactivity and defensiveness compassion and personal responsibility.
2. Befriending your shadows — The art of welcoming everything by integrating exiled or wounded parts of yourself home.
3. Reclaiming your whole-being wisdom — developing a relationship with your sixth sense, somatic intelligence, intuition, heart wisdom and gut feelings.
1. Embracing your primal wiring
Developing self- awareness, self-compassion & personal agency
We are wired to protect and connect which can feel contradictory and confusing when we flip from one to another in a split second. You know, those moments when you’re feeling so loving and peaceful and then you get an aggressive email or phone call and you bare your teeth as your hackles go up?
Here’s the neuroscience reality. We are messy and reactive mammals wired to react and defend when we feel threatened.
There are countless types of threats presented to us on a daily basis.
Physical threats, such as financial instability, boundary transgressions of our body, or lack of shelter.
Social, emotional, and psychological threats, such as conditions that interfere with our emotional well-being, social status, sense of worthiness, freedom, lovability, and belonging.
What do you do when you feel exiled, criticized, or dismissed?
Have you ever hesitated from speaking your needs, to a partner or boss, for fear they will diminish them or punish you in some way?
When afraid of losing someone you love, or rely upon, do you lash out with controlling demands, ultimatums or coercive and subtle power-plays of manipulation?
If we want to truly embrace our Wild Power, then we need to normalize and study our defensiveness, excuse making, blaming, shaming, and other forms of self-protection. Like it or not, we are all wired to do this when we feel threatened.
In one moment, we might fight by projecting our emotions, disappointments, and needs into blame, guilt trips or forms of emotional punishment towards others.
And, in the next, we may flee or freeze by turning our reactivity inward, fueling our inner critic, shame, dissociation, or self-doubt.
How does this affect our body? Well, the stress hormones released through conflict, aggression, and compliance can influence our body and heath in a myriad of ways. For example, over time, chronic patterns of explosive or internalized anger will burden our heart, increase blood pressure, distress our digestion system, and decrease our resiliency.
The evolutionary arc of reclaiming our Wild Power is not about abolishing our impulsive reactivity.
Instead of reacting habitually, we learn to train ourselves to slow down and create space between when the trigger arises and how we respond — resulting in a either a quick habitual reaction or an empowered conscious response.
We build our personal agency through cultivating mindfulness and discipline.
Let’s imagine that you’ve had a recent conflict and you reacted, unable to stop yourself in the heat of the moment. That’s okay — it happens to all of us.
Then what’s possible from here?
Let’s say you ignore it and hope it will blow over. If a common dynamic between you and this person, or group, is to erupt and then move on, then the situation may appear to be laid to rest by avoiding it.
However, even when it appears that things are back to ‘normal,’ some residual impact may remain between you and the other person, or group, which quietly fuels a subtle sense of mistrust or lack of safety.
Here’s what mindfulness and discipline allows you to do.
Once you’re more resourced by self-reflecting and seeing things more clearly, you can own your reactivity and circle back to respond in the way that you wished you had.
With this kind of personal agency, you can return to the conversation, take ownership for your reactivity, repair and ask to have a re-do by sharing what you wish you had heard, said or seen more clearly when you were triggered previously.
This type of rupture, followed by ownership and repair, deepens trust and safety. It deposits emotional money in the bank. As opposed to sweeping it under the rug in the previous example, which can translate into a withdrawal from the bank of connection.
During conflict or differences, someone has to take leadership. Great, but what does that mean? Here are a few areas to hone our strengths and lead:
Vulnerability: Learning how to build vulnerability-based trust – first with self and then with other’s
Discipline: Discipline yourself to choose connection over protection – honesty with vulnerability rather than truth telling with unprocessed anger and hurt.
Repair: Explore your process for engaging with ruptures and repairs in your close relationships. Learn how to own your part, hear the other’s perspective, show empathy and seek repair.
Reflective listening: Seek to engage with reflective listening before you explain, defend or make excuses
Boundaries: Empower yourself with clear boundaries It goes against our primal wiring to own our ‘vulnerabilities’, especially when others’ haven’t done so yet.
The trap of victim consciousness or being blind to our defensive tactics is that if instead we deny our contribution and project the problems onto others we remain unaware and locked into our defensive patterns.
From this place, we’re powerless to evolve. And, we are uable to model a new way of leading, loving, and connecting.
Read more about the brain science of this process triggers and defensive posturing in my article, We’re wired to connect and protect.
“It takes courage take ownership for the impact our reactive tendencies.”
YOU HAVE THE POWER TO FREE YOURSELF FROM THE BINDS OF CONDITIONING
How do we embrace our primal wiring with compassion, ownership and self-accountability?
Revolutionary leadership is a heroic journey of reclaiming our Wild Power. It’s a courageous jailbreak from outdated ways of being, behaving, and beliefs that limit our ability to access our whole-being wisdom, presence, and love.
The good news is that we can learn to cultivate the self-awareness required to map our triggers and patterns of reactivity. Each time we take personal responsibility for how we show up, make adjustments, or ask for “re-do’s”, we embolden a new way of being.
Educating ourselves about the nuances of how we’re wired to protect is an important step towards embracing our reactivity, defensiveness, and protective posturing.
It’s humbling and brave to break the chains that imprison us -- and to own our reactive tendencies. If we don’t, who will?
Each time we expand our conscious awareness and illuminate patterns of reactivity and defensiveness, we stockpile a reservoir of internal maps and wisdom to guide our journey of becoming.
These insights help us to expose the ways we keep ourselves enslaved by our own personal beliefs.
Practicing mindfulness and tracking how patterns of thinking, emotions, and behaviors either serve harmony or fuel conflict is an essential ingredient to embodying our power and love.
“How can you become the ripple in the pond of embodied love and power?”
SELF-INQUIRY:
How do you work with your own triggers and reactivity?
What are predictable triggers for you? (i.e fears of being irresponsible, abandoned, rejected, misunderstood, exiled, or loss of freedom, status, control)
What experience do you fear most in your relationships? (being dismissed, abandoned, betrayed, and rejected)
What are your defense strategies to manage these triggers?
Do you have a mindfulness and self-inquiry process? How does it serve you?
How do you self-regulate and manage your states of reactivity? (meditation, exercise, talk to a friend, etc)
When one of us has the courage to own our bleeps and blunders with humility and sincerity, we become the pebble in the pond rippling a larger movement of de-shamifying, embodied power, and love.
2. Befriending your shadows:
Shadows serve as an intelligent form of compartmentalization.
Shadows typically show up as unconscious, anxious-driven behaviors of control, defensiveness, and judgment towards ourselves or others.
They represent a form of blindness. An inability to track, own, and embrace unconscious habits and behaviors responsible for reinforcing limiting beliefs.
When painful feelings and memories are tucked away from our awareness, they become shadows. They follow us wherever we go, yet they are often hard to illuminate without steady self-inquiry and mindfulness practices. Or feedback from compassionate and trusted sources who want to help us see in the dark.
Befriending our shadows is a journey of coming home to all the ways we create separation inside and out. It’s a process of illuminating various pathways of self-protection, withdrawal, hiding, or controlling others to protect our vulnerability.
When we befriend our shadows we reintegrate and welcome exiled parts back home into our wholeness
Exploring The Shadow of DOMESTICATED ‘SHOULDS’
As I mentioned earlier, there is a very large cultural shadow associated through domesticating messages of should, disapproval. Or even disdain when we seek to express our inner authority when it contradicts the prescriptive messages of our culture, family, community or colleagues.
Cultural and social domestication occurs when our authentic expressions and passion are replaced with a life of who we think we “should” be.
When we hear enough messages wrapped in "you should," "you're not enough," or "you need to work harder" from an early age, it's easy to lose contact with who we are.
For me, the process of reclaiming my Wild Power has asked me to expand my inner strength so I can embrace the exiled and shameful parts of myself that I haven’t wanted to see or own.
For example, I cringe when I feel needy. I grew up early. Beginning at the age of seven I was responsible for taking care of myself in ways I was not prepared to do. I was often in a threat response, especially when I struggled to cook my meals, regulate my nervous system, and fill the gaping holes of isolation and loneliness.
To this day, befriending the feelings of being 'needy’ is a work in progress for me. I still squirm when I am unable to do something on my own and have to ask for help.
What beliefs cause you to feel unworthy or shameful for being who you are?
These types of questions are a rich place to begin your self-inquiry.
Learn more in my article, What Is Domestication?
“Embarking upon the journey of shadow integration requires humility, patience, and a heaping dose of self-compassion.”
REVEALING AND EXPLORING OUR SHADOWS
To track our shadows, we need to expand our capacity to self-reflect. We also need trusted allies whom we feel safe enough to receive reflections about the ways we operate and impact others (for better or worse) in unconscious ways.
Shadows aren’t always about ways we unconsciously defend, puff up or act out to get our needs met.
Some shadows present through the way we disapprove of our skills, talents and gifts for fear they will be a threat to others and cause ostracization or jealousy.
For more resources on befriending your shadows, explore: Self-Acceptance Power.
INTEGRATING OUR SHADOWS IS ESSENTIAL TO reclaiming our wild power
Everyone has shadows. We’re not designed to be perfect. Taking personal responsibility for our shadows is how we re-wild ourselves.
If you’re like me, you’ve spent years, or decades, judging, dismissing or hiding parts of yourself through elaborate adaptive strategies.
What’s it like to slow down, and investigate and embrace these parts and protective strategies?
How do you shine light on the parts of you that have been exiled or that you shun and shame in others?
Each time I manage to welcome another disowned part home, my heart opens and I feel more whole. This is the irony of shadow integration.
As I continue to expose my shadows, I have two common experiences either liberation or an extended period of despair or hopeless as I retrieve the fearful and untrusting parts of myself.
Sometimes I feel liberated by the sweetness of how my vulnerability exposes me — not into humiliation or shame — but into empowerment and compassion.
While other times, I feel hopelessness or despair because I don’t know how to change the self-criticism that roots back to my early conditioning.
Befriending our shadows is a heroic journey of revealing the parts of ourselves that have been exiled, either by our own disapproval or by the criticism cast upon us by others.
We reclaim our power when we illuminate and embrace our shadows — especially when they incite shame and self-aggression.
“This path of reintegration requires enormous courage. It is gritty and filled with obstacles and triumphs.”
Self-Inquiry:
What ways do you judge or disapprove of yourself?
What ways do you judge or disapprove of others?
What type of feedback do you get from others about your shadows or blindspots? Are you aware of any specific themes?
Do you envy others and put them on a pedestal and then get angry when they reveal their humanity or disappoint you?
Do you dismiss the gifts of others because you feel inadequate in comparison?
Is it easier to judge others for their differences rather than get curious?
3. Reclaiming your whole-being wisdom
Each one of us is wired, not just for connection and protection, but also with a multitude of intelligences.
Culturally, most of us have been taught to value our intellect, disregard our feelings, and treat our body like a machine -- often driving ourselves into illness and burnout.
I was a triathlete in my late twenties and early thirties, and despite the amount of hours training, I wasn’t in touch with my body intelligence in an intuitive or embodied way. In fact, I treated my body like machine responsible for doing whatever my ego and mental goals demanded of it -- despite its need for rest and care.
That wasn’t sustainable. It was abusive, and further disconnected me from my body wisdom. I domesticated myself and cut off access to a significant part of my intelligence and wisdom each time I ignored its messages.
When logic and reason are exalted, and emotional intelligence is dismissed and critiqued as ‘soft,’ then what do we choose when we sense something intuitively, or sense that the words we’re hearing are not matching the emotions and non-verbal cues of the person speaking? Do we honor our seeing, or do we discount it and abdicate our inner authority?
The term ‘soft-skills' has a connotation of being less valuable than hard-skills, which discounts the equal power of both. This is partly due to an imbalance of masculine energy and superpowers over feminine energy superpowers.
“Relying on our intellect as our sole channel of wisdom has cut us off from the multi-dimensional nature of our brilliant primal power.”
What does it take to trust the information that our mind-body communicates?
When I worked for a multi-million-dollar health care organization, I was responsible for a team of 100 accountants hired to reconcile decades of unpaid debts from health care members. I frequently felt dismissed when I suggested to the chief executive officer that our low morale issues, and high error rate, was due to the team members living in a chronic state of stress and overwhelm.
Literally, their brains weren’t working due to the high pressure and job security threats that he used as a tactic to ‘sharpen their output.’ At this point, the team members were not in their bodies — they were tired and felt unappreciated. The months of overtime were causing stress, health issues, and conflict at home and with their families.
And, any attempt of mine to bring awareness to the imbalance was too threatening to the executive in charge. He wasn’t concerned with whole-being wisdom and the whole system – he was concerned about a bottom line. Period.
We reclaim our whole-being wisdom when we pay attention to, listen to, track and map what we feel, sense, think, and know through the various channels of intelligence of our mind, body, heart and spirit wisdom.
All of which hold our history, fears, love, yearnings, and desire for evolution. Which is why it can feel contradictory or confusing at times.
Which often leaves me asking myself, how do I discern what’s wisdom or what’s wound from my history, conditioning and trauma?
Cultivating a relationship with our whole-being wisdom is the key ingredient that reunites us with our true power.
getting acquainted with our CHANNELS OF WHOLE-BEING WISDOM
There are reservoirs of sophisticated wisdom that live within each one of us. This include our cognitive intellect, body sensations, emotional intelligence, intuition, erotic intelligence, heart guidance, gut feelings, and information that unexpectedly arises from a non-linear knowing.
How do we locate these multidimensional channels of wisdom?
Let’s look at this through a metaphor. In the cockpit of an airplane, one prominent feature is the steering wheel. If we rely exclusively on this singular feature to track changing conditions and assess potential threats, then we’re flying partially blind. We need the array of instruments in the cockpit to measure altitude, radar systems, temperature gauges and so on.
We each have an internal cockpit as well. If we’re solely focused on our cognitive thinking as the steering wheel to navigate our flight, then we may miss the incoming data from other channels of wisdom that are relevant for our journey.
Let’s explore these channels of wisdom and how we can access them:
Mind Intelligence — When we become intimate with our minds, we come into an honest relationship with our operating system. Developing an inner witness to build our self-awareness is the first step towards recognizing, dis-identifying, and interrupting the disempowering habits, beliefs, and behaviors the imprison through fear, control, or paralysis.
Somatic Intelligence— Our body wisdom is powerful. It’s the vessel that channels and directs the life force flowing through us; the home from which we experience life. The body is a potent messenger that delivers information about our internal conflicts and deeper desires. It tracks our boundaries and gathers information through movement, sounds, touch, smells, visuals cues, and so much more. It holds our repressed memories, emotions, and beliefs. Since unresolved trauma and emotional pains often manifest as disease, chronic illness, and a variety of physical complications, it’s helpful to befriend and listen to what our body is holding, as well as what is needed to heal and release old burdens.
Heart Intelligence — Our heart is filled with hormones that release when we feel love, gratitude, and connection. Our connection to the heart helps us regulate states of activation and fear, as well as express our passion and love, and metabolize our grief and heartbreaks. Heart intelligence often can sense and feel things long before they become known to the mind. The heart is our invisible eyes of clarity and inner knowing without conceptual thinking.
Spirit Intelligence — Our spirit is an expression of our expanded Self, which includes and also expands beyond the boundaries of ego patterns, personality traits, achievements, social, economic class, and other self-identifying markers. Our spirit is the inner compass that guides us towards remembering and prioritizing our soul’s destiny. It teaches us through life’s lessons and guides us towards the mastery of various human experiences.
Emotional Intelligence — The ability to welcome emotions as guides for clues and information about undercurrents that are unspoken in ourselves or in the group. Such as, boundaries being crossed, contributions being dismissed, needs overlooked, dissonance in the group and other pointers to places of stuck-ness or shadows in group dynamics.
Erotic Intelligence — Our erotic intelligence is our life force and creative power. Erotic energy is best known for its expression through sexuality. However, it's not limited to just this domain. It expands beyond and includes the fullness of our presence, life-force, vitality, and inspiration to create. The essence of erotic intelligence is based on desire and a visionary impulse. The biological drive to procreate is only one of its infinite forms of catalyzing new life. It is also known to be a primary driver of business endeavors, artistic expressions, or other forms of innovation that foster connection, joy, pleasure, and delight.
Our whole-being wisdom is an apothecary of integrative medicine that we can draw upon any time. Freeing our mind and body of limited and conditioned ways of being enables us to dial in and out from various antennas of intelligence and inner guidance.
It’s natural to feel paralyzed by states of fear at times. These are the moments to draw upon the practices and tools that help us regulate our nervous system.
If we’re operating from fear, it’s much harder to access expanded states of consciousness because we’re hyper focused on managing the threat with logic and reason, which isn’t always the most comprehensive approach.
There is no point in attempting to make a significant decision when we’re in a state of fear — unless our life is in danger — and we’ll do that without conscious thought anyway. Just another genius aspect of how we’re wired to survive.
Together and separately each channel of wisdom provides us with the essential ingredients to navigate states of fear, uncertainty, complexity and chaos.
“We are innovative and wisely wired creatures.
We have unique channels through which we access and express our inherent power and creative life force.
We are a powerhouse of energy, love, emotions, thoughts, sensations and primal reactivity.”
WE all have primal intelligence & whole-being wisdom
Living in a modern world has truncated daily connection to our primal intelligence. The increased use and speed of technology, responsibilities, busyness, and other modernized ways of life have dimmed the light on our subtle perceptions.
Many of us have been trained, through higher education, to sharpen and bolster our linear, logical and rational cognitive capabilities. This is undoubtedly valuable. But what about our body wisdom?
Accessing somatic intelligence requires slowing down, and sensing into subtle forms of information that serve to open and guide our minds and hearts.
Within each of us lives the infrastructure of sensibilities living within our primal somatic wisdom.
Indigenous people sustain an embodied connection with their primal wisdom by developing a relationship with their mind, body, and senses. They use their whole-being wisdom to deepen their spiritual connection to the love and life that exists in all of creation — plants, animals, stars, land, and one another.
Hunters call upon their senses of sight to track animal’s footprints and their migration signs. They listen for signposts of herds roaming, subtle sound changes from exuberant bird songs to staccato bird warnings. They rely upon the felt sense of vibrations underneath their bare feet to track animal movement. And, take note of the shifting temperatures of the soil as indicators of the directional passage of weather patterns and animal migration. Their sense of smell is amplified to attune to scents carried by a slight breeze. Similarly, those who are gathering fruits, plants, and herbs have built an internal repertoire of knowledge to assist in discerning poisonous plants from healing medicinal ones through smell, sight, touch, and taste.
Each member of the tribe is responsible for cultivating their sensate and whole-being wisdom. Each member is responsible for creating the internal conditions of a mind, free of discursive and distracting thoughts, in order to be present to the data they are gathering on multiple levels.
This generates a sharpness of one’s awareness which allows them to listen, track and commune with other forces of energies and information that is not conceptual or linear.
In addition to physical survival, whole-being wisdom is used to access spiritual guidance and support, which can manifest through dreams, prayer, spiritual vision and ritual. Indigenous tribes have been known to embrace all of life as spiritual. Life is a series of rituals and ceremonies to give thanks to the harvests of food, warmth, and shelter from the animals that they hunt and kill.
“When we are disconnected from our bodies and live primarily in our thoughts and habitual emotional patterns, we’re missing a reservoir of our wisdom that waits patiently for our attention”
Primal instincts — Our internal compass
Our primal selves know the truth. Our primal wisdom is the key ingredient that reunites us with our embodied power.
We often know, in our bodies, when truth is being twisted, concealed or unspoken.
Have you received a rational explanation that sounds legitimate on the surface, but your gut instinct communicates a sense of mistrust and doubt?
We know when someone is withholding something. Our body may respond with a warning of flight, fight, or freeze. When this happens, our sense of reality can become scrambled. Especially if we push back, or seek to clarify, which they respond to with shaming or blaming language in order to maintain their power and control. It can be confusing and stir self-doubt if they are persuasive enough. We may wonder, “Do I trust my instincts or do I trust their word?” or “Is this my wound or are they withholding and deceiving me to protect themselves or portray a certain image?”
When critical information is concealed from us, we feel it in our primal bodies. If this occurs and our feelings are dismissed or we are told “All is well,” we may experience rage, confusion, and cognitive dissonance. For example, in January 2020, the day after President Trump’s orders to assassinate Iranian General Qassem Soleimani was complete, he tweeted the statement “All is well.” I felt my body tighten, not from fear, but from the alienating nature of his flippant delivery, because it was clear to me, all was not well.
Our primal instincts can be developed into a refined discerning filter for manipulation and control-based messaging.
Our primal selves know the truth — can we slow down enough to listen?
“Wild Power: To take full ownership for our power through channels of wisdom beyond our rational, linear mind.”
The gifts of our full Embodiment
Disembodiment is a loss of direct contact with the fullness of our being, embodiment is the ability to embrace and discover the fullness of who we are. It’s the process of sharpening our mindfulness skills, attuning to our inner rhythms and tracking our reactive tendencies.
Embodiment is not a static state of being or final destination. It’s a dynamic sense of knowing and discovering ourselves, moment-to-moment. It’s a journey of paying attention to various streams on information rather than operating in compartmentalized ways.
Transitions and changes require us to stay alert, awake, and to invite in creative ways of relating to our life. These are the times when we’re often motivated to challenge what we’ve believed to be true and invite a more authentic way of being.
Einstein’s message returns with an arrow into the heart of this threshold:
“You cannot solve a problem from the same consciousness that created it. You must learn to see the world anew.”
SELF-INQUIRY:
Which channels of intelligence come easily to you? How do you access them?
Can you remember being in touch with these channels of intelligence as a child? (i.e curiosity, wonder, collaboration) What came natural to you then? Is it easy or difficult to access this now as an adult?
Is there a channel that you wish to turn up the volume on? If so, why?
Do you dare to make decisions based on your intuition, even if it goes against logic or popular opinion?
Wrapping it up: The three key antidotes to assist in the reclaiming of our Wild Power
Embracing your primal wiring — engaging your reactivity and defensiveness compassion and personal responsibility.
Befriending your shadows — The art of welcoming everything by integrating exiled or wounded parts of yourself home.
Reclaiming whole-being wisdom — developing a relationship with your sixth sense, somatic intelligence, intuition, heart wisdom and gut feelings.
How does this all tie into leadership?
I believe that reclaiming our Wild Power is a heroic journey of re-wilding and jailbreak. Those of you devoted to this path are the revolutionary leaders the world is waiting for.
Since most of us know what it’s like to remain contained and trapped in limiting beliefs, defensive patterns, unhealthy lifestyles and toxic relationships. What’s the alternative?
The process of evolution and liberation often requires us to let go of what is known and familiar. From here, the only place to go is into the unknown — which can be terrifying and threatening to our primal instincts.
Yet, despite the voices of fear, in the dark fertile ground of the mysterious unknown, we are never alone.
If you think you’ve failed because your life has fallen apart, I invite you to investigate more closely.
Perhaps the unwanted losses and deconstructions of your familiar and comfortable reality are not mistakes but the evolutionary rocket fuel for your evolution and integration.
When our habitual strategies and ways of operating no longer match who we are evolving into, it can be disorienting and terrifying. When we can no longer fill up our tanks in the ways that are familiar, we might fall into exhaustion, despair, or frantic attempts to fix and control what appears to be slipping out of our hands.
This blustery storm has the power to spiral us deep into the bones and marrow of examining all the ways we’ve been colluding and fueling our own suffering.
This level of engagement is the birthing of revolutionary leaders.
WHAT IS AN REvolutionary LEADER?
Revolutionary leaders are change agents of discipline, courage, fierce compassion, and embodied love.
If this is you, you willingly, fearfully, and with great devotion, free-fall into the unknown because the known and predictable paths established are no longer enough.
The initiations associated with the process of dismantling domestication can feel like a startling plunge into rock bottom. Down here, in the unknown, nothing that once made sense or stitched our life together is reliable. Simultaneously, we have no idea how to manage the rudderless process of who we are becoming.
The seams have burst and we have decisions to make. Do we evolve through the agency of our self-abiding power or do we become trapped by victim consciousness?
If we choose evolving then, in that moment, we wander into the wilderness of our own soul and power to shed old skins and re-discover the mystery of who we are. Not just once – but over and over again.
The path of revolutionary leadership is a heroic journey of reclaiming our inner authority and reconstituting the powers of self-awareness, self-compassion and learning to abide more in our self-abiding power than our personal conditioning.
“To re-wild is to remember an inherent trust in our basic goodness, despite our messy human wounds, vulnerabilities, and challenges.”
Embracing the Revolutionary Leadership Path
The revolutionary leadership path is an invitation to integrate and descend from our heads into our hearts, and into the ground of our being.
It’s a daily practice of embodying the fullest expression of who we are, which also includes the parts we feel most afraid to look at, welcome and embrace.
Revolutionary leadership is a heroic journey of re-wilding and jail break. It’s a sharp cutting away from outdated beliefs, behaviors and limited perceptions of reality that obscure our ability to access our whole-being wisdom and presence.
In my role as a corporate consultant, I work with leaders who are committed to transforming their cultures by addressing outdated power dynamics and finding ways to make it safe enough to transform any lingering toxic patterns that are suffocating the system.
I’ve partnered with hundreds of leaders and organizations who have prioritized creating safe environments for creativity and success as a key component to their organization’s long-term growth plan.
One of the key ingredients is to focus attention on the health of the system, which begins by educating each person about their reactive tendencies, followed by providing tools to help one another interrupt patterns of blame, gossip, triangulation, while refining the art of establishing clear expectations and accountability systems.
This process is most effective when the top leaders set the tone. Each revolutionary leader models their personal commitment to evolving their own self-awareness, and taking personal responsibility and ownership for their reactive tendencies in a conscious way.
SELF-INQUIRY:
Have you traded your own wildness to fit in? If so, how? What have you sacrificed of your true nature to belong?
Which conditioned beliefs about who you ‘should’ be to be lovable, worthy, or successful have stifled your sense of wholeness, passion, sovereignty and freedom?
What are the repeating ‘shoulds’ that keep you domesticated and un-wild?
How do you access the longings of your wild heart and relinquish the impulses to shrink and hold back?
Embracing it all: Individually and together
As embodied leaders, we learn how to interrupt fear-based thoughts and entrapping emotional patterns. We take ownership for the behaviors that cause separation and judgment. We embody healthy power and we practice communicating with authenticity and compassion.
The path of embodied leadership is a journey of re-wilding back into our most integrated self.
Re-wilding is process that helps us dismantle domestication and disembodiment by befriending our shadows, embracing our primal reactivity, and re-opening the door to our whole being wisdom.
We’re in a time of imperative nature. Resources are stretched. A time when reclaiming our internal radar system is a fundamental skill required for managing the chaos unfolding on our planet.
Perhaps, through accepting and exploring the full range of our experiences, we can authentically invite in a new world that includes and transcends any sense of separation.
Stay tuned for a more in-depth series of podcast interviews and articles on the topic in this gateway of domestication and disembodiment.
Your stories and questions are welcome here. If you prefer to send a question anonymously, you can do so via the form included on Ask Anne-Marie. Or chime in on Instagram, @anne.marie.marron.