What Is Embodied Leadership?
What is Embodied Leadership?
Within each of us lives a primal intensity, hunger, physicality, and power innate to our wild nature. Simultaneously, our grace, softness, and deep well of curiosity and patience are another aspect of our embodied self.
As embodied leaders, we recognize the intelligence of nature that lives within and outside of us as an unparalleled primordial source from which we access vitality, life force, the power of nurturing, and self-healing wisdom.
The embodied 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 practice of embodying the fullest expression of who we are.
The wisdom revealed through the process of embodied leadership is a heroic journey of re-wilding ourselves back home into our most undefended, compassionate, expansive and creative self.
Why now?
In a world driven by increasing complexity and speed come more commitments and demands on our time and energy, causing overwhelm, burn out, and disconnection from our inner knowing.
Counter to this lightning speed of "doing" and busyness, there abides a quiet presence of "being" within each one of us. When we connect with our inner stillness, our wisdom is revealed like the blazing sun.
The absence of space and momentary pauses can lead to high reactivity states driven by autopilot behaviors that are often threat-based, causing division rather than unifying and creative solutions.
Embodied leadership is about marrying the “doing” and the “being” parts of us so we can stay connected to ourselves and others, rather than operate primarily from autopilot or reactivity.
A heroic journey of re-wilding & jail break
When a leader starts to feel the confinement of their cage, they begin to suffocate in the odor of stale air built up by habitual ways of being.
Filling up their tank no longer works and they become exhausted by their current strategies for managing stress. The time has come wander into the wilderness to shed old skin and discover the mysteries of who they are.
Some common prompts that push the river of change and introspection are:
working hard but feeling unfulfilled
achieving all they set out to achieve and still feeling restless
intimate relationships falling apart
chronic physical pain or accelerating health issues
addictions to work, substances, busyness increases with only short-term reprieve
reactive tendencies of needing to over-control, high emotional swings and high anxiety causing sleepless nights or periods of isolation, rage, or feeling stuck ‘going through the motions’
no longer feels satisfying to hide behind the ‘victim’ perspective of “it’s the world's fault,” feeling a visceral call to self-transformation
discovering the spiritual path has become another layer of protection from feeling vulnerable
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 practice communicating with authenticity and compassion.
Together, we birth a new world that includes our mind, heart, and full embodied intelligence. We break out of the confined boxes, open our hearts, rediscover our wild nature and we use this intelligence to create more harmony both inside and out.
What is embodied power?
Power is energy. We power our electrical grids through a variety of energy sources such as fossil fuels, wind, water, plants and the sun. Similarly, our life force and presence is our power.
Personal power is a mysterious energetic force. Our lives are animated through our connection to our inner source (also referred to as presence, God, the mystery, divine nature, higher self).
Our capacity to express our embodied power is largely influenced by our belief system, familial and cultural conditioning, and core wounds. We express our personal power through our beliefs, behaviors, emotions, body language, personality style, spiritual connection and perceptions about reality. We communicate our power through our reactions and responsiveness to states of fear and love.
Power can be expressed in integrated or un-integrated ways. Integrated power, or embodied power, is the fullest expression of our essence — including our heart, intellect, gut feelings, intuition, body sensations, presence, passion and sense of soulful purpose. Integrated power grants us access to our unbridled life force, fueling the creativity and intimacy that feed us on the deepest levels.
When we place our power outside ourselves, and give power away, we deplete our energy reserves and resiliency bank. Common ways we leak energy and power is through a lack of boundary setting, habitual patterns of compliance, excessive busyness (with no space to refuel) or blaming externally for our feelings of powerlessness. The results are depletion, reactivity, resentment and helplessness. Giving power away draws upon our primal energy. This is why managing our energy consciously, through the art of boundary-setting, is essential.
Power is intimately connected to our life force and energy levels
When we’re in our power, we set boundaries to support our vitality. We practice the art of self-trust. We’re in touch with our body wisdom, and we make choices that align with our personal values. We learn to honor our authentic needs, moment-to-moment.
We practice saying no when we are aware that saying yes would override our ability to be present or true to our values and needs.
We courageously say yes when a knowing in our heart calls us into action, despite our fear of the unknown or the losses we may incur as we honor our yes.
Understanding the ways in which we generate, express, deplete and replenish our power is a life-changing journey to the heart of who we are. Each one of us is an artist, a storyteller, and a curator of our life. We hold the potential to express our authentic selves and serve our unique medicine to the world.
As we traverse our life’s initiations, we can become empowered and further integrated each time we observe the patterns and triggers give rise to states of:
fear over love
separation over connection
mistrust over trust
exclusion over inclusion
self-aggression over self-acceptance
reactivity over curiosity
control over surrendering trust
over-giving to others over self-care
containment over self-expression
Power in relationships
There are three categories of relationship:
Personal power — in relationship to ourselves
Interpersonal power — in relationship with others
Collective power — in relationship to a larger whole or system
To read more on power dynamics associated with each of these categories, click here.
Understanding our cultural inheritance
We are wild creatures in a world that is often seeking to tame, shame and box us in. Our “cultural norms” have created order and control by exiling aspects of our primal nature and wildness.
This suppression and oppression has yielded a diminished trust in our own intuition and a heavy reliance on logic and reason. Relying on our intellect as our sole channel of wisdom has cut us off from the multi-dimensional nature of our brilliant primal power.
We’ve inherited a collective story of fear, judgments and shame that limit our potential. We’ve lost connection to an inherent trust that when we surrender, rest, and listen, the flow of all things will carry us.
We cut, tear and shred the boxes that confine and suffocate us, which often live primarily on the inside now with reinforcing messages from our culture and societal norms.
Learn more about this topic in my article, What Is Domestication?
The subconscious drives 80-90% of our behavior
80-90% of what we believe, say and feel is subconscious, which means that without further investigation, our lives are run on autopilot.
Our operating systems are organized like icebergs.
The tip above the waterline represents our conscious awareness, which equals 10-20%. Below the waterline is our subconscious awareness, which equals 80-90%.
How do we become more aware of what's beneath the waterline?
By becoming scuba divers and actively studying the subconscious material that drives the majority of how we operate in life.
Areas of study to grow more aware & integrated:
A few common areas to study for quick insights and growth opportunities are how we relate to:
INNER CRITIC AND SHAME PATTERNS
DIFFERENCES WITH OTHERS
Do we judge and diminish our experience when it differs from others? Or do we judge other people for thinking, believing and doing things differently than us?
VULNERABILITY
Do we allow ourselves to be vulnerable or do we withhold vulnerability? How do we relate to others being vulnerable or withholding their vulnerability from us?
NEEDS
Do we suppress our needs or do we reach out for them to be met in a desperate way?
BOUNDARIES
Do we set clear boundaries? Or do we expect people to know what we need and become resentful when they don't read our mind or behave in the way we desire?
NAVIGATING CONFLICT
How do we relate to conflict? Do we stir it up, withdraw, blame, gossip, etc?
JUDGMENT
Do we judge ourselves or others for judging? Do we know the difference between judgment and discernment?
MENTAL TRAPPINGS SUCH AS
Comparison (I’m better than/I'm less than)
Judgment (I should/they should)
Disappointment (collapsing and withdrawing into "I'll never have what I want," or puffing up into "I will force what I want to happen no matter the impact on others.")
Belief systems are electrical patterns
Our subconscious patterns are called superhighways (neural pathways).
They’re created to efficiently process the 4 million bits of data we download per second through our mind, sensations, emotions and body.
Superhighways are the foundation of our belief systems and hold our perspective about who we are, how the world operates, what we can and cannot expect from ourselves and the world.
Even as adults, we continue to perceive the world through the lens of our early conditioning and the blueprint of beliefs we inherited.
We react to the threats that have burrowed into our psyche, which, un-examined, run our present life and the ways we respond to every experience along the way.
We can rewire our brain
With self-awareness, courage, repetition and compassion we can update and rewire our brains to match more accurately the reality we want to live in rather than the one we inherited.
Embodied leadership in action: The courage to go first
Among this pack of embodied leaders are the courageous ones who are willing to take the lead and acknowledge, study and bring more conscious awareness and compassion towards the powerful, brilliant, wild, and reactive natures that lives within each one of us.
1. COURAGE AND HUMILITY
As an embodied leader, we embrace being a messy human and practice self-acceptance for the ways in which we make mistakes, react when we wish we didn’t, and control when we want to let go.
With this self-acceptance in place, we can investigate the driving factors of our beliefs and behaviors, and make changes that are more aligned.
It takes courage and to be truthful about the distortion of our belief systems, reactive tendencies and to embrace the wide range of our emotional bandwidth and capacity.
In essence, it’s bold and powerful to come to a place where we stop fighting who we are, or pretend to be something we’re not, and rest into our essential, messy and wild nature.
2. SELF-AWARENESS AND COMPASSION
Our greatest impact as embodied leaders is to cultivate self-awareness and compassion so that we can welcome home all aspects of what it means to be a messy and wonderfully mysterious creature full of love, tenderness, hunger, and reactivity.
This requires apprenticing to pausing, slowing down and creating space in contrast to a world that accelerates with great velocity and fervor.
Interrupting the cultural addiction to busyness and exploring the power of what emerges when we are more present, moving more slowly, listening more deeply and accessing reservoirs of wisdom that include and transcend intellect and ration is a radical act of integrative leadership.
This is the discipline of the path of embodied leadership. It’s not for the faint of heart.
It’s for the change-makers who are committed to revealing wisdom rather than chasing solutions, firefighting and getting lost in repeating the same patterns over and over again.
3. SURRENDERING INTO THE UNKNOWN
Embodied leaders are revolutionary guides who walk into the unknown because the known and predictable paths established are no longer enough.
Embodied leaders trust multiple channels of wisdom beyond cognitive intellect and reason to include: body sensations, emotional guidance, intuition, heart guidance, gut feelings, and information that appear without thought or feeling.
What if we could open to our full potential beyond the limits of who we think we “should” be, and into who we are becoming?
To live into who we are becoming means we are surrendering into trusting that our inner wisdom is a reliable compass even when it’s in conflict with our mind.
To do so we must cultivate a precision in distinguishing between the voice of our inner wisdom and the one of fear, protection and scarcity.
And, then we must act boldly even if it feels like we’re jumping off a cliff into waters below that may not be deep enough for a soft fall.