There once was a village that was experiencing a horrible drought. In desperation the villagers sent for a holy woman in hopes that she could break the drought. When she arrived, she went into the small house that the villagers had provided and closed the door behind her. The holy woman sat in the house and began to meditate. The villagers paced back and forth outside the house impatiently waiting for her to come out and deal with the drought. After three days of this, the sky clouded up and a gentle but steady rain fell from the sky. When the holy woman emerged from the house the villagers asked how she had made this miracle happen. She looked at them and smiled. “When I arrived,” she said, “I realized that this place was out of harmony, and that I too was out of harmony. I went into the house and meditated for three days, until I was back in harmony. When I was in harmony, the place moved back into harmony. When the place was in harmony, the rains came.”
The holy woman understood the secret of alignment; we can align with the place and people around us, or pull the place into alignment with our own connection to Spirit. This is such a subtle process that most people do not realize that they are moving away from their sense of spirit and aligning with the surrounding emptiness until the inner sense of barrenness becomes overwhelming. Leaders who are driven by Spirit must face and embrace this challenge on a daily basis; how to remain connected to Spirit, and bring that connection to the out-of-harmony hallways that fill our academic and corporate worlds.
How did the hallways become so void of Spirit and soul? It would be easy to blame the tight budgets, increasing student needs and shifting policy or political demands. Education, however, has always meant doing a great deal for a great many with fewer resources than necessary. Perhaps it is not the situations we are dealing with, but our own exhaustion and resignation that pull us out of harmony and into a spiritual drought. We are too tired and defeated from decisions made in isolation from the issues. We are beaten down by the lack of trust and mutual respect that is inevitable when we lose the ability to honor ourselves while, at the same time, honoring the rights and needs of others. It is difficult to remember what brought us to academics in a time- and task-driven world where guidelines become rules and rules become theology.
Many people involved in education have forgotten the deeper meaning and purpose that called them to academia. A sense of calling is lost in the face of a frantic obsession with tasks and goals. We live in a world that defines even our favorite holy days in terms of tasks; shopping, buying, wrapping, addressing, mailing, opening, eating, and then collapsing. Educators had, at some point in their careers, a passion for a discipline as well as a passion for teaching and learning. Remembering and embracing this passionate engagement, this sense of wondrous curiosity, is one way to break the pattern of losing our individual self in the process of serving the needs of the many. True engagement will help us make the courageous choice of walking with spirit.
How do we use the love of our discipline and learning to remain in a state of spiritual harmony, and to feed our own souls? By utilizing the creative cycle of engagement, reflection, and expression. Engagement – a personal connection with our spiritual self, our passions, our values and ethics and our own process – is the first gateway we must pass through if we are to retain our own inner harmony. We can find this gateway by remembering how we first fell in love with a subject, a topic, an experience or a course. We can remember the journey of thought we took, as unknown concepts became part of our daily language. Re-immersing ourselves in the original excitement and passion engages us and enlivens our spirit.
Another passageway to engagement is found through being present in nature. Research has shown us that there is a true human need-for-nature (Pollack, 1999). Regular contact with nature (the mountains, parks, plants, ocean, etc.) makes humans physically and emotionally healthier (Pollack, 1999). Nature provides a mirror of our creative process. Erupting volcanoes are perfect reflections of the first step in any birth process; frightening and ferocious, yet beautiful. We see a history of stories and times and experiences in the layers of polished sandstone and red rocks in the American Southwest. The folded, faulted metamorphic rocks, at the ancient base of the Grand Canyon, represent our own transformational processes. We see rivers dammed, tunnels drilled through mountains and pavement covering the earth. Yet the rivers are still rivers; the mountains still mountains; and the layers of sandstone are still there beneath our feet. The earth teaches us that our form may change, that change might be forced upon us, but through it all we can hold on to our true essence.
In the creative cycle, engagement is followed in a natural way by a period of reflection. This is a process that teaches us courage (grace in the face of adversity) through self-examination of our values and beliefs. In order to make our work and our world sacred, we must have time for exercise, meditation, journaling, or prayer (expressing gratitude). All of these are ways of recognizing the sacred in our lives, and a willingness to be human. Spiritual leaders, just like everyone else, make mistakes when taking risks. Spiritual leaders learn that boundaries are healthy but difficult to set and hold. Spiritual leaders learn that being fully present enhances experiences and relationships, but is also frightening and therefore avoided. We are not our jobs, other people, or the places we work. Spiritual leaders learn not to look for themselves in those mirrors.
So, if we are not the empty echo of tasks and chores and titles, then who are we? The answer is found as we change our actions and processes. We find our true spiritual self when we slow down and make choices from our strengths, not our fears. We become more fully ourselves when we accept that paradox and contradictions are part of life – that we never had control over this creative chaos. We find our best self in a holistic world of creative options. Reflection leads to a clarification of what we are doing and why, and, more importantly, what we are committed to and why.
This process of creative reflection leads us, in a natural manner, to creative expression. This is the visible aspect of leadership, what we actually do. We use a language of ongoing regard (Kegan, 2001), not the language of judgment. We focus on building cultures of trust and integrity, putting justice into action. Bringing our best self to any leadership position requires knowing when to exit, when we are done. Perhaps the best measure of this is when we are no longer able to separate ourselves from the place, the good of the many, from the conviction of the one (ourselves). The two most powerful skills that this type of leader must posses are the courage to be held accountable for all actions and words and the courage to make difficult decisions. It is this willingness to stand up and face the more difficult aspects of leadership that allows a leader to build a sense of resonance in any organization.
This type of creative expression has been termed Transformational Leadership (Conger, 1994), though it might also be referred to as Ecology of Leadership, or Leading with Spirit. We become Shamans, walking with a foot in both worlds, bringing spirit into the empty places around us. It is this type of leadership that can bring human warmth and energy back to the barren hallways of our corporate and public institutions. Taking on the job of bringing a sense of spirit back to the empty hallways, however, can be an exhausting practice. How do we prepare ourselves for this personal journey of spirit? How do we retain the clarity and connection to our own well of emotional nourishment?
We can take time to honor our needs and ourselves. We can understand the nature of leadership demands and recognize that we will never please everyone. There is, in fact, a danger in trading respect for nice words and superficial friendship. The only safety comes from recognizing that chaos is creativity in action and that all forms are temporary. Our nets do not come from retirement plans or tenure, rather from the quality of relationships we have built with others. In the end safety and control are illusions; defenses we create against the unknown that allow us to feel, momentarily, that we are safe from the darkness of the unknown. It is easier to make decisions from fear than it is to stay open to adventure. It is easier to create shields of hierarchy than to be visible and vulnerable. There is no true leadership or connection to Spirit, however, if we make our choices from deep within our own fears. It is more powerful to ask ourselves what we would do if we were like the holy woman, aware of our ability and need to stay in harmony and alignment with spirit.
This is the challenge then; to be a Shaman, aware of how the places and tasks, people and obligations, commitments and goals, time schedules and rules tug on us, drain us, and pull us out of our internal sense of spiritual harmony, and yet bring spirit with us as we walk through the empty hallways of our world. If we take the time and energy to realign ourselves with spirit, if we find the courage and elegance to walk and work in that state of harmony, we will find that our hallways are no longer empty, but are filled creative possibility and passion.
References
Conger, J.A., (ed.) 1994. Spirit at Work. Jossey-Bass Publishers. San Francisco, California.
Kegan, R. & Lahey, L. 2001. How the way we talk can change the way we work. Jossey Bass Publishers. San Francisco, California
Pollack, J., 1999. The Need for Nature, Masters Thesis, University Northern Colorado.
Honoring
8 years ago
Posts
