Leadership and power has been a passion of mine since I was young. Not because I felt inspired by the leaders and their use of power, but because I felt disillusioned. I knew there had to be another way of engaging with power dynamics that was based on connection, inclusion, and respect, rather than reactivity, control, and self-appointed ownership.
Early in my career as a business consultant in Chicago, I saw first hand how much drama, pain and injury was created in the systems where untrained minds and leaders reigned. I felt like I was dying inside, trapped in these systems.
I didn’t realize until later that I was actually also trapped in my own untrained mind and disconnection from my body and being. I primarily oriented towards the world through my fears and the strategies I developed to control my fears, protect my vulnerability, and avoid uncertainty. I looked externally for recognition of my value, rather than building a foundation of knowing my essential Self from the inside out.
I took a month-long leave of absence to dodge the skid marks of burn out and went into retreat.
By the time I returned to the city and my corporate life, my whole life began to reinvent itself for me. I didn't have to figure anything out. I just had to follow the next most obvious step of leaving my career, home, and community to follow this unknown call.
It required me to make incredibly scary and courageous choices to leave everything I knew, and nose-dive into the unknown. I rented my home and moved from Chicago to Boulder, Colorado to slow down, connect with nature, train my mind and make contact with my sense of self beyond all of my roles and self-images.
“It required me to make incredibly scary and courageous choices to leave everything I knew and nose-dive into the unknown.”
A mysterious illness and initiation
Within months, I fell into a mysterious illness that lasted for over 6 years. Excessive medical tests continued to leave me without a diagnosis or prescribed pathway of healing.
I had to surrender, which was one of the most excruciating and disorienting times of my life. I had no answers. I felt broken. I had no way to fix it. I felt isolated and alone as I watched my colleagues and friends advance in their careers and start having families.
I moved to the mountains of Santa Cruz and dove even more deeply into my meditation practice, studied various mind-body modalities and I became my own science experiment by studying human suffering patterns through my direct experience.
I wouldn’t have sought out a situation in which I chose to study the dynamics of human suffering through my own mysterious illness and deconstruction of my egoic identifications. The invitation to break down the ways I was keeping myself a prisoner with an untrained mind and survival-based strategies of fear and shame was true liberation. The fruition is that I am present and truthful with myself about my immediate experiences and my reactions of grasping or aversion towards them.
I received gifts from the land where I lived. The wild creatures that roamed the property, and the spirits of this sacred land, fiercely and gently taught me the ways of the shaman.
I lived off of my savings focusing exclusively on deconstructing layer after layer of culturally inherited ideas of who I was, who I needed to be, and the life I thought I was supposed to be living.
I sat in silent meditation retreats multiple times a year with a spiritual teacher, and apprenticed to learning what was beyond the noise, fear, and controlling patterns of the mind. I didn’t want the isolation or days in excruciating pain lying in bed alone. Yet, it was what was before me, day after day, month after month.
Finally, I accepted this hand I’d been dealt and went even deeper. This ‘obstacle’ became one of my greatest initiations. I received the most precious gift of discovering a path to my authentic life; a reunion with space, presence of being and surrender. This was the pathway to greater wisdom, peace and compassion for myself and all of life.
“The invitation to break down the ways I was keeping myself a prisoner with an untrained mind and survival-based strategies of fear and shame was true liberation.”
Integrating: Returning from the cave
After years of this deep immersion into the silence, mind-body training, and nature, I reemerged with a desire to help others see beyond the matrix of fear-based suffering and to remember that beyond all the ego patterns of mind and body we are Love.
Since that time, I’ve continued to integrate those long hours of meditation and silence into how I move in the world every day, including my reentry into the corporate environment professionally as a consultant and coach.
My life is a moving meditation with the intention of being present, witnessing my mind and emotional patterns, exploring power dynamics and what drives them, and welcoming all part of myself (the gifts and the shadows).
Every day I explore:
What are my reactive triggers and how do I know they are here?
How present can I be with my own emotions, thoughts and mental patterns that create disconnection from myself and others?
In essence, I apprentice to the wild, passionate and reactive nature of this human design to honor the gifts of this primal animal within.
Along my path, I have also deepened into the study of power dynamics, working directly with embracing my own shadows, which I define as areas in myself or others that I disapprove of or judge. In essence, ways that I still create separation and disconnection.
I continue to scour for each nuanced place inside where I carry shame or withhold love, power, beauty and presence.