“So… as human beings, how do we embody spirit?”
a dear friend and mentor asked a group of us this morning, as we gathered to reflect on the intersection of leadership, AI and the sacred.
I know this isn’t her first rodeo – that her question came not from ignorance or innocent curiosity, but from a longing to make sense of experiences she had been having for years. So I tried to hold my breath, awaiting the wisdom she was about to share.
But my own answer came back loud, clear… and resonant, as I spoke it audibly with a fractured voice…
We break.
The emotion rose in my chest without warning,
and I knew it was true.
- We fall in love… only to have our hearts broken open by the joy and the pain of profound human connection.
- We surrender control of our bodies and let our animal instincts take over as we slide through the gateway of giving birth.
- We surrender our minds, our egos, or both, as we open to higher states of consciousness assisted by our psychedelic plant medicine family.
- We break the rules of our own culture, values, or self-imposed boxes when, driven by a calling, we risk taking actions that like feel inevitable, unexplainable steps on the path appearing underneath our feet.
- We embrace the fragility of our own human bodies, as we allow ourselves to be taken beyond the known as we enter the portal of death.
In the liminal spaces we discover not only what it means to access god – power, spirit, consciousness, spirit –
– but also, what it means to be human.
What started out as a discussion on artificial intelligence and purpose driven leadership had opened into a deep well of feeling. For most of us, the proximity of emotion – of grief, of awe, of fear, of inspiration… is near at hand.
More often that we’d like to admit. Closer than is comfortable.
Yet what we value – speed, efficiency, orderliness, predictability, perfection, cognitive understanding – keeps the sea of feeling at bay. Just barley…. just at arms’ length.
Said the author James Joyce, “he lived a short distance from his body…” Sounds funny. But isn’t it so?
Don’t we prefer the safety that comes with the numbness of emotionless boundary?
Today I ask myself one… more… time…
at what cost?
I am writing this note on from seat 7F on an unplanned JetBlue flight to Boston, where a dear friend is now living the last few days of her life.
We are the same age. She knows me differently than most people – a secret keeper of parts of my story and my shadow that may go to the grave with both of us.
This will be the second time I get to say goodbye to a woman who is far too young to die. But then… she has always been a spiritual woman at heart. And maybe… just maybe… this breaking open – breaking away and breaking through – is exactly the right next step for the grand prayer that is her life.
I love you my dear friend. And I thank you, for reminding me how to live –
In relationship with the sacred.
In relationship with my own humanity.
In relationship with the power of our creation,
and the importance of a precious human life.
“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”- Mary Oliver
A few weeks ago, I started to fall in love again… with a special human whose life, health and sanity has an unknown but limited shelf-life. It felt both poetic and ironic. What is this ridiculous attraction in me? To darkness. To risk. To uncertainty. I may or may not see them again. But it felt worth it to open. What else could I do?
A few weeks later, another sister unexpectedly lost the father of her son and love of her life. Coming and going. Going and coming. We break. And break again.
Is it crazy to risk?
Maybe.
But what else would we find ourselves doing… with our time? Our energy? Our hearts?
Perhaps, when you really think about it, everything else is just filler.
So what does this have to do with leadership, purpose, or AI?
Personally, I believe we are at a crossroads. Although the scale of our collective timeline is grander, nonetheless, like a short and fragile human life, we don’t have so very much time.
Another thousand years? A hundred? Twenty? Ten?
In the time that we do have, we have choices.
- To hold on and to resist.
- Or to allow and to break.
And while it may sound like there’s just one obvious choice – I sincerely wonder if we understand our own human operating systems well enough to make the right call.
What if to allow and to break is the only way through safely now?
Would we be willing to risk?
I don’t pretend to know exactly what that means. I can’t see the details of how it would look, or what would then manifest in our visible world.
What I can see and feel (with the benefit of nearly twenty years of somatic practice and forty-five living in a human body) is the impossibility of things staying “the same as they have been” forever – and the inevitability of a breaking point (or many) that comes from the build-up of an intensity of energy that needs to go somewhere, somehow.
And while I don’t disagree that “holding on and resisting” is one of the KEY leadership skills of our times,
I do disagree that it holds the seat of “the best” or “the only.”
And so, in the spirit of Practical Wisdom – the concept of phronesis, dating all the way back to the time of Aristotle – we must hone our ability (and willingness) as leaders to do the right thing, in the right way, at the right time.
And sometimes…
that means we will need to break.
With love,
