The Zen Leader: From Coping to Transforming

Ginny WhitelawDefenses, Full-Length, Integral Life Practice, Integral Life Practice, Intrapersonal, Mind, Practice, Spirituality Leave a Comment

This Integral Life Practice module was lovingly produced for Integral Life members.

Become a member now for just $1 for the first 30 days, get access to hundreds of perspectives, practices, videos, and audio recordings, and support the global Integral Movement.

Start Your Integral Life

What does it mean to lead in disruptive times? To sense connection, seize opportunity, and serve people.

Some call it the 4th industrial revolution. Others call it the Age of Connection. Whatever you call it, the increasing speed, complexity, and uncertainty of this time is changing the workplace and challenging leaders like never before. Ordinary leadership development may make your ego more capable, but it is not up to the challenge of resolving your reactivity to forces outside of its control, or seeing beyond your ego altogether to the essential connectedness between us all.

Dr. Ginny Whitelaw offers a practice that explores Zen leadership, an authentic expression of the connected Self to serve people, create value and beauty in the world and take away fear. How does it do this? Zen training is physical, emphasizing mind-body-oneness and developing in particular, the hara (lower abdomen). Developing hara leads to greater centeredness, resilience, and felt sense of connectedness. Cultivating energy in this area is like fire in the belly, directly related to movement, action and courage. One way to think about the work of leaders is turning the energy of ideas into things that matter. Through Zen training that penetrates narrow self-interest and strengthens this vital link to hara, leaders are better able to sense what’s worth acting upon, seize opportunity, and serve people. We help leaders find this joy, which is the fullest expression of their gifts in the world.

How it works:

The Coping to Transformation ILP module will equip you with the first flip of the physical tools of Zen training that can help you develop a felt sense of connectedness to the bigger picture, seize the opportunities in challenges, and serve people, not as other-than-themselves, but as extensions of a Self without limits. Ginny’s teachings and practices will support you developing the courage, resilience and groundedness of hara (lower abdomen), find your voice, master energy, and reduce your fear. What mindfulness does for self-awareness, the physicality of Zen does for self-actualization: i.e., bringing desired futures into the actual present through oneself.

This Zen Leadership ILP module will help you with:

  • What needs to be added to leadership training in disruptive times.
  • What to do with the pressure caused by rapid change.
  • How pressure can lead to breakthroughs.
  • What is the promise of a Zen Leadership approach.
  • Moving from coping to transforming leadership experience.
  • First flip: Loosen the body, settling the breath.

Leave a Comment