Contemplative Leadership
About This Site
This blog is a compilation of experience, investigation, searching for meaning
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This website grew out of a colleague suggesting some of our conversations might be appreciated by others - those walking their own paths as well as those standing at the window.
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It’s about bringing action to our innate abilities for leadership and creativity. Sharing my own searching and learning through words and images, I hope to offer encouragement to others along their own path. The messages and images of the site are grounded in a contemplative practice, which simply is being fully present—in heart, mind, and body—to what is.
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Contemplation is a process of awakening, of habits of noticing, of experiencing ourselves as part of a larger whole, and accessing innate wisdom from within. It produces an awareness of the present and a response to the stirrings of the Universal within the human nature.
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Our society trains us on how to be rational, how to be part of a community, to live in practical and largely self-beneficial ways. These skills are important for our survival in our day-to-day navigating of life and achieving goals – they are tactical goals as Jan Birchfield, author of Silent Leader calls them. They are important for having community, organization and structure, and we would not be able to survive without them.
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Our society, though, largely leaves out of our education – even is unaware of –our connection with our inner being and the intelligence of the earth, parts which unites us with the all. These are connection we access through a contemplative mind. Birchfield elaborates:
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When our mind becomes still, and are no longer clouded by inner obscuration, we become like a reflective pool, mirroring the world around us. Thus, we have greater clarity in all that we do - in our ability to see others more objectively and with greater compassion, to comprehend a broader point of view, to recognize patterns, to receive connections between seemingly despair and bodies of information, and to recognize the trajectory of the future that arises from where we stand. Again, the core of the work leadership development in this context is working through inner obscuration, including turbulent emotions and habits.
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We arrive then at a place of not only of confidence, but also generosity, compassion, empathy, tolerance, constant learning, patience and importantly innate wisdom.
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Sharing my search and learning through words and images, I hope to be able to help others along their own path.
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To recognize that God, the Universal Source, The One …is loving you into existence moment by moment