Big Presence: An Interview with Diane Hamilton http://integralleadershipreview.com/archives/2005_04/2005_04_hamilton.

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Diane Hamilton is a trainer for Integral Institute and a senior student of Zen meditation. She is also professional mediator, group facilitator, and trainer in conflict resolution.

She was the first Director of the Office of Alternative Dispute Resolution for the Utah Judiciary from 1994 -1999, where she established the original mediation programs in the state court system. She has extensive experience in facilitating large meetings, including public policy issues.

Diane received the Utah Council on Conflict Resolution Peacekeeper Award in 2001 and the Peter W. Billings Award for from the Utah State Bar for outstanding work in Dispute Resolution in 2003. She was a founding member of the Utah Council on Conflict Resolution, and serves of the Board of Trustees of Utah Dispute Resolution. Diane teaches mediation at the University of Utah Law School and Communications Institute. Diane has been a student of Zen for over 20 years. She has a Masters Degree in Contemplative Psychology from Naropa Institute, in Boulder, Colorado. She is a senior student of Genpo Merzel Roshi, Abbot of the Zen Center of Utah and serves as a facilitator of Big Mind, a process designed by Genpo Roshi to bring the insights of Zen meditation to western audiences. ^ - ^ Q: Diane, you were described as a student of Genpo Roshi and an authorized Big Mind process facilitator. I had never heard of Diane Hamilton and all of a sudden she shows up at the Integral Organizational Leadership Workshop in Colorado and does this extraordinary job of leading 50 plus people through Big Mind. From what I got from doing interviews with participants and from the evaluations at the end of the workshop, it was hugely impactful on everyone in the room. Rarely have I seen anything so powerful in terms of the responses people had to you and the process. Virtually everyone indicated that your presentation was the most powerful experience of the whole week. In that context that is very powerful and positive feedback. Now I find out that you are also doing the Integral Practice Seminar in Europe and elsewhere. Last spring I knew that the Integral Institute was recruiting trainers for some of the programs that theyve been developing. So, apparently, you ended up in that role, is that correct?
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A: Yes, thats right, for that particular seminar. Q: Today I would like to talk a little bit about the Integral Practice Seminar. I would like to talk also about some of the things that you had to say on Integral Naked about the importance of teachers having leadership training. Does that work for you? A: Yes. Q: Okay, so tell us a little bit about your background that has brought you into such a very interesting role in the Integral Institute. A: I think I had a somewhat ordinary upbringing. I was a child of the American West. I grew up riding horses in the mountains and playing basketball. I was Miss Rodeo Utah as a young woman. When I was about 17, I lost seven friends in a series of accidents over about a six month period. Four were killed in a plane, one was killed in a car, one was killed in a fight and one committed suicide. So going through this series of trauma took me into a deep existential search. I had been raised LDS Mormon. Mormonism is a faith based approach to spirituality, but my rational mind was really activated and curious. I was grappling with the fact that we die. Through a series of events I was introduced to Eastern philosophy, particularly Buddhism. I started studying Buddhism when I was in my early 20s. Then I made my way to the Naropa Institute, which is the only Buddhist university in the country. I started a degree program there when I was 24 and finished when I was 26. I received a Masters Degree in Buddhist psychology. From there I went into conflict resolution work for a number of years. I realized that I needed to deepen my meditation practice to be able to be with people more fully in environments when they are distressed, fighting, disagreeing and what not. I started studying Zen pretty intensively in about 1996 with Genpo Roshi. Ive been a strong Zen practitioner for about the last seven or eight years and came to the Big Mind process because Genpo Roshi found a way of using a Western psychological technique to eliciting the spiritual insights of the East. Q: Thats how you came to Big Mind. How did you connect with the Integral Institute? A: There was a fellow that Roshi and I worked with here in Salt Lake City: John Kesler. John has been a student of Integral and Ken Wilbers work for quite a long time. He is also a lawyer and does a lot of non-profit work. He came to a conference that I sponsored for mediators. We were using the Big Mind process to teach neutrality to mediators. John came to the session and had a really profound opening. John wanted Ken to see the Big Mind process. He set up a meeting between Ken Wilber and Genpo Roshi late in 2003. I traveled with Genpo Roshi to Kens in February of 2004. Ken asked Roshi and me to do some of the Big Mind sessions at the Integral Training Seminars. We started doing those and the people at Integral Institute saw that I also had mediation skills and facilitator skills, which they needed in the Integral Practice Seminar.

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When they asked me to teach for them, I was willing because the people at I-I are exceptional people and my spiritual practice has always been an Integral practice. It has always involved not only the spiritual dimension, but Ive worked a lot on interpersonal and psychological issues, and how to deal with emotional experiences in relationship to other people. I also have a physical practice at the gym and that kind of thing. Thus, it was a natural fit for me to do the Integral Practice Seminar for the Integral Institute. Q: Perhaps it would be useful to go into some more depth about Big Mind before we get into some of the other topics, because that has been such a strong introduction for you into the Integral community. A: Yes, its been a very powerful vehicle to come in on for sure. Q: So youve characterized it as a meeting between Western psychology and Eastern spiritual practice. Could you say more about some of the principals involved? A: One of the reasons that Ken Wilber really is a proponent of the Big Mind practice is that it addresses both psychological and spiritual dimensions of mind. Big Mind is a combination of Voice Dialogue, which was developed by Hal and Sidra Stone who are in the lineage of Carl Jung. They are interested in looking into the phenomenon of the self, if you will, of the individual identity. But they suspend a conventional approach to it as a kind of complex constellation of aspects that form one whole that we call Diane or we call the self or whatever. Through suspending and changing the orientation to the self and exploring the aware-ego processthat which makes up the identity of Diane, for examplewe can pull out different aspects of what we think of as the self and explore those aspects individually and in relationship to each other. As I understand it in voice dialogue, they always look at aspects of the self in pairs, so there may be the part of me, for example, the part of Diane that is interested in control and they would also identify that part of me thats prone to chaos. Q: I have a Gestalt background, so speaking from a perspective of a voice seems very much in harmony with that approach. What may be different here perhapsalthough it certainly emerges from a Gestalt therapy point of view, Fritz Pearls approachis the idea of pairing those voices with their opposites. In Gestalt we develop such dialogues. A: Its something that I think is unique to voice dialogue. They help you become aware of both the part of the self thats more primarily identified with and then that part of the self thats less identified with. They bring both of those two qualities into awareness and then work to find a balance or to at least have those two aspects form a relationship to one another. This is about bringing aspects of the self into consciousness and exploring those. Where it takes a Zen turn is when it moves beyond the traditional psychological self, beyond the self to where awareness transcends the individual identity and enters into awareness like Big Mind or Big Heart. There the identity actually expands to include much more than our usual conventional self. Does that make sense? Q: Absolutely. It seems like its another huge step forward in the sense that its about owning what is called the shadow. Rather than seeing the shadow as something to be overcome or something to be escaped from, the shadow is something to be integrated and owned.

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A: Yes, indeed. Those aspects of the self that we like to marginalize, ignore or even actively suppress are actually brought into view for whatever role they play. This unbiased willingness to relate to the whole self is really important. Q: Was there anything else other than geography that might have had a role in your having worked with Genpo Roshi? I guess one might say he is your Guru? A: Thats right, he is. Hes my teacher. Well, from a kind of a rational perspective it looks like geography, but from a Buddhist point of view we would probably say that hes my teacher because of karma. There are a lot of events that led to our working together. You might say that our relationship is a result of cause and effect. He showed up as my teacher and so, on one level, it seems ordinary. On another level, its quite uncanny to have the good fortune to be able to study with a Zen master who was right around the corner. Q: Ken is fond of pointing out how important it is to have a teacher is in ones developmental practice. Youve worked with your teacher now for how long? A: I worked with him for about seven years altogether. Ive worked with him pretty intensively for about three, ever since he and I started to work with Big Mind together. Q: One of the criticisms that we find of Kens work on the spiritual level is his support for certain teachers who have reputations for having authoritarian or oppressive approaches to working with people. It sounds like your experience with Genpo Roshi has been quite different from that. A: Yes, there are a couple of different aspects to that question. There is the whole issue about why a spiritual teacher becomes important at a certain stage of development. It became clear to me at one point that I really couldnt go deeper in my meditation without a guide. The analogy there is a coach. If I wanted to become a really skilled athlete or a really skilled musician, it wouldnt really occur to me to try to do that without the help of somebody who could see me more clearly and guide me in a certain way. So, on one level, thats what the relationship to the teacher is about. There is also a real deepening of your practice and deepening of your connection to the lineage. In Zen, for instance, and this is true in many spiritual traditions, that is what is carrying the teaching: the lineage of teachers that actually pass the tradition and the convention of the teaching from one living teacher to another. In other words, it isnt in the text. Its actually in the relationship that we find the vehicle for transmitting the teaching. Zen practice concerns itself with helping the student transcend the limit of the ordinary ego. We are extremely bound by how we are used to seeing and interacting in the world. The only way to move beyond that orientation is through the help of somebody else who can see you more clearly than you can see yourself, because that orientation is so deeply embedded in who you are. Q: How would you characterize the relationship with your teacher from the point of view of his practices as a guide, as a coach, as a teacher?

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A: Its relatively simple. To get back to your original question, Zen itself can be quite rigorous and quite authoritarian as a tradition. It derives from China through Japan and theres a strong austerity to Zen practice. In terms of authority, the way that it comes up is that I have a very good rapport with my teacher and we work very closely together. But when he sees my mind get caught by a view about how I think things should be or who I think I am or what it is I personally need to defend, he is very quick to challenge that. Im very quick to receive his challenges, because thats precisely the reason I entered into the relationship: to get his help in that way. He is somebody who has been through that process and whom I can trust. You cant give your authority away to just anybody. So you have to have a lot of discretion about whom you choose to give that spiritual authority to. Ive done that in relationship to Roshi. Q: In a very brief video on Integral Naked, the point I think you made is that people who are in teacher roles, albeit in spiritual traditions or other traditions, need to understand and be trained in leadership. Is that correct? A: Yes, I made that comment on a panel that we held at Kens. We were questioning the whole influence of integral practice on the practice of Buddhism. The point that I was making is that Buddhist practice helps us let go of our conventional notions of how things should be, cut through our conceptual thoughts and relate to the world as a field of experience in an integral way. One of the things that Ive observed is that within Buddhist organizations there is a tendency not to utilize conventional wisdom regarding leadership, organization, negotiation patterns and communication skills. My view about that is just like within medicine: you can be a profound Buddhist practitioner and be a much stronger healer because of that, but you still are going to utilize conventional methods of healing. You are still going to utilize emergency room techniques to heal a broken bone. The reliance on meditation and the realization of emptiness underlies our ability to work together in a more straightforward, conventional way. I was speaking for the need to join meditation practice with organizational skills, including leadership and teamwork skills, and not throw those out just because there is a deeper realization that were also working from. That was the perspective I was bringing. Q: How would you see that working? A: Let me see if I can explain how it comes up in my experience. Meditation practice frees us from our expectations of how things should be so that we dont get stuck in petty little worldviews. At the same time, we can lose our ground as an organization. What I mean by that is, for instance, we get thrown back on ourselves every time we set up an expectation that the organization is going to perform in a certain way, that certain deadlines are going to be met or we are attached to a whole range of conventional notions related to organizations and getting along with other people. Theres a really powerful practice within Buddhist practice to look into your own mind at those moments and notice what sort of idea youve become attached to about how things should be and how things should run. Very powerful! Very important! But organizations can start to be a little bit aimless in my view, if we dont also include the relative form side of leadership, negotiation and good communication skills. If every time I go to communicate with a colleague Im told that I need to work with my own mind, theres
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never that moment where as Ken would say, we now explore what happens in the we space. In other words, we privilege the I awareness a lot without necessarily looking at problems within the we space. Q: If we are going to talk about leadership from an integral point of view, then we have to include all four quadrants. A: Absolutely. Q: And youre suggesting the lower quadrants are also part of leadership. A: Absolutely. Q: Tell me a bit about what you mean by Leadership. A: In the context that I was speaking in, what I was thinking mainly about was the skill set that allows an organization to function and allows people to coalesce. For instance, in a Zen center or in an organization whose function it is to provide spiritual practice to others there needs to be somebody in a leadership position who has vision, provides direction, helps decision-making processes and knows how to build teamwork among the people within the organization. To the extent that leader provides those, that organization is going to increase its capacity to provide the service to others. To the extent that those qualities are missing and were relying mainly on the teachings themselves, then I feel like we diminish the capacity of the organization to actually be of service. Q: Let me push back just a little bit because theres a tendency when talking about leadershipdespite the admonition to attend to the collectiveto focus on what historically might be known as a heroic notion of leadership. There is one leader who does all those different functions that you named. Increasingly Im finding both in the academic world and elsewhere more and more attention to the notion of collective leadership or to leadership as an emergent property within organizations that is manifested by multiple individuals throughout the organization. Given that different slant on it, does that alter at all the way you think about leadership in the kinds of institutions youre interested in? A: Not terribly. I mean I think that leadership as an emergent property. Leadership that is flexible and moves among members of the organization is a more powerful leadership ultimately because its contained by the whole. But even one good leader makes all the difference in my view. Q: So you can never have enough, but A: Ill take a General Patton if thats Q: so you can never have enough, but one is great. A: Yes. When youve got a group of five or six, how wonderful. But just one is essential.

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Q: And what meaning am I to make of the fact that you cited a military leader in your example? A: I used to watch Patton when I was a kidthe movie with George C. Scott. Actually he had some flaws as a leader. But he did have quite a remarkable ability to see the big picture and to strategize how to move successfully. It takes a lot to hold the big picture. to help coalesce people behind a vision to get an organization to move fluidly and to help people to move fluidly. Theres nothing more frustrating than working within an organization where everybody has great intent, but theres no galvanizing presence. Leadership is either disbursed, confused or conflicted. I certainly see that as a mediator. Ive seen a lot of organizations like that, a lot of them. Q: So your mediation brings you into organizations, not just mediating between individuals. A: Absolutely. Ive done a lot of mediating within organizations and these issues related to leadership emerge pretty much all the time. Q: Could you give an example? A: I helped to facilitate a meeting of cardiologists who ran a practice together. There were somewhere between 10 and 12 doctors who participated in this practice. There was one de facto leader who had a very bold presence and who had great skill as a doctor. People intuitively followed him. But the way that the organization was governed was actually by consensus. What they had done unknowingly is create a group norm that required a unanimous vote in order to implement any initiative. They werent necessarily aware that they had done that. There were two levels of governance. One was the intuitive level where people spontaneously followed this one persons lead and then there was the next level, which was the more formalized level where they would take a vote. Without realizing it they had created a governance model that kept them from being able to make any decisions, because they could never reach a unanimous decision. But they didnt understand why they couldnt get anywhere. I think one person was able to block whatever decision they wanted to implement. Once I diagnosed that, we changed it and required a supermajority. They were able to move forward after that. Q: In other words, they had a conflict between the lower left and lower right quadrants. A: Perfect, yes. Q: Because the culture was saying one thing, but the formal system was saying something else. A: Precisely, and they just didnt know. They just didnt quite understand what had happened. Q: Behind leadership of any kind, whether its collective or individual, is the notion of the practices that make us capable of fulfilling leadership roles. Lets look at what the

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Integral Practice Seminars are about and how you see them supporting leadership. What is an integral practice workshop? A: It is a contemporary version of the spiritual retreat. A traditional retreat might focus a lot on meditation practice, maybe contemplative prayer and a lot of silence. The Integral Practice Seminar also picks up the importance of training the physical body, because increased physical capacity actually results in greater meditative capacity. Q: And in what tradition is the body trained? A: Well, Ken has basically landed on strength training because it most efficiently addresses the kind of activity that our bodies evolved to perform utilizing the main large muscle groups of the body. Q: Weights? A: Weightlifting, yes. Strength training is the most important kind of training for people to do. He said the research shows that you can take 10 years off your aging process by a engaging in a simple strength training program three times a week. That is what we teach in the Integral Practice Seminars. We also do a Kata or kind of training sequence in the morning that addresses the gross body, the subtle body and the causal body. Q: What is a Kata? A: The Kata is a routine, a form, which takes about an hour and a half to complete. It strengthens the intention behind our integral practicewhile addressing the fitness of the physical body through push ups, squats and strength training. It addresses the subtle body and the energy flows through aspects of the Kata that are like Tai Chi or Chi Gong. It addresses the causal body through about 30 minutes of meditation. The meditation also has a Big Mind component to it. So the Kata is a formal routine that you can practice each day to strengthen the body mind. Q: Addressing the physical side and then the spiritual side through meditation, right? Are there other practices that are in the workshop that are spiritually oriented? A: The spiritual component in the workshop is meditation practice and Big Mind. Q: So we have physical and spiritual, what else is part of the practice? A: We call them the Four Pillars of Integral Practice and theres physical, spiritual, emotional or psycho-dynamic and cognitive dimensions. In the psycho-dynamic realm, we teach whats called 3-2-1 shadow work. It is an approach that helps people work through psychological material that arises and usually takes the form of a disturbance in their emotional field. This disturbance is usually in the form of a negative habitual pattern, one that distracts attention from the present, and uses unnecessary energy, and is repetitive. The 3-2-1- of shadow work identifies one of these patterns, usually in the form of a negative (or a positive) projection or a disturbing figure in a dream that is causing a disturbance in the body-mind of the participant. We then teach people how to work with that material when it arises, so that it can be freed up and integrated.

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Spiritual practice does not necessarily address psychodynamic issues. In other words, you may be able to access very expanded states of awareness, and still get very hung up when addressing personal or interpersonal matters. One of the attempts of integral practice is to help address the distinction between the personal and transpersonal work, and to give people the tools to address the right aspect of the self that needs to be worked with. Q: What would be an example of an approach to working the shadow or the psychodynamic element? A: As I said, we call it the 3-2-1 of shadow work. We often have experiences in which aspects of the self are marginalized or repressed for some reason. In other words, some part of who we are is put out of awareness due to shame, anxiety, or trauma. That aspect of the self will often reappear in our awareness in the form of a projection. For example, I may have a dream in which there is a figure that is disturbing to me. Or perhaps there may be another person in the seminar who, for whatever reason, is bothering me. These projections or dream figures always show up in the third person, externalized position. The 3-2-1 of shadow work would begin by describing in full detail and in third person who that person or dream figure is and what exactly it is about them that is disturbing. This is what it looks like, this is how it sounds, this is what it tastes like and this is whats disturbing to me. From that process, we learn to move the projection into the second person, into the you and I (not it out there) or the we position so that it is now closer to our identity. We can now get to know this figure in a different way because we are willing to relate with it directly. For example, I have a problem with someone because they seem arrogant and overly-ambitious. Theres something about those qualities that I just dont like. Once Ive described that figure fully in a third person, then Im going to engage that figure or form a relationship to it by dialoging in my journal with him or her. Im actually bringing the figure in closer to my own identity. By doing that I am opening up to it and even learning by dialoging and asking questions about arrogance and ambition. The last stage would be to identify with the figure as me or move that figure into the first person position. I am going to imagine now that I am that person. I see that I am arrogant. Im overly ambitious and I am disturbing to others for these reasons. I may find some compassion in me regarding what it feels like to be this figure. I may also discover the positive side of those characteristics. Most importantly, the aspects of myself that have been exiled are re-integrated and the energy that has been holding them away is freed up. Thats how the 3-2-1 process works. Its related to Big Mind in that were trying to create a field whereby all aspects of the self can be owned and even valued, as opposed to split off and assigned a place in the world apart from the self. Q: I am really struck by your description in terms of how familiar it seems to someone whos worked with Gestalt and other practices from the human potential movement. A: Precisely, its basically the same process but with a different emphasis. Kens view is that the process of seeing a projection, making a relationship to a projection and then identifying fully with the projection is a streamlined approach to working with psychodynamic material. Its a tool that we can give in the workshop that people can actually take home and use.

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Q: Plus it accelerates the process of shifting from subject/object in Kegans sense. A: Yes, precisely. Q: What about the cognitive side of the workshop? Is it all just talking about integral theory? A: Within the Integral Practice Seminar it is about Integral theory and Integral practice. Kens presents his beautiful cognitive maps, which help to expand our awareness to include first, second and third person (singular and plural) perspectives on the world. In other words, he is challenging us to take the widest stance possible in our understanding. It is the cognitive compliment to the Big Mind meditation. One of the most important perspectives that his work provides, and one that is very important to this seminar, is the relationship of states of consciousness (which the East has thoroughly mapped) to stages of consciousness, (the view of which is brought to us via Western developmental psychology). While anyone can experience deeply expanded states of consciousness, consciousness evolves in a stage-like progression and it takes at least five years to move from one level to the next. This process can be accelerated through practices such as meditation. The emphasis of this seminar is really on Integral practice. We look at how to meditate regularly, build your physical capacity to support the meditation, clear your emotional obstacles to provide energy to your practice, and have the cognitive understanding to illuminate and make easier the process of growth. The seminar helps us design and develop this practice and do it in such a way that it actually isnt separate from our own life, so that life and practice are one thing. We also have modules on ethics, on art and on some other optional lines of development. The ethics module is actually really important. We want to give people a framework for really thinking about what constitutes an ethical life and what kinds of scenarios create dissonances in our ethical lives. To the extent that we have dissonances internally we actually create suffering for ourselves and for others. Often, we may not even be aware of them. In the seminar we are really trying to heighten the whole understanding of ethics and the way in which certain values we hold may conflict. We may end up in ethical dilemmas because certain types of values may be coming into conflict with each other. Were trying to help people have a more nuanced view of the ethical life, both from the left and also from the right hand side, particularly the lower right of the holon. When we think about fairness and systems, what justice means, how we create a rule that applies to everyone and what does it mean to break rules for yourself but expect other people to follow them, those kinds of questions are what makes up the ethics module. Q: Recently I read about someone asking the question, "When is it alright for me to violate a rule from a developmental perspective that has been established democratically within the system Im a part of?" A: Thats a really important ethical question, and one that has to be lived. Q: What about the art aspects of the Seminar?

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A: An aesthetic life is a ripening of a healthy integral practice. You become more sensitive to your surroundings, space, color, light and the fluidity of energy. We talk about the good, the true and the beautiful. Beauty starts to become a by-product of a life thats fully inhabited. We have some exercises to help people come into their senses and really appreciate and contribute to the beauty around us. Q: Are these exercises in which people observe or express artistically? A: Both. They get to observe and express from an artistic point of view and we give them a little bit of guidance to get past resistance and old artistic wounds. Q: But Im not an artist. A: Yes. The aesthetic process supports the impulse to the beautiful. Q: Theres another question I want to ask before connecting this back to leadership. One concern about Kens work is that he has a way of expressing the idea of development so that it seems to represent a blank slate point of view in terms of the development that people can achieve in their lifetimes. People are inherently capable, if they follow these practices, of moving to higher and higher stages. Yet when I hear Ken talk about his work, what I hear increasingly is that his work is focused on the few. It is focused on those who have the potential to manifest second tier types of perspectives, views, actions, that sort of thing. I wonder if, from a developmental point of view, you can comment on who are the people who can benefit from such workshops as this and what does that have to say about all those other folk out there who cant? A: Obviously, anybody who is attracted to this workshop in the first place would certainly benefit by participating. In a way, you could say Zen practice is all about realizing Buddha nature or your own perfection that already is. So from that perspective, there is nowhere to go and there is nothing to develop. But recognizing that can take an entire lifetime. We are all innately inherently perfect just as we are. To realize that and to manifest that is an entirely different thing. It can take a really long time to learn. I think that what Ken is trying to do with his work is to provide the most efficient means for people to make those realizations and to overcome the subtle ways in which we limit the beauty of our manifestation all the time. Lets say youre in a relationship to someone who has a particular belief of a certain kind. Lets imagine the loss of a spouse through a divorce. Lets say they were divorced and they had held the belief that to get divorced is really a bad thing. One can see from talking with them how just a little shift in that belief would unleash a ton of energy and free them up to actually be in their life and manifest more fully, not in spite of the loss, but in this case because of it. How can we help them make that shift? This is a movement to greater liberation and therefore, greater manifestation. The Big Mind process and these integral training seminars are designed to help us really start to see the ways in which we unconsciously limit our experience of reality all the time and how much greater and vaster and more beautiful and elegant reality is than that to which we make ourselves available.

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As far as those other people are concerned, they are just perfect the way they are. They are developing at the pace that theyre developing and I dont think we can answer the question why some people want to continue to push up against their limits and transcend those limitations while other people seem to be satisfied or not with the limitations in their lives. We dont need to answer the question about why people do or dont. We do need to address those people who are interested in continuing to grow and expand in ways that they didnt even know they could. Thats who the seminars are designed for. Heres an example: I had emailed a friend and told him that I was concerned that practicing Zen and practicing Integral might now work for me. In the email, I used a metaphor. I said, Well, theres an old saying: Chase two rabbits, and catch neither. And he wrote back and said, Sweetheart, first of all you dont need to chase anything. You just put peanut butter on your knees, kneel down and let the rabbits come to you. Now thats actually a really profound shift in the frame. All of a sudden I can realize that Im limiting. Im creating distress for myself by using a metaphor that I dont really even need to use, right? Q: Have youve given any thought to how these different streams of development are related to the practice of leadership in organizations and systems. Would it be helpful if we just took them one at a time and see what you have to say about it? A: Sure. Q: How about the spiritual? How is that related to the role of leadership in organizations? A: The spiritual manifests in a number of different ways. Lets say from a Zen perspective, the mind is free. The mind is utterly free to relate to whatever conditions arise, because its not attached to conventional views about how things should be or how things should get done. Its a field of creative opportunity. It also allows for outcomes or for direction that was sort of unprecedented. Theres the possibility for new vision as well. When somebody has cultivated a deep spiritual practice the values that emerge from that kind of practice are values that tend to create more of the same. Lets say the value of compassion for instance. The organization starts to have a quality of caring for itself, the whole and whatever its organized towards. There is some sense that actually benefits others. Compassion would be another byproduct of a spiritual leader and wisdom. I think its really great to think about certain leaders traditionally whove had highly developed spiritual roles. If you are in a leadership role, these spiritual qualities necessarily emerge or you just cant handle it. If you take somebody like Gandhi or Nelson Mandela, they penetrate to that ground of being and that heart of compassion in order to lead. Its not even possible to lead in those kinds of situations without spiritual integrity. I always think about when someone commented to Nelson Mandela that 30 years is a terribly long time to spend in prison. His response was, Its just the right amount of time to teach the guards to read. That comes from somebody who has deep spiritual awareness.

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Q: Your comment reminds me of a scene in Fahrenheit 9/11. George Bush is informed about the attacks on the towers and the pentagon and he just sat there and was stonefaced and unmoving for what seemed like an eternity. Perhaps an alternative interpretation to the one that I think Michael Murphy intended might be that Bush moved into a deep space within himself to try and come forth with the level of compassion that would allow him to respond in a Presidential way. A: Yes, I mean, I tend to be like you. I would have needed a couple of minutes to take in that news. Q: Well, that is a charitable description of what was on the screen, but if he hadnt waited before reacting, who knows what might have happened. A: I am well read in organizational development literature, but I do see people like Meg Wheatley and Peter Drucker arriving at spiritual realization. The more you explore it, its like science. You just come to these places where spiritual realization is ultimately the goal. Q: Theres an extraordinary growth in the literature on spirit and soul in the work place, so I think its an area thats being given a lot more attention. I dont know if you have any comment on this, but theres something kind of bubbling around for me in relation to this. I look at the version of spirit work that we see in fundamentalist religion and how that is being given a louder and louder voice in many, many parts of the world including our own country. A: Right. Q: And the voice of spirit in the workplace and soul in the workplace is being given a louder voice in the way that I just suggested, as well as by those who are attracted to things like the Integral Practice Seminar. It all feels like its connected and related in some way and it scares the hell out of me as a born again skeptic. Do you have any comment on that? A: I think that there is a depth of need and the world feels like its slipping out away from underneath us. I have two responses in relationship to that. One is to try to solidify it. We do that by solidifying our notions of God and the rules and codes of behavior. Then we can at least feel somewhat secure through doing that. Then we amass power to implement all of those rules that we come up with. Thats one approach. The other approach is to learn how to surf that kind of groundlessness: how to live with that and how to live in that open space. That can be a terrifying prospect for a lot of us. So, that attempt at form and grabbing a hold of something trustworthy and solid is one way to go about it. The other way to go about it is to let go. We just hope these two approaches can co-exist and that one doesnt try to impose that solidity and form on the other. But in a way, I think thats also a dynamic thats shown itself throughout human history. Theres always an impulse for one force to dominate and oppress another one. Q: And the physical side, the physical stream and leadership? The obvious is that by keeping oneself fit and in good health ones mind is fit and in good health as well, since there is no mind/body dichotomy.

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A: In a way, its sort of the most obvious. In fact, theyre all important, but the physical seems to be the most obvious. A healthy, relaxed, open body is just going to perform better. People are going to be more attracted to it. People are going to listen better. It seems the most straight-forward of the four, but for some of us, the hardest to implement. Q: And perhaps equally obvious, the whole psycho-dynamic piece in relation to leadership. A: The psycho-dynamic aspect tends to be underplayed a little bit because my guess is that for most of us, unless we have done a lot of psycho-dynamic work, theres still a tendency to see those disturbances that occur, not as emanations of our own mind or at least in part a relationship of our mind to the world, but as the world itself. Its a really strong developmental shift when a person starts to take responsibility for those disturbances and work on them from an upper-left perspective, as well as say a lower right perspective or a lower left. Does that make sense? Q: Im trying to make that connection to the lower right. Are you referring to something you said earlier? A: Well, just that we often relate to the world as an it. There may be a person or a set of people in the field that are causing this trouble, lets say Republicans for instance. Then we may get organized around just trying to overcome the Republican agenda, as opposed to picking up the part of us thats also Republicanthat cares about certain kinds of values, security, predictability, those kinds of thingsreally seeing those aspects in ourselves. Our next step would be to address what is in the field, because it changes our relationship to it, if we see it as part of us. We cant be as cavalier. We cant be as onesided. We ultimately cant be as violent. Q: Also, it frees us to focus on what we may have control over, which is ourselves. A: Yes. We dont have to go around in a big fight with the world all the time. Q: Or under the illusion that we can change others. A: Yes, that one. Q: What about the cognitive integral theory part? Why would leaders in organizations want or need to understand integral theory? A: Well, for a lot of different reasons. Integral theory can help us understand individuals. It can help us see an organization as a whole and understand its methodology. If we were to include all four quadrants in our thinking that would expand the functioning of the organization and the orientation of the organization. I do a lot of work for the Nature Conservancy and there are two people who are there studying integral theory. Lets take something specific like ecology. If we take a four quadrant view and are really working all four of those quadrants, as well as looking at levels of development, we can have a much more nuanced approach to how it is we do our business: how we work with government officials, how we work with land owners,
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how we create policy, how we build strength in our own organization. Its just a more expanded and whole approach to doing what it is we do, doing what it is we care about and what we value. Thats my view. Its been really helpful to me. Its explained a lot of things that I just couldnt make sense of before I encountered Ken Wilbers work. Q: Ethics seems fairly straight forward. What about art? Why would you include the aesthetic stream in understanding or developing leadership? A: Well, people are impacted by their aesthetic environments a lot. Its not coincidental that successful organizations generally have beautiful surroundings. Q: Well said. I have a client, an all-jazz radio station, record label and retail outlet. I have the wonderful opportunity to frequently attend small jazz concerts. When I say small, the room only holds 60 people and top name jazz artists come as well as local musicians. Its so wonderful to have that kind of artistic energy in my life. I know that kind of creativity. A: Absolutely, and beauty. Q: And beauty. Im also on the board of a classical chamber music organization. I enjoy music particularly to bring beauty into my life. I think most people that I have worked with have some dimension of the arts that they are connected to. A: My husband works in a law firm downtown. They remodeled recently. They did just a beautiful and very tasteful job on the remodel. Every time a client comes in they remark on how beautiful the environment is. Not only does the beauty get communicated, but there is a sense of relaxation and comfort that sets in. The clients feel like they will be taken care of, like theyre going to be okay. Q: Wonderful. Well, is there anything I havent asked you about you think I should have? A: I think the important thing for meand this comes from the Zen sideis the realization that we practice even though theres nothing to attain. We already are fully who we need to be. To hold that particular paradox is really important when it comes to integral practice. Otherwise, we get too much oriented towards some project that we can really never fulfill. Q: Thank you very much, Diane.

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Copyright 2001 - 2006, All Rights Reserved, Russ Volckmann