“Ki-ai before Ma-ai” read the sign in the Zen dojo where I trained for years, meaning, “Energy is primary over form.” Rather than get stuck in or fooled by the appearance of things, this principle reminded us to sense their energetic underpinnings, such as clarity and intention. Similarly, systems theorist and co-founder of the Presencing Institute, Otto Scharmer, speaks to the importance of submerged social soil and roots, such as the quality of relationships, dialogue and collaboration, in conditioning the visible fruits of our collective life. This energetic realm that is behind, beneath or before the visible appearance of things is rich terrain for leaders, as it is from here that a future ready to happen can be sensed and the conditions for it manifesting can be cultivated.
Yet not all futures are created equal. Some manifested futures bring suffering and drag people down to their worst while others lift people up to greater consciousness and flourishing. The difference lies in whether leaders are operating from a felt sense of separation or connection. From a place of separation, destruction rules as evident in our present time where many things we took for granted or perhaps cherished—democratic institutions, human rights, global order—are being destroyed while fear and greed prevail. As Scharmer puts it, “Collectively we’re creating a future that nobody wants.” He cites three type of separation that fuel such destruction: self from nature, self from other and self from Self. It is the last one—closing our own divide, what Scharmer calls a spiritual divide—that holds the key to healing all divides and equips us as leaders to sense and create flourishing futures.
In their new book, Presencing—7 Practices for Transforming Self, Society and Business, Scharmer and Katrin Kaufer lay out practices that cultivate connection and islands of coherence, that is, the social soil from which higher order forms of society and business can emerge. These practices, such as becoming aware, co-sensing and co-creating, hinge on leaders being able to make a crucial flip from ego-centric awareness, which is conditioned by the past, to eco-centric awareness, which arises from outside one’s own bubble and is oriented toward the emerging future. In other words, the ego has to get out of the way. What makes this so difficult is that the ego has gradually consumed our sense of identity, building up decades of habits to get its need met, protect itself and keep us humming along. Getting it out of the way feels like death and it will put up a fight.
The good news is that the ego or what in Zen Leadership we call the “local self” is not the limit of who we are. The strong medicine of Zen and other mystical traditions can flip us into a state of experiencing our whole Self—a boundless, selfless Self that interpenetrates with all that is. As Omori Sogen Roshi expressed it, “The true human body is the entire universe.” While words never capture it, when people have this experience, eco-centric awareness, compassion and care for the whole picture are the natural result.
So, how might we approach closing the divide between local self and whole Self? In my Zen tradition we start with closing the divide between mind and body. Part of what keeps the ego’s game going is living in a head full of thoughts and thinking that’s who we are. But by training the body we change the conditions in which thought arises, opening us to an expansive sense of interbeing. As a part of and alongside Zen meditation, here are a few ways Zen Leadership closes the mind-body divide and equips us to sense and enact flourishing futures.
Hara Breathing
Breath is the great uniter of body and mind, and when we learn to regulate breath from deep in the lower abdomen—the hara—we enjoy the deepest, slowest breath possible. Learning to set the hara on the exhale, we find energy radiating through us. Cultivating this way of breathing calls for releasing and relaxing every pointless tension, every energetic block, from top to bottom. Every one of us finds we have work to do. For example, trauma or injury in our life has likely left its signature in the form of tension or blockage. Protecting our heart from breaking or aching puts tension into the chest area. The ego’s efforts to keep our act together puts tension into the solar plexus area, and so on.
These unconsciously held blockages create inner divides. They disrupt the smooth flow of energy and breath from head to hara. As we release them—ah-h-h-h—we get juicy biofeedback as breath and energy find more room to expand. This process heals inner divides and thaws the body. A tense body is hard, rigid and gets stuck in its form where ego-centric awareness is the only option. A relaxed body is soft, agile and can shape-shift into many possibilities as eco-centric awareness opens up to sense what is needed.
Coherence Among Three Centers
As we get the hang of hara breathing and release tension in the torso, the head, heart and hara come into relaxed communication with one another. Communication between head and heart has been well studied by the HeartMath Institute and they’ve identified a frequency (.1 Hz or every ten seconds) at which head and heart vibrations cohere. They’ve also developed an app that measures when one is in head-heart coherence. Objective measures match the subjective experience of feeling together and at ease when we’re coherent versus scattered and distracted when we’re not.
We can bring hara’s strength into this coherence as our breath rate drops to match a harmonic of the head-heart frequency, say, 2-3 breaths per minute. It’s as if we add the double bass of hara to our inner jazz trio and all three centers resonate together. As an island of inner coherence, we’re much better resourced to co-create outer islands of coherence.
Opening Our Senses
The alternative to living in a head full of thoughts, which puts us in our ego bubble of separation, is to be here, now, alive through our senses. Our conscious awareness is a highly filtered pipeline of available information. Moment by moment, we’re choosing what to pay attention to, what to ignore, how much to admit new input versus process (or perseverate on) stuff from the past. The more we attend to our senses, the more we open to eco-centric awareness and the more subtle signals can register in conscious awareness.
Supporting this increased sensitivity is the thawing of the body. In order to sense something, some part of us has to physically vibrate with it. Our eyes, for example, vibrate with the frequencies of visible light. Bones in our ears and much of our body resonate with frequencies of sound. We also have many senses we don’t name, for example, picking up on the vibe of a relationship, reading a room or sensing the rhythm of nature. Our physical body is the antenna for all of these sensations; a relaxed, thawed body can pick up more subtle signals.
As a metaphor for this increased sensitivity, consider a pond of ice versus a pond of water. If we drop a bowling ball onto the ice, we might register a slight signal like a few radiating crack lines. Dropped onto the pond, the bowling ball will generate big radiating waves. If we now take a leaf and drop it on the ice pond, we don’t see any effect—there’s no resonance. But if the leaf is dropped on the water pond, we’ll see tiny radiating waves.
Our bodies operate similarly. If we’re like ice, we might only sense bowling ball-sized signals. But in a relaxed, coherent body, even subtle signals stir resonance. The more we pay attention, the more we pick up, just as when we attend closely to a conversation we notice more subtle voice inflections, body language and what’s beneath the spoken words.
Opening our senses is a trainable skill. From a resonance perspective, it tunes our body-as-antenna to pick up more frequencies and lower amplitudes. As those signals resonate in a coherent mind-body, we’re better able to turn that energy into things that matter.
Using The Four Energy Patterns
The conversion of energy into things that matter is supported by four energy patterns in the nervous system. These patterns not only inform our personality but let us feel how different physical movements connect to specific emotions, thought processes and behaviors. They reveal the mind-body-as-one in our own experience.
They also work together as a system to support the process of Presencing and, for that matter, all leadership. We might start, for example, from the expansive Visionary pattern, where we expand our senses to merge with the whole picture. Radiating out from the body, through the top of the head, we become like a huge, eco-centric satellite dish. A signal registers that we language into an idea that lights us up. Resonating strongly with an idea is a good sign that it’s ours to act on as it descends through our body. Activating the Organizer pattern centered at the solar plexus, we begin to process the idea, listening for what it wants to become, giving it form—our form. As the energy descends further into our hara, we enter the Collaborator pattern and feel the rhythm and timing of this idea and ways to engage others in it. At the base of the hara, the root from which we push with intensity, we enter the Driver pattern to act with clarity and determination. But we don’t want to get stuck here, rather we move freely through all four energies as they serve the idea. Coming from connection, what we’re enacting is a flourishing future.
Closing the mind-body divide is essential to closing all divides, that is, seeing through the illusion of separation and making the flip from local self to whole Self. In that process we become more like water less like ice. The principle of “Ki-ai before Ma-ai” becomes our own felt experience as we play the in primacy of energy before it solidifies into form. And even our own form, our local self that thought it was separate and tried to run the show, finds its joy, ease and purpose as the manifesting instrument of our whole Self.
Closing the great divides and functioning from connection matters. Reflecting on our present time, Scharmer poses the poignant question: “Given all that hangs in the balance, what if this is the moment we were born for?” The more we see through a seemingly separate self to our connected whole Self, the more we sense exactly how we can play in the energies of this moment and serve life. Let’s get to work.