Introduction: This manual is a map. You must walk the territory.
“The Great Wisdom Dwells Within The Body”
― Reginald A. Ray, The Awakening Body
If you follow this map and physically learn to walk the raw, real territory of this path, you will discover gifts in the form of skills.
The skills you learn from this practice will allow you to develop a lasting sense of purpose called your unshakable purpose. When you discover your unshakable purpose and commit to it, you open the door to consistently growing and excelling as an embodied leader in your life, work, and relationships.
Courageous people like you, who choose to follow this path and to perform these practices, show the world, your relationships, your communities, and your co-workers that this way of being is possible. You are a living, grounded embodiment of leadership.
Thank you for being here today. As you read this introduction and the following manual, I invite you to sense yourself on a threshold and read this text while feeling your breath filling your body.
On your next breath, go ahead and begin inhaling in your nose and out your mouth or in and out of your nose. As you begin to breathe softly and consciously while reading, go ahead and try an experiment.
On your next breath, go ahead and open to receive a single breath in whatever way feels natural to you. As you do this, notice how this simple practice of opening to receive the breath changes the quality of your physical experience felt in your body.
Feel into your body. Go ahead and try this exercise again while you turn on your feeling sense. Notice that this ability to sense and to feel is not “Thought”. The feeling sense is not thinking. You’ll learn later that what you are physically doing is called “interoception.” This is a neurological skill that you are learning to develop. This is the primary skill of embodied leadership and the doorway to accessing your potential.
You’ll learn more about this in lessons 1-4. What I want you to know is that developing this skill allows you to respond to and grow through challenges rather than getting stuck in leadership ~ S.O.S ~ stagnation, overwhelm, and stress.
So much of this work is simply a willingness to open up and to be with our real, raw experience as it can only be felt in our bodies. This simple exercise shows us how we are active participants in our experience. The state you are in while you consume this material has a major effect on your ability to receive the teachings. The reason why is not fantastic or mystical, but as you will learn in the following lessons, it is rooted in how your nervous system functions.
As we move forward in this embodied leadership training and physically practice together, we will be crossing the threshold of our thinking minds and learning to skillfully and masterfully drop into our bodies. This is a physical practice; it is not thinking. It can only be done in the present and done in your body. You can not feel something in the past or future, but you can be trained to work with the present experience of a past event or potential future event in the present.
This manual is a map describing a three-month seasonal process that we will move through together and alone. You will take with you awareness of this process and the somatic skills you develop along the way when you leave this training in six months.
In the next section of this introduction, I will review how the manual is organized and the purpose of Parts 1 and 2.
Before we start with the manual, I want to bring our attention to the most common challenge we all face while reading or beginning a training program like this. Sometimes, when this material is presented in writing and a 200+ page workbook, it inspires a part of us that has been trained to anxiously try hard to be a good student.
At its core this work is an allowing process, trying too hard creates tension and sends us into intellectualization or we desperately try to understand what we are reading. My invite to anyone consuming this material is to allow the act of reading this manual to be a relaxing and soothing practice. As we practice together, we will refer back to the manual so that you can make inspiring intellectual connections to what you have physically experienced by practicing.
My hope is that reading this manual will be an opportunity to practice befriending, attending to, and shaping your experience in a soothing and compassionate way. If this is how this process feels, I know this training will begin to plant and take root in your life.
When in doubt, just show up and practice the skills that will help you get into your body. The rest will fall into place as you learn to practice. This manual is here to help you set the view of the practice. You can refer back to it to place the work as it takes root.
It is my deepest honor to go on this journey with you. It brings me joy to share these practices, which have opened me to access the fullness and richness of my life, with you.
Congratulations to you for being here. Let’s cross the threshold together. Are you ready and willing to answer this call to adventure?
Who is embodied leadership training for?
This training is for leaders who want to become whole humans while connecting deeply with their life, work, and relationships.
This work is for real people with full lives. We come here from many different backgrounds. You are likely an accomplished professional with responsibilities and challenges that constantly call on you to grow.
In my experience, the people who are ready and capable of taking the responsibility required to do this work have spent the first half of their lives working hard to get their house in order. Then and only then can we begin the deeper work of transformation as embodied leaders.
We are all navigating a work and life culture filled with distractions and responsibilities, the pressures of full lives, bombarded with messages about how to live from overcoming stress, trauma, and burnout/numbout, how to grow in our career, and how to best improve our personal and professional relationships. It’s confusing and overwhelming, to say the least.
This training will show you that the answer to all these challenges is found, not by escaping these challenges, intellectualizing or understanding our challenges, or structuring a perfect scenario but by learning to get out of our heads and into our bodies. Any practice that is not at its core somatic, such as mindfulness, is only a respite or harbor in the stormy sea of life. This work will teach you skills to surf the waves, to swim when you need to and to be one with your life and world.
Connecting to the body is, in fact, the only way to find a lasting sense of peace. This training is for people who want to grow through the challenges and tests of their real, raw life by befriending and attending to their bodies and nervous systems. When a person is trained to perform these practices, they automatically gain access to their own inner wisdom and creative ability to respond to challenges.
The major problem we are all working with.
The major problem is that we’ve all been trained to live in our heads, and we “think” we can think our way out of our pain and protective patterns. The only way out is by learning to befriend and attend to what is happening inside our bodies.
We’ve been trained to live our lives in our minds and intellects, constantly ruminating, planning, strategizing, and trying our hardest to be happy, not depressed, or project some ideal state. This requires a ton of energy, and without training, most people are forced to give up or live in a box of ideas that become our way of seeing the world. But even if this is a beautiful movie, it’s still a movie; it’s not our real life.
This leads to constant anxiety, disconnection, and reactive protective patterns. Maintaining resilience and well-being while striving for growth is daunting. The overwhelming pressure of modern work and life is an unrelenting demand on our nervous systems, leading to overload. This leads to protective patterns, numbout, burnout, and traumas, resulting in leadership S.O.S.
I routinely hear leaders ask questions like, “I’ve tried everything! How do I balance all of it?” or “What can I focus on to truly grow and excel? There has to be a better way.”
The answer is found by learning real skills to get out of our heads and into our bodies. You’ll learn more about how the nervous system works and how this form of training will change your life in the following four supporting lessons/chapters. What you need to know now is that this path leads to the life we all want to experience and that this is not an exaggeration or mystical statement.
As a leader, facilitator, coach, and human, I intend to do my best to deliver these teachings in as grounded and direct a way as I can. This means when I write, I intend to do so in literal terms and to point or give directions that point to a direct experience or practice.
It is important to be clear; you will have your own experience, and any and all experiences are welcome here. Our community's intention is to create a brave space, a container for relating to and witnessing others' experiences and, in doing so, learning about our own.
When I use descriptive language or poetic prows, I am doing so to point to what can only be felt or experienced, not to define or to say that your experience must match.
When I facilitate or practice with you in real-time or via recording, I do so as a fellow human and leader. My intention is to be with you in your experience as best I can while constantly leaning into my practice to share and express my own experience as best I can.
This work is an act and practice of dual collaboration and opening, this is not dogma or my way of the highway, we co-create this space together. What you and other leaders bring to the space will be the content we get to work with, so my invite is to go deep, to be authentic about your experience, to speak from your own experience and not to speak for others, to take risks, when in doubt share you experience at the moment or the story in your head about an experience and leave intellectualization or interpretation for outside of our practice sessions or 1:1 reflections.
This manual outlines the three-month seasonal process we move through each season to practice embodied leadership.
This process was discovered and outlined by practicing with over 400 leaders for 25 training seasons in two groups of 12 leaders. We met every Wednesday and Thursday for 2 hours over 5 years, and we learned to witness, guide, and be with one another through real-life challenges. The result has been the most meaningful and productive work of my life and training that I am confident will enliven you, your work, and your relationships.
This three-month process is a natural process that developed out of doing this work. When we intentionally create a space in our lives to practice tools and skills to grow, we fall in sync with the seasons of our lives and work. As we documented this process and the embodied tools we used to grow, a process took shape.
This manual describes the 3-month process and the stages of embodied leadership training.
How is this manual organized?
This manual is organized into Part 1: Introduction and Part 2: Program.
Part 1: Introduction includes this introduction and chapters 1-4. Each chapter is a supporting lesson, including a written opening statement for a live and recorded training session covering a major building block of embodied leadership training.
These training sessions aim to create an intellectual framework or “view” of the physical practices we will experience and engage in together during the three-month process. We suggest reading and listening to these sessions three times over the first season of your practice to allow yourself to internalize and connect the concepts to your direct experience.
The main objective of part 1 is to discover the power of the body as “the” vehicle for lifelong transformation and growth and that your unshakable purpose is discovered when you perform these embodied leadership practices.
Part 2: The program includes the written and recorded opening statement as well as supporting material for each stage of the seasonal process. The process we move through is the map; what you experience, the challenges you bring to space, and the tools you discover to respond to what is happening in your life, work, and relationships are the territory.
Discovering and moving through this process is the practice of embodied leadership training, and the practice is your life as it is. This work is intimately connected to your raw, real life. You cannot do this work in your head. It is not an intellectual process, rather you will be training to use your mental capacity to mindfully guide your energy and attention out of your head and into your body where you will learn to craft stretches.
Anything we do in our heads will be either learning to conjure a past sensational experience in the present moment or to future pace and to craft a stretch to respond consciously to a future sensational event. We will do this work in the group and our 1:1 coaching. You can imagine this as a form of productive thinking practice that will allow you to see through the distortions of your anxious, protective, ruminating mind so you can learn to respond to challenges clearly from a grounded, responsive, creative internal locus of control that we will learn to define as accessing the qualities of embodied Self.
The stretches you will learn to craft are the keys to unlocking new behaviors and skills, which will, in turn, change the outcomes of your life, work, and relationships.
The following is an outline of the program, with a short description of each of the three-month-long phases and three-week-long steps within each phase.
For more descriptions and details go to Getting Started Pg. 22
Month 1: Purpose:
Week 1: Life and Leadership Assessment
Week 2: Return To Practice
Week 3: Finding Focus
Month 2: Power
Week 4: Embodied Stretch
Week 5: Uncovering Shadow
Week 6: Going Deep
Month 3: Presence
Week 7: Reflection & Review
Week 8: Integrity & Accountability
Week 9: Celebration, Appreciation & Commitment