Re-Introducing Myself, Part 1

The Journey to Trauma Informed Contemplative Approaches to Growth

Stepping Out to Step Back In

“To grow is to become more than you have been, to transform loss into presence, and to allow what is false to fall away”— John O’Donohue

December 31, 2021, I stepped back from seven years of founding and directing the nonprofit The Hive: A Center for Contemplation, Art, and Action. The holidays wrapped up, and I packed my bags for three weeks in the UK, kicking off a two-month sabbatical that would stretch into an entire year of jubilee (aka unemployment).

I waited hours in line at the Northern Kentucky drive-through COVID testing center and was cleared for international flight. Arriving in London, I took the tube from Heathrow to Waterloo Station, boarded a train west to Dorchester and then to Dorset, to spend five days with the Franciscan monks and their intentional community at Hilfield Friary.

I had expected to rest, but I couldn’t stop moving. Seven years as a nonprofit founder/director—fundraising, marketing, community building, compounded by building out a first and second location, only to move online for years of COVID, and then back to office—had wound me up like a top. Thinking I was unwinding with a simple pull of the string, the real spinning had just begun, hopping from one stimuli to the next. I hiked through the English rights-of-ways, the forests, and old cemeteries. I borrowed guitars to write. I had long walks and conversations with pilgrims and monks. I picked out books from the library and started one, only to start another, and then another. Then I was back on the train to Bath, then a taxi to the Ammerdown Retreat Center in Radstock with the Soul of Leadership cohort, then on train again to Glastonbury to celebrate St. Bridget, then to Brixton, London to learn about UK civil rights leaders, then to the remote South Downs to “rest” walking kilometer after kilometer across the flint-stoned historic Ridgeway.

A Longing To Come Home

All along, the late John O’Donohue’s familiar words were pestering me “you’ve travelled too quickly over false ground and now your soul has come to take you back.” As an epicurean (enneagram 7), it takes quite a lot to reach the end of my false ground of planning and doing. The day before flying back to Cincinnati, I was alone on a friend’s rooftop garden in Camden, London, after a day of touring the stomping grounds of David Bowie and Amy Winehouse. As I was preparing to write about it all, my cigar lighter ran out, the laptop battery died, phone was dead, and I drank the last dram of Bushmills from my flask under the cold stars realizing that in the guise of “recovering” I’d actually been postponing the longing to come home, to myself, to my inner life.

Days before leaving on my trip I learned that neither of the new work contracts I’d expected for 2022 were coming through. I felt like I’d be secure in this upcoming season of job hunting if-only I could prepare more. I felt that stepping back from the Hive would be worth it, if-only I knew what my next project was. I felt I could be a reliable spiritual teacher, coach, husband, and dad, if-only I could get a few more personality flaws cleaned up and more experiences under my belt.

The Illusiveness of Healing

Somatic therapist and movement leader Prentis Hemphill connects these if-only conditioned behaviors to the disconnections we experience in life that freeze us into habituated loops. This frozen state is one way to describe being traumatized (caught in past). And the habit loop is one way to describe ego. No matter how small the past experiences might seem to us (big T or little T, trauma), our ego-attachments to “if-only” constrict our freedom and agency in the present. Even on sabbatical, I could observe the only-ifs doubling down, snow balling into even larger and larger reactions of overwhelm or numbing. This was my glimpse into the illusiveness of inner healing for leaders.

“Healing is the process, often lifelong, of restoring and reawakening the capacities for safety, belonging, and dignity on the other side of trauma… We either find safety or create it with who and what we have. Belonging is about bringing us back into the world around us, and back into relationships with others. Dignity is where we feel our worthiness again, where we are about the business of eradicating shame and expressing our agency and choicefulness.” —Prentis Hemphill¹

What is Your Lingering Question?

My work over my lifetime has always involved jumping before looking—moving from Charlotte, to Lynchburg, to Concord, to Spokane, to Decatur, to SW Atlanta, to Finneytown, to Northside Cincinnati. Writing songs just before playing on stage, finishing writing deadlines in the 11th hour, starting nonprofits, faith communities, and conferences, saying yes, or reaching for more, often before considering what has been here all along.

I remember a journaling question posed to me in my late 30s “what are you learning about your lingering question?” A few years into the practice, I realized my lingering question had been “Is there enough time for me to become who I am supposed to be in the world?” And on that London winter rooftop it occurred to me, something has already been becoming all these years. I am already home in this body. What if, out of love or reverence, I just allowed that to happen?

Poetry and Reflection

Around this same year of jubilee, the unemployed season between leading a non-profit and finding a groove as a coach, I resumed writing poems, fiction, and songs. One poem, On Seeking Employment, addresses this no-mans-land I found myself in, and the recovery of the treasure of my own life, even in the midst of darkness and uncertainty. Here’s the beginning of that poem (you can read the rest here):

There are nights in your travel
when there is no moon
and your phone is dead.
And you find yourself

alone alongside an empty road,
boots against cold foreign concrete,
and the fast bus is late or canceled.
The sides of your stomach close in
screaming, there is no path! …

—from On Seeking Employment

Awareness plus Connection

It’s hard to believe that it’s been three years since then! As I’ve slowed down, unpeeled layers, played, and connected with others, I’ve been rediscovering the treasure already buried in my very life: the rich experiences, encounters, and sacred connections I’ve known. It’s not that the amount of safety, belonging, or dignity in my life has increased. Instead, the conditioned behaviors that once constricted my awareness of these sacred gifts have become less and less distracting.

As one teacher says, “Energy follows attention.”² By consistently shifting our attention toward our inherent giftedness and sacred connection, we free ourselves from suffering’s hidden authority—what many recognize as the influence of trauma.

This has been true for me, and for countless others I’ve walked alongside: Contemplation is the practice of growing in awareness and gently returning to that awareness of connection to the sacred—consenting to sacred presence in this life, around our life, and as our very lives.³.

Awareness-plus-connection is the starting point for releasing the grip of individualism and entering into the sacredness we share with others—friends, strangers, groups, species, and even the land, water, and cosmos to which we all belong.⁴ Awareness-plus-connection is more than mindful detachment; it is vulnerable, I-Thou experiences through which both personal and collective healing can emerge. It is seeing all the worts, wounds, and uncertainty, and joining in anyway with compassion and courage.

The signs of overwhelm, addiction, anger, or depression often originate in separation we’ve armored ourselves against, calcified into our habits and the stories we tell ourselves. Physical wounds don’t require us to teach a cut how to scab and regenerate—we simply create the clean conditions for reconnection. This is just as true for inner transformation and community transformation.

Which brings us to leadership. Leadership is not a skill you acquire to get a promotion or achieve success. It is not a singular personality type, and certainly not a title reserved for Type-A individuals who plow over or coerce others to extract more productivity. That’s not leadership—that’s simply management bypassing leadership with power.

Bypassing trauma is unsustainable. You and I have seen this in tech giants, toxic congregations, restless start-up nonprofits, and even abusive relationships. Over time, simply “managing” trauma and anxiety undermines and slowly sinks the entire culture of an organization. True leadership begins with the willingness to create the conditions for healing, connection, and shared purpose.

Reclaiming the Word “Growth”

Leadership is the healing process of growth, beginning with you, and then broadening into accountable, liberative relationships.

Words like leadership and “growth” become buzz words, often maligned by those interested in liberation and spirituality. This takes us full circle to the opening quote by John O’Donohue reopening us to the horizon of growth as the reestablishing connection through dignity, safety and belonging.

“To grow is to become more than you have been, to transform loss into presence, and to allow what is false to fall away”— John O’Donohue

Some malign growth because it was misused by our if-only traumatized parts. Parts of ourselves forced us to go against our own will in exchange for belonging or security. We mistook growth as a quick tweak of external achievements bypassing shame or internal insufficiency. Take for example New Year’s resolutions and strategic plans acting like a carrot or stick, doubling down on if-only fears and shame. Such resolutions can trigger anxiety, motivating us in the short-term but making us more susceptible to triggering bosses or family members, or even pushing us into defensive postures that harm to others.

The Contemplative Leadership lens reverses this (or restores it to a more dignifying perspective). Growth, individually and collectively, can mean:

• Expanding the dignity we’ve already glimpsed in ourselves.

• Feeling present in situations where we once felt disconnection.

• Finding freedom from false, habituated patterns and stories.

In my next letter I’ll share more on the implication of a contemplative, trauma-informed lens on leading systems and co-creating culture. But let’s pause for now. I’d like to hear from you.

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Request for You to Contribute:

I gave up writing for a season in favor of teaching groups because I find shared discovery and diverse experiences so valuable for learning. These insights have emerged from so many relationships and shared experiences. Now as I begin the process of sharing my experience, would you please consider adding your experience to discussion?

• What ah ha moments came to you as you read ?

• When did you notice numbness or constrictions in response to what you read?

• What dissent would you offer?

• Can you be curious with me? Help me keep an open mind, heart, and will by your own food for thought or questions.

I’ll do my best to respond in the comments and keep the dialogue going.

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1. See Prentis Hemphill, What It Takes to Heal: How Transforming Ourselves Can Change the World

2. See Tami Simon’s interview: Richard Strozzi-Heckler, Somatic Transformation

3. “What Tibetan Buddhists call rigpa, objectless awareness.” … “an attitude of inner receptivity and self-surrender” which Fr. Thomas Keating describes in centering prayer practice as “consenting to God’s presence and action” …. “in, around, and as your very life” See Cynthia Bourgeault’s contemplative biography, Thomas Keating: The Making of a Modern Mystic

4. Caroline Myss & James Finley, Transforming Trauma: Uncovering the Spiritual Dimension of Healing (Sounds True, 2010). Finley describes connection and awareness as two of the “Seven Steps of Contemplative Healing and Spiritual Wholeness.”