INsight/ Embodied Leadership Practice
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TaiJi practitioners meet in Viet Nam. Photo by Thao Le Hoang on Unsplash.
Manila, 17 February 2021 — Making your body mind spirit move as one.
Story
It happened in 1955. Master Huang (Chungliang Al Huang) came to the US from Taiwan to study architecture, cultural anthropology, and choreography. His studies in the US would lead him on a journey to share the culture, art, and philosophy of China with ever more people in the US and around the world. We learn from Wikipedia and his website that he was born in Shanghai in the 1930s, received a rich background in the classics, fine and martial arts, and followed his family when they moved to Taiwan at the end of the Chinese civil war.
In this post, I invite you to enjoy an embodied experience of what leading yourself and others can look and feel like, by joining in an interactive talk given by Master Huang at Hendrix College in Arkansas in 2012. ‘Embodied’ because, as you will see, he’s unlike many others when it comes to introducing the philosophy of TaiJi and YinYang in a way that uses not only your mind but also your body. Do set aside 30 minutes to enjoy and learn. If you’re anything like me, you won’t regret it.
While studying Huang’s talk and work, including his rich illustrations in countless books on coaching and mentoring, I was reminded that leading is much more than a mindset and skills: it’s about using your body, heart, and mind to move as one, in harmony with each other. Or as Huang says: body mind spirit. His example inspired me to help myself and the leaders I coach to practice embodied leadership together: physical, focused, social, heartful, mindful.
Challenge
Your body mind spirit is more connected than you might think, and that has been known for thousands of years by the world’s wisdom traditions in China, India, and elsewhere. And it’s not just happy feelings that have a place in our body. More people are experiencing stress, especially now during the Covid-19 pandemic. So do I. Who doesn’t? More than before, we wonder how to manage our stress.
I have come to see that nurturing my body mind spirit helps in stress management and forms an essential part of my daily leadership hygiene, which also includes quality sleep, healthy food, and exercise. In doing so, I still benefit daily from a residential training program I took almost twenty years in Chiang Mai in Northern Thailand, led by another Daoist Master, Mantak Chia. Fortunately, we can now access many Daoist training resources online and practice as we work from home.
Sure, managing stress is easier said than done, and we will keep encountering situations where stress can rise up unexpectedly. Managing your stress involves more than calming your mind. I found that it helps to get in touch with stress as a bodily experience. Where do you feel it? Some leaders told me that they will experience it in their lower back, others in their shoulders and neck, or as constricting feeling in their chest. What about you?
Question
In the Grow3Leaders community, we are diving into this challenge of stress management and embodied leadership practice, and our discussion has raised important questions like how to scan your energy in your body as you work, how to send energy to where you feel low or stuck, and how to move your body to let energy flow more freely and release or resolve stress? We are learning from sharing our experiences and from exploring which tools can help us to help ourselves and the leaders around us that we work with.
How embodied is your daily leadership practice? Is it part of your leadership hygiene? I hope that reading this post and participating in Master Huang’s interactive talk will lift your body mind spirit and lead you to review how you can make your leadership practice more embodied, for yourself and those around you.
If you’d like to learn more about nurturing your body mind spirit and managing your stress, you’re welcome to get in touch with me. Meanwhile, you can start practicing by using Master Huang’s video. The secret is not in the knowing but in the doing.