Do you Recognize Your Own Mysterial Leadership Emerging?
This budding quality of leadership is not based exclusively on roles, power, and command over others. It is an integral way of being that takes into account your vibrant inner world, your outer capacity for effective action, your co-creative relationships with others and your understanding and influence of the systems and structures of the world.
Our definition of leadership manifests in the smallest, most mundane activities in your life, as well as the profound and consequential actions you may take. It is about how you get up in the morning and do what needs to be done even though you might be feeling your own fear and anxiety. It is about making wise decisions in the press of your professional responsibilities and the ambiguities of conflicting information. It is about taking the time during a busy day to stop and be with a good friend who is struggling, as much as it is stepping forward with a new policy that could change the way health care is funded.
A Mysterial woman who leads is committed to ongoing development as a way of life. Knowing that she is a “work in progress,” she accepts failures and feedback as part of her ongoing learning adventure. Mysterial does not mean a fixed way of being or behaving. The capacities that arise when our Mysterial nature is unlocked are constantly expanding and growing to meet the needs of the moment.
A Mysterial woman who leads is able to bridge between the old worldview in which the majority of the world exists and the new worldview that she is here to bring. She is a kind of shape-shifter who can be in the world, but not of it. When you engage this quality of consciousness and courageously show up in the world you are able to embrace a wide range of differences while maintaining a grounded connection to your own unique experience. You recognize your relationship with Mother Earth, not just as a resource for you to use, but also as a dynamic partner with whom you are on this co-creative evolutionary journey. You tenderly care for her and her creatures just as you count on her for the food, air, water, earth and fire that you need.
A Mysterial woman who leads is consistent in her authenticity, as present and genuine at a boardroom table as she is with the bus driver on her morning commute. She knows the power of a dynamic collective and takes the time and effort to tend to the energetic field of any group she is in. She is willing to be vulnerable and open in a quality of dynamic mutuality with others that naturally creates a trusting environment where everyone brings their best selves forward.
A Mysterial woman who leads draws upon all her ways of knowing. She allows things to manifest in natural and unpredictable ways so that creative solutions arise that are vastly more complex than anything that could have been invented through a predictable process. She is open to the mystery of life and welcomes uncertainty, ambiguity, and change as necessary aspects of any creative endeavor.
A Mysterial woman who leads knows how to pace herself and others as she engages in her well-lived life. She values being as much as she does doing; stillness as much as action. She tunes herself to coherence, order, harmony and beauty at the same time as she recognizes and embraces the incomplete, chaotic, conflicted and ugly dimensions of reality.
A Mysterial woman who leads understands the current world pattern of “power over” and how to navigate through it, and yet is committed to a life of “power with and for” others. She knows that true wisdom is not something she can glean only with her rational mind but rather is something that emerges when she is open at all levels—body, mind, heart and soul—in any moment and fully present to all that streams through her.
Love is her deepest motivating impulse, guiding her to more and more wholeness and compassionate connection with herself, others, and the world around.
Sound familiar?
I encourage you to take any one of these images and energize it in your lived experience. Become the woman today that has the capacities needed for the women of tomorrow to thrive.
