Connection and Leadership

Lately, I have felt a sense of curiosity about the nature of connection and the role of leadership in my life and how it's shared with others. While many study this kind of thing through informative data driven approaches, my perspective really speaks from an intuitive lens that allows me to more deeply understand how my inherent nature meets my sense of calling in the world. 

While called to serve my community as a teacher and healing practitioner, I am also aware of being an introvert with a strong pull to explore creative building endeavors that include play with repurposed/recycled materials. Projects that feel deeply nourishing and satisfying. And often so immersive that I find myself, outside of my work as an acupuncturist, herbalist and consciousness teacher, deeply focused on these creative projects. 

These creative immersions represent a sharp contrast to my earlier life where creativity with such enjoyment always felt out of reach. Today, I know and experience a sense of deep contentment with the balance of my day-to-day life. And yet, there is this curiosity… How is this way of being an expression of leadership? How do I find growth and acceptance within myself in balancing my calling as a healing presence, and simultaneously, to honor a very deep call to live a very introverted life? 

Over the last few years, the imagery and totem of the wolf entered into this curiosity. Prior to that, outreach or connection with the larger world as I understood it carried a feeling of conflict. A push-pull within myself about how to be connected while also maintaining a sense of self-care and truthfulness in the process. I struggled until I began to recognize my nature as having many of the energetic characteristics of a wolf. 

While I speak in-depth within my book about the concept of leading from behind as a form of nurturing leadership, what has emerged from my curiosity is an epiphany on the nature of how I connect with others. Within this epiphany, I have come to observe other healing practitioners who have enormous communities of friends, colleagues or even followers of their work. I have also observed the kind of energy required to maintain and care for such communities. While serving as many folks as possible in a community may seem ideal to growing one’s mission or calling, it's often not natural for many of us. In fact, it can be outright exhausting. 

As I stepped beyond my curiosity and into the intuitive energy of the wolf, I recognized that in many ways I operate socially within intersecting circles of relatively small packs. Packs that have short periods of great connective intensity. This recognition has been a deeply freeing understanding and has allowed me to let go of the notion that I am somehow failing by not choosing to cultivate large circles of connection that sustain indefinitely. That being in some ways a lone wolf and in others, a pack leader, works for me. This has allowed for a letting go of the many social expectations that once vexed me. 

Letting go has brought about a peace in being just as I am, while at the same time, continuing to Heal & Grow as a human being. A personal truth that provides a cultivated nurturance, shared with the people I serve within my community of friends, family, students and clients. Circles of connection that often intersect and serve as a foundation for the Healing & Growth I share. 

Ironically, being true to my nature as an introvert, a veritable lone wolf, has informed me about how I connect with the world, and given me a more embodied sense of community and leadership I had not seen modeled effectively in my life. A model of living that dwells, within all of us, at the Soul’s open doorway.