On Dancing

In psychological perspectives on vertical development, we often point to shadow work or the need to integrate and address longitudinal aftereffects of family and collective trauma. I am a huge proponent of this in my work and our offerings at Mobius Executive Leadership. In spiritual circles discussing vertical development, we often highlight the need for placing one's journey in the wider context of the world, the natural environment, the generations of life, and the presence of the numinous. I believe strongly in the importance of this transpersonal perspective and transcendent experiences. However, I want to highlight here the importance of beauty and joy.

Plain everyday beauty: Going to a farmer's market. Caring for a sick family member. Preparing a community gathering. Repairing a beloved fixed piece of furniture. Attending a prayer service. Walking in your neighborhood. An intimate conversation.

Contemplative beauty: reading a poem, sitting by the ocean, listening to music, lighting candles, reciting a prayer, or laying a wreath at a grave.

Rewiring World Beauty: Protesting. Offering shelter to a refugee. Thinking in dissidence. Conscientious disobedience. Tithing your income. Speaking your mind.

Too often leadership programs underestimate the creative fire that is art, beauty and closeness as seeds for the expression of unbridled joy. Joy is the deepest invoker of possibility, novelty, vitality, intimacy, and hope. In my sister Erica Ariel Fox's Winning from Within methodology, joy is the emotional gateway of the Dreamer archetype.

In our programs when we give people permission to tap into their intuition, tap their natural passions, revisit their earliest true longings and find their sources of playfulness, lightness of heart and desire to give, create, manifest, and dance with life, they literally start to do that.

They start to write poems for the first time in twenty years, to send love letters to their families, to forgive long-standing grudges, to sing aloud the lullabies they usually reserve for their children, to paint, to breathe anew, and to dance. They dance at first with self-consciousness, then with self-expression, then with exuberance, and eventually with self-abandon that hints at their true unfiltered rhythm and restores the life force within that wants to pulse, pound, and move.

As practitioners, we need to hold the intention for leadership interventions to be pathways to this kind of happiness and these sources of meaning and self-expression.

To re-welcome the sound of the great YAWP. I believe that welcoming this quality of connection and the concurrent re-kindling of awe that it beckons will be an engine of innovation and belonging. Perhaps joy is an untapped antidote to the restlessness, disengagement, and ennui that currently permeates the organizational fabric we live within.