The Geography of Descent: A Full Blooded Practice for the Future

I guess the first thing I need to say is that I am 39 weeks pregnant. This will be my first child, and shaping my life around the pregnancy and the changes to come have been at the forefront of my life for this entire year.

Being pregnant, surprisingly, has not changed my practice dramatically. On the micro level, I am moment by moment focused on physically, spiritually and emotionally being present and preparing for this great, eminent transformation. What has been wild for me is that I am trained as a midwife, and I have assisted the delivery of babies for women all over the world.

And yet, to have the experience myself has opened up an even greater respect and admiration for the ceremony of becoming — of living and dying — that is birth.

As a co-founder of a leadership and innovation consultancy I have found myself these last years enacting a practice around what I have come to call the art of translation. You see, there is no more powerful ceremony than birth, short of death, and all acts of transformation and change represent little ceremonies (or big ones!) of their own. Carrying this translation into the four walls, bright lights, and hectic workdays of the modern organization represents a never-ending practice of trial and error for me!

In my work with top leaders and in companies, it is my job to provide a deeper field of guidance and leadership for the inevitable transforming that happens as people meet their threshold moments. And this can be so subtle as to be almost invisible in workspaces that privilege hard facts, solid data and recognizable roles. A consequence of this collision between leadership worlds — one invisible and another highly visible — is that I have developed a practice that allows me to stand my ground in the tension between the points of collision.

It is often hard for super driven and professional people to believe that a strong woman is not always the one “leaning-in” and making her voice heard as loudly as the men. My role and practice has been more around holding space, moving the subtle energies, motivations, hang-ups, fears and tensions around in a dynamic play so that entropy does not enter into the process; killing movement and the arc of change.

The strangest part of this enactment, where my practice fuses with my role as a leader, is to receive critique from other women who fail to see my role as embodying power. I have had to work with the assessment, quite strong over the years, that tries to paint me as quiet and yielding to the men’s voices on my team. At first, I was confused and annoyed by this, but as time has passed I have found important ways to use the confusion of others as part of the overall trajectory of transformation I am guiding.

One of the most challenging elements of my work in the corporate space is watching so many woman deteriorate physically and emotionally due to the overwhelming demands placed upon them at home and at work.

When I hear work-life balance battered about — and then the Hallmark stories shared — I am drawn instinctively to the other side; to honoring the faces and bodies of women ‘balancing’ to the point of exhaustion and decay.

And while the Hallmark stories are loud and the slogans of success, balance and breakthrough achievement seductive, the realities of physical collapse, organ and gland devastation, and emotional breakdown are all too real and prevalent. And they are almost always suffered by women in silence, a silence governed by the maxim; “Let us all be positive, positive thinking all the time!”

For better or for worse, I decided this year — the year of my pregnancy — to find my own way to bring voice to this silence. I have made this quest a central part of my future ready practice; how do I honor the other side of future-readiness that is more mysterious and outside the bounds of everyday life? How do I help women talk about their fears, their pains, their illnesses and the sheer impossibility of their responsibilities?

It seems to me, as a woman that owns her own business and helps others grow theirs, to not grant relevance to the darker possibilities awaiting us in the future would be an act of cowardice I must defend against at every turn.

My initial response has been to build a digital platform I am calling Exile Project (www.exileproject.com) for women to develop their own voices and stories, no matter how painful and challenging to the dominant slogan of positivity so prevalent in their personal and working lives these stories and voices may be.

While “lean-in” and “work-life balance” point a way through the Ascent part of life and may help woman chart a course towards professional success, my platform is grounded in the topography of the Descent.

I am interested in the more primordial, ancient even, journey through silence and the unknown. I want to know, and I want others to know, what this landscape really looks like, free of cliché. My belief is that as more and more women give voice to this space, that special geography of power known by the wisest and most courageous in every culture since the beginning of time, we can round out our conversations around leadership and success in crucial ways.

We can begin to understand more and more both what is beautiful and amazing about the possibilities for the future, and what is dark and menacing. We can begin to hold the two sides of the coin as we chart a way forward.

In conclusion, my future ready practice tends to boil down to holding both sides of this coin together in one body, in one practice and in one vision for the future. Moving with power along the narrow ridge of my life, creating my own future and that of my family, while helping others create theirs has become my framework for practice and action.

I want to stay alive to the pivotal moment that always shows up in the ceremony of birth, that moment where the possibility for death and birth stand side by side. I have often seen this moment as embodying a different kind of time that could almost be likened to timelessness but is not. It is too concrete to be without time.

Instead, it is a moment of pure creativity. Nothing is assured and nothing is guaranteed.

In my experience, this is the primordial moment where we step into our power as humans to give shape to the future. We can harness this power, we can make it a central part of our personal practice as well as our practice as leaders and agents for change. I am inspired to ground all my work in the world upon this level of possibility.