Surrendered Leadership
We are leading a Surrendered Leadership practice every Saturday at 15:00 BST / 16:00 CEST
What is Surrendered Leadership?
SL is the most transformational practice that we’ve ever discovered. It’s the practice of meeting the naked rawness of who we are, moment-to-moment. We come to the depths of connection with ourselves, and can touch into our highest potential, individually and collectively.
Why practice Surrendered Leadership?
Connect to your needs and wants.
Develop a deeper sense of safety in yourself.
Learn to express from a deeper alignment between mind, body, and soul.
Un-filter your expression.
Higher agency (self-leadership).
Develop the ability to lead without using force (making others wrong).
Connection to source.
Develop your capacity to stay with not-knowing. Discover that, if allowed, states of confusion, lostness, boredom, and discomfort have deeper intelligence.
Develop the capacity to hold polarity and ambivalent states.
What are we surrendering to?
When we come together in SL, we’re surrendering to the highest potential of what wants to emerge in us and between us collectively. We don’t know what this is, and so it takes a moment-to-moment surrender into our experience. As we do this, it brings us closer to ourselves and allows us to touch this emergence together.
What is leadership in the SL context?
Allowing your truth to be expressed. Leading can be subtle, energetic, silent, prayer, body movement, or words. In our highest leadership, we fully allow the truth of our experience to be seen, and are coming from a place of integrity with our whole being.
Pointers to the practice
Allowing what is here and now. Our experience is already perfect. We are used to pushing away the parts of our reality that we do not feel welcome or safe to be with. These parts might include challenging states and emotions like judgment, anger, disgust, or hatred. Or we might discover that we don’t allow our joy when there is sadness in the space. In any case, we have the opportunity to continually meet what is true for us.
Finding the intelligence of the present moment. All that is here now is intelligent. By deeply listening to ourselves, the group, and the space without we can tune into that intelligence, rooting into the present.
The emptiness between is just as important as the content. The empty space in the cup is as important as the cup itself. What is not said or done is as important as what is.
A dance of doing and non-doing. Since SL inherently allows for non-doing, we more and more can allow the non-doing to balance all the attachments in “active” and “doing” states, coming back to our serenity.
Patient listening for a deeper truth to arrive. “Do you have the patience to wait until your mud settles?” Laozi. More profound clarity can emerge by being with the silence, waiting, listening, embracing boredom, lostness, and confusion.
Spiritual practice through real connection. Allowing the rawness of our experience to be seen is in itself a spiritual practice.
Acting(leading) without using force. In SL, we lead through invitation or exemplification. This requires us to let go of being attached to the results of our leadership, and hence the need to use force. In SL, any time we use force to prove our point, we will likely receive immediate pushback from the group. We can learn to listen for these moments and self-correct by owning our desire to prove our agenda.
Embrace polarity and ambivalence as the natural state of all that is. Masculine and feminine, order and chaos, leading and and following, cognition and embodiment.. Often in SL the practice asks of us to embody and include both sides of a polarity within ourselves. Other times it will have us stand firmly on one side and polarise with others. This is a core way the practice continually has us meet and welcome more of ourselves into connection.
Owning our deepest needs, desires, and longings by being willing to fully experience them. When we really stay with our experience, we tend to get more in touch with our wants, our needs, and even our deep longings. It’s often scary to take ownership for these parts of ourselves—our desires are often inconvenient and even dangerous if we allow ourselves to fully experience them. However when allow ourselves the courage to do this, there’s no limit to how much our lives can be transformed.
Our experience in each moment is a vital part of the collective unfolding. It’s so often the case in SL (and in life), that we discount our experience in some way. Where we don’t hold it as perfect and exactly as the thing that should be happening right now. In this practice we get to see that actually the experiences that are the most difficult bring, the ones we really don’t think are relevant or important to what’s happening in the group, are actually the most beautiful gateways to aliveness and freedom, and are in fact deeply intelligent and vital to the collective process.
A space that always encourages you to be at the edge of your own surrender. In the practice we really try to play at the edge. Whatever is there for us, whatever we’re currently experiencing, that’s the material and that’s where the potential is. The edge of surrender is right here, now, and the practice will continuously bring this into consciousness for us. Even experiences that feel known or mundane to us contain great potential, and can open us up to profound new possibilities.