A Circular Concept of Leadership

In a com­ment on my last post, Flor Fer­nan­dez Bar­rios talked about med­i­cine wheels:

Native-Amer­i­cans have the con­cept of the med­i­cine Wheel, the great cir­cle of life based on the car­di­nal direc­tions. Every posi­ition has equal pow­er and unique teach­ings. The essence of life is move­ment and as we move through the wheel we learn and unfold.…Every stone has a teach­ing and a val­ued vision of the world and life. Each stone is a sis­ter or a broth­er ready to mir­ror back a part of our­selves. There is no judg­ment involved in this process. I think adopt­ing this cir­cu­lar con­cept in lead­er­ship is esssen­tial if we are to con­tin­ue grow­ing and evolv­ing with equal­i­ty. A sys­tem where every one’s voice is heard and no one is discriminated.

Bighorn Medicine Wheel — National Park Service Photo via Wikipedia

What strikes me most deeply is that line about each stone as a sis­ter or broth­er ready to mir­ror back a part of ourselves. 

That would mean we might well do an inven­to­ry of our “sis­ters” and “broth­ers.” We might think of every­one we know and have known and let them come into us, to hear their sto­ry, their teach­ing, their vision, and see also the parts of our­selves they reflect. This is no easy task, for while there are many that we like to attend to there are undoubt­ed­ly oth­ers, per­haps only a few, per­haps more, that we would like to ignore. In my mind’s eye I sit at the cen­ter of the cir­cle with some stones behind me, out of sight, fac­ing those I appre­ci­ate the most, fac­ing away from those I appre­ci­ate the least. 

Flor’s com­ment touch­es direct­ly on the prob­lem of dis­crim­i­na­tion, the voic­es that are heard and those we are con­di­tioned (have con­di­tioned our­selves) to dis­cred­it and dis­count. And there are always a mil­lion good rea­sons to dis­cred­it and dis­count them. It seems to me the pow­er and beau­ty of the wheel is in the recon­sid­er­a­tion of who we think we know — and there­fore what we think we know about our­selves. Do we look at those, for exam­ple, with whom we have our gravest con­flicts or who inspire our great­est fears and see in them an aspect of our­selves? Or do we cre­ate a palat­able dis­tance? It’s easy to look if we are acknowl­edg­ing the good, but how about the dark­ness and dare I say it, our belief in oth­ers’ evil? 

I once used to think that evil was an out­mod­ed con­cept; that our unde­filed natures were spon­ta­neous­ly good, and I still do believe this in a way. But I no longer hold to such a rose-col­ored view with sim­plic­i­ty. And this is why the med­i­cine wheel is so impor­tant, pre­cise­ly because with­in its cir­cuit we can­not claim to see evil in oth­ers with­out know­ing that in some way it is also a part of our­selves. Which is to say I note its pres­ence in my own soul as well as feel its pres­ence in my world. 

It is only our pri­vate and unique forms of denial, our per­sis­tent blind spots, our sat­is­fied uncon­scious­ness — in effect our belief that we can face one way only in the cir­cle — that keeps us blam­ing oth­ers for what we our­selves are doing or par­tic­i­pat­ing in or avoiding.

This is very hard because we can be quite sure we know what evil is — in oth­ers. We can be quite sure we know it when we see it. But, don’t you know, it slips away as soon as it is named, slips out of the noose of our con­cepts and judg­ments, trans­formed again by our own hid­den processes? 

Mil­ton got as close as pos­si­ble in Par­adise Lost, defin­ing evil with one state­ment from a fall­en angel, “Myself am Hell.” This is a state­ment that tells, at least, where evil comes from, and how it spreads: inso­far as I am hell to myself there­fore my attempt will be to stamp out the evil in you. And maybe tak­ing it a step far­ther, because I can’t stamp out what is in you, I sim­ply try to stamp you out instead. In any event, if you buy in, if I am able to trig­ger in some way your own inner pain, the cycle continues.

Sunlit-Hill1

And do we all have a side of our­selves that can be awful to us? You bet. We can all be hell to our­selves, just as we all can be good. There­fore we must sit in this med­i­cine wheel awhile longer, talk­ing with the stones, with our broth­ers and sis­ters. We must share our suf­fer­ing, let­ting the after­noon sun come down to warm our backs and remind us of the heal­ing that is avail­able. We must find our own self-for­give­ness and for­give­ness of oth­ers, our “grow­ing and evolv­ing with equal­i­ty,” as Flor says. And we must use our war­rior selves to stop at every turn the belief that there’s an “it” out there some­where, an evil that wants to get at us or destroy us, espe­cial­ly as we believe it is embod­ied in oth­ers. Because in truth, that “it” is no one but our­selves, trans­lat­ed through the inter­stices of a crys­talline world in which every vibra­tion we send out comes back to us ten­fold and per­haps in fright­en­ing disguise.

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By Dan Oestreich

I am a leadership consultant, coach, facilitator and trainer supporting the growth and development of leaders and teams. For further information about my work and services, please access my Oestreich Associates website.

4 comments

  1. Deeply res­o­nant on many levels.

    In the Mankind Project, which derives part of its wis­dom and prac­tices from Native Amer­i­can tra­di­tions, we have a say­ing that “each man is my teacher”, which com­bines the recog­ni­tion of our relat­ed­ness as sib­lings (on some lev­el) with an acknowl­edg­ment that the emo­tion­al charge I get in react­ing to some­one — or some­thing — is typ­i­cal­ly root­ed in a pro­jec­tion onto “the oth­er”, and reveals an area of shad­ow work … a teach­able moment in which I can come to a deep­er under­stand­ing of myself through pro­cess­ing — and own­ing — the projection.

    I’m also remind­ed of one of the ker­nels of wis­dom expressed by James P. Carse, in his book “Finite and Infi­nite Games”:

    Evil is nev­er intend­ed as evil. Indeed, the con­tra­dic­tion inher­ent in all evil is that orig­i­nates in the desire to elim­i­nate evil. “The only good Indi­an is a dead Indian.”

  2. Yes, the Carse quo­ta­tion nails it per­fect­ly, Joe. But I wor­ry this is so only in an intel­lec­tu­al sense. We do have the addi­tion­al prob­lem, as you men­tion, of that very real “emo­tion­al charge” that dri­ves the process. It does seem some­times that evil very much has a life of its own. It’s not so eas­i­ly put aside. I might know in a way that I’m pro­ject­ing and expe­ri­enc­ing some­thing in the world or in oth­ers that’s real­ly part of myself, but the charge can be over­whelm­ing and tap emo­tions that have been buried and unman­age­able for a long time. My sense is that’s why we go uncon­scious or into denial and why there­fore the med­i­cine wheel is essen­tial. If evil is “out­side” us, if it does in a way have a life of its own through our uncon­scious­ness, then a cer­tain amount of med­i­cine needs to come from “out­side” as well — from com­mu­ni­ty and from nature, from what­ev­er help the local shaman can offer. I don’t think we get there real­ly until we’ve done the evil, accept­ed that we’ve done it, and won­dered why — all the way through. We have to hang on that tree for awhile before the changes come.

  3. As much shad­ow work as I have done on myself I real­ly do won­der just how much I am actu­al­ly miss­ing as being from me. How much of what I see exter­nal­ly is me pro­ject­ed I won­der? And that is just the visu­al sense. What about smell and hear­ing? The con­trac­tion or dis­like away from anoth­er is obvi­ous but what about the sub­tle. It is mind boggling.

  4. It is mind bog­gling, Glenn! And just so. Thich Naht Hanh speaks of “inter­be­ing,” the notion that every­thing inter­pen­e­trates. If I am read­ing a page in a book, the trees that made up the paper are in that book as well, as is sun­light and rain, as I am, too, as the read­er. When we apply that idea to our inter­per­son­al rela­tion­ships, the notion that we are iso­lat­ed and alone, pro­jec­tors and pro­jectees mechan­i­cal­ly act­ing upon one anoth­er, breaks down, I think, and we are left with deep­er ques­tions and rich­er insights.

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