I HAVE BEEN, and continue to be, extremely uncomfortable with the language of leadership. I’ve studied leadership and worked with corporations around the world. I’ve studied Sun Tzu and other models. And the underlying pattern I see we’re all concerned about—these harmful power dynamics—is patriarchy. It’s a military model of what it means to be human. If you’re conditioned to control, if your understanding of being human is such that brutality and violence are solutions to a problem, this spills out in society more broadly. It spills out at home. It spills out at schools. It’s a power that harms.
To practice in the midst of those forces, we need to learn how to practice without being disempowered. I’ve been learning that my whole life. I’ve also been learning how to. It’s very tempting to only focus on the experience of either. I wrote a poem about working with this, one I started twenty-five years ago and completed on the day Thich Nhat Hanh passed away:
