Katie's Video Blog
A personal response and call to conscious activism from our friends at The Conscious Leadership Group.
As we learned from our mentors, Gay and Katie, we practice and teach that our results—not our words or intentions or even our actions—demonstrate what we’re committed to.
Based on the reality that systemic racism exists, we want to acknowledge that we are (unconsciously) committed to it existing. We are consciously committed to taking responsibility for our part in creating these results.
Read the Conscious Leadership Group’s latest newsletter—and subscribe if you feel called—to learn their step-by-step process for conscious activism, discover resources to self-educate, and read Jim Dethmer’s reckoning with his own racism.
Click here to access the resources compiled by The Conscious Leadership Group.
Big Leap coaches Dhira Dale Brown and Elaine Eddinger demonstrate the exercise What’s True About This? It’s a simple practice you can do with a partner or alone, and it’s designed for you to discover what’s true for you by noticing your thoughts, feelings and sensations.
Katie and Gay created a short, powerful activity a couple of decades ago to explore this question. Who knew that 30 years later it would be a center pole of our current national dilemma. Many people have found the practice described here to be profoundly useful.
“The enemy is fear. We think that it’s hate, but it’s fear.”
Mahatma Gandhi
This recent blog by Katie Hendricks appears in Mindful Leader. It focuses on fear and the transformative impact of shifting from fear to flow.
Read the blog here.
Waking up and staying awake may not be easy. But this simple practice—Presence. Connect. Play.—is the best invitation I know to build an awake muscle. Developed and mastered by Kathlyn Hendricks, Ph.D., I offer a taste of the practice in the form of a five minute try-it for you to become familiar and get your feet wet. Allow your cognition to grasp the concept. Allow your hands to begin to embody the practice. – Gayle Coleman, Somatic Finance
Dr. Kathlyn Hendricks
Thank you all for your presence and connection in this new year. Even though I may not post about these principles every day, I wanted you to know the organizing principles I plan to use to structure actions and choices during this (what shall we call this time, eh?!) upheaval:
1. I plan to commit and recommit to opening to discovery and learning in each interaction as the foundational practice of my days. Since, as my friend Bruce Lipton has said, your community of 50 trillion cells is either protecting or growing, I intend to be growing lifelong. That is the filter that I most value to choose to bring to my connections. I am focusing primarily on generating new structures, as the old ones are bankrupt and boring (and that’s just for starters).
2. I intend to continue practicing the integrity skills that we’ve been exploring for several decades. For those of you interested, you can find short explanatory videos here. These practices have allowed me to contact essence, who I am from the inside out, and to live and contribute in the world with ease.
3. Appreciation and acknowledgement of the wisdom keepers and the lineage of shared knowledge are precious to me, and I intend to celebrate what’s possible, to share solutions that are being invented and to collaborate with those who resonate with the power of integrity.
4. This is a biggie: I’m in a dialogue internally and with the world about “How do you know what’s true?” Currently I’m focused on what I call matching: is what I’m communicating closely expressing what I’m actually experiencing? Can I hear the clear matching in others’ communication? Am I willing to say, no, that wasn’t accurate–here’s what I’m feeling/sensing, thinking? I go to my body to find the truth, and in the presence of embodied accurate being and sharing, new models for being together can emerge. More experiments to follow.
5. I focus on agreements as the basis for collaborative decisions. Short form: Do I do what I say I’m going to do and not do what I say I’m not going to do? Period. Others too. Impeccable agreements create a matrix of generosity and contribution. From clear agreements I become reliable, and my collaborations have power.
6. I think that true response-ability is the issue of our time. My explorations for decades have focused on how genuinely responding rather than reacting generates quick and effective solutions. My experiments lead me to focus big-time on melting fear, as in fear I/we can only react, shuffling around the roles of villain-victim-hero over and over. Time for new games.
7. Bodify, bodify, bodify. How are you experiencing this in your body? Your brain lives throughout your whole system. I have honed my body-brain to resonate with what is occurring so I can fully respond, while having a great time. I can and you can continue generating love, connection, creativity from whatever is happening.
8. I’m looking for where the possibilities are, where is the opening, what is really wanting to happen, to be communicated, to be felt and loved, touched and appreciated.
I invite you to plant some tent-poles to structure your matrix during what looks like topsy-turvy world.
And to create a genuinely Happy New Year!
