For more con­text on this post­ing, please see:

The Prac­tice of Leadership
Eight Lead­er­ship Practices
First Prac­tice: Know­ing Your Lead­er­ship Edge
Sec­ond Prac­tice: Devel­op­ing Your Com­fort Lev­el with Feedback
Third Prac­tice: Car­ing for Self
Fourth Prac­tice: Lead­er­ship and Influence
Fifth Prac­tice: Dis­cussing Undiscussables
Sixth Prac­tice: On Collaborating
Sev­enth Prac­tice: Per­son­al Integrity

Although spir­i­tu­al­i­ty is less dis­cussed as a qual­i­ty of effec­tive lead­er­ship — prob­a­bly because our cul­ture does not know how to talk about such things very well — it is per­haps the most vital domain of any leader. It has these two essen­tial func­tions: to help us deal with adver­si­ty and to bring real hope to oth­ers through the work we do.

A long time ago, 2004, when I start­ed this series of posts on eight prac­tices, I con­scious­ly saved this post for last. Not because spir­i­tu­al­i­ty should be the last thing to be con­sid­ered, but the best, the most open-heart­ed, the most vul­ner­a­ble, and the most true. To say a leader must have a spir­i­tu­al per­spec­tive is not to say that this per­son must believe in God or adhere to a par­tic­u­lar reli­gion. In fact, when­ev­er such require­ments are made, I would say the essence of spir­i­tu­al­i­ty itself is lost. This isn’t the spir­i­tu­al­i­ty of belong­ing to a par­tic­u­lar group. It is the spir­i­tu­al­i­ty of what you dis­cov­er on your own of wis­dom and what you refer to when no one, and no art or phi­los­o­phy, no oth­er forms of intel­li­gence at all are of fur­ther val­ue. To find the inner cen­ter, a place found­ed on the great­est virtues of life on earth, in love and in peace and in divine free­dom, is to know, in a sense, all there is to know about self and lead­er­ship. This is not to say there is no fur­ther learn­ing because once touched that depth is con­stant­ly test­ed in a world such as ours, filled as it is with so many sor­rows, vio­lences, and fears. It is the first and last step beyond ego, beyond the small self in favor of a larg­er, more pen­e­trat­ing, more per­son­al view.

Many years ago I lis­tened to some lec­tures by John S. Dunne, a philosopher/seeker, who has writ­ten many books includ­ing his very beau­ti­ful, The Way of All the Earth. I recall him describ­ing how often we look at our lives from a very short time span, maybe a few years, some­times a life­time if we are lucky. But there is anoth­er van­tage point, which is our lives with­in the con­text of his­to­ry as a whole, in effect with­in the frame of end­less time. This is the tem­po­ral alter­na­tive to look­ing up at the stars at night and notic­ing our own small­ness. There is noth­ing like these “demag­ni­fi­ca­tions” of our lit­tle exis­tences, exis­tences that we make so much out of, as if, tru­ly, we are not only the cen­ter of the uni­verse, but its immor­tal cen­ter. The great teach­ers, John Dunne said, from Muham­mad to Gau­ta­ma to Jesus all were able to keep the greater view in what they did — and we can attempt that as well.

If you look, if you are real­ly aware, then per­haps what you will see around you is a depress­ing view of human­i­ty, a mad con­test of egos and crush­ing events. Per­haps that makes you angry. Yet ego is, as D.T. Suzu­ki once said, also as nat­ur­al to human beings as wings to a bird. And that depres­sion or anger, if you let your­self feel it and fol­low it faith­ful­ly, may actu­al­ly be some­thing more like the begin­ning of a spir­i­tu­al path than a psy­cho­log­i­cal “prob­lem.”

The con­cept of capital‑S Self, or True Self, is close, at least for me, to the study of lead­er­ship spir­i­tu­al­i­ty. But, of course, we all have to expe­ri­ence and define that on our own. Per­son­al­ly, I’ve always liked the words of Sekkai Hara­da, a Bud­dhist teacher, who said:

In the course of our life­time, there is one per­son we must meet. No mat­ter through which grass­lands we may walk or which moun­tains we may climb, we must meet this per­son. This per­son is in this world. Who is this per­son? It is the true self. You must meet the true self. As long as you don’t, it will not be pos­si­ble to be tru­ly sat­is­fied in the depths of your heart. You will nev­er lose the sense that some­thing is lack­ing. Nor will you be able to clar­i­fy the way things are.

Cer­tain­ly, with­out meet­ing this “true self,” our sta­mi­na is deplet­ed. Life throws curve balls all the time, some­times sev­er­al at the same time. But more than hav­ing this inner strength of a true self avail­able to us, this inner “radi­ance” to rely upon, it is also the key to offer­ing hope to oth­ers in the deep­est pos­si­ble ways. As Karen Tse — the famous human rights leader and founder of Inter­na­tion­al Bridges to Jus­tice — not­ed about her own spir­i­tu­al path, she learned in a moment of cri­sis to work with “the Bud­da” or “the Christ” in each per­son, but she also learned that “what you focus on will grow.” So even if we focus in a sim­ple way on pos­si­bil­i­ties rather than lim­its, on the good that is avail­able instead of the bad that must be defeat­ed, some­thing in us changes, and some­thing in our world changes along with us. We see capa­bil­i­ty in our­selves and oth­ers as a fact, and they say it inspires them.

I have known peo­ple who gave up as lead­ers, sank into a kind of dark­ness, were angry with the world, with peo­ple, so that their bit­ter­ness became their cave. Yet we all know so many sto­ries of oth­ers who brought light into dark­ness, not only for them­selves but for oth­ers as well. Karen Tse, of course, is one such leader. But there are so many oth­ers. Who do you know who brings hope? And if you do not know any­one who does, what brings you your own hope? 

For me, I can only say that from an ear­ly point in my life, when I could find hope nowhere else, only a few steps into the nat­ur­al world were need­ed to restore it. The sound of a creek or the pass­ing of clouds can bring that hope back to me, and is some­thing I’ve always tried to share through my pho­tographs. That’s why they are part of these pages. And maybe that is because nature is a win­dow to all of what is beyond us. We only have five sens­es, so we only can be aware of so much of nature. Yet there is more, much more that is unseen, unheard, untouched, unsmelled, untast­ed — and per­haps out­side of time itself. We are only con­scious of so much. But if we have an intu­ition, a psy­chic sec­ond sense of what does lie beyond, if the walls of this world are indeed as thin as they some­times appear to be, then of course there is hope, and that makes us crazy only if we do not acknowl­edge it.

Well, such is my faith, and I have no right to impose. But there may well be some­thing, how­ev­er irra­tional, that does draw all of us clos­er to faith itself, not nec­es­sar­i­ly a Chris­t­ian or Bud­dhist or Islam­ic or any oth­er reli­gious faith, not faith in our­selves or our insti­tu­tions, not cul­tur­al faith in our coun­try, not faith in opti­mism or pes­simism or cyn­i­cism, not faith in this leader or that one or any of these things at all, nor even faith in a God or gods, but faith in what the poet Wal­lace Stevens called in a sim­ple way, “a tune beyond us, yet our­selves.”

This faith, this psy­chic under­stand­ing of the world, this inner strength that pass­es through us, is a path of encour­age­ment, a well-spring of dreams. I believe it is what con­nects us ulti­mate­ly, free­ing us from what is old, and what is known. It is solace as well as soli­tude, a source of con­nec­tion and always, a feel­ing of home. It is always present in the face of beau­ty, in the way “light takes the tree,” wait­ing for us there and with­in our­selves. And there are no words.

How strange, that you sim­ply have to ask about your own wings, and the air — the air — is there. 

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