A year or two ago, I participated in a 10-day challenge to cultivate space with spiritual teacher Thomas Hubl. On the fourth day of the challenge, he discussed reframing the challenging things in our lives as a means of detoxification. In other words, through the process of reframing difficult memories, emotions, and thoughts, we are detoxing. Interesting, right?

As someone who has been working with long-term viral and bacterial infections and post-viral activity for over a decade, I have found that detoxification is crucial for health and well-being. It plays a vital role in returning the body to homeostasis after an assault on the immune system and the lingering effects of infectious debris in the system.

But I want to be real here. Detoxing sucks. It's hard. When I finally get to intentionally detox my body (because I put it off as long as possible), it's like all the garbage in my system comes out sideways with claws. You may be asking, so why do I do that to myself? I detox because I know that I will feel so much better afterwards. Once the gunk is gone, I feel lighter, more energetic, and even more hopeful. There really is something powerful about getting it all out.

Detoxing comes in various forms. It can be a food detox, where you limit the kinds and amount of food you eat to allow your system to have more resources available to eliminate the toxins. You can detox through saunas, exercising, and sweating. (Check out the literature on the regular use of saunas for well-being – pretty compelling!) You can undergo emotional and psychological detoxes by acknowledging and working through stuck emotions. You can do a spiritual detox by going on retreat—silent retreats are one of my favorite things in the world! And let's not forget digital detoxing, which involves going offline for a period of time, allowing us to reset our relationship with social media, television, and the Internet.

As we say in the mindfulness meditation world (and so many other healing and spiritual arenas), your issues are in your tissues. So when you detox and allow the gunk and garbage in whatever form to exit your system, you powerfully move stuckness and lingering issues. It can be liberating.

Hubl's teaching got me thinking. We also carry lingering issues in families, friend groups, organizations, communities, societies, and all forms of collectives. Issues in our collective tissues, if you will. One need only to try to understand the U.S. political arena in the current moment to know that we've got lingering issues. And it seems that our collective problems only continue to escalate and grow.

As a society, Americans tend to be uncomfortable with dealing with difficulties. And that may be because we are not very good at it. We don't really know how to go about having healing conversations. We're much more likely to fight, hold grudges, and act passive-aggressively. We're so fragile and cast strong emotions (except anger) as weakness. That's my experience, anyway. Many of us were raised by people who didn't want to talk through emotions, pain, trauma, generational trauma, and the like. We'd rather push forward and hope the yucky stuff goes away. But it doesn't.

What if we reframed dealing with our collective difficulties by calling it detoxing, as Hubl suggested? Yes, detoxing sucks. However, there are numerous tools available to help us with collective detoxification. I am currently enrolled in a course with Thomas Hubl and the Pocket Project titled Global Social Witnessing Facilitation. In the course, we are learning how to be with the violence, disruption, and difficulty found all over the world that we now have life, unfiltered access to. How can we witness the world as it is without turning away or without over-engaging? How do we find the middle path? We can be present in the moment by noticing how we react to the difficult news of the day and mindfully acknowledging our somatic, emotional, and spiritual reactions and responses. Staying present isn't easy, and I'm noticing how easily I can turn off, turn away, and numb out. It's a defense mechanism.

There is something to feeling our feels, noticing our reactions, staying in our interiority instead of blaming all of the things outside of us for making us feel awful. Can this same mindful approach be applied to our social systems, inviting us to simply focus on our experiential reactions to challenging dynamics instead of running away, turning away, or sitting in dispassionate judgement?

Cultivating our internal lives allows us to be with life more fully because it frees up space and internal resources. If we don't do the inner work, our hurts, pains, histories, memories, and traumas consume so much space that we are unable to move beyond them, tune into those around us, and witness the world. Connecting and healing in community, if we all bring our suitcase full of pains and traumas with us, can be almost impossible. So how do we find a way to reconnect and heal together?

I advocate for cultivating our inner lives. How do you do that? Again, there are numerous tools and options available here. I am an advocate for mindfulness meditation. It supports us in sitting silently with ourselves and just noticing what is going on within us. It's a compelling technology for really knowing who you are. Therapy can be helpful with especially painful memories, grief, and stuck places. Coaching provides a mirror through interaction with a professional who is holding space for you and your goals. These are just three methods I’ve done in-depth, and they are not even the tip of the iceberg.

AI can help! I just went to Pi.ai and asked, "Pi, what are some ways I can cultivate my inner life and really know who I am deep within?" Here is Pi's response:

That's a deep question! Here are a few ways you can start your inner journey:

1. Meditation: Spend some time in silence every day, focusing on your breath and observing your thoughts without judgment. This can help you connect with your inner self.

2. Journaling: Write down your thoughts, feelings, and experiences in a journal. This can help you process your emotions and gain clarity on what is truly important to you.

3. Self-reflection: Take time to reflect on your experiences, values, and beliefs. Ask yourself questions like "What do I stand for?" or "What gives my life meaning?"

4. Mindfulness: Pay attention to your present moment experience, noticing your thoughts, emotions, and physical sensations without judgment.

5. Do any of these resonate with you?

Nice work, Pi!

Find a way to begin that resonates with you and that you can commit to. If the thought of doing this alone feels horrifying, fear not. You can do it in community. Pi suggests that you join a meditation group, go on retreat, participate in group therapy, or engage in meaningful conversations.

Cultivating your inner life begins the work of healing our world collectively. When we start to engage with our inner lives in this way, we become more open to and curious about other people's inner lives, and we seek deeper connections. And with that comes a desire to collectively detox and heal together.

I recently stumbled upon a new term: sensebreaking. And specifically, sensebreaking leadership. Turns out I am a leadership sensebreaker.

I found this term when I was recently doing research for a presentation on leadership. I was away from home and away from my usual materials, so when I went to find my old standby book, I found, instead, the 2023 SAGE Handbook of Leadership (Schedlitzki et al., 2023). In the book’s introduction, the editors explain that the handbook is about both sensemaking, assessing where leadership scholarship is in the current reality, and sensebreaking, breaking with our traditionally held views of leadership.

Schedlitzki et al. call for a shift into viewing leadership as a collective process, and I’m 100 percent here for that. I have always been a skeptic. I have never been excited about the idea of a charismatic leader coming in to save the day. That’s not how things work. And yet, we hold this romantic view of leadership, focused on the person of the leader who will fix everything.

In the West, we certainly have a strange fascination with leadership. We all sit back and watch what the leader does, eager to pounce on imperfections and criticize their choices and processes. The way that we put leaders on pedestals and separate followers creates a schism. In his book Community, the Structure of Belonging, Peter Block called this schism a “cause and effect” dynamic.

…leaders are the cause and all others are effect… All that counts is what leaders do… They are foreground, while citizens, followers, players, and anyone else not in a leadership position are background. This is a deeply patriarchal agenda, and it is this love of leaders that limits our capacity to create an alternative future. (2018, p. 41) 

In a forthcoming chapter in my co-edited volume, Leadership at the Spiritual Edge, I build on that idea of cause and effect, foreground and background, by arguing that this separation between leader and follower is a duality that may contribute to the rising numbers of people who are reporting that they feel lonely (Murthy, 2023). By spotlighting the leader, everyone else becomes inconsequential (Guenther, forthcoming).

The business arena is fraught with complex difficulties in our current moment. A churn-and-burn culture is pervasive, with a focus on results no matter the cost. A with that focus is a zero defects environment, where mistakes are intolerable, which brings about human nature in the form of covering, blaming, and finger-pointing. Additionally, creativity is stymied in risk-averse climates.

And coming back to Schedlitzki et al.’s sensebreaking, they posit that leadership is a collective process. Let’s break that down. According to Kelly (2023), there are two ideologies when it comes to leadership. The first is that leadership is a “non-linear shared processual activity,” and the other is that leadership is a “top-down causal tripod structure in which leadership results from the character or actions of the leader figure.” That tripod is leader-followers-goal.

Leadership as a process. According to Booysen (2013), leadership is a dynamic, generative element of an organization that changes with the system. And as a dynamic, generative element of a system, it is not influenced by one leader but instead by a process involving many people within that system. The process, then, is enacted by leadership practices and informed by leadership development (Booysen, 2013). Leadership practice is vital in this equation. According to Raelin (2016),

A practice is a coordinative effort among participants who choose through their own rules to achieve a distinctive outcome. Accordingly, leadership-as-practice is less about what one person thinks or does and more about what people may accomplish together. (p. 3)

Collectivity holds a central position in sensebreaking with the traditional view of leadership as something enacted by a single person. The energy of this lens is from “power over” to “power with” (Follett, 1995). I like to think of a circle of employees or members of any kind of organization or enterprise. Within the circle, different people step forward to perform a leadership function and then step back as someone else steps forward. It’s like a coordinated popcorn effect, with various circle members sharing their gifts and talents appropriately and inviting others to do the same.

Collective leadership may seem like a different kind of romanticized notion of leadership to my fellow skeptics. But I think this is where we are headed. I believe that the time is coming when everything is about harnessing the power of the collective. Alone, we cannot solve the intractable issues that we face. But we could make effective inroads with hive mind, OneMind, or our shared genius.

As we are now, collective action is problematic. As part of a year-long program I am doing with Alef Trust called Nurturing the Fields of Change, I attended a presentation by Jamie Bristow of the Mindfulness Initiative, during which he named the key challenges we face as collaborative action and relationships. We struggle with working together, collaborating, and getting along.

What’s to be done? I believe the answer can be found in individual and spiritual development; that is, we, individually, engage in long-term practice to truly know ourselves, cultivate our inner landscape, and build a capacity for engaging in the world and with ourselves mindfully. Additionally, intentionally developing toward each other is essential. We must get better at engaging with others, particularly those with whom we don’t have much in common. This development requires us to be willing to be uncomfortable, dance with our shadows, and be open to the unknown.

The first step is a commitment to our own healing and developmental process. The possibilities for the collective blossom with humans who begin to see themselves not just as a “me” at the center but instead as a “me” in relation to the “we.”

NoVA and DC friends… I will be doing the Sunday message and offering a 2-hour workshop locally on Sunday, April 14, at Unity of Fairfax in Oakton.

For friends not in the area, you can catch both virtually!

The Talk: What happens when we intentionally shift our focus of awareness and spiritual practice from vertical (between me and God) to horizontal (between all of us and God)? Based on my doctoral dissertation research and spiritual practice and teachings, I will share what I learned from studying group consciousness when it is intentionally cultivated. You can catch the talk via Unity of Fairfax's live stream: https://unityoffairfax.org/sundays.

The workshop: Come and experiment with “we” practices in this experiential workshop. I will share several practices for expanding awareness of and presence with other people, some of which I used in my research with groups. The practices will be meditative in nature with some dialogue and will include individual, pair, and group activities. It is a fundraiser for the church, which was my spiritual home for 15 years.

The workshop is presented both in-person and virtually. To register or to learn more, follow this link: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/practices-for-shifting-from-me-to-we-registration-862231536737?aff=uofweb

This blog continues the series of excerpts from my book. In this piece, I discuss the experience of connecting deeply and the field in which connection is held. Included, you’ll see that I’ve quoted one of the participants from the dissertation study that I conducted on coherence.

“Something” happened.

In the sessions with my study participants, “something” happened. The participants left the sessions deeply moved, connected, full of love, calm, and mystified. “Something” had happened, but they were not exactly sure what that “something” was. Three weeks after his session, Alex explained:I don’t fully understand all the magic that happened, whether it was biological, spiritual, energy flow, or a combination, but I believe the experience of it opened me up to understanding there are beautiful and deep ways of connecting that I had not experienced quite like before.

He didn’t fully understand what that “something” was, but he did know that the experience changed him.Coherence opens the way for a mystical experience.

It is an experience that seems to occur in one’s consciousness and across members of a group’s consciousness and could be described as a spiritual experience. And what do I mean by spiritual experience? I’m not talking about religiosity, dogma, or a passage from the Bible. I’m talking about “something” touched directly, encountered, that involves the core of our being while simultaneously encompassing the whole of the Universe.

I like Benefiel’s[1] definition of spirituality: “the human spirit, fully engaged.” It is of the spirit and an inner, subjective focus in lieu of outer behaviors that can be measured and evaluated, and it is closely connected with values[2].

This enchanted, ephemeral phenomenon binds to a group of individuals in an otherworldly, unified field where there is nonduality and a union of sorts. The field can be found in the collective consciousness of the group members. Some say it is a living entity unto itself, a tendril of the Divine, actively participating in the group’s shared experience. The late Terry Patten, for example, called it a “larger tide of living intelligence,”[3] and Scharmer[4] described a women’s circle practice that invoked the field, acknowledging it as the eighth member of the circle.

In this nonduality with the field, group members remain individuals, but at the same time, they become more. In groups I facilitate and am part of, we begin by intentionally contacting and entering this space. In an Emergent Dialogue[5] group I was engaged in, we began each session with a meditation followed by sharing how we were experiencing the field. Our sense of it, or how it felt, changed each time.
I remember comments like, “I feel drawn to the field,” “It feels like a pool of warm water inviting me to jump in,” and “a spark to the field.” In my healing circle, we imagine ourselves as light beings in a circle in the astral realm.

As I said, many of us believe that the field is part of a larger Field: the Universe, Spirit, the All There Is. And that by touching into the field, we are touching the Infinite.

---[1] Benefiel, M. (2005). Soul at work: Spiritual leadership in organizations. Church Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1080/14766080509518601. p. 9.[2] Astin, A., Astin, H., & Lindholm, J. (2011). Cultivating the spirit: How college can enhance students’ inner lives. Jossey-Bass. https://doi.org/10.6151/CERQ.2015.2303.05. p. 4.[3] Patten, T. (2010, October 23). What’s emerging from the collective field? [Blog]. Beyond Awakening Series. https://www.beyondawakeningseries.com/2010/10/whats-emerging-in-the-collective-field/ [4] Scharmer, C. O. (2016). Theory U: Leading from the future as it emerges (2nd ed.). Berrett-Koehler Publishers.[5] Thomas Steininger and Elizabeth Debold facilitate and teach Emergent Dialogue through their organization, evolve World: https://www.evolve-world.org/ed-module-1

An excerpt from my forthcoming book, Coherence: Cultivating Group Magic, hopefully coming in 2024.

Being part of a group experiencing coherence is a peak experience, both mystical and alchemical. There is something so incredibly connecting about it. And it’s a connectedness far beyond finding commonalities and that sense that I fit with another person. It is touching the Divine, communing with the Kosmos, and confirming that I’m not alone.

I have been part of a healing circle for several years, meeting virtually by Zoom, and I am confident that we often move into coherence. When the eight of us meet, we usually open with a meditation practice that concludes with us all turning on our video feeds and gazing deeply at each other. When I’m leading the practice, I invite the group to gaze deeply into each other’s souls, moving far beyond the surface and physical presentation of the person and connecting with each person’s highest, most authentic, infinite self.

We recently discussed this practice as a group. And together, we marveled at how quickly and intensely we connect (and re-connect) with each other despite not being physically located in the same place.

“It's very, very powerful, and when I am gazing [at] somebody, there's an immediate felt sense of connection. Where I'm seeing them very deeply and in this unconditional love kind of feeling, I actually feel their energy. I physically feel their energy coming from them,” one group member, Janice, a new Earth group leader in Texas, shared.

A coach and writing group facilitator, Lisa, continued, “I feel when I look in people's eyes, I'm met with this love. I'm recognizing the truth of being in each person. It’s elevated, and it's calm. And I feel like my eyes relax, my body relaxes.”

“It's not something that I'm doing. It's just happening,” Ron, a Unity minister who leads a congregation in Pennsylvania, explained. “We start out connecting with our eyes and the love that I see, and we just go from one person to the next. And the boundaries are very clear. There are these little boxes [in Zoom], and then what starts to happen the further we go into it, the boundaries start to blur. And this light and energy starts to swirl from one person to the other. And it's just the most amazing thing—the boundaries are blurred somewhat. They're still there, but they're blurring, and this energy, this latent Love and Light, is flowing from one to the other.”

The group is powerfully connected at a profound level. We sense that we are providing each other with support, which fortifies us for the work we do in the world. We all bring each other up higher. While we don’t always agree with each other inside the circle, per se, we have a beautiful appreciation for how we all see the same thing from different perspectives. No one is right or wrong.

My senses are heightened in the circle. I am aware of my somatic responses and tuned into my heart's intelligence. Just as Lisa explained, my body relaxes. My heart opens. I’m lighter, happier, more content, focused, and clearer during these experiences. My sense of what is real changes because I’m no longer grappling with fear, lack, and smallness; instead, it’s all love and abundance. It is expansiveness.

But there’s even more to it. After Ron talked about the energy that he sees moving around the screen when we gaze at each other, Rebecca, an Albuquerque author, chimed in.

“The same thing, Ron,” Rebecca continued. “I see energy going around me and then around each person like infinity symbols. And we're all just connected in this like big infinity loop. It is so cool that you just described it almost the way that I experience it.”

And this is not unusual for our group. During our sessions, we choose an intention and then meditate on it. After the meditation, we tell each other what happened for us. Quite often, more than one person will see, hear, and recall experiencing something similar inside the meditation. It is light-filled and otherworldly.

Yes, deep connectedness can absolutely happen virtually. I, as well as some of the other members of the healing circle, believe how we experience our connectedness is easier in Zoom. Wild, right?

Have you ever experienced coherence? Whether it’s just a feeling of an intense connection, or if it’s like what Ron and Rebecca expressed, a shared experience, chances are, if you’ve experienced it, you know you’ve experienced it. If you haven’t, I hope this book will bring you closer to the phenomenon and provide additional information and preparation for the possibility of coherence.

So, What is Coherence Exactly?

In 2021, I set out to study coherence in small groups. I wanted to know what it was like and how they were able to do it. I ended up facilitating small groups in a day-long session that was designed to move them toward coherence. To study the phenomenon, I loaded the deck recruiting small groups who came from the same organization, so they shared a common language, and who had some form of spiritual practice, which was mediation for most participants.

I had a burning desire to gain clarity on what coherence was exactly. There was no standard definition of what it was, because most of the writing on coherence was either focused on facilitating coherence experiences or talked about what it is conceptually. One concrete outcome of my study was a definition of coherence:

Coherence is a group-level phenomenon wherein members experience a collective shift into a heightened state of connectedness marked by a quieting, slowing, and calming of the group climate, an activation of an enlivened intersubjective field, and a calling forth for members’ best selves resulting in an acceptance and celebration of differences among members. The shift is aided by skillful means, and members can process and make sense of the experience through somatic, emotional, spiritual, and creative ways of knowing. Coherence experiences are often accompanied by individual and collective awakenings.

For those of you who have heard the term coherence bandied about previously, you may wonder how individual coherence relates to how a group experiences it. Indeed, coherence is only sometimes a collective term. The HeartMath Institute, for example, works with internal coherence related to heart rate variability and the entrainment of the body’s oscillating systems. Dr. Joe Dispenza has popularized the term by discussing coherence as something that happens within individuals to shift them into resonant, heart-full states and as a collective experience when a group of people is in individual coherence.

If you’re familiar with Dr. Joe’s work, my view on coherence complements his work. I continue his inquiry into what happens when groups come together in coherence.

The term coherence, in the context of this book, describes the communion of two or more people. I like how Robert Kenny[1], an experienced organizational consultant and facilitator, discussed coherence:

When the group reaches a certain level of coherence, generally there’s some higher level of order that comes into the room and it’s very noticeable to people. It’s like something has shifted. People stop fighting for airspace and there’s a kind of group intuition that develops. It’s almost like the group as a whole becomes a tuning fork for the inflow of wisdom.

An entire book on being in coherence by Drs. Olen Gunnlaugson and Michael Brabant[2] includes a well-spring of chapters on facilitating and being in coherence experiences from a long list of experts. They discuss their experiences as cultivating shared well-being and optimized collective energy as an outcome of attuning to heart intelligence and trust and resulting in a feeling of everything just falling into place. What’s possible is heightened creativity and new potential.

But coherence is also a paradox. Typically, groups come together with competing agendas and different histories. They have varying degrees of comfort with vulnerability and openness, yet these factors are usually needed for a group to shift into the phenomenon. In other words, getting there can be challenging. They might also find that the intense connection is difficult to maintain and sometimes challenging to return to once it does happen. Researcher Dr. Lyle Yorks[3] detailed a study he did with small groups who were moving in and out of something akin to coherence. He found that they were not able to sustain a deeply connected space.

And while some groups may try and try to enter an altered field together, others stumble into it with no effort at all. Those accidentally coherent groups could find the experience baffling and may either not want to return or find it impossible to do so. The bottom line is this: a group can set an intention for coherence, but their efforting will not allow them to shift into a cohered state. Coherence is more about beingness and allowing.

Often used interchangeably, coherence and cohesion are not actually synonymous. Cohesion is one of the most researched topics within the group dynamics field of study and is a term used to describe a group, often a workgroup, experiencing interrelatedness and a sense of “group-ness,” i.e. that sense that we belong together.

Coherence, conversely, takes group cohesion further, resulting in oneness and non-duality wherein the individuals within the group join energetically and in consciousness with other members, creating one whole. While cohesion is undoubtedly a necessary element of group and teamwork, particularly in the business environment, coherence is a transformational experience for both the individual and the group. It will probably not involve driving toward a goal or any particular outcome.

One of the keys to coherence is the group members involved and their availability and openness to experience something together they might not understand, be able to name, or control. In my experience, it is all heart, pure love, rushing energy, and elation, which may or may not be comfortable to contact. Even so, words don’t adequately capture it. It’s through the experience of sharing space with others who are also entrained in coherence that the actual essence of the experience becomes evident.

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[1] Kenny was quoted by Craig Hamilton in a 2004 article in EnlightenNext, the title for which was Come Together: The Mystery of Collective Intelligence. [2] Cohering the Integral We-Space: Engaging Collective Emergence, Wisdom, and Healing in Groups, edited by Olen Gunnlaugson and Michael Brabant (2016, Integral Publishing House) [3] Adult Learning and the Generation of New Knowledge and Meaning: Creating Liberating Spaces for Fostering Adult Learning through Practitioner-based Collaborative Action and Inquiry in Teachers College Record, volume 107, issue 6 (2005).