Kathlyn (Katie) Hendricks, PhD, BC-DMT, and Julia (Julie) Colwell, PhD, are pioneers in the field of human consciousness, conscious leadership and human potential. Nancy Kepner, co-founder of Crafted Leadership, LLC, sat down with Katie and Julie to get their perspective on a range of issues. Crafted Leadership’s mission is to spread conscious leadership throughout the global workplace, using Julie and Katie’s work as the foundation.
Nancy: One of my current wisdom teachers, Lama Tsultrim Allione, a Buddhist, has this statement about women and nature: that women and nature have always been treated in parallel. Where one has been disrespected so has the other, historically speaking. Would you speak about this framework?
Julie: Sure. That's a great question.
My intention and commitment is to co-create with nature. It's not about dominion, nature over or humans over, it's about how does nature work? How can humans interface in a way that we get to play with how nature works, the laws of nature? For example, how do intentions work?
My belief is that humans supply intentions and nature supplies the raw materials. This is a partnership, and if we understood that, how would things be different? We could step back and really see each other as allies.
Humans’ main motivator has been threat. Can we stay alive? The answer at this point is, yes. We are good at that. I honor my ancestors that have made it possible for me to have ease in survival now. That was not true until recently. Now we know that, we know how to survive, we've got it.
The next question is, can we roll into truly being partners with nature and using our consciousness to support nature as it has supported us, with every breath, every cellular division?
Katie: What you are calling threat, I think the human response to that has been to live in an increasingly dense fear-trance. My theory is that really accelerated with the dropping of the atom bomb.
This act, in my felt experience, changed the chemical structure of the world, and put into place a level of subconscious, chronic fear that has escalated over the last 70+ years.
One of my major foci over the last several years has been to show it's actually possible to shift out of fear into felt presence, resourcefulness, and connection.
There are two main gulfs that occur in fear. One perceptual shift makes another person suddenly appear to be the enemy. That disconnection happens at a level of the brain that's not conscious. So, in fear-seeing any inhumane action becomes totally justifiable because that's no longer a person over there, just an other, an enemy.
That fear perception then infects the world view, so that civilization has become associated with control over nature. Sources for this viewpoint all the way back in the Bible and other places. What runs these control programs is the fear of creation. And who gets the main brunt of that prejudice: women.
This acculturated fear of enormous, primal creative power combined with seeing women as the "other,” results in this crazy meme that has existed for centuries imposing an either-or role on women, the Madonna-whore fixation. Human’s inner thoughts careen from I love you, but I hate you. I love you, but I'm going to dominate you. I love you, but I'm going to abuse you. First you're a person and then when I’m scared, you're not a person anymore, you’re a “witch.”
We are nature. Humans come out of nature and we go back into nature. The experience of co-creating, a moment of co-creating and seeing the other person as an ally — that is where a new kind of world can be created. It's through the gateway of both befriending fear and moving from power over to power within co-creation.
Fear-control circuits connect right back into the fear of feelings, because feelings are simply the movement of our body sensations along tracks that have long been established over centuries. For example, the anger circuits that light up in us in response to a trespass, run up the back of the body from the shoulder blades up over the shoulders, neck and jaw, the “hackles” that all mammals raise when angry.
Emotions are a shortcut to our intelligence. Our feelings are really what make us most human and most creative.
As we can befriend those, and really see those as our allies we can actually move from fear into presence. I call it “from fear to here.”
Because we can be afraid of our feelings, our feelings become the enemy. When I'm in fear I'm not here and I don't see reality.
Perception gets very narrowed in fear. Fear perceives everything as coming at rather than flowing with nature, which is to mingle and co-create, to blend and to join into new forms. When we stop that flow, damming up emotions, we are like the Army Corp of Engineers. We try to dam everything up. When I was in school, we learned about the Army Corp of Engineers trying to dam the Mississippi. It was a hilariously futile kind of effort.
We humans don't seem to learn from those disasters we keep recreating every year. Humans build Houston (on wetlands). I was just thinking, maybe that viewpoint comes out of needing to be right. It's the same dynamic as in relationship power struggles. I want to be right with the world. I don't want the water to come here, I want it to go there, and therefore it should go there.
If we think of nature as a person, what does nature want? We don't ask what nature wants. The whole possibility of moving into riding waves of co-creativity – I know that's possible because I've been living in those co-creative waves for several years now. [Gay and I] dreamed up these waves a long time ago and wrote about them in The Conscious Heart.
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Other blogs from this interview touch on courage, emotions in the workplace, flags, their bodies of work, and the present world. Read the next installment, Part 5: Emotions in the Workplace.