The Tension of Emergence: Thriving in a world that remakes, not breaks

Embracing Pain, Remembering Joy with Amy Elizabeth Fox

• Jennifer England • Season 3 • Episode 19

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We’ve been talking about “feeling more” so we can access more wisdom in our leadership, but what if we’re really good at avoiding pain?  

In the final week of season three of the Tension of Emergence, Jennifer delves into the question of how to work with personal and collective pain with the co-founder of Mobius Executive Leadership and expert in trauma-informed development, Amy Elizabeth Fox. Together they break down the illusory binary between the personal/professional, individual/collective and pain/joy. 

They also share—

  • Three stages of working with pain and how to transmute pain into possibility
  • How the privatization of healing has gotten us into trouble
  • Why communal witnessing can shift everything

Tune in for an in-depth exploration of how to work with personal and collective pain so that you can access more joy, presence and liberation. 

Links & resources—


Gratitude for this show’s theme song Inside the House, composed by the talented Yukon musician, multi-instrumentalist and sound artist Jordy Walker. Artwork by the imaginative writer, filmmaker and artist Jon Marro.

S3. Ep 19 Embracing Pain, Remembering Joy with Amy Elizabeth Fox
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My friend, we are in the final week of season three of The Tension of Emergence. And, True to the name of this podcast, we're diving right in to, I think the hardest question for me, and that is how to be with pain.

The pain of our lives, the pain of our collective suffering,. And I realized as I was walking towards the garden this morning is that every time I see beauty, I'm also so aware of its fragility. And I think that is the essence of what I'm exploring in the show, is that any kind of emergence into a new becoming requires this tension, and between often these seemingly polar opposites.

And today we're diving into this tension of pain and joy. And I realize It's very rare that we actually don't experience one without the other. When I'm standing there in the garden and just so appreciative of the heat, and then at the same time have this sharp pain of recognition that the heat is not normal.

that the heat is too much. And so I can hold in any moment this deep appreciation for joy or beauty and then what can seep into my consciousness is the sting of a pain, the potential of a loss.

And the counter is also true. In the midst of so much pain, whether it's physical pain or whether it's emotional, there's often these moments of reprieve. Reprieve that comes from a tender touch, a beautiful hug, a call or a text from someone who loves us, or the genuine care of someone so skilled they want to alleviate us of our own pain.

And as leaders this is true on the collective level in our work.

To some extent, we've wanted to separate. Our own personal suffering, or a personal joy with our professional, and that dichotomy, I have noticed, creates more suffering in our work lives than it needs to.

I can see this unnecessary bifurcation of the professional and the personal, the inner and the outer, what is to be maintained within an individual interior. and what is okay within a group. And what is so enlivening to me these days is the work of public intellectuals and artists and creatives and spiritual seekers and countercultural change makers who can feel and see a willingness to collapse these unnecessary walls between them. I am so honored to have my next guest, Amy Elizabeth Fox. She has served as one of the founders and chief executive officers of Mobius Executive Leadership, which is a global transformational leadership firm. For the last 20 years, she has served as a leadership and culture change advisor to Fortune 500 companies and has facilitated immersive executive development programs for senior leaders.

Amy is considered an expert in healing, individual, family, and collective trauma, and has been a pioneer in introducing trauma informed development and psycho spiritual principles into leadership programs.

In addition to her work with Mobius, she's a senior student of the mystical teacher Thomas Hubel, serving as part of his online faculty and as lead faculty for his two year Timeless Wisdom training.

When I sit with Amy, I drop into a really quiet and still place, a place where I can feel a deep trust in the potential of us as a collective to not shy away from those hardest things. in the most professional of contexts. 

I hope this conversation will be invigorating for you to trust that there doesn't need to be a separation between our interiors and, 

a collective. 

Jennifer: I'm just so drawn to the depth of your work, Amy, and wondered if you could speak to what question or questions enliven you.

And where and how that's shaped this contribution of depth to serving groups.

Amy: Thank you for that lovely question. I don't know if I would frame it in terms of questions, Jennifer, I might say yearnings. So one very long yearning that has walked with me since my childhood is a yearning to be free of a certain amount of terror and a certain amount of pain and a certain amount of loneliness.

There were dimensions of my childhood that were tremendously fertile and rich and nurturing. And there were other dimensions of my childhood that left a really quite serious traumatic scar. So in some ways, I feel like I've been on a quest for 45 years to heal my heart. And that deep looking that you're referencing is the depth of my work, inviting someone to look back at the events of their life at the ways they interpreted and made meaning of those events, and about the unconscious habits fears and emptiness that that those events shape in consciousness has become one of my passionate arenas of exploration and of practice. Because in the same ways that I've been gifted with the chances to be with extraordinary teachers and extraordinary healers, I've learned something through the process of my own integration and metabolization of my early hurts about the process of repair and restoration.

And it is my profound conviction that everything can be healed. And it can be transmuted into potential. So I have a kind of passionate conviction that in creating context in which people will stop looking away from their life and look back towards themselves is an extremely liberating possibility, even though it looks like I'm inviting people to be in more pain.

They're in the pain. They're just numbing that pain in eight ways to Sunday. And the cost of that numbing is significant in their lives, in their leadership, in their families and in their joy. So one longing would be the longing to be freer, to be liberated. Liberated from a certain amount of pain and maybe an absolutely parallel longing is to taste life's beauty and poignancy and intimacy and to feed the flame of Eros and aliveness inside me and to be part of it.

bringing that more fully into society. Because I think part of the ways we're sleepwalking is that we don't drink of the well of life's beauty and life's possibility as fully as we could. So there's, I wrote a piece recently about soul void and how many leaders come into programs, having excelled in their mind and achieved a tremendous amount of expertise and authority, but soul empty of the things that really would touch their heart and light them up. 

And not even asking the questions of what would light me up anymore. It's like even the important profound yearning has the, lamp of that light has also gone out. So trying to rekindle for people who are settling for less than they ought to bring back their vitality to quest.

That's the second yearning that drives my work. And Both of those were very intimate experiences of my own longing. 

Jennifer: I love that longing feels like a bridge between working with pain, alchemizing pain and the taste of Eros, you know, the longing for both those states is a beautiful, it's just a beautiful movement and that the two are necessary for the kind of freedom that you're speaking to.

Thank you. And I'm curious how your relationship to pain shifted over time. And one of the drivers of this podcast, this word, you know, tension of emergence feels in, in a way, very similar to what you've just described, the emergence, the possibility of more aliveness. And yet the, The critical and necessary and such difficult terrain of working in the tension and moving through a tension, whether it's a constriction, whether it's pain, whether it's suffering in order to experience the emergence that wants to come forward.

And so how has your relationship to pain shifted over time from when you're a kid to sort of a teen and young adulthood and to now? 

Amy: That's a beautiful question. Maybe I'll just say it as phases of immaturity, maturity, and embrace. So in immature phase, you just want to be out of pain, and you're making a lot of choices to skirt around or avoid or numb anything that feels hurtful. And I did that in all the ways we all do that.

I did that by being overly busy. I did that by being very oriented to achievement and taking some soothing by, you know, external success. I did it by socializing and staying very engaged with other people and caretaking. I did it by overeating. And so I think my first relationship to pain was one of just avoidance and addiction in a sense.

And then at some point, the cost of those avoidance strategies kind of hits you in the face. And in addiction terms, you're hitting some kind of a bottom in which the cost of the soothing is more daunting than facing the pain. And at that moment you start to have a mature relationship, which is turning towards the narrative of your life, turning towards the emotional residue.

The memories, the sensations, the feelings, the affect, et cetera. In my experience, being well accompanied in that turning was critical. Particularly for those of us who've had more serious kinds of trauma in our life story. It's often literally too much to hold by yourself which is why the psyche dissociates and goes numb in the first place.

So I think the thing I would say about my. Maturation phase was really looking for and finding cradles or havens or sanctuaries where somebody knew how to take me and guide me through that process of re emerging what was dormant or buried in my unconscious in a safe way, in a somatic way, in an energetic way, in a cathartic way, and in a titrated way.

So one of the things that we've learned about trauma treatment in the last 30 years while I've been on this journey is how important it is to not oversaturate the psyche, to not take somebody to a state where they're dissembling and not able to function in daily life, but to actually pace the integration at the pace that a psyche can tolerate and absorb.

And I've learned that both by watching, us get more and more refined in trauma treatment, but also I've learned it the hard way of having. Moments that were more decompensated and more challenging and I hope that we can not ask that of people anymore. And the final phase of it, I think, is you start at a certain point and again this is a long layered unwinding this is not a weekend workshop, where you go to, a personal growth center take a two day yoga class and walk away feeling whole.

This is a painstaking devotion. To continue to liberate your heart, to continue to let more and more of, of your life experience have voice and have expression and pass through your system. So you have more and more spaciousness, more and more compassion, more and more capacity for joy, more and more self expression and many, many beautiful by products of that process. At some point, there starts to be space in your system where pain or terror or grief or, shame that those were the particular emotional tones of my heart no longer have the foreground. All of a sudden you're dancing with life in a much different manner and mode. And. Your self identity becomes not one that feels so defeated and so hopeless and so imploded.

But your self identity starts to be one of somebody who can be an instrument of service, an instrument of restoration, an instrument of connection an instrument of intuition. And so I feel like the final relationship I have to pain is harvesting the gifts that that pain matured in me .

Which is a beautiful full circle. And I've only really recently begun to feel how blessed the whole journey is because I know that the practitioner that I am now and the ways that I can be of support to the leaders I have the privilege to work with is, is in every way informed by every step I took on that journey.

Jennifer: Absolutely.

Amy: And there's a kind of tacit communication, Jennifer, I feel that whatever I have lived through transmits itself energetically as an invitation for them to bring me more and more of their stories and their interiority and their life's hurts. It's very subtle communication that somehow I think when you, when you as a practitioner have really done your own healing work, you're a walking invitation for people to bring you things and to act as a refuge.

So that's a beautiful full circled for, you know, one's life's walk and life's work.

Jennifer: Thank you for sharing that. And I resonate so much with those different stages. And I love when you said, you're embracing your pain and then you're allowing it to pass through you. And yeah. And not clutching on to the story or the sensations and trusting and recognizing that there's a capacity for us to let it in and let it through.

And then hearing just what that's done in terms of impact as you embrace and let others pain and stories. move into you. There's a receptivity, but it's also, an invitation. And when there's movement, there can be healing. And I love this turn towards the fullness or the wholeness.

of your own human experience and then just the sheer gift of when we work our raw edges over and over and over again and we can sit and be with it without numbing and pushing it away. I think for me my journey in this more transformational work came with just feeling my own limits of not being able to hold other people's pain, nor my own.

I mean, it's precisely this question for me around how do I be with the suffering of the world? I remember one time I heard Pope St. Francis say, you know, he wanted to be strong enough to bear the suffering of the world on his shoulders. And it's funny because I was always told as a kid, he's like, you know, you're not Atlas, Jennifer, you can't hold the world on your shoulders.

But I just remember this statement from Pope Francis, and And just how unbelievably generous it was in my view of just that statement, and yet how impossible it felt so impossible for me until, as you say, you start to do the work in your own life and be able to really sit with it and to the point that it doesn't become so terrifying that you can be at home in your own skin and with your own stories and memories and experiences as they unfold.

Amy: Saying two things that I think are worth slowing down to really capture Jennifer. One is there's a correlation between my ability to meet and encounter my own inner truths, and the recesses of my heart and what it contains, and my ability to make that overture offer. Or as you said, offer that sanctuary to others.

And I deeply believe that it's one of the reasons why in creating my global practitioner community, I'm so passionate about us doing our own healing work with one another, because there isn't another way to refine yourself as an instrument of the work than doing your work, just really, but there's a second important thing, I think you said, which is the difference between taking on the suffering of the world, which could feel like An enormous burden or an overwhelming weight or, you know, simply something that's not conceivable to engage versus making yourself available moment by moment, occasion by occasion, to be in service to the liberation of the world.

It's a very different

Jennifer: Mm hmm.

Amy: orientation. So I think my role or any of us who are trying to be healers in any way, I mean, you do this in the podcast with the quality of your deep listening and the permeation of space that you're offering the people you're dialoguing with, that hospitality or container that you create is a self healing mechanism in a way you don't have to do the work, you have to simply disentangle the Societal hacks that are keeping the natural evolutionary flow from happening.

You don't have to teach a tree how to grow. You don't have to teach a human heart how to reopen. You just have to create the conditions in which that naturally will happen. And that doesn't leave you with nearly the same residue or resonance with other people's suffering. And I think maybe that's another dimension of this third phase of embrace, which is When I'm seeing the suffering, I'm not I'm not like a guitar string that's reverberating with my own version of that same grief or that same pain or that same fear.

I've cleaned out enough, and I think many of us have been working on this for a long time, that we can now witness that pain not with a neutral heart, but with a compassionate heart, with a heart of attunement, with a heart of empathy, with a heart of holding a heart of willingness to listen. But that comes at a different cost, a lighter cost than running through your system and having it reactivate aspects of your own history that are unintegrated. My activism in my twenties was to fix the world and my activism now as a healer and a practitioner and a teacher is really to meet the world. While you were talking this wonderful lyric, which I am not going to remember verbatim from the feminist singer Holly near came to me, which was, she says something like if you have lived it, then I can hear it.

Jennifer: Mm 

Amy: I remember hearing that in college and thinking that's my life's goal

That anything somebody has lived through I can become a repository for that witness.

Jennifer: And witnessing, is not to be underestimated. Because witnessing can shift and change profoundly at the heart level and at the soul level. And so I'd love to transition into, you know, how this profound yearning of yours, both for Eros and aliveness and the alleviation of suffering.

How, how did that inform this beautiful entanglement between you and your sister, Erica Fox, and the creation of Mobius Leadership? And it, is, a radical edge that I believe you're walking together in doing the work that does not look typical to many leadership development initiatives. So tell me how this embrace of the deeper healing work of pain and of Eros, how that is informed this entanglement and offering that is the genius of Mobius right now.

Yeah,

Amy: and I have very different vocational paths historically. So I'm a psychotherapist by training and a social entrepreneur by history, and she is a stunning legal mind and a lecturer at Harvard Law School and a longtime affiliate of the Program on Negotiation there, and a CEO coach. And our paths came together just before the founding of Mobius when we became really interested in, in taking what was at the time, a lot of corporate development around mindsets and behaviors.

So helping people to have better communication skills, helping people to have greater emotional intelligence, helping people to create feedback, rich environments. A lot of the work at Harvard Law School had really focused on how to help people have business critical conversations and All of that is still to this day incredibly relevant, meaningful, helpful managerial training.

But it seemed to us that it was absent calling people to a much deeper path of development and a deeper path of transformation and alchemy. And so we were interested in Erica in particular having studied perennial philosophy and wisdom traditions and me having studied more of the sort of psychological dimensions of adult development.

What if we brought those worlds together and created not such transactional short term interventions, but actually much longer, deeper retreats where executives could pull out of day to day work and ask the most profound questions of their lives and look in a Coherent and structured way at what was unfinished in their early childhood that they can go back for now and reclaim and open up again in a very safe way in a titrated way in a purposeful way.

And Erica has been doing this kind of shadow work where she creates individual bespoke rituals for an executive based on their life narrative for almost 25 years. And, I took a version of that and really started introducing early childhood attachment repair work into leadership programs, where each executive spends time looking very deeply at the events of their lives.

And in particular, at meaningful traumas, adverse incidents in their childhood. And I was quite stunned, Jennifer, having now done thousands of leaders through these programs. I very rarely met somebody whose life wasn't touched by some kind of a tragedy, sometimes kind of a significant family challenge.

And even those executives who had somehow a pristine childhood of good attunement, good enough holding, lots of emotional support, lots of encouragement. When you went back one generation, or if need be, In rare cases, two generations, you would find war, you would find violence, you would find immigration, you would find hurt hearts you would find addiction, you would find domestic violence, you would find poverty.

And so really, it just presented itself as a canvas of multi generational trauma in which everyone is sitting and we've created all kinds of social agreements that are based on a hurt world. And so I have a conviction, I think Erica has a conviction, that if we want to build a different world, a more just world, a more peaceful world, a more inclusive world, a freer world, you have to help people to understand Their own unconscious habits, but equally to be able to discern the ways in which we're operating inside of organizations and society that are based on that untreated hurt, but don't have to be.

So as an example The notion that a nuclear family is the unit of our obligation, that we're only responsible for the immediate people inside of a marriage and our children, as opposed to we're responsible for the commons, to our village, our ancestors, ecology, for the generations yet unborn.

Those are two very different perspectives. You make very different choices. Where you think your accountability lies where your stewardship lies. So part of what we're trying to do is very personal healing, but a lot of what we're trying to do is rewiring society so that it starts to operate in ways that become life reinforcing and life thriving.

Jennifer: beautiful. And my hunch is, and I'm sure this is intention and by design with both you and Erica through your programs, is that the, deeper healing work that you're doing liberates something profoundly, and it can do in very short periods of time, such that Okay. so much We have more capacity to hold more to hold the collective and to feel that we're, interdependent and in a mutual reciprocity with, the whole.

And so I'm curious, and I want to break this down, because you've made this point a couple of times, and I just so appreciate it is that, therapy has been privatized. And you've made the distinct to integrate healing and healing modalities within a group of leaders. And so, for many listeners, this might seem a bit surprising or strange.

inappropriate, that there needs to be this very thick boundary between the professional, the outer and the inner healing of the individual, the interior, but you've collapsed those. Where did you start to discover the impact when you started to experiment? 

Amy: Yeah, I mean, in some ways, the work I'm doing is a harkening back to Indigenous wisdom we used to have. You could look at the way Native ceremony happens. You could look at the way a Quaker meeting is orchestrated. You could look at the way Jewish grieving is done in communities. Like, we used to understand that we need each other. We need to be accompanied to use your word earlier. We need to be witnessed. We need to be supported. We need to be held when we're touching our most fragile and vulnerable dimensions of our lives. And so as beautiful as a therapeutic relationship is, and I've been deeply well served by a number of such practitioners, I do believe there's something Almost magical, but certainly potent and beautiful when a group of adults comes together outside of their roles, outside of their functions, outside of their formal ways of interacting and decides to de mask themselves or unshield themselves and share the vulnerabilities that they carry.

And I've seen over and over how almost immediate the heart. Response to that invitation is people feel so relieved to not be in the isolation of living in a walled off superficial routinized exchange with one another. They feel so touched to understand the courage and depth of one another's soulfulness and resilience and bravery in life, like you, you listen to life story after life story.

You just marvel at the human spirit. So we all want to be uplifted in that way. We all naturally feel fulfilled when we can support somebody in their healing process. We feel closer. We feel more benevolent. We feel more peaceful. When we're allowed to meet in our depth, we're doing a huge amount of self control to keep us from the natural outpouring of kindness and generosity and solidarity.

I never have to teach in my leadership programs, how people can love each other, how people dance together, how people can create together, how people can hold each other, how people can Talk to one another. All you have to do is remove the restrictions and normative expectations that it won't be that way, or that it can't be that way, or it isn't professional for it to be that way.

And the myth constructs all of that. And we do it together. It's like, everybody looks, what's the cost of living in such a walled off universe? And people will universally say, I feel like an imposter. I feel lonely. I don't know who to ask for help. I don't feel like anybody celebrates when I do something wonderful.

I don't really know who I am. I don't know who to have an honest conversation with. I don't know who to ask for emotional support from. They're very capable almost immediately of saying the way we're doing it isn't working. It isn't working for me. It isn't working for my team. It isn't working for the organization.

It isn't working writ large. And once that is sort of a universally acknowledged problem, then the solution becomes very naturally arising in my experience.

Jennifer: I'm feeling so relieved as you share this because it feels both so simple and obvious and also, Just the degree of relief that you've witnessed and I've witnessed also just was simply having storytelling, storytelling about significant moments in our lives and what that does to unmask in the hierarchy, the hierarchy of a particular team and open up just relating center to center.

And what that unleashes in a group if you can maintain that quality of humility and ordinariness and, the real human side. And my question is, what have you observed in terms of what continues to hold leaders and teams back? I mean, you have many CEOs in particular who've done, you know, if they've done the leadership circle, they've done leadership 360s, they've done much development, probably therapy.

And yet, There's a recognition that something holds them back. And often we think, well, we need a better vision. We need better strategy. We need better tactics. But your hunch and what you've experimented with is often gone the different direction than the mind. The mind is great. As you, as you know, we need bright strategic thinkers, but you've put the emphasis somewhere else.

in order to deal with those restrictions. 

Amy: I'm putting my finger on a different cause of the restrictions. I believe the restrictions are early childhood survival mechanisms that are now antiquated in their usefulness. No senior successful leader is acting in dysfunctional or less productive ways because they haven't gotten the feedback.

Or because they're not aware of what's in their blind spot or because they're unwilling to change. They're continuing to do those things because they are hardwired in their neurology and in their survival strategies from very young and in early points in their development. And until you go back for the real root cause, telling them three other alternative behaviors or Doing some kind of a cognitive behavioral change might work for a time, but it won't work under stress and it won't work sustainably. So I think the first thing we've gotten more profoundly aware of is that these behaviors have deep roots. And said something else that I think is important, Jennifer, which is the solution isn't just Go back for your pain in an accompanied way. Although I do believe that's part of it. It's also the glistening possibility of activating all kinds of other dimensional intelligence.

That is the fertility of your potential. So helping people to arrive into their embodied somatic awareness and felt sense of life, helping people to open up the chamber of their heart so that they can. Feel themselves and feel each other and permeate themselves with the emotional relational dimension of love and belonging.

There's access to the aesthetic and the expressive arts. We dance in our programs, we play cello, we paint, we tell stories, we make jokes, all the things that are just Aliveness, natural expression of wonder and awe and grace come back infusing into an executive repertoire that is often really stilted in the mind.

One can't innovate, one can't contribute to the re invention of life from a routinized mind. The process of alchemy and transformation and transfiguration has to come from a quality of inspiration, including inspiring one needs to breathe and drink and sort of be actively writing the book of life, not passively receiving information. It's a very different orientation to what the work is.

Jennifer: Oh, I love that so much. And I'm a big dancer, and I always get people to dance in all the work I do. And it's just beautiful to watch the music coming alive, art, embodiment and how that also creates a spaciousness for the unseen world for this you know, borders of ourselves to dissolve between each other in both joy and playfulness and joy.

And I love if you could share a story about a a group that particularly stood out for you. You know, maybe they came in with significant resistance, they were a little bit open to the work, and then you took them through a journey that was remarkable.

And I'm wondering if you'd be willing to share a story without telling names.

Amy: I know of course I mean this kind of work is tremendously confidential but I can give you some illustrative examples, although I did want to just go back to one thing you were just saying about the unseen world. There is a kind of mystery. That we aren't day to day so aware of, you know, one might call that the indwelling of the divine.

One might call that the presence of spirit. One might call that people's higher selves. You could call it the implicate order, the way Bohm called it. And I do believe that there's a resting when you really understand that there's a profound interconnection and intelligence that we're part of that's far vaster than just our body and our particular personality and identity.

And however you bring that sense of the numinous into the room, that becomes literally a source. It's a connection to source that can call people to something. much wider in their lives, and is ultimately the resting place for all of the hurt. So I just wanted to underscore the profound addition you were making to what I was describing as the process, which is tapping into the blessing field, which I think is also super important.

You know, every group comes in a little nervous and a little anxious because there's much we do before the program to telegraph how seriously we take the process. And I think they're unconscious is already cooking from the moment they enroll long before they arrive in the room. So, I don't really feel like I encountered that much resistance I feel like people come somehow.

synchronized to the moment when they're really ready. And we welcome that readiness. We can meet it very well, but what I can say, it's maybe a couple of stories of profound moments that I've had the privilege to witness. There was one man who came into the program. This was a multi client program.

So 24 executives from all over the world, many different industries, all. very, senior leaders. And on the opening night, we do a guided visualization in which they make an image of their intention for the week. And we go around the room and hear them. And this particular man had grown up in Russia and had a really a catastrophic life experience.

I mean, just tragedy on tragedy, hardship on hardship. And when it came his turn, He showed us a piece of paper, and on one side he had simply written a black line, a sort of slash across the page. And he said to the group, this is my life before this week. And think about the gravity and enormity that he told us just with that one line.

This is my life before this week. And then he flipped it over and he had color everywhere, random, chaotic, chaotic color. And he said, and this is what I want my life to be after this week. That was Sunday night. On Tuesday morning we read people's life stories and we get a chance to hear the seminal events of their life, both the ones that shaped their gifts and their sense of life purpose, but also the ones that really were the crucible events of their life. His narrative was written with vast understatement.

And I knew that in part because I had interviewed him before the program, but also you could just feel the weariness of his being in his presence. And when he finished, I was guided to say to the group, you know, sometimes in life we have a moment to honor what somebody has endured and to bless their healing that really will only come once in their lifetime. Everyone sitting here has the chance to be that moment for this friend of So please, in silence, will you stand and just bow to what he has walked and what he's telling us by the music beneath the words he's speaking. And everybody stood and he sort of went into shock for a few seconds and then he started to weep and the group went forward and just rocked him while he wept. touching moment. I'll never forget it. No one will ever forget it. And on Friday, he said to the group, on my deathbed, I'll remember that moment. And I know it's true. I know something holy happened in that moment. Now, you have to create a field of receptivity for that. You have to have everyone slow down and be present with a reverence for that moment to happen in that way. And you have to have the time, you know, we have a wingspan of five days, so we have enough time to give things their appropriate time. He didn't have to contain his weeping.

The group didn't have to move on from rocking him. Somebody stayed with him all day. So the tending is also very important. a slightly different story, but in some ways I could literally tell you thousands of such moments like This is what happens when people come together to be part of each other's repair this is the depth of it. This is the beauty of it. And this is the efficacy of it Like it changes something fundamental for the person because often the reason the trauma is, the trauma isn't the event, but it's the fact that it wasn't witnessed, as you said earlier, it wasn't held, nobody was attuned to it.

So that repair to go back in time and say, we're with you, not today, we're with you then, I really believe has a kind of extraordinary profundity to it.

Jennifer: Listeners can't see me as tears are rolling down my eyes, but I, I'm just so appreciating the power of collapsing this illusion of separation between our professional lives and work and what happens on teams and our interiors. And our interiors that have deep roots.

And I'm so appreciating this point about time, because that's the major constraint that leaders and teams don't have. We don't have time to bring the emotions into the room. We don't have time to deal with the eruption of our nervous systems. We have all these other important priorities to get.

And so I just wanted to pause there, because the gift of time, to come out of time, to actually not be bound of time, and to simply be bound by relationship, feels like the gift of that particular moment, and many of these countless other moments you're, you could share with us today.

Amy: Yeah, it's gorgeous what you said, right? You're literally taking people out of time, which means every facet of modernization of too fast, too intense, too much exertion, too much constant data, too much pressure, too much achievement, too much doing, too little being, too little spaciousness, too little time to integrate, to reflect, to love.

But you're not moving from modernity to Ancient time. You're moving from modernity and present time to eternal time. And in eternal time, exactly as you said, things can move profoundly and with precision and with a quality of indwelling presence that has its own potency and that cannot be accessed in the interstices between meetings.

Jennifer: Beautiful. 

Amy: I mean, you said it beautifully, and you said it with such an embodiment. I just want to call everybody's attention to the quality of your presence when you're talking about this, because that is the thing that we're pointing to.



Jennifer: You know, I'm speaking to you from a place of our community experienced a tragedy this week, and it is Just so beautiful to witness and be taught about how to be in community with each other. And I just want to circle back to your point in the beginning around this, we can see our lives in terms of these limited relational fields, the nuclear family, or this is my team, or this is my unit.

Or we can find ways to. Relax into a wider view and to be available for the needs of our community, our teams, our companies. And it's this capacity, if we are able to be fully seen in our own pain, in our own deep challenges and just be accepted for what they are without having to analyze it, without having to defend it, without having to, go in through all the details.

It's like, that can be enough.

Amy: Yeah. I mean, there's again, two facets to what you're saying. One is absent the reflection, absent the sharing, when we're keeping all of our stories as secrets. They live with a binding of shame. The only way to melt that shame is to have them cross the threshold to another. And once it can be received, all the different dimensions of my psyche, all the different emotional residues that I have, all the vulnerabilities and foibles that I have, all the places that I've failed and fallen short, all the places where I've stepped out of my own alignment and my values.

If somebody can meet that with a real unconditional acceptance, that is a profoundly de shaming opportunity. And of course, shame is an incredible inhibitor for innovation, for self expression. You know, I don't, I don't quite want to say, but, That de shaming is just very, very important.

That's the first thing. The second thing is the loneliness that people walk with. You know, I've had people end a week of programs with their colleagues and say I've worked next to this person for 18 years and I didn't know they had an autistic son or I didn't know their mother had dementia. Or I didn't know she had miscarried two babies in the last six months, like we don't have the information that would allow us to walk in tandem and in accompaniment with one another, even though we're sitting next to each other all day long collaborating on projects.

I believe that is a fundamental distortion of Over isolation and over independence and an emphasis on autonomy, where we actually the reparative emphasis would be exactly as you're saying, Jennifer on community on interweaving on our capacity to show up for one another and support each other through hard moments.

That's whether I walk alone in an organization, or I walk in solidarity with my colleagues. is a very different felt experience of what it means to be part of a team, or what it means to be affiliated inside an enterprise. And I think we're going to ask people to bring their highest intelligence and their full life force and their engagement to To our shared enterprise, the thing we owe them in return is to be part of a real systemic expression of generosity and care.

Jennifer: I so appreciate your point of this overemphasis of individuality and it's something we've been talking about particularly in season two of this podcast is composting outdated tropes and expectations of leadership, right? The hero's journey is a good example. We've been saying, okay, there's limits to this story and trope around the hero's journey.

But this point you've made is around. This overemphasis to about resilience and individual resilience, and I'd love to double click on that because I think this point about living into the web and living as we are interdependent in a more full and expansive way where we're integrated and inclusive.

Peter. Engaging our full range of intelligence is the counterpoint of, hey, just go gain a few more skills to be rock solid in the face of oppression or rock solid in the face of more tragedy and that point, and that comes to sometimes to therapy and not to.

I don't mean to be down on therapy, but this like, it's all on you. We can misinterpret that the work is only our own.

Amy: Well, again, you're saying, I just love the way your mind works because you always say things that are so dimensional. So I want to take the second one first and hope I remember the first one. The second thing you said, which is we take a individual lens to understanding people's pain, which misses all of the racialized trauma, all of the economic disparity, all of the historic oppression and colonialism, all of the forced migration, all the divergence of resources and access to help that have lived for generations in every pain point in the world.

That's just an distortion that puts the onus on the people who have been oppressed to find their own access to their resources and take responsibility for what really are systemic violations. And so the political analysis that you're making, the socio economic analysis that you're making, the geopolitical analysis that you're making is part of what's missing you From a psychologically biased society.

It's also absolutely part of what's been wrong with the history of psychotherapy, not the feminist therapists and some of the more liberatory movements, both theologically and psychologically. But that absence of analysis at the level of the system has largely been relegated to social entrepreneurs and activists, and not thus far been the domain of healers and teachers.

I think that bifurcation. And the spiritual or of the material and the, , sociological, the private and the collective. That's just a distortion that we need to address and we need to repair and stop. And I think the second, what was the first thing you said?

Jennifer: Oh my god, I can't even remember. I love that you say you love the way my mind works because sometimes I'm like, oh my god, my mind, like, I just jam it all in. So, and part of,

Amy: talking about something more recently on this podcast, which are the tropes that aren't work.

Jennifer: well, composting,

Amy: Yeah. Yeah.

Jennifer: and the hero's journey and this idea of, you know, life being a succession of linear arrival points. And I believe most of us and including the executives and leaders that I've worked with, including those in the social justice and the social entrepreneurship space.

I mean, that's a really significant story that we can fall asleep into. And it points to, again, this overemphasis on the individual. And that isn't. The way forward for our collective liberation.

Amy: Yeah. So two things to say about that. One, I think the understanding of the hero's journey as an individual linear quest is a deep misunderstanding of the real meaning mythologically and sort of in consciousness of the hero's journey. The hero's journey is actually a journey into the mystery of oneself.

The deepest dimensions of who we really are and a sort of invitation to the portal of the adventure of consciousness, the adventure of re experiencing a unitive field, the yearning we all have to be in a state of communion with our real essential nature. And I think that's actually an invaluable tool for calling people to that that lifelong path of spiritual development.

However, the part of it that you said that I really agree with is The notion that our lives are linear goalposts Bob Kegan and Lisa Leahy, my dear friends and colleagues talk about this as sort of socialized mind and executive whose orientation all of their life has been. What's the next achievement? What's the next prestigious recognition?

What's the next demarcation of status that I can get, which can drive in particular children who were too early relegated to parental roles too early in the family had to take on responsibility, precociously got tasked with caring for many things and ordering many things and really missed the opportunity to have a childhood that was playful and creative and just sort of wild in nature.

Those people often go on to lead big, big enterprises because they get very used to having followers and guiding people and taking care of people. But those hero kids don't rest well in their goodness, in their enoughness, in their innate value and worth. And so that individual questing is actually a desire to be accepted and loved.

And when you can provide that quality of acceptance and love and receiving of their unique qualities, of their potential, precise beauty, of their actual perfume of their essence, that's quiets that in such a wonderful way. And then they're free. Then they can go on to paint the picture of their lives as they're called to do it out of their own values, their own callings, their own unique contributions. And that's a beautiful process to watch that, that sort of striving, take a rest or take a pause. 

Jennifer: It's bringing me back to this very beginning of our conversation when you shared your yearning and to be free of pain and also to taste the beauty and aliveness of life of Eros. And so I love that you're bringing, you know, we've talked about the witnessing and the holding of pain. And the rocking and being with and deeply feeling met where the shame can dissolve when there's deep empathy and compassion and love brought to the witnessing of someone's suffering past and present.

And also the joy that happens when we just watch and be with one another in our complete joy. And so maybe, you know, I'd love to turn to the part of our conversation about your own practice. I love being in your company can feel so much the depth of your embodiment and your healing journey and your capacity to give and create and envision spaces that are so transformational for folks, but I'd love in true name.

To this podcast to dial into a tension that you might be wrestling with at this stage of your adult development, your development in your practitionership, your spiritual journey. I'd love to know what is the rub or the friction that's working you right now.

Amy: First of all, thank you for your lovely mirroring of my qualities. I hope that very much that that's true. I mean, one thing I would say in acknowledgement of how long the process of healing is, even though certain parts of it are immediate and, you know, can be done in an extraordinary moment in time, my experience of self love or the journey to self acceptance is that it requires.Layer on layer on layer of de shaming and of quieting the voice of the critic that gets internalized so early. My mother was an extraordinary woman and very brilliant, but had four children under the age of five and a half and was exhausted a lot of my childhood. And that showed up as a kind of harshness or criticism or very aggressive commentary on me in particular.

I'll let my sisters speak for themselves. And You know, I'm 60 years old, Jennifer, and I'm still working on not giving that voice as much real estate in my life. And the beautiful thing is that that does kind of use the word dissolve, I might say melt or soften over time. And even still if I was honest, I would say it's a kind of rigor to when something goes wrong or I fall short of something or I get reactive with somebody I love, or I too tired to do something, like whatever ways I disappoint myself to not have that just sort of activate that voice in a kind of replica of the kind of cruelty that I experienced early in life.

That would be one example. I don't know that I'd call it a tension. I'd call it a burden, a lingering burden. Actively working on. And the second one has to do with the threshold of joy

Jennifer: Hmm.

Amy: when you're very attuned as you and I both are, and probably many listeners to your podcast are to what's challenging and difficult for people in the world.

And you have a real. Not just a radar, but a heart for that, a desire to meet that and encounter that and to engage that and respond to it. It can be harder to take up room and space and time in your life for the things that bring you joy. It feels like sometimes, in me anyway, as a trade off of time, am I tending to The suffering or my filling my cup.

And I've come to really believe that they're first of all, not mutually exclusive filling my cup. Any of us, particularly those of us that are privileged enough to be able to be of service. That's a critical thing to do or you're going to burn out and get sick, which I also did. So I would say the second edge I have is expanding, widening, and making even more radical how much time I'm dedicating to my own self nourishment and to my sources of joy, which include, you know, many different things.

I mean, I think that life gives us lots and lots of different ways to nurture ourselves. And some of them are as simple as, you know, taking five minutes quietly in a beautiful spot in nature. But I don't always have those five minutes or I don't always perceive myself to have those five minutes or I don't always grant myself those five minutes.

So there's a kind of inner reprioritization of keeping the cup full. That's happened for me in the last few years. That feels still very new and a little awkward, maybe.

Jennifer: Oh, I love that. Awkward joy. It's just something so fresh about that. Yes, funny, funny you say that. I, I know last night I was trying to get to bed early because it was, I had a big, big day today and my teen was prancing around. The bedroom after sort of in a peak state of three hours of goofiness and, you know, doing little tick tocks and jumping on the bed, acting out all sorts of things and, you know, I was like, I have to get to, I have to get to bed.

And my husband just looked at me and said, like moments of joy, you can take this and fully join with her, or you can stick to your your sleep schedule, both of which I need and but it's just a wonderful moment around these awkward negotiations around these competing priorities, even with so called quote air quote self care, but I just, I really agree with you.

And then yet when we join with the joy fully, we're out of time.

Amy: Yeah, I mean, I love your example. And I love the notion of goofiness, right? Like, there's a way in which, particularly, I think, in the time that's ahead, there's going to be enough solemnity. We don't need to add sobriety to life. We need to add poverty to life. We need to add light to life,

Love to life. So exactly as you're saying, especially in a spontaneous arrival of such a moment, to have the presence of mind and the clarity of purpose, to set everything else aside, to launch in and join the goofiness.

I think that's a great reminder and it's exactly what I'm pointing to in my own life. I, I love when I do it. I'm deeply fed when I do it and I never regret when I do it.

Jennifer: Yeah. Beautiful. Well, I'm wondering to end if you would give us a blessing for joy in whatever way you might feel called to do that.



Amy: What a lovely question, a blessing for joy. So let's see. May we be blessed with a quality of awe and wonder in daily life. May we walk with an acknowledgement of the grace and blessing field that is our lives. May we open our hearts to see that which is not joyous and to respond with vast compassion and care and solidarity for that which is out of alignment and hurting and suffering.

And may we hold one another in the induction. Of beauty and grace and creativity and qualities of love that are the real holiness of life. 

Jennifer: Beautiful.

Amy: what comes to me in the moment, Jennifer. Yeah.

Jennifer: Oh, thank you so much, Amy. Thank you for your generous heart, your capacity to include all of you in this life and to offer it with such, wisdom and generosity to those that you're supporting and, I am so deeply grateful for your courage to collapse some of these unhelpful walls that keep us separate from ourselves and from each other.

And so grateful for the ripples and the potential that that's created for the companies and the leaders that you are walking with. So deep bow to you and your work.

Amy: Thank you so much, Jennifer. It's a privilege to spend this time with you and to see the similar ripple of, generosity that's underneath your podcast and the ways you're bringing visionary people together and poetic people and, cultural creatives into dialogue with you. It's very inspiring to all of us.

So lovely to be part of it and wonderful to have This time together.

Jennifer: Thank 

you.

Here's the essence of my conversation with Amy, that being able to presence and maybe even embrace the pain in our lives is directly linked to the experience of aliveness. The more we feel pain, the more we can access joy. And this is not an individual project, a project of self liberation.

Unfortunately, as Amy talks about, the psychologizing of our human experience, has had the unintended consequence of creating these unhelpful distinctions between the individual and the collective, the inner and the outer.

And what I'm touched by in Amy's work, Is not only her courageous turning towards the pain in her own life, but that trusting that the collective is a profound source of witnessing and healing. And this doesn't mean that all the pain magically disappears, but she makes the point that we don't have to hold it all by ourselves.

And in a way, the collective doesn't either. In a subtle and crucial shift, She says, it doesn't have to fall on our shoulders. But what if we have the courage to be able to turn toward it moment by moment, in service to the liberation of our own hearts

so perhaps the advice I was given as a young woman was right. I'm not Atlas. I don't have to become stronger to hold all the suffering. Instead, I can soften a little and look up and be able to walk in and through the beauty of your garden even while feeling the pain that sits in your bones.

I'm Atlas. And this is the tension that brings an aliveness so exquisite. And it reminds me of my old teacher, George Lovell, who said, It's a beauty that hurts.

Thank you so much for tuning in today. You can find resources and links from this episode in the show notes to learn more about Amy's work, the world of Mobius leadership, and her co founder, Elizabeth Ariel Fox. If you know someone who'd appreciate this conversation, please share this episode.

And if you've loved any part of the season and haven't had a chance yet, I'd be so grateful if you could say thank you by leaving a review. Leaving a review on Apple and Spotify give the show a huge squeeze and it also signals to others that they might just want to check it out. It really helps this labor of love find its people, especially as we come into the final week of this incredible season.

To stay in touch with me, Jennifer, you can come sign up for my newsletter today at jangland. substack. com. Before we close, a reminder that there is the last bonus episode coming this Friday.

I'll offer you a short practice inspired from my conversation with Amy that you can take into the field of your own life. Because on the show, we're also not separating. Insight from action or from our conversations with your beautiful life. That is all for now, my friend. I'm Jennifer England. Thanks for being with me on the Tension of Emergence.