Of the many deeply mission-aligned programs at SCS, the Institute for Transformational Leadership (ITL) is one of the most obvious. Mission in Motion has previously reflected on the deep connections between Georgetown’s mission and values and the work of ITL. Recently, ITL, through its podcast, hosted an important discussion about the relationship between body intelligence and transformational leadership. ITL academic director Bill Pullen interviewed Marcia Feola, a master certified coach and faculty member in ITL.
What resonated strongly is an opportunity in the conversation to make more explicit the relationship between leadership coaching and a diversity of religious and spiritual wisdom teachings about the body. Bill and Marcia use the language of “whole person” to describe an approach to embodied leadership development, which links up nicely with the commitment in the Spirit of Georgetown to “Educating the Whole Person.” This value encourages all of our endeavors at Georgetown SCS to integrate the holistic development of the human person’s many facets – intellectual, emotional, physical, spiritual – in the learning experience.
The podcast helped me appreciate how much good leaders need to attend to knowledge of their own bodies in the work of exercising transformational leadership with and for others. It is common to speak of the need for emotional intelligence, a reflective self-awareness of how affective sensations influence one’s thoughts and behavior. But body intelligence is no less important. And this focus on the body is manifested in different religious and spiritual traditions.
Ignatian spirituality, which gives rise to the Spirit of Georgetown, emphasizes the body as a location for encountering God. St. Ignatius of Loyola, in the Spiritual Exercises, invites the retreatant to experience the mystery and love of the Divine by encountering God in one’s own body and in the body of Christ. God’s desire to be in relationship with human beings does not occur in the abstract but through the fleshy, incarnational reality of the human body. The Australian Jesuits offer further insights about this connection between the body and the Spiritual Exercises in this piece: “Ignatian Spirituality and the Wisdom of the Body.”
Other faith traditions also speak to the central importance of the body in the quest for spiritual insight and knowledge. The Jewish tradition describes the need for healthy living with particular emphasis on caring for the body. So many of the teachings and laws of the Hebrew Bible focus on care for the physical self. The Islamic tradition similarly draws attention to this connection between a sound body and a healthy spiritual life. For Muslims, the human body is a gift from God and humans are responsible for being good stewards of this gift.
Practicing care for the body happens in many ways. A mindfulness meditation practice, like the one offered in the SCS Daily Digital Meditations (sign up here), typically begins with a body scan exercise that relaxes the body and makes one more present and aware of their physical sensations. The body communicates its status with all sorts of sensations, but making sense of these signals requires paying mindful attention to them. Reflective awareness of our emotions, another key feature of mindful meditation, depends on our achieving some sort of grounded centeredness in our physical bodies. In these SCS mindfulness meditations, one enters into greater emotional awareness through conscious breathing exercises. The body, the mind, and the spirit all co-exist in an interdependent and interrelated relationship.
I encourage you to listen to the ITL podcast on body intelligence and reflect on how you might grow in deeper awareness of how your body affects – in both positive and negative ways – how you lead in the world.