Zen and the Art of Leadership with Ginny Whitelaw

Dr. Ginny Whitelaw, a Zen master, former NASA scientist, and founder of the Institute for Zen Leadership, joins the Blue Sky Leadership Certificate at CIIS to guide students in embodied, purpose-driven leadership. This unique program brings together visionary facilitators who support participants in cultivating inner capacity and outer impact in today’s complex world.

In this conversation, Ginny shares her powerful journey through science and spirit, and explains why training the whole self is essential for the leaders we need now. This interview was conducted by Danielle Johnson for the Integral Leadership Review.

Danielle Johnson: I'm here today talking with Ginny Whitelaw. She has a long list of accomplishments and experiences throughout her life. She's a Zen master, 86th-generation; a NASA scientist; a long-time leadership coach; and 12 years ago, she founded the Institute for Zen Leadership and has been training leaders in-depth in Zen leadership ever since. So, thank you so much for taking this time.

Ginny Whitelaw: Thank you, Danielle. It’s good to be here.

Danielle Johnson: I want to start with a simple question, and that is, what leadership means to you. How would you define leadership?

Ginny Whitelaw: It's when we authentically add value to help this world, to help other people. So it isn't a position in an organization chart, I want to be clear about that. It's when we're making a difference. I like Kevin Cashman's definition of it, where he would call it “authentic self-expression that creates value.” What we add in Zen leadership is the expression of the authentic self. So we're going to really blast open who we think we are, our sense of self, and then that plays a different game in terms of leading, and to its purpose.

Danielle Johnson: Do you think that's what's missing from the more Western-style leadership, that diving into your authentic self? We take personality tests or whatever, but don’t really dig into the soul…

Ginny Whitelaw: Well, sure. I think it's missing in two senses of the word. One is, most people live in their heads. And the dominant stage of consciousness in the culture is sort of a rational stage of development that looks out for enlightened self-interest – the Adam Smith word – right? What's in it for me? That mindset is destroying the world. That kind of individualistic, ego-based way of looking is very good for creating and exploiting a technology, and, for that matter, for exploitation altogether. It's a very colonizing mindset, and it is by no means the height of what a human being is capable of. So we're pushing toward a more integrated, integral stage of consciousness that reintegrates the whole person. We say “head, heart and hara,” the hara being the lower abdomen, which is a key power center. So we're operating as a whole person. And to take it a step further, leading beyond just an I-centered mindset or bodyset. So, we're starting to sense what it is to be connected with the whole picture, not a corpuscular “I” looking out for its corpuscular interests.

Danielle Johnson: I'm really curious about how you got to this level of leadership. So, first of all, I'm fascinated by your journey from NASA scientist to Zen master. Could you give us a little history of how you got here, but maybe highlighting your leadership journey, and how your views of leadership shifted as you went through those different changes?

Ginny Whitelaw: I was always drawn to science as a kid, in part because I wanted to be an astronaut. NASA told me when I was 13 years old that I should study science if I wanted to be an astronaut. So I absolutely did. A little bit like your story, I wanted to figure it all out. I wanted that unified theory to understand what was going on. So I studied physics and biophysics. I wanted to understand the energy of the human being. My doctorate's in biophysics.

When I went to NASA, I ended up going into management, not into space, integrating the space station program. As part of that, NASA put me into a whole slew of leadership programs. I was learning about leadership and leadership development, and I could see that the quality of what we flew as the space station was going to depend more on leadership than on engineering. It had to do with how we would bring together four space agencies, 42 contractor teams, and four "work packages," and how we could get people who did not have to work together to work together. That's a real leadership challenge, and it fascinated me.

As I studied leadership, I was struck by how conceptual it was. They left out the body. Now, maybe when they trained astronauts, they included the body. That was one of the reasons I think I was drawn to that job as a kid, because I could sense the holism of it. And I had started in martial arts and meditation when I was in college and graduate school, so I had been trained in how the body is really the source of change and power. If you want to make changes in habits, if you want to do something at full strength, there's a deeper integration than just thinking about it that needs to happen. I could see this was missing in the way leadership was being taught. It wasn't whole enough. Even the way they looked at personality left out the body, and I wanted to find a way to bring that back in.

I thought, well, maybe that's my work. I left NASA in the mid-90s, and the team that taught leadership at NASA brought me into their faculty. So I got to learn from world-class experts who taught leadership and coached, and then gradually began working on how to introduce the physical element into how we teach leaders. That developed over a couple of decades.

Danielle Johnson: And so now you practice Zen leadership. What is Zen leadership?

Ginny Whitelaw: Zen leadership is the expression of the authentic self, your whole self, the selfless self that brings wondrous value into the world. It is not ego-based, but it's actually able to see through the ego to the whole that you are. This experience is not a concept. It is an actual felt experience that the physical training of meditation opens us to.

The Zen aspect of it is no accident. It's no sidecar. It's really through the physical training that we enjoy the experience of what it means to be a connected human being and the way that we change. My physics background comes out in this because I've come to appreciate the human being as something of an antenna. We're always tapping the field of consciousness for what we pick up. Obviously, a certain range of electromagnetic frequencies resonate with our eyes, and we call that light or sight; another set of frequencies vibrate our ears and our bones, and we call that sound. Each of our forms of consciousness is a tapping of the field.

And when this antenna changes, the things we see change. Max Planck, the physicist, had a wonderful phrase: "When we change the way we look at things, the things we see change." That is so true, truer than maybe even he realized. So in cultivating the whole leader in Zen leadership, we're changing the antenna, and that is going to change what that person can sense in the future. They're able to bring it into the present through themselves.

It's really a flip of conventional leadership altogether. It's not "I" making something happen out there. It's a shift in who I am, who I know myself as, and how I tap the field in a way to bring about the future I want. And the "I" in that sentence is not what the ego "I" wants. It's the future that the Whole wants through the part. You start to recognize your local self and whole self as two aspects of the paradoxical human being.

Danielle Johnson: This idea of paradox kept coming up for me as I was reading through the Zen Leadership material. I'd love to hear you talk about these balancing forces and holding paradox, and what that means in leadership.

Ginny Whitelaw: I'm going to start with physics again. Every theory of everything that has come up since the 1920s has needed more than three dimensions to describe reality. Current string theory, or the current modern theory of everything, posits a universe of something like 10 dimensions. You and I can see three. There's a lot going on that we don't have direct senses for. There's a lot of room for mystery, wonder, and awe in this.

What we do as human antennas is we flatten it down to the three dimensions that we call conventional life, and all the rest of it is what we call the spirit world, or we don't know what we call it. We all call it different things, and we don't agree on what we call it, so we don't really talk about it much. But life in those three dimensions, what we might call conventional everyday reality, is flat, and it's not all that there is. We all sense it, we all kind of know it, and we all try to figure out where there's meaning in that, or what's meaning beyond that, in our own ways, to our own levels of curiosity or hunger.

Carl Jung once commented that the only thing that really adequately describes this reality is paradox. There's nothing you could say about it that captures it all, because the words that we form come out of our form. They come out of that three-dimensional reality and the kind of reality we can agree on by how we sense the field in common.

Every wisdom tradition gets at this in its own way. You think about the yin and the yang, trying to get at the opposites that way. Or if you read the Buddha sutras, they'll talk about the intermix, the weave of emptiness and form. Or if you read the ancient Taoists, they talk about it as absence and presence. Even in the Judeo-Christian tradition, they'll talk about it as spirit and human, or God made man. This sense of spirit and human form somehow marrying together.

What is clear from Zen training is that this is not some far-off conceptual future possibility that I might explore after death when I go to heaven or hell. It's right here, right now, describing this moment and how we enter it. That’s not a belief; it becomes a felt sense. When that informs how we live this life, we use it differently; when we sense both the wholeness and the partness of it, we lose our fear, that sense of self-protection.

The ego has a very important job to keep this physical body alive. That's a job we like it to do. So it's developed a whole agenda around what it thinks is good for this body and what it's afraid of, who's predator, who's prey, and all that stuff. But that's not the whole story. When we see through that ego to the wholeness of our connected self, to the no-self, then we understand how to use this pair of hands, this pair of feet, this set of resources available to the local self, to live a good life, do what we're here to do.

As Jill Bolte Taylor said so beautifully after she had a stroke that wiped out her left brain for a while, "What we all are, every one of us, is the universe with manual dexterity." So in working with that paradoxical nature of the human being, wow, does that ever flip life around! From "I have to prove myself" to "What can I do? Who needs what?" From "I have to take care of myself" or "Oh no, this has happened" to "How do I roll with this? What's next?" It's a different life, a much happier life, a life of intrinsic joy.

Danielle Johnson: I've always been drawn to the paradox, and that was one of the things when I was studying psychology that I noticed, too. When you look at the nervous system, each branch has its counterpart. We talked a lot about the dual processes and intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation. I just kept seeing those paradoxes that were held even within the physiology of the psychology of the human. You know what I mean?

Ginny Whitelaw: The paradox in the form. And even form itself is part of a paradox of knowing.

Danielle Johnson: Right, and then you start to see it in Eastern philosophy and physics, and you just see it more and more.

Ginny Whitelaw: There you go.

Danielle Johnson: So you were just talking, and you talk a lot about finding your purpose. You get to the Zen, right, and you feel this interconnectedness. But then, how do you know what you're supposed to do? What do you say to people? How do you know what you're supposed to do from that place of Zen? How do you know what you're resonating with?

Ginny Whitelaw: Resonance can't be faked. You don't even have to know what you're resonating with. You're either resonating or you're not. It's like two waves come together and something's going to happen. What I love about this kind of training is it takes the "supposed to" out of the equation. There's nothing you're supposed to do. There's just something you do, and you do it because it's the right thing to do, and you know it's the right thing to do because you feel it in every bone of your body.

It's like catching the beat of a song. You don't have to know how you're supposed to dance to it. If you feel the music, you know how to dance to it. When you catch the beat and you're moving along with it, there's an enormous joy in it. You know when you've got it right. There's no question about it.

So you do your own thing to the beat of this music. That's kind of how I've come to think about purpose. You do your own thing to the beat of the music. But the beat of the music is the rhythm of life. It's sensing the way of things. We don't talk about that a lot in Western mindsets. It's a very Taoist concept, very deep in Eastern philosophies and wisdom traditions.

But we know intuitively that there is a way to things. My husband is a great sailor, and I watch how he sails. He's listening to the wind and the waves, he's looking at all the conditions, and when he gets the sails trimmed just right and everything's going, he's in the groove. He knows it. He feels it. The boat responds at peak performance. All is well. Every part of life is like that.

It's not always that simple or clear, though. Our various sports make it more clear. There are times where it's easier and harder to sense the rhythm. You can sand with the grain of the wood or against the grain of the wood. And there's a difference. You can go with the grain of life or against the grain of life, and there's a difference.

The more sensitive we become, and again, it goes back to sensing the field we're a part of and how attuned our antenna is, the more we sense what's going on, the more we can accord with it, the more we can go with it. But as soon as something happens we don't like and we start reacting, saying "I don't like that, that sucks," and get into this kind of coping mode, we go back into a victim mentality. We're separate from it, and we can't lead from that place because we're stuck. We're stuck to a self having a problem.

That's why we make that our very first flip in Zen leadership: how to unstick from a victim mode to a place where we can really extend our energy into the conditions around us. So we can dance to the beat of the song. We can start to add our value.

What purpose is, is more like what the conscious mind puts words to when we're in the groove. The conscious mind, I would submit, is the last to know, and the words we put around it are always imperfect, but they quiet the conscious mind. So we say, "Okay, that's my purpose. I'm playing into my purpose." But what we're really doing is according with the way, and we know it when we've got it because we feel a certain joy or rightness to it that is unmistakable.

So it's not something we have to go find. It's more something we listen for, but not listen with our head. It's more feel in our heart and listen with our hara. When you try to catch the beat of a song, you don't do it by saying, "It's just 3/4 music. I think it's about three beats per 10 seconds." No, you feel it. In the same way with life, you feel it.

Danielle Johnson: As I'm sinking into that and trying to feel it, I experience sometimes having a lot of energy, and I'm wondering if it's because it's stuck somewhere. Do some people just have bigger energies, and some people have quieter, more Zen energy? Do I need more cultivation? Or is this just what my antenna is, really loud or really...?

Ginny Whitelaw: [Laughs.] We're all a different kind of antenna, Danielle. There's no wrong or right to it. When we can sense in ourselves, "I've got this abundant energy, and I want to use it more artfully," that's a good clue that there probably are some really good somatic practices that'll help us do that. There is no end to how much you can refine the energy flow in the body. I've really learned that through 40 years of Zen training.

We really focus in our line of Zen on hara development, because that's often where the blockage is. A lot of people are cut off from the lower abdomen, in part because of our culture. We tend to cut off from that part of the body. We think, "That's where bad stuff is, bad impulses, or all that sex stuff, or all that shit." We cut off from that. But in the deeper integration, and this is really honed in martial arts because you can't be powerful without the lower body, that's where the power is. That's where the energy is.

What I found in this body is that when the head, the heart, and the hara all started working as an integrated whole, my energy could flow top to bottom much more clearly. I do chakra opening exercises and energy practices every day. And I also, like you, am a person with a lot of energy. In my younger years, it used to be a bit frenetic, to be honest with you. As I get older, I can feel it's streaming more. There's less turbulence in it.

For what it's worth, I always advise people, if you have a lot of energy and you're not sure it's really being directed, find the practices that help you smooth it out. Energy is a gift. Don't want to squander it. It's a great gift.

Danielle Johnson: So what do your practices look like? How long do you spend in a day and what routine do you have?

Ginny Whitelaw: I start every morning with hara breathing exercises. Then I move into a set that comes out of a Daoist tradition, or Qigong tradition, and then move into ways to open up the chakras, to get a clear energy flow. Then I move into yoga. In our tradition, we use vibration sound training. We call it okyo, a kind of chanting to really open up, use vibration of sound to open up the antenna. Then I sit for meditation with an online group as part of Chosei Zen's group. So that starts my day, and I love that start to a day.

Later on in the day, I might run, usually midday. I might do some calligraphy at night, or sit again at night. I might be teaching a course or something with different practices as a part of that. Not everyone finds a morning ritual works for them. But what I love about owning that first hour of my day is I can control what time I get up in the morning. So I always get it, even when I'm traveling and teaching early in the day, I'll still get up and do that. Then I feel launched and ready to go.

Danielle Johnson: Beautiful. I'm wondering how you got connected with the Blue Sky Leadership Program.

Ginny Whitelaw: I've been connected with the integral folks, with Ken Wilber and his team, for some time. There was a time when Bruce was working with them – the wonderful Bruce Alderman that you and I have in common. I had sent them a paper that I thought they might be interested in, which referenced some of their work. Bruce followed up with me on it, expressed some interest in talking, and then told me about this program. So it's sort of one thing leading to another.

Even years ago, when the Zen Leader book first came out, Ken Wilber gave it a lovely review and did a whole bunch of podcasts on it, which got me connected into the integral network and community more. I'm very grateful for that.

Danielle Johnson: From what you know about the program, what makes you want to be involved as a facilitator?

Ginny Whitelaw: I think it's going beyond conventional leadership, for sure, and it's reaching an audience that might not come to a Zen Leader program. So it feels like a wonderful opportunity. What I really appreciated about Bruce's invitation was that he knows how much I like to work with the body, and he was welcoming it. He said, "Bring that in." So it's this wonderful opportunity to do the work that is wholly on purpose for me, with a bunch of colleagues that I haven't had a chance to work with yet. It felt like great fun.

Danielle Johnson: Since this is a different audience, what will you be bringing? How will you present to this audience? What will you be offering to this course?

Ginny Whitelaw: Bruce and I had spoken about a couple of things some time ago when talking about this course. One of the things he had mentioned was how I might be paired on a weekend with a musician. I'm still thinking back to that conversation.

What we were looking at is talking about Zen leadership and resonance, and how leaders can work with vibration and resonance to build following, always bringing it back into the body – the body as an antenna. I would be offering some of the most accessible flips or reframes in Zen leadership that get leaders out of ego-based leading into appreciating that paradox we were talking about earlier, and that ability to extend their energy toward the things they want to create in the world.

I'd probably be working with resonance around a whole set of physical practices, from one breath to working with the two sides of paradox to working with the three centers of the body (head, heart, and hara) to working with these four energy patterns that are in our nervous system. These patterns orchestrate how nerves fire muscles, but they're also a nice link from body to mind, emotions, and behaviors. They link all the way through.

People start to get a sense that how they are in the world isn't coming out of nowhere, and it's not just coming out of their head. There's a whole patterning to it that they have access to. They have some go-to patterns they really like a whole bunch, and they have access to a suite of patterns that map to the natural elements – fire, earth, air, water. Talking about according the way, there's a way to match your energy to what you're trying to bring about as a leader.

That's what I'm imagining we're going to get into in the course that I'm teaching. Then I want to see how we can integrate it best with what else is going on that weekend, and what has come just before.

Danielle Johnson: You write a lot about AI, and I know it's something that will be talked about a lot in the program. How does the Zen leader engage with AI and the existential risk that it might pose? Or just as a leader in general?

Ginny Whitelaw: Those are great questions. There are several levels at which to ask that question. In terms of the existential risk it poses, our involvement, our engagement with AI needs to come from a stage of consciousness that's not that rational head looking at what's in my interest, which is where it's coming from now.

It can't be this hell-bent race to the finish of what company can beat out all the competitors to get something in the market. That said, it's going to be a mess because we don't control all the players who are in the AI space. We don't control all the ways it's going to be used.

So how can we as leaders work with the reality it's going to present? That's going to require some clear seeing, and some agility, some adroit use of AI ourselves. People are already doing that. I think understanding what it's good at and how to use it where it has strengths, and from a consciousness that takes care of the whole picture, is about the best we can do in our generation. The generations to come, the generations that are working with it now, will have to see how this plays out.

The AI that's really hitting the scenes now is largely based on language models, the large language models and the way they work with words. Already, it's starting to be discernible to a human being when you're reading something on a website or on social media that's AI-generated. It has a kind of flatness to it, a kind of "sounds like everything else-ness" to it.

We've been using AI assist in some of our work at ICL, and when I would read what it came back with, it just sounded like word salad. It didn't have heart to it. It was missing something. So the consciousness from which we use these tools, as that changes, the tools will change, and also our use of them, what we will ask them to do, will change. We need to be prepared to face something of a mess, I think. That's probably where we are.

Danielle Johnson: I'm curious about your relationship with hope. When you're starting to look at all these existential risks, how do you relate with the concept of hope?

Ginny Whitelaw: Well, when I talk about a mess, I recall fondly the great Joseph Campbell's comment in his interviews with Bill Moyers. He was the one who really studied all the creative mythologies and wisdom traditions of the ages. He'd say they agree on one thing: everything's a mess, and all is well. I don't draw hope from an assumption that all will be wonderful. It goes back to that paradox. I was talking with a colleague yesterday who said, "Yeah, I just have to learn to trust the universe." And I said, "You can trust the universe to deliver what you want about half the time, and about half the time it's not going to be according to your agenda, Danielle's or Ginny's or anyone's agenda."

That doesn't mean we lose hope. It means we have to also be the whole picture, and not just what it looks like from our local perspective. From my local perspective, I say it's going to be a mess. From the whole picture, it's going to be a part of the creative destruction process that we have to go through as human beings. So it's going to be what it is, and the skillful leader who wants to create value for other people will do the best she can, the best they can.

Danielle Johnson: What would you tell young leaders in this time?

Ginny Whitelaw: I’d tell them to train. I really feel like they're going to enter a mess. This is a very dicey time, and I don't say that in a "woe is us" sense at all, because I also sense that we've chosen it. We chose to show up at this time, and we can do wonderful work at this time – very purposeful, loving, healing, important work that advances human consciousness at this time when there's so much up for grabs. There's so much that a good leader can do.

When things are all stable and stuck in their rigid forms, it can be very hard to change things. When things are all up in the air, a good, creative mind that loves people and cares about the future of humanity – there's going to be great opportunity in that. But to take advantage of that opportunity, you need some ballast, and that ballast does not come from your head, it's going to come from your hara. So develop that hara, develop your energy, develop that rooted strength. So you have a way to ground what otherwise rises to your head as anxiety and mental illness and all those other things. To be stable in a storm, you want to be rooted in your universal nature. So train, don't take my word for it. Have your own experience, and learn from your own experience. This is not a belief system. This is an experience and a way to live that's available to the human being.

Danielle Johnson: Do you believe it's for all ages, or do you have to kind of go through a process first?

Ginny Whitelaw: I would guess it's for all ages. In our culture, we don't even know these options exist when we're really young. We don't even know it's a possibility. If we were in an Eastern culture, we might know that children can meditate or something. When we had kids in Aikido class, we had them meditating. They understood that they were settled down and more ready to take an Aikido class if they did a little bit of breathing and sitting still ahead of time.

So it certainly can start young. I didn't find it till I was in college – actually in graduate school – and something in me knew I needed to do this for the rest of my life. I don't know where that hunger came from, but for anyone who's got it, I'd say follow that hunger and find a teacher and sit, meditate. And it's not just about being mindful of your thoughts. It's about something much deeper and fuller of how you hone the antenna for living your best life.

Danielle Johnson: Do you see – because you've been doing this for a long time, do you see a trend within the culture? Do you see more people awakening, or people awakening younger? What are the kind of cultural and consciousness trends that you've seen?

Ginny Whitelaw: There's much more integration of mind and body now than there was 20 years ago. That's for sure a trend, and it's a welcome trend. A lot more somatic experiencing, somatic studies, a lot more understanding of how the body stores trauma, ancestral trauma, epigenetics that transmit trauma from one generation to the next. There's a lot more understanding about the body-mind integration, and it's concomitant with the frothy edge of consciousness development too.

That's moved beyond the rational stage toward what we call post-modernism, or what integral might call the Green stage, toward tier two levels in integral theory, which are more holistic yet, working with flex and flow and even unity consciousness. More people are getting to those stages in the span of their lifetime and pulling on humanity to come along.

But the dominant form, the dominant stage of consciousness is still stuck at rational. So we still see that battle kind of going on. But without a doubt, it's not just what I see. Those who study the arrival of new stages of consciousness, I'm thinking of Frederic Laloux's work in Reinventing Organizations, mapping these stages – they're happening faster than at any point in human history.

So it's probably no accident that at a stage where we really need a broader consciousness to grapple with today's issues, it's showing up. The gestation toward that consciousness in terms of our young people may be a little longer. In other words, it may seem like our young people are cocooned a little bit longer in life, or need more support, and yet, I feel like what will be asked of them, from a consciousness point of view, is even greater. They're getting launched into a realm where we absolutely need what, in the integral world, would be called tier two kind of consciousness.

Danielle Johnson: Do you speculate on the future? Do you have a vision for the future?

Ginny Whitelaw: I think if you look at the long arc of the development of life, it's pretty clear that we're evolving consciousness. I don't think there's a lot of fuzz on that fact. How much evolves in your lifespan or my lifespan, what we're going to see in the near term or in the blink of our eyes, is not clear to me. I don't feel prescient about it.

I do stay in touch with the news and what's going on, and the predictions about AI, and the predictions about climate. There seems to be a kind of race of what can destroy us faster when you read some of the doomer predictions that come out of people who watch these things.

I take the point of view of seeing what arises. Some of the things that we thought would happen by 2030, or even 2025, some things seem to be happening sooner. Some things seem to be happening later. It's very hard to predict exponential curves and when they hit tipping points. And I'm not such a good predictor anyway, so that's not my special sauce.

I think what we need to be able to do, though, is as things arrive, how to accord them, how to work with them. As the music changes, how to change how we dance. If you worry too much about what the song will be like next week, you may not be listening to how it is right now, which is the only time where you get to live. You don't get to live next week. You never get to live next week. You're always living right now.

So being able to feel into how it's changing, and then what that means for your leadership, your life, your family, your community, your passions – to me, that's the real art. And not to get too stuck on my prediction being true or not true, because that can generate a lot of emotion – doomerism, optimism, hopium, lack of hopium, whatever. A lot of emotion that, in the end, isn't helpful. What's helpful is when a situation arises and you put your best self into it and you do some good. That's helpful.

Danielle Johnson: Beautiful. I love it. Is there anything else that we missed that feels burning to say about leadership, or that you think...

Ginny Whitelaw: Well, I love your questions, Danielle, and I thank you for asking them. It's wonderful to talk with you, and I look forward to joining with other colleagues and the participants in this course, in an adventure that I think is really ripe and needed in this time.

Danielle Johnson: Thank you so much, Ginny. This was beautiful. I appreciate you.

Ginny Whitelaw: As I appreciate you, Danielle. Thank you.