An embodied experience: consciousness, coherence, and courage.
Session 2:
This resource is an extension of EMCC Global’s Disruptive Series, An embodied experience: consciousness, coherence, and courage, facilitated by Dr Hayley Linthwaite.
Our second session deepened our understanding of embodied movement as a tool to stay regulated and responsive through disruptive change.
We were guided by two practices from The 360 Emergence movement map: Waking the Wisdom Centres, and Dancing the 8 Directions, interwoven with an embodied exploration of the Proximity Paradox by Beena Sharma, Founder and CEO of the Vertical Development Academy.
The tools shared here are designed to support you beyond the series. Simple, transportable embodied practices you can apply personally, or bring directly into your work.
Session 1 Recap
You are not required to understand concepts from Session 1 to find value in Session 2. However, if you missed Session 1 and are curious about:
1) Our “Why” - understanding dynamic disequilibrium, consciousness, coherence & courage.
2) How the dance floor is a training ground for disruption
3) Ken Wilber’s 5 Up’s: A developmental map describing the different dimensions of human growth and integration
4) Five embodied movement practices for regulation, orientation, and awareness
5) Session 1 post-reflection questions.
Waking the Wisdom Centres
Before we can move with wisdom and intelligence, we must awaken the places in which they are stored.
Sometimes your body knows what your brain has yet to comprehend.
You are an exquisite network of intelligence. Trillions of cells multiply into systems, building bones, brain and blood, right now, moving, breathing, sensing, feeling.
Wisdom centres are somatic locations where a vast amount of energy and intelligence meet. Each carries its own kind of power:
Safety and support at the root
Vitality and the power to move, choose and generate energy at the navel
Confidence and courage at the solar plexus
A heart that blooms with boundless and infinite energy.
A throat that holds the seat of empowerment of your voice.
A midbrain that witnesses and chooses
A crown that connects you to something larger than yourself.
Waking your wisdom centres in sequence, root to crown, imparts knowledge of what's already moving, what's stuck, and where.
It provides clues to things your waking mind has yet to discover, and guides where you need to focus.
Through intentional activation, you can bring your whole system online.
SCRIPT:
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Dancing the 8 Directions
Most of us live facing forward. In challenging times, we focus on what’s ahead. Stay the path. Place one foot in front of the other. What happens when we pivot to 360 degree movement?
Disorientation does not mean danger.
As humans, we default to what's directly in front of us — literally and metaphorically. But disruption rarely arrives from where we're looking. It often takes us by surprise, and spins us off our feet as we try again and again to overcorrect back to the path we were walking.
The 360 Emergence's 8 Directions practice deliberately turns the body toward what's usually out of view: below, above, before, behind, to the right, to the left, within, and all around. It's how the body learns that disorientation does not mean danger.
Each direction is paired with a distinct developmental question. The dance becomes a way of physically rehearsing your answer.
The Below: Earth
Feel the earth below.
SCRIPT:
"Feel the earth below you. Let your awareness drop into the soles of your feet, into the bones of your legs.
Notice where your body trusts the ground, and where it doesn't yet. Let the parts that feel safe teach the rest of you how to land.
Imagine an anchor extending beneath you, sunk into mud or rock, giving you room to move at the top while staying held below.
How do you stay connected to safety while still moving with what's happening around you, without getting pulled into threat and stuck there?
What is being aware of the below, for you? Let your body answer, not your mind.”
The Above: The Great Mystery
Reach in the direction of the limitless sky.
SCRIPT:
“Shift your attention upward, past the crown of your head. Reach. Lift. Expand.
As you reach upward, what are you ready to release — even just a little?
This is the direction of vision, of limitless sky, of what is yet to come. How do you move when you remember you're part of something vast?
Drop a golden thread from the sky through your crown. It's yours to call on, unique to you. What do you need of this thread today? Does it lift you effortlessly, or does it connect you back down to the anchor you just built?
Let it pulse through you — bridging the unseen to the seen."
The Before: What is in Front of You
Step into your future, alive with possibility.
SCRIPT:
Turn your awareness to the space in front of you. This is the path of becoming — the future that is already whispering to you.
As you reach forward, feel where your power begins to return. Not forced. Just available.
Let your eyes fix on a single point ahead. Move toward it. Then let it go. Find another. Move again.
What are you moving toward, even without knowing? Can you let yourself be magnetised by your own potential?
Notice: you can move toward this… or not. Choice is here.
5.0 10,000 Eyes
Our final tool is a perspective-taking practice.
It deliberately moves awareness between self and system: Me, We, Us and Beyond.
Perspective-taking strengthens empathy, cognitive flexibility, and relational awareness. In dynamic disequilibrium, the ability to zoom out and zoom in prevents collapse into ego-defence, bias or over-identification.
Adaptive leadership requires both intimacy and altitude. This practice trains both.
SCRIPT:
"Stand or sit in stillness.
See an eye, or 10,000 eyes, on the sole of each foot.
Let the eyes open and flip down toward the earth.
Let them gaze into the soil, the stone, the ancient memory held in the land beneath us.
Let these eyes take in the view.
This is the place where you belong.
Close your outer eyes.
Take a few breaths to rest in this seeing, this sensing, this being with the slow wisdom of the earth.
Now, when you're ready,
let those eyes rise — turn them inward —
to see into the temple of your body.
Let them take in the view of your bones, your breath, your quiet courage.
Close your eyes again.
Rest here.
Let the space behind your eyelids become vast.
Now play — back and forth —
Flip the eyes toward the earth,
then back into the body,
then earth again.
Let your breath follow this pendulum.
Let your nervous system settle.
With each pass of your attention,
gently breathe that seeing into your whole body…
…Until you arrive at your crown.
Let something catch your eye —
move toward it.
Then return."
Transporting Tools Into
Everyday Practice
These 5 tools can be explored in a modular, or sequential practice.
You might:
-Begin executive coaching sessions with "Breath" and "Zero" to widen the space between stimulus and response.
-Use "Anchors" when teams feel destabilised by change.
-Introduce "The Golden Thread" during values clarification or strategic conversations.
-Apply "10,000 Eyes" in team ideation and ways of working conversations to expand perspective.
They can be practised seated in boardrooms, standing in workshops, or embedded into curated experiential movement labs.
Importantly, they are not about performance. They are regulation, orientation, and awareness practices in the form of movement.
Post-Reflection Questions
Session 1: Returning & Becoming is structured around Ken Wilber's Five Ups: A developmental map describing the different dimensions of human growth that need to move together for real integration to happen.
You can be intellectually advanced, but blind to your triggers. Spiritually open, but emotionally reactive. The Five Ups asks: What does growth look like across all of these dimensions at once?
We explore this integration through dance.
Below are questions to reflect upon each dimension.
1) Opening Up
Becoming aware of your inner life, your reactions, and the fact that your viewpoint is one of many.
Surrender: How can you soften the hard edges of your armour? Where does your individual body end, and where does the collective energy begin?
Trust: What happens when you stop trying to force your moves and let the music move you? Can you trust yourself to be held by the larger system?
2) Waking Up
Expanded presence and connection; seeing yourself as part of something larger.
Presence: As your feet track the beat, ask your body: Am I actually here in this moment, or am I rehearsing the past and anticipating the future?
Sensation: What does it feel like to drop the story and just inhabit my senses? What do you notice right now when you stop thinking and start sensing?
3) Growing Up
Developing a more flexible, complex perspective; holding multiple viewpoints at once.
Perspective: When you feel resistance or friction today, track it somatically: What age am I moving and reacting from right now? Am I reacting from an old, wounded place, or from my mature, capable adult self?
Expansion: How does my future, evolved self stand, breathe, and occupy space? How can I move from that horizon?
4) Cleaning Up
Shadow work; noticing and integrating the patterns, triggers, and unresolved places that get in the way.
Gift: The shadow always carries treasure. What glinted through the cracks today and what does it feel like to begin to reclaim it?
Integration: You were invited to whisper "Thank you. I see you. You belong." Who or what were you saying that to, and can you receive it yourself?
5) Showing Up
The outward expression of all the inner work; responding with intention rather than reacting from habit.
Contribution: If you stopped hiding your brilliance, how much space would your body naturally take up right now? What is the unique spark that only you can bring to this collective field?
Commitment: Where do you need to stop hesitating and fully commit your weight? How does your body move when it is a definitive 'Yes' to your vision?
Listen to the soundtrack of Returning & Becoming
Further Research
I'm excited to be leading a research project into this emerging area of adult development, "Leading in Motion".
My hypothesis is that dance can be a vital tool for transformative development by simulating disequilibrium and rehearsing adaptive responses.
I'm working with a select group of leaders to look at how embodied movement practices influence growth in three critical domains:
Physiological regulation: recognising stress signals in the body and consciously responding rather than reacting in moments of challenge or ambiguity.
Emotional awareness: building agility, calm, and inner capacity.
Meaning-making capacity: opening new ways of perceiving and navigating complexity.
Want to know more?
Further Reading
The Way Out is Through, by Alis Anagnostakis of The Vertical Development Institute
The Practice of Adaptive Leadership, by Alexander Grashow, Marty Linsky & Ronald Heifetz
Dance for Neuroplasticity: A Systemic Review, by Lavinia Teixeira-Machado, Ricardo Mario Arida & Jair de Jesus Mari
Understanding the Path of Embodied Leadership, by Peter Hamil of the Strozzi Institute
An Introduction to the Neuroscience of Dance, by Sofia Amaral Martins
Your Brain on Art, by Susan Magsamen & Ivy Ross
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