“The whole leader demands the whole person— body, mind and soul. And that that is also true of community.” Today’s guest believes in this wholeheartedly, and it guides her in fulfilling her purpose. Ina Gjikondi and Bonnie Buckner join in an inspiring conversation with Deborah Rundlett, a practical Mystic who guides leaders and their teams in connecting with their inner wisdom and purpose. Debbie shares her wisdom and experiences as she discusses the Poet & Prophet competencies, the importance of reconnecting with core identity, and the transformative power of social action pilgrimages. She delves into the essence of spirituality in leadership and its role in fostering personal and systemic change. Discover how Debbie’s work with the Global Consciousness Institute is mapping the terrain of global consciousness and uniting communities worldwide. Tune in for a profound exploration of belonging, wisdom, and the healing journey, as Debbie offers a simple practice for self-awareness and self-discovery.
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Poets & Prophets: Nurturing Belonging And Wisdom In Leadership With Deborah Rundlett
In this episode, we have Deborah Rundlett who is a practical mystic who guides leaders and their teams in connecting with Source. Her conviction is that the whole leader requires the whole person, body, mind, and soul. Debbie serves as director of The Meetinghouse, home to Poets & Prophets, a global community of change leaders, and is the Founding Steward of the Global Consciousness Institute. We are so excited to have Debbie here with us.
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Debbie, it’s a treat to have you with us. I wanted to get us started and ask about this birth of Poets & Prophets. It’s a creative way of being that you have expressed and brought to the world. What are poets? What are prophets? What is it together? Can you say more about it?
All of my work has been with communities, in many cases, faith-based communities, although not always, and helping them to reconnect with the communities of which they’re a part. What is their purpose in this time and place? It became clear that again and again communities needed to reconnect with their core DNA and remember who they were. In that remembering, it is to begin to make those connections in this time and place and not confuse who we are and the why of our work with what we do and how we do it because that shifts over time.
Two competencies began to weave their way through my coaching. Most of my coaching is done with teams. I work with the leader but they’re a leader among leaders. We began to look at the competencies of poets and prophets as a way to understand opposite sides of the same role and seek the flourishing of people and the planet.
Think of the poet as the one who makes sense of the story in this time and place. What does it mean in this liminal time in history or this period where we’re stepping from one way of being into another to both help articulate the pain and question, a questioning that comes with our present context but also to remember our core identity and that we belong? As Brené Brown has said, it is an essential piece of what it means to be human to belong, and to find ways in which we can do that with intention.
When we nurture in Poets & Prophets the competency of the poet, we nurture active listening. We learn to sense the experience of the body, give that experience a voice, and sift through the many voices that compete for our allegiance. The poet helps us to remember who we are so that we might reclaim the integrity of our core identity and our character and move beyond the quick fix. “It’s a poor memory that only works backward,” says the White Queen to Alice in Alice in Wonderland.
The poet weaves together the different voices into a tapestry of story that from my perspective, neither reduces nor eliminates the tensions but explores collective new possibilities. That’s where the prophet comes in. The prophet helps us then to step into this world and move from a place of social justice into the wholeness that we yearn for. The prophetic challenge becomes that means of crossing over into a new understanding of role and responsibility, seeking well-being, the flourishing of our communities, and also how we do that not individually because it will never happen if it’s just for ourselves but collectively.
In nurturing that, we do it in two ways. We work with immersions in which we go deep into that journey of the inner self. We call that a formational journey. The word formation is rooted in transformation. How do we move into that place where we cross beyond one way of being into another? We’ve then got to move back into the world. We use the design of social action and pilgrimages, which are done specific to the community in which our clients work for them to begin to see with new eyes. That’s a little bit about the poet and prophet.
I want to build into that energy. How did both poet and prophet move in you to bring it in a way that you have articulated it and used it with organizations and communities?
For a very long time, I would work internally. I would have oversight of distributive communities. I had been working on an intervention where there had been abuse and deep woundedness. I was so tired and frankly discouraged by how dominant fear was in our institutional systems that I bargained with my husband. I said, “I need time off. I’m going to launch a learning community called Poets & Prophets and then we’ll see where it goes.”
Five years later, that’s what I’m doing. It works itself out in a variety of ways and contexts. With community building, I like the way how the institute talks about it. We have the level of personal transformation and the creation of alternative communities so that we might have a direct experience of what we yearn for. In that way, we begin to work on systemic change. It’s across those three levels. There are times when I’ve thought I was crazy for stepping it out but I wouldn’t change it.
I have a question for you. There’s a word that I’m hearing that hasn’t been said but it’s flowing through everything you’re saying. It is this ability to imagine and have a vision of something, re-envisioning a community, a whole world, and our place in the community. I want to go back to something that pulled my attention when I was looking at your CV. You were on the advertising launch team of IBM-PC. That was a game-changing technology.
You were tasked with communicating that new vision to the whole world as being on the advertising team. I’m curious how that plays in because that often comes up with leaders. Leaders are supposed to be visionaries, have a vision, and communicate vision. It strikes me that that piece has played into everything you’ve done subsequently.
Working on the launch team was the best preparation for everything I’ve done. It’s interesting. You’re one of the few who’s made the direct connection. I’ll often make that connection and they’ll be like, “I see that.” Here’s the thing. At this time and place, we have the privilege of moving beyond that lone leader with the vision. My work from the very beginning was to get all the teams talking with one another and understanding the different strengths and gifts that they brought.
In learning how to collaborate and communicate with one another, there became this incredible synergy that allowed us to bring something into the world that nobody quite knew what to do with. I will confess that the hardest day of my life was when they took my little apple away and replaced it with this behemoth IBM-PC because the footprint was so different at that point in time.
Yet, at the same, time, it was incredible to get research and talk with media, the client, and the field. Why did we need one of these things in our home? What would that shift mean in terms of connecting us to the world in a whole new way? What I love is bringing together the whole team and weaving the thread of all their giftedness so that there can be this offering that’s life-transforming.
I’m so curious to know what that looks like. It doesn’t have to be from that time. Maybe you can give an example and tell us a story about some of the communities you’ve worked with.
I am in Ridgefield, Connecticut. I came back a few years ago because my mom was entering the latter stages of dementia. I thought she was going to kill my sister because my sister wanted everything perfect for her. It became clear that I needed to be on the ground but I also needed some boundaries. I did something I hadn’t done in a very long time.
I’m an ordained minister with the Presbyterian Church. There was this little itty bitty UCC church that was trying to figure out what life in the 21st century would look like. They happened to be located in a Meetinghouse. The only thing that the Meetinghouse voted on every year was whether or not to have to preach. In every other aspect of their life, it was where the community gathered to have conversations that mattered. It was where this community voted to enter the Revolutionary War.
They sent people off to the first Continental Congress. They supported the Amistad captives. They participated in the Underground Railroad up the road. Woven into the DNA of this place was this incredible commitment to social justice, the rights of all people, and incredible consciousness about the land and honoring of that land on which we sit. There’s a silver lining to everything.
With COVID, we were asked to ring the bell every night, this historic bell, for the essential workers and medical personnel. Everybody in the community wanted to ring the bell. There was this sign-up for it. Others came to stand on the lawn and ring their bells on the lawn. People who had never known each other, because they drove into their garage and the door went down, and they went into their house, began to know one another.
We used elements of presencing in terms of process and appreciative inquiry to gather the community into a conversation about what were the roots, what was the essential DNA, and what was its purpose in this time and place. The collective discernment was it was to be a brave space. It’s getting everybody into the conversation to see where passion perceives purpose, how is it rooted, and how the expression seeks to change.
On a Sunday afternoon at 4:30, I got a call from our first selectman. He’s our mayor. He said, “Do you have anything you want the state to fund?” An hour later, I got a call from our state senator. She said, “Do you remember when we talked about bringing kids together from across communities so that they might live and experience that diversity?” I said, “I sure do.”
By the next morning, we had a proposal to the state senate for a student youth initiative in which we will help them to create a social action pilgrimage that they will invite the adults on. That will be the September 2023 to June 2024 project as we create a brave space and help Western Connecticut begin to look at what well-being means for this community and beyond.
Some key pieces of that are lots of conversation, collective visioning, and an understanding that these little kairos moments, like ringing a bell, can open up to conversations that you could have spent years trying to get people to sit down and do. All of a sudden, that space is open. I have to give this little congregation a deep bow because they weren’t tied to what it meant to be church. They were tied to what it meant to be a community, understanding that the whole leader demands the whole person, body, mind, and soul and that is also true of community. What is the soul of a community?
That’s a great story. Thank you.
What a question. What is the soul of a community? You talked about this social action pilgrimage with the young people and bringing them together. What does it look like? What is that?
Each time we work on the design of a social action pilgrimage, they’ll pick what the topic of inquiry is but it’s always out of a positive core. It always involves letting go of something as we have expected it to be. What’s interesting to me is if you dig deep down into perennial wisdom across all traditions, you find this movement that is the same among all of them. There is this awakening. Our first step with the kids will be to awaken them to the possibility that dwells within them.
There are these trials and challenges that come with trying to articulate that. We have this vision that’s so clear in our head but nobody else understands it. You get to that point of illumination. You think you’re on the home run and then you hit what the ancients might call the dark night of the soul. It is that place where it all seems to fall apart because that’s the letting go.
There’s that crossing over into this place of presencing, to put it in Theory U terms, in which something emerges that’s beyond what they would think. It begins to crystallize and prototype. What I am clear about is adults will do pretty much anything for their kids. We find ourselves in conversations that adults might do their best to avoid but because the kids are leading them, they’ll participate in them.
We also know that eleventh grade is a marker where you begin to think, “What is it I want to do with the rest of my life?” You tie that then to the reality that 1 in 3 students across the globe is in a business school. How then do we plant the seeds that begin to transition the questions and how we learn particular topics? Whether it’s engineering, marketing, or finance, how do we learn that with a social consciousness?
They invite the adults in. Where is the adult role in this process? Do they get some guidance in the beginning? I would assume, yeah?
They do. They get process guidance. Depending upon what ideas they bring in terms of the social action pilgrimage, we then begin to pair a change theory. The formational journey, which is linked to the spiritual journey, goes hand in hand with leading intentional change. They’re the same. If we can teach kids how to be intentional about the change they’re leading in a time of disruptive change, then they can begin to plant the seeds.
Can you talk a little more about the spirituality piece? You do use a lot of language to connect the soul to the Source. Talk about what that means in terms of leadership.
I finished about 75 interviews on wisdom. There are a lot of different responses to that in terms of what is wisdom. For some, it’s more of an analytical piece much like Sternberg in terms of the fact that it’s the wisdom to know what we choose to do. It’s impact both in the future and the present, the short-term and the long-term. For others, it’s very much connected to their faith journey. For others, it’s connected more to an energetic field and Gaia. How do we honor the creation of which we’re a part, understanding that we have a responsibility toward the common good?
I’ve applied for a grant to take a sabbatical to begin to distill it all and write some. What I’m clear about is that we’re in a beautiful place where we can honor a whole variety of ways of understanding spirituality. Some people would not use the word at all. Some who used to use it would prefer the word consciousness. It is to understand that collective movement that is there. It is one of those times when wisdom is seeking to come above ground. In that coming above ground, it’s seeking to move us to a new level of consciousness and a new place of understanding our role in the care of people and the planet.
When I talk about Source, some of it is connected to the energetic field. For others, it is a relationship with the divine. For others, it is an important mental model to them when we look at wisdom. For me, I look at the dance between wisdom and science, the perennial wisdom and indigenous wisdom, with the quantum ontology of being. There’s that beautiful movement between the two. We’re trying to figure out what the language of that is because we don’t have it yet.
You’ve been gathering people to work around that and identify some language. Can you say more about what you’re doing with that project?
This is the Global Consciousness Institute of which I am a founding steward with Ina. The project that I’m working on is mapping the train of global consciousness. Another founding steward links it to helping the field know the field. It is building those connections because sometimes, we can feel so alone and feel like, “Is there anybody else out there sharing the work that I’m doing?”
As we begin to map, whether it’s using Cynefin, the SenseMaker, which has a beautiful resonance and depth, or whether it’s looking at kumu, we’ll begin to look at what those themes are that we see across different organizations and communities where global consciousness evidence a desire to work toward that collective well-being, not just of people but also of the planet. In that look too is frankly, a deep inner healing.
I suspect we’re going to see that involves a personal transformation of leaders, the creation of a deep sense of community for those who are gathered in that particular organization, and a commitment to systemic change. We are in the early stages. We’re identifying the factors by which we will take the first naming of globally conscious organizations. We’ll move from there and learn from them.
This is part of the number of interviews that you’ve done. Is that right?
No. That’s separate because those were with individuals. This is looking at the organizational level. It involves individuals because organizations are collectives of individuals. You’re right. There’s a golden thread. I’m clear that you can’t give what you don’t have. Learning and understanding those journeys of personal transformation are important. Understanding the communities in which they dwell is significant because we need that support. This isn’t a solo hero’s journey. It’s a collective journey. How do we, in that coming together, reach that tipping point toward deep systemic change?
What’s a deep systemic change?
A deep systemic change is healing. It is an understanding that paradoxically, out of the very brokenness that we’re experiencing economically, environmentally, and socially, there’s a wholeness wanting to be born. That wholeness isn’t a plastic perfection. That wholeness allows distinctions across cultures. It honors that there isn’t one single path. It is something that moves across the level of self to team, family, organization, community, and ultimately country and across countries. It pulls from some of Barrett’s work in some ways in terms of that movement across different stages that transcend and include.
Bonnie, this is a typical question you ask but I’m going to build on it. Bonnie often asks, “Is there an image to that?” You’ve described it in different ways and levels but is there an image that comes with it?
Yes, a tree that’s deeply rooted and has this strong core that allows it to reach and extend out. I’m deeply drawn to the mother tree and the care of the mother tree. It’s not only for the same species but all species in that extension of the roots that extend nutrients and growth, and then reach out into the world and the environment. That would be my image. It is the mother tree.
The image is getting us even more quite specific. I want to go even more specific because we’ve been talking at a very high level here. You talk about different things that you offer through Poets & Prophets. One of the things that sparked me is that you have an offering of weekly ponderings that anybody can sign up for. I’m wondering. What does a weekly pondering look like?
It depends on the week. Sometimes, it’s a reflection in response to something that’s happened and ways in which we might as poets and prophets respond that pull us out of reactivity into a deep pondering or thinking about how might this create a liminal space in which to invite deep transformative change. Sometimes, it’s a practice. Some weeks, it’s inviting people to play, go outside, sit by a tree, and listen. In other weeks, it might be a mindfulness practice or an embodiment practice. Yoga is important to me. I like to be in my head so I need to get out of my head or at least provide that integration of the three. Sometimes, it’s a simple quote that has touched me on a profound level.
One of the people I interviewed, one of the questions I asked in the wisdom interviews was, “Where do you experience wisdom in your body?” He said, “I’d like to think that it’s in my heart but it’s not. It’s in my ears. I don’t always know it’s wisdom in the moment but it sticks with me and I have to think about it. It shifts something in me so then I know I’ve encountered wisdom.” He wants that integration between heart and mind but for him, the ears are the place of entry for wisdom. I had to share his story because it touched me on such a profound level. He was cute. He goes, “I can’t believe I said that but it’s true.”
It made me wonder. Where does wisdom sit in your body?
It sits in my seat of belonging.
What is that?
It is my root chakra. For me, one of the aspects of this life journey is to realize that as much as I love the place, rootedness is not always in a place but in a network of relationships and to be able to honor that across the globe. I would love nothing more than to pull everybody into the same space as me and all of us be together. There’s something so extraordinary about the fact that we get to have these conversations.
Rootedness is not always in a place, but in a network of relationships.
Another project I work with is Pivot Projects. That started during the pandemic to bring leaders from across the globe to look at the UN sustainable development goals and how might we enact them with more intentionality. It’s an extraordinary network. We are connected. Even if we’re not in the same place, there is that sense of belonging with one another.
I’m wondering as we bring things to a close if you could give our audience a very specific practice that could help them.
One of my favorite practices is to begin deep breathing. It is settling ourselves in stillness. Teresa of Ávila said, “Settle yourself and stillness and you will come upon Source in yourself.” Settle into a stillness that allows us to move up from the feet. It is by doing a whole wheel of awareness in terms of our body from toes to head and to listen where is there tension. Can you then tighten and release?
Where is there an openness that perhaps you hadn’t perceived before? Can you honor that openness? Where is there invitation even in the tightness of a shoulder or a neck that is inviting you to release into a new reality? To do that visualization, which you can do on a subway train and while you’re walking the dog or cooking dinner, you can breathe deeply and scan that body. A lot of people talk about it. There are a variety of ways to do it but it doesn’t have to be complex.
It’s simple. Bring your attention to it. Thank you so much. This has been a wonderful time with you. We’ll leave it at that and invite our audience to join in and maybe try the practice that you suggested.
Thank you.
Sign up for the ponderings that you send out.
That’s right. Thank you.
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About Deborah Rundlett
Deborah Rundlett is a practical mystic who guides leaders and their teams in connecting with Source. Her conviction is that the whole leader requires the whole person: body, mind and soul. She currently serves as Director of The Meetinghouse, home to Poets & Prophets, a global community of change leaders; and is a founding steward of the Global Consciousness Institute.