Academic institutions place great emphasis on learning about the world out there but very little time is spent in the world in here, the inner work of the learner, the leader, and the human being. Ina Gjikondi has observed this, and created the e-Co Leadership Coaching Program and the One Humanity Lab– grounded in an eco-pedagogy of wholeness and interconnectedness, as way to integrating and addressing the fullness of human experience, and not only a part of it. Starting the show, Ina takes the hot-seat for this pilot episode opposite co-host Bonnie Buckner to tell us more about her life, her mission, and the genesis of this podcast. Ina believes in the idea that you are the system, inspiring us with the insight that we contribute to our very own growth and development. Join Ina and Bonnie in this conversation to learn more about the connection between humans and nature, Ina’s creative experiences with her son, and creating intentional spaces.
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Listen to the podcast here
You Are The System: An Eco-Pedagogy Of Wholeness And Interconnectedness
Ina, I’m super excited to sit down with you because we talk all the time. Our talking is around all kinds of different topics, but there are certain questions that I have been sitting on that I’ve wanted to ask you. This gives us an opportunity to do that and for me to bring that to our readers. You work at the Center for Excellence in Public Leadership and have been very instrumental in getting all these coaching activities going and then building out this coaching program, the e-Co Leadership Coaching program, and this One Humanity Lab.
The first general question I want to start with feels anchoring to me because it sets the stage for you and your mindset. You say all the time, “You are the system.” I’m wondering if you can open that out for our readers and explain what you mean by that and how that pertains to this different work that you’re doing.
Thank you, Bonnie. I am a firm believer that through our way of embodying the world, our own consciousness, and our own ways of being, we are instruments for larger systems change whatever they are. Large does not mean, “I am seeing something like ending poverty,” like one of the UN Sustainable Development Goals or that big brush stroke. Large could be as simple as sitting with a client. By holding space and listening in ways that a leader or a human being has cultivated, you can help them transform their question and the way they look at themselves or at the situation in a new light.
You are the system means that our work starts by doing our own work first. It’s not like an event where you did your work and then now, you’re good to go. It’s a continual process and a mindset because that has to always come first. I have to, and that’s been, for myself, a practice to continually do my own work as I show up as a teacher, mother, scholar-practitioner, or whatever roles I occupy or contribute to in the world. You are the system is about cultivating, owning, and intentionally contributing to our own growth and development. Also, holding space and extending this capacity to be with others.
In hearing that, “Doing your own inner work,” starts to get into what some of the people who first enter our coaching program say is soft or more touchy-feely. They speak often about how surprised to find that work is put into an academic institution and situation. That brings to mind a host of questions I want to ask you, but I want to start with this idea of your work and bringing that into such an institution and why for some people that seems contradictory, and for you it’s not at all.
I bring the work and show up with the work by continuing to do my own work. To be and to do what feels right and important is the way I’ve moved. I don’t necessarily see it as the thing that we need to effort to put in the system. It’s already in the system. It’s a form of naming, playing, and experimenting. Academia is a place of learning and education. What does it mean to educate?
If you think of Latin, “educere,” it means to bring forth, bring out, or bring forth the best. It’s to bring forth that part of us that needs and wants to be nurtured, is curious, human, playful, and thirsty, but at the same time, we do have multiple worldviews. There are dominant worldviews in the academic world that are primarily Western.
What I’m hearing from you that’s interesting is your idea of you are the system. It’s your reframing of an educational institution, to begin with and letting education be something that’s not just part of the mind, but also, part of the psychology of a person or that inner space. Maybe it would be useful to be a little more specific about what we mean by doing your inner work. What do you mean by that?
Doing your inner work has various layers to it, but one of the ways is to see yourself as more than an act of cognition or your separated mind. These are the dominant ways when I was mentioning the Western ways or dominant ways which have been primarily focused on that separation of body-mind, nature-human, or subject-object. That dynamic is embodied in the philosophies of research, learning, education, pedagogy, and so on, but we have newer ways. We have things like eco-pedagogies that bring more than human ways of knowing and bring in multiple approaches to learning.
One of that aligns with the inner work. What inner means to me is a way that it’s more embodied and the way that it incorporates and extends our beingness beyond this duality or that ranscends duality. The transcending of duality is not like a body-mind. It’s a mind and a body, and we’re always embodied. The mind is not something out there that is who we are in enactment, entanglement, and co-creation with what is alive but also what is here in our flesh or body. That means that we’re not just thinking our way through at all times.
We’ve evolved in miraculous ways. We are a very intelligent species. Within our own body, we have the reptilian brain and then this prefrontal cortex, which is the youngest part of our brain. We are in this perpetual or continuous dialogue of reactive and creative. We need to continually integrate these ways of being within us. To integrate is to pay attention. To pay attention is to become an observer. An observer is not something out there, but it’s in here.
To be an observer of the self, we need not only to pay attention to what’s going on out here but also to come back to our sense of self. The sense of self is in the senses. It’s activating our senses. Most people will speak to what they see with their eyes, and it’s always very difficult to speak to what you feel. “I don’t know what I feel. What does that even mean what you feel?” “Give language to your experience.” “How can I give language to my experience?” “Is there something in this moment that you’re feeling as a sense of touch? Are you feeling as a sense of smell or hearing? As you are in this experience, how is your body moving? Where is your body moving? How does that feel to you?”
To be an observer of the self, we need not only to pay attention to what’s going on out here but also to come back to our sense of self. The sense of self is in the senses. It’s activating our senses.
As you started talking about the touchy-feely ways, these are the touchy-feely ways. By doing that, we’re not allowing our wholeness of us to come through. We’re denying ourselves the fullness of experience. That, to me, is touchy-feely. The touchy feel is not addressing this because it becomes a touchy-feely subject, almost like the thing that we bottle up and want to deny because we don’t want to accept. The touchy feel is not to describe that experience. It is to describe our fear of that experience.
That brings me to something else. To give a concrete example, in the coaching program in the module that you start out the semester with, you have each one of the participants take a plant as a “client,” and it’s a plant practice. I want to talk about that. You and I have certain practices and then the participants go and talk to you about them. The participants talk to me about the plant practice. They’re like, “Maybe I’m not getting this. I don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing.” The plant practice brings up a lot in people. I want to talk about that a little bit, why you do it, and your experience with that.
That’s a way to experience the touchy-feely-ness so that we can get uncomfortable or into a space of discomfort. We don’t always learn when we are comfortable. When we’re too comfortable, there’s no tension, intention, or attention, and we are vegetating. That doesn’t have to be at all times. We need vegetation too. The program is grounded in a pedagogy that comes from eco-ontology or a way of being that is centered in wholeness.
Eco-pedagogy is also a way of being that honors the reciprocity and full agency of the natural world. We share this earth and life with other beings, humans and non-humans. There are so many philosophies for how we’ve evolved as humans and as a planet from evolutionary theories to other perspectives and theologies. I’m not going to touch on that now. All I’m saying is that humans in nature are always connected. There’s an illusion of that separation. We are nature. Nature is us.
Going back to reclaiming or rekindling this sense of connection with the self and the extended self are core principles of our approach and learning. In this space. Learners expand their capacity for knowing. They bring in things such as imagination, intuition, perception, and creativity. This philosophy is aligned with developing what the International Coaching Federation has been capitalizing on, which is competency number two, Embodying a Coaching Mindset, which is critical.
How do we develop as humans? How do we develop the being? There is a lot in the coaching field that you can work on. At the same time, I keep coming to develop the being, the coach, and the inner, within the context of this worldview. I was taken years ago by this practice. I naturally engaged in nature observation. I learned a lot at that time from these beings and the plants in ways that we humans don’t always think.
How do we develop as humans? How do we develop the being? It’s because you’re going to develop the processes. There are lots in the coaching field that you can work on. At the same time, I keep coming to develop the being, the coach, and the inner within the context of this worldview. There are multiple ways of knowing. I was taken years ago by this practice. I naturally engaged or nature observation. I learned a lot at that time from these beings and the plants in ways that we humans don’t always think.
You had an experience with healing yourself in this way.
Yes, I did years ago. I started becoming aware of different plants and their energetics rather than the chemical compound that defines who they are, which is treating them as beings. It’s seeing them as an extension of this fabric of the universe that connects us all, and quantum science addresses that. That got my attention, and I started studying Goethean science.
Goethe, who was a polymath, did a little bit of everything. He was an artist, a poet, a researcher, and a scientist. He brought together this approach which he called delicate empiricism, which is about engaging with the natural world through a conscious participation process. He studied animals too. In fact, that’s where he started. He started with animals and then moved to plants.
In engaging with the plants, he said, “I am not going to write, try to systematize, and put them into buckets in the way that science had been done in research like naming it such and such…” From that perspective, you are the subject, and then the plan becomes the object or the observer, the observer and the observed. He said, “No, we’re both subjects in this. We’re co-thinking, co-being, we’re co-creating.” (Some of this is my language in paraphrasing his work). This process is not just about me. It’s about our relationship.
I don’t know that he developed and named it the way many scholars have named it further, but the basis of it is that you start by describing what you see, then you move into a space that is deeper, which activates all your senses. He called it the artist’s perspective. That’s when you allow the phenomenon to arise. He said, “We need to do this by gazing with soft eyes and taking in whatever comes and observing it with soft eyes, without impression or putting our own paw into it, and allowing it to come.”
There are other steps in the process. I have brought this practice to the coaching space as a way for us as coaches, and I say this always, as human beings, to become better observers of the self and experience as a whole. The more we can do that, the more we’re able to discern, describe, connect, and articulate our experience in ways that move us from an embodied place to a place of wholeness rather than fragmentation.
We go from plants to coaching. You put it in these ways, and it makes complete sense. I want to touch on something else that is a big influence of yours that doesn’t get formalized in the coaching program but speaks to you in a lot of different ways. That is the creative experiences you have with your son. You’ve written a book in that way. I don’t know that it’s a beginning conversation you’ve had with him.
You write songs together. You do a tremendous amount of creative activities, even shifting the experience of walking home from school. You told me a story about spending time observing things from the perspective of an ant. I want to hear from you a little bit because you mentioned creativity is one of the capacities that you want to develop in the coaching program. I call it playful experimentation and creativity with your son feeds into that.
Everything feeds into everything. That’s another way of knowing. It’s through children’s way. It’s not just children’s way, but it’s building on what I was sharing about the plant experience is another way to become an observer of experience and slow down our thinking or cognition to the point that we can feel and tune into the experience of the moment. What does that do? It creates more space. That’s what it does. As it creates more space, then that is the fluid or the juice where new things emerge.
When you’re in the shower, all of a sudden, for example, your ideas come in. These insights come so quickly and they move, and you wonder why. It’s because it’s quiet, and then there are water effects and so on. What I’m saying here is that in a way being with Hadrian, it’s like taking that shower for me. It’s a refreshing experience if I allow it. There are times I don’t allow it because I want to get to my next thing, but sometimes I allow it. Allowing is by slowing down and being intentional, “I’m going to play.” He is good at giving a hand to follow the thread because he’ll bring in these prompts, and then it’s up to me. If I follow them, then I’m in that place, and it influences me.
Can you give an example of that?
You mentioned the ant. I had the ant experience. We were coming back from school, and it was raining. There are all these puddles, and then he said something, “We’re going to play with the puddles. These puddles are going to be oceans and they’re oceans for the ants.” He started that. I could have gone and said, “Let’s keep walking fast, Hadrian. We need to get home because it’s raining. We didn’t have an umbrella.” I could have done that, and I have done that other times. It’s a practice and a choice, but instead, I just kept going and built a story with him.
“What’s happening in that ocean?” He’ll start building on it, and I’m like, “I wonder what place is that one? What’s happening there?” Engaging in that dialogue is a way that creates more space. You can get a lot more done. When I go back to my own thinking, it’s like, “I had a little spacious moment. Now I can have more fluidity, things move faster, and there is more creativity.” That’s how creativity merges from engaging intentionally, pausing, and playing. Again, it’s a choice. It’s everything.
Creativity emerges from engaging intentionally, pausing, and playing.
You talk about spaciousness and also intentional spaces. The coaching program has a certain intentional space. There’s also this One Humanity Lab. Our show is one project in that One Humanity Lab. Where do you see that going? What’s the possibility of that intentional space?
Coaching is one of the containers through the e-Co Leadership Program. All this activation of a pedagogy of wholeness is weaved within a coaching container. We have a program to which we both contribute. The intention for the lab has been to continue to build on these capacities of wholeness such as intuition, creativity, and imagination, but to take them into other spaces. There’s not just the coaching container, but there’s more leadership and community development.
One of the reasons of why One Humanity comes out of the United Nations, because of the Sustainable Development Goals platform and a call for One Humanity, which was part of a World Humanitarian Forum years ago, where all countries were invited to look at this collective vision for shared humanity and responsibility. It’s bringing coaching and wholeness capacities in organizations and communities that are seeking to build on the vision of One Humanity.
To be right at that intersection of social change is the space or place that the lab wants to cultivate. We also want to do it from the perspective of bringing in other domains. It’s the pedagogy, but it’s also more explicitly bringing things such as aesthetic education through the arts, technology nature, and being a place for integration, grounded in this ontology of wholeness, oneness, and interconnectedness.
What’s the last non-fiction book that you read?
I read a lot of books at the same time.
Choose one, and then I want to hear what the last fiction book is that you read.
The one that’s closest to me is the book called Reconnecting to The Source by Ervin Laszlo. It offers beautiful stories from different thinkers who bring this whole system or whole person view of life. They look at it in terms of relation to the conscious universe and how we’re all connected. It’s their personal stories, so it’s a good book.
If someone wants to pick it up, my favorite story is by Barbara Marx Hubbard, this amazing visionary woman. One of the things she spoke about was the intention of spontaneous writing. I can’t remember how many, but she had these black books or journals where she would write. She was a prolific writer. She wrote books, but she also wrote for herself. She would write every day. Maybe 100 or so of those were written throughout her life.
I wonder sometimes what would be like to look at some of those journals. She would stay in questions. One of the questions that she asked for quite some time was, “What’s the reason for this new power, and how do we use it for good?” This was at the time when the nuclear threat had become a significant threat. She asked this question even to President Eisenhower. I don’t know that she got an answer from him, but she’s quite a person.
We’re still asking that question. What about fiction?
I read with Hadrian every night. We finished A Wind in the Door.
Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, A Wind in The Door, and A Swiftly Tilting Planet.
A Swiftly Tilting Planet is the one we started reading. We love these books. There was something interesting in this last book, A Wind in The Door. It’s amazing, but the idea of owning your own power and being able to come to terms with it with a sense of authenticity and courage. When we name something, someone, or a circumstance, then we own it. We name it ourselves. We don’t name it outside.
Meg is this teenager who is quite intuitive. She is on her journey of building this capacity for trusting herself wholly and getting to know herself. She is invited to love and name Mr. Jenkins, her principal who’s annoying and irritant, yet in the end, she embraces Mr. Jenkins, and they see each other in new ways. It’s not just about seeing the world in new ways but also about seeing yourself. Mr. Jenkins is another part of herself that she was pushing away. Integrating that part of her and in her, moved her to do very courageous things. There’s so much in it. It’s such a juicy book. For anyone who’s a science geek, I love mitochondria. I used to study mitochondria, so this was like, “A mitochondria conversation.”
Is there anything else you’d like to say to our readers?
What I want to say is that my invitation is for all of us to hold ourselves lightly and take our development seriously. We step into these new places that sometimes challenge us as human beings as we are creatures of habit and we want to make things safe. It’s how we’re wired. Again, we go back to comfort, but we need to have some tension to step into the unknown because sometimes we’re not supposed to know. That’s how we learn. Keep practicing, trying, and turning in.
Years ago, you and I were having this conversation, “I get very impatient when things don’t go the way they’re supposed to go. The thing is that they’re supposed to go exactly how they’re supposed to go, but I’m human and I don’t have patience.” I remember sharing something with you and you said, “It’s like a brush stroke at a time.” At that time when you said that to me, I said, “I want to get done with it because I can see the picture. I want to move it.”
There’s a time for everything. There’s a time to build, sow, reap, and blossom. Our work as leaders, coaches, or human beings is to set intentions, be practical with our work, do the work, and let go of the outcome, as simple as it sounds. The outcome can be quite controlling because it has you. You don’t have it. If it has you, it doesn’t mean that things won’t happen. It’s just they’re going to happen with less joy and flow. Sometimes you can get sick in the middle of that. I’ve done that several times myself. That’s where I’d like to leave it.
Thank you. It’s such a pleasure because now our readers get to know what some of the time I get to spend with you is like as we think and talk about these things. Thank you for that, Ina.
Thank you for the questions. It’s been fun to think this way. I’m looking forward to interviewing you next and hearing a little bit about your story.
Thank you.
Important Links
- Ina Gjikondi
- Center for Excellence in Public Leadership
- e-Co Leadership Coaching
- One Humanity Lab
- Reconnecting to The Source
- A Wind in the Door
- A Wrinkle in Time
- A Swiftly Tilting Planet
About Ina Gjikondi
Ina Gjikondi is the co-host of the podcast One Humanity Lab: Into an ecology of wholeness. Ina is a teacher, leadership coach, speaker, mother, innovator, poet, modern mystic, and co-curator of whole-person and whole-system learning experiences that awaken creative capacity for embodied intuition in service to love, joy, and peace.
Ina believes that all life is interconnected and that our work as humans and leaders is to honor and hold in reverence and compassion our own lifework, and all living beings. Ina’s invitation is to bring forth all of our bits of intelligence and connect, reclaim, and remember our wholeness.
Ina serves as the Director of Executive Education & Coaching and as the Founder & Director of the e-Co Leadership Coaching Program and the One Humanity Lab at the George Washington University’s Center for Excellence in Public Leadership. In this role she works with leaders across the globe, to cultivate their inner knowing, agency, power, and will, mobilizing the capacities of spaciousness, perception, imagination, inspiration, intuition, and creativity.
Ina is currently working on her dissertation at GW Graduate School of Education, which focuses on understanding direct knowing in the context of ecopedagogies “or more than human ways of knowing”, applied in leadership coach becoming. Prior to moving to the US, Ina was an active UN advocate, political campaign professional, and founder of several nonprofit organizations in her native home of Albania. She is inspired by her son Hadrian, who teaches her to slow down and show up for life with genuine curiosity.
Ina’s calling for the world is summed up in four words, two of which have been attributed to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe as the last pronounced words before his death, “More Light and Love!”. Ina holds a Masters in Political Management from the GW Graduate School of Political Management, a Master’s in Human Resource Development from the GW Graduate School of Education, and a BA in Law from the University of Tirana.