Kathlyn (Katie) Hendricks, PhD, BC-DMT, and Julia (Julie) Colwell, PhD, are pioneers in the field of human consciousness, conscious leadership and human potential. Nancy Kepner, co-founder of Crafted Leadership, LLC, sat down with Katie and Julie to get their perspective on a range of issues. Crafted Leadership’s mission is to spread conscious leadership throughout the global workplace, using Julie and Katie’s work as the foundation.
Julie: I want to say something about the state of the world right now. People have all of these stories; here is my story.
My story is that it is unprecedented that we are now a global community, and so we have to reorganize. All of these structures that are falling away. I just saw a kid’s coloring book that was called Smash the Patriarchy. A kid’s coloring book! So — we are smashing the patriarchy. That is happening. I didn’t dream that this would happen in my lifetime, but here it is being disassembled before us. It’s a dinosaur and it needs to go away.
But that means we all need to be showing up. We can’t just go submissive anymore.
It’s not just those dominators, those patriarchal white men who are in charge that need to change. It’s all of us who go submissive and say, “Alright, good, if you’re in charge, I’m happy you are going to take care of me.”
We all need to step out of that trance, to know we are global citizens who have something to offer, and then go and offer it. This is a huge time, a huge time in history that we are stepping into.
Yay for our political leaders who have failed us, failed being our patriarchal, white fathers. That got exposed, you know? That was helpful to see the man behind the curtain. We don’t need that man behind the curtain anymore.
Katie: You don’t need the Wizard of Oz.
Julie: Every single one of us can step into our full authority, and I bow to your work, Katie, because that’s what I’ve learned from yours, how to be the author of my life, and to know there are 7.5 billion other folks who get to do the same thing. Then we end up with this incredible world, where there’s not all of these people sitting on the sidelines waiting for someone else to do the thing. We can all step in and do the thing. We don’t need somebody’s law to tell us it’s okay to do it. We can decide from our own integrity that this is the right moment to speak, to act, to be who we came into this world to be. So, I feel really excited about this time of our existence.
Katie: Yes, after I felt pretty nauseated for several days [after the 2016 presidential election], for about the last six months I’ve been experience the tone/context shifting. We’ve been turning over rocks and going, “Oh, look at those bugs. Oh, I’ve got a little abscess there.” All of this uncovering, revealing, seemed incredibly necessary. The bringing to light the ways that we humans have been in trance, and these old systems, it’s been amazing to me and to see all of this in my lifetime … I came of age during the Betty Crocker era where the roles were very defined, and they were very defined with gender, but also with race, also with hierarchy.
Gay was raised in the South, in the Deep South. So he had the whole black/white thing, and I was raised in a middle-class family where my dad worked for GM, which when I was growing up, it was one of the preeminent companies in America. You were there birth to death, married to the company, and my mother entertained. That is what she did to support my dad. We were able, all of us, to go to college on my dad’s income, and then in the later twentieth century that all fell apart.
Julie Colwell, her partner Kathy Kucsan, and Katie Hendricks have been collaborators and friends since 1995.
The sense that I have is that we are in a state of where the old structures are crumbling, and part of the panic is that people have been looking for, out there, exogenously, for a structure on which to organize themselves. It’s why our focus is body intelligence; through body intelligence you can access all of the resources you need that are inside of you already. As you practice integrity, you practice aligning so that you can let this huge universal wisdom come through and support you. So, there’s plenty of energy. Energy is limitless. Three laws of thermodynamics, energy is infinite. We now have a possibility to really shift things very quickly.
I also remember when the Berlin Wall came down. One day it was us versus them and no-man’s land, then one day, okay, that’s over. So, I know we can do it and we can do it very quickly. So I think this is a very exciting time.
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Other blogs from this interview touch on fear, courage, emotions in the workplace, flags, their bodies of work, and the present world. Read more!