“The Achilles Plexus, #1.” In a session with a client not long ago I came upon a key phrase I want to develop: “The Achilles Plexus.”
It addresses one of the visions I have of the current scene that just haunts me. How much are we leaders, authors, teachers, and cutting-edge showers of the path, actually blind to our own brokenness and therefore still governed by it? A lot, I feel. And I have this deep anxiety that we’re not going to work this piece out till it’s too late. Till the slide into an evolutionary arrest or regression, with accompanying devastating breakdown of society and biosphere, is impossible to prevent.
I address this in Dawson Church and Geralyn Gendreau’s anthology, Healing Our Planet, Healing Our Selves. My essay is titled “Healing the Roots of Fundamentalism.” In it I suggest that we’re all fundamentalists—in that we’re all still far too driven by relatively unconscious rigidity, irrationality, and brokenness. And I make the point:
“This includes many of our leaders, secular and spiritual. When a leader requires others to hold him as flawless, or simply unaccountable, his flock becomes self-toxifying. The idea of a leaders’ untouchable superiority betrays brokenness in all willing participants. Such societies become like extended dysfunctional families. Their ‘children’ shoulder unbearable pressures of both their own shadowy brokenness and that of their ‘parents.’ These collectives often embody the worst attributes of what we fear as cults. However, many of them flourish not only in marginal spiritual or political communes, but also in corporate high-rises, respectable churches and synagogues, and halls of government—all over the planet.” (p. 32)
The power dynamics of this kind of toxic leadership still prevail. What’s of most urgent concern, I feel, is that they still prevail in spirituality as much as anywhere. And one of the most entrenched features of such toxic, double-messaging leadership is what I recently began calling “The Achilles Plexus.” It’s a fundamental wound in our primary personal-power zone, the solar plexus, that we unconsciously act out in nearly all our relations. And we act it out in ways that ultimately can and often do sabotage just about everything we stand for.
I’ll say more about this in my next entry.