Over the past few days, I have been at a retreat – my first one focused on fasting and meditation. There has been lots of downtime, and, no surprise to me, I have not been able to be offline. And that is okay.
I’ve caught up on some reading too, and have been very moved by a series of Substack and LinkedIn essays that, from different angles, are circling the same uncomfortable core question. Heather Plett (Centre for Holding Space) reflects on the rise and fall of spiritual leaders and the dangers of isolation and hierarchy. Elise Loehnen (Pulling the Thread) revisits M. Scott Peck’s exploration of evil and courage, asking what happens when we refuse to face our own shadow. Lissa Rankin (The Body is a Trailhead) writes from inside the wellness world, describing the personal cost of speaking about breaches of integrity she has witnessed behind the scenes. And Antoinette Braks (StageShift) offers the Triskelion as a symbol of leadership evolution – a living spiral that holds emergence, conscious expansion and shadow transformation in continuous motion.
Different voices, different contexts, yet the same underlying inquiry keeps appearing: what happens when growth moves faster than maturity? When expansion outstrips integration, something will eventually fracture.
This question reaches far beyond spirituality or wellness culture. It sits squarely in leadership and organisational life, and it shows up regularly in my coaching conversations. We live in a world that celebrates expansion – more influence, more visibility, more innovation, more reach. Development is often framed as upward movement, a ladder to climb, a trajectory towards mastery. Yet human development rarely unfolds so neatly. Expansion without integration can leave us ungrounded, and insight without humility can become fragile or inflated.
What these writers are touching, in different ways, is the pervasiveness of shadow and the risk of leaving it unexamined. Scott Peck’s framing, as interpreted by Elise Loehnen, suggests that harm often begins in self-deception, in our refusal to tolerate the discomfort, the dissonance, of seeing ourselves clearly. Lissa Rankin describes the consequences when charisma and influence are not held inside structures of accountability. Heather Plett points to the way hierarchy isolates leaders from peers who might challenge or hold them accountable. Antoinette Braks’ Triskelion offers a helpful visual: movement rather than ascent, integration rather than ranking, a dynamic interplay between emergence, conscious power and shadow power.
Antoinette’s Triskelion resonates deeply with how I experience leadership development. Real transformation does not move in a straight line. It spirals, both upwards and downwards. We encounter new challenges and provocations, expand into greater awareness, and then meet the parts of ourselves that resist change. We revisit familiar terrain at deeper levels, often surprised to discover that what felt resolved returns again and again, asking for new attention. The work is less about arriving somewhere definitive and more about increasing our capacity to stay present with our complexity.
This is where the language of shadow becomes so important. There is nothing wrong or pathological about shadow. It is simply everything about us that we deny, disown, or don’t see, that we have yet to fully integrate – fears, ambitions, vulnerabilities and protective patterns that sit beneath our polished professional identities. Leadership magnifies these dynamics. The more authority or projection we hold, the more essential it becomes to remain connected to peers, community and honest feedback. Without that, it is easy to confuse external success with internal maturity.
Mortality awareness, which sits at the heart of my Mortal Leader work, offers an interesting counterbalance here. Remembering our finitude tends to soften our need for control and certainty. It brings a different quality of presence – one that is less concerned with appearing exceptional and more interested in relationship, contribution and integrity. When leaders allow themselves to feel the preciousness of life and the brutal reality of endings, whether personal or organisational, the questions shift from “How do I grow bigger/ better/ smarter/ faster?” to “How do I grow wiser and contribute more coherently?”
My belief is that grief plays an essential role in this process. Many of the most profound developmental shifts I witness come not through success but through loss – the loss of identity, certainty, status or long-held narratives about who we thought we were. Grief strips away illusion and invites a more honest encounter with self and system. It is a vital initiatory process that leadership and its development culture overlooks, yet it is one of the strongest pathways into wisdom and maturity.
This thinking also shapes how I approach my work with psychedelics and microdosing coaching. Expansion experiences can open extraordinary doors, but without integration they risk reinforcing the very patterns they promise to dissolve. The work is not about transcendence or optimisation; it is about relationship, with the nervous system, with grief, with shadow, with others, and with life as it is actually lived. The Triskelion spiral feels like an apt symbol. Emergence, conscious expansion and transformation are not separate stages but ongoing companions.
What I find hopeful in all these reflections is that they point towards a maturing culture rather than a collapsing one. After all, abuse by those in power is as old as the hills. What is newer is the calling out of it. Disillusionment with people we have admired, while painful, can be a sign that projection is loosening. We begin to look less for gurus and more for grounded guides, less for unattainable perfection and more for authenticity and honesty. The invitation is towards leadership that is human-sized, Griefwise and mortality-aware, accountable, relational and willing to acknowledge one’s own unfinishedness.
Perhaps the real work of development, whether in our personal lives, in organisations, or in our wider cultural conversations, is not about transcending our humanity but settling back into it and inhabiting it more fully. Growth then becomes less about climbing higher and more about learning how to stay present as the spiral turns again, inviting us to face into what we wish were not there.
