When she was 13, Ginny Whitelaw wrote a letter to NASA asking how she could become an astronaut. What should she study? Which courses should she take? NASA wrote back with detailed instructions that Whitelaw followed to a T. She received degrees in physics and biophysics and ended up working at NASA, but not going into space.

While she was studying physics, she began practicing dharma. “I started taking night classes,” Whitelaw said. “And women on my campus were being attacked, so I figured, ‘I need to learn how to defend myself.’ That led to a self-defense class, and I thought, ‘Oh, this is cool. This is giving me a real sense of empowerment.’ I started studying martial arts, which led, in graduate school, to a world-class aikido teacher, Fumio Toyoda, who was also training in Zen. And he said, ‘If you want to understand my art, my aikido, you have to start meditating. I said, ‘Sure, OK.’ ”

Studying Zen was a natural transition for Whitelaw, whose curiosity led her to seek the explanations behind appearances. “I wanted to figure things out, and I was very driven,” she said. “I would say I was a dabbler in Zen for five to eight years, trying to fit it in alongside this very ambitious life I was driven toward. And it wasn’t until the whole astronaut dream fell apart—in fact, a lot of my life fell apart—that I quit trying to protect its contours and decided that maybe I didn’t know what my life was about, and I just needed to sit. I dove in.”

Today Ginny Jiko Whitelaw is a priest and teacher at Chosei Zen and CEO of the Institute for Zen Leadership. Both are in Wisconsin, but much of the teaching and training is now done online.

When she began to practice seriously, Whitelaw traveled to Hawaii to study at the training temple Chozen-ji with Tanouye Roshi and Hosokawa Roshi. “By this time I was a senior leader at NASA,” Whitelaw said. “I was not an astronaut, but I was in management, and I was getting very interested in leadership. And one of the things Tanouye Roshi modeled for me was this integration of Zen with how you can help people in leadership.”

It might not seem obvious how lessons from NASA management and Zen practice fit together. For Whitelaw, it was the physicality of Chozen-ji Zen practice that rounded out her management training.

As you see through illusion, the truth of your original nature remains.

“NASA had been training me through leadership development programs, and they were great,” Whitelaw said. “I loved them, but they left out the body, and I knew that’s where the change is happening.” The question was how to integrate the depth of Zen training, the physicality of somatic learning with leadership principles, and how leaders can bring a desired future into the present. “Figuring this out,” she said, “just gnawed at me, and that became my calling.”

The physicality was not just left out of typical leadership training but it was (and is) left out of many forms of Zen practice as well. “A lot of people think meditation is, ‘Oh, calm your mind.’ Mindfulness, this is all about the mind. And they think, mind is this little thing in the head, just this little thing. But every part of our senses, every part of the body, is a kind of antenna for mind. That’s what opens up when you start working with the whole person.”

But still, the practical matters of how to integrate Zen and leadership needed to be resolved. “I wrote a book called The Zen Leader, on how to bring Zen training into leadership, and I was working with a wonderful teacher, Gordon Greene Roshi, who is the abbot of Chosei Zen. He and his wife, Patricia, had bought 109 acres, and they built this magnificent place for training. They built a dojo from the ground up, from the wood and the stone of the land. It was deeply inspiring to me. At one point Gordon waved his arm across the landscape and said, ‘Make this your canvas.’ This was around the time when he was conferring inka (mind stamp) to me as one of his dharma successors. And I thought, ‘I could bring leaders here.’ It was going to be a very different experience from how I had been teaching leaders for years in fancy conference centers and hotels. If I brought leaders here, I could work with them more deeply and take them further. So that’s what I started doing.”

What makes the physicality of Zen so important in life and leadership? “Without it,” Whitelaw says, “I would never have learned to breathe so deeply. I wanted to be an astronaut, even though I was an asthmatic as a kid. In this style of Zen, I learned how to breathe from the hara (energy center in the lower abdomen), where you get the deepest, slowest breath possible. It also regulates the parasympathetic nervous system and helps the body settle down. That settling down and slowing down leads to profound clarity. It’s like the fan blades of life start slowing down, and you can see through the ego, rather than getting caught in the whirl of it as your identity. As you see through illusion, the truth of your original nature remains. Living and leading from this truth manifests joy, beauty, and purpose.”

---

What is Zen Leadership?

Zen Leadership is unique in that it’s not about this or that skill. It’s about getting out of your own way to accord the Way in a universal sense. It’s not egocentric-based leadership but rather cosmocentric. So it flips leadership around, turning conventional leadership on its ear, and looking at what happens when we aren’t stuck on a personal identity but rather serve the whole picture. When leadership serves the whole picture, then what is exactly yours to do can come through you. It might be different for me than it is for someone else, but that’s the beauty of it. Each of us becomes a different node in what can be created as we conduct that universal energy into the realm of human affairs. So, for example, leadership is sometimes described as creating the future. Conventional leadership might look “out there” for how to push the present toward a future state. Zen Leadership works “in here” on how you need to change to match that future, because the present is where you live. And when you match the you of a particular future, that future is also in the present.

We teach Zen Leadership in a three-part series, each of which is a four-day program. We start with how you lead with energy and connection, including how to work with energy patterns in your nervous system. This energy framework helps people not take their personality as a fixed construct but as a blend of patterns they’re able to adjust to match conditions. The second program moves into how you work with fear and strengthen relationships. The final course integrates all of the “flips” and culminates in how you can lead from your whole self.

–GJK