Ginny Whitelaw is a Zen Master, and she knows that the mind and the body are connected as one. She taught leadership development for over 25 years and her passions ultimately led her to where she is now. She strives to be authentic every single day. Today, we talk to Ginny about her experiences, her career path, and how helping people is the ultimate goal in life. 

According to Ginny, Zen opens up the authentic self. It is so vital to embrace vulnerability, because feeling things is what aids us in feeling connected to the world around us. Pulling back to hide from reality is human, but when the mind and body is one, the hiding places go away – there is nowhere to run, and we must embrace feeling and growing. 

Ginny’s role as Zen Leader comes with a lot of responsibility. Ginny explains that our subjective experience and ego can give us the experience of being only part of what is going on in life, which is an illusion – we are actually connected more deeply than we will ever know. To penetrate this illusion of only being “part of” something is freeing to the mind, and that is pure medicine. As long as we are separate, we will have fear. We start to see the ego as a tool rather than a tyrant. That is what Zen opens us up to – resolving that sense of separation so we can resolve the fear and experience this precious life we have and use it to help people. 

We all take on leadership roles in our daily lives, whether we are aware of that or not. We all deal with coping with life, versus embracing it, and pushing away versus accepting change. 

That orientation is in the mind and body of all of us – how we take it. When we are coping with it, we are partially resisting what is going on. We have these negative emotions that develop as a result. We feel a victim of circumstance, because life can be so unfair. Acceptance relaxes the body, and it is then that our energy can start flowing. It will start flowing towards our purpose. We physically conduct energy in our body, and if you just put that into leadership, it puts you in the right direction. It is in that flip that we are able to take situations as they come. It doesn’t matter what I like – I accept it. 

Check out Ginny’s work at www.zenleader.global.