The Art of Spiritual Leadership: 40 Laws to Transform Your Life (and the World)

By Daniel Aaron

Awaken the Spiritual Leader in you now!

 

★★Attention Spiritual Entrepreneurs★★

 

Have you tried to help or guide people you care about only to have your overtures coldly rejected? Do you sense that you've got a higher calling yet don't know the path to realizing it? Are you simultaneously motivated to teach, lead, and inspire, though part of you feels unworthy, like an impostor?

 

In this entertaining and inspiring book, Daniel Aaron guides you on a journey where you will learn the forty spiritual leadership principles, which, as you grow into more and more mastery of them, will unleash the hero, leader, and master that is already inside you.

 

In the Art of Spiritual Leadership, you will learn how to:

 

• Create remarkable transformation in your life and work predictably, reliably, and effectively.

• Appreciate and own your past pains, mistakes, and misfortunes–they are all the material you need to reach, teach, and uplift others.

• Crush the crippling imposter syndrome as you increasingly understand and master the 40 Spiritual Leadership Axioms.

• Obliterate limiting beliefs and transcend old stories, liberating you to triumphantly step into your spiritual leadership potential.

• Manifest what you want most in your life: meaning, impact, success, abundance, love, and happiness, all through learning how you can best serve and help others.

 

Simmer in the stories and you'll find that every day you are embodying more and more of the leadership laws. Unleash the leader that's already in you and realize that opportunities for transformation exist everywhere. As you choose to rise up, you not only elevate yourself, you elevate the world.

 

What's stopping you from living your destiny, serving, and being fulfilled in ways you never could have imagined? Now's the time to believe in yourself step into your heroic destiny.

 

You can start right now! Scroll to the top and click the "buy now" button.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Daniel Aaron
• Release date: May 20, 2021
• ISBN: 9798201353919

Book preview

Introduction

You Are the Solution

You need this book, and the world needs it too, though we start with you. Whether you know yourself to be a leader, and even if you don’t yet think of yourself as spiritual, activating your potential to become an extraordinary spiritual leader is the most practical, magical, and valuable step you can take right now. It’s the key to manifesting what you want most in your life: meaning, impact, success, abundance, love, and happiness.

The problems pressing on humanity at present are extreme. It’s a dire and dangerous time that may end in disaster for us humans. Yet, just as we are responsible for creating the messes we’re mired in, we are also capable of transforming tragedy into triumph. The only way that will happen, though, is if we, including you, rise to the occasion. That’s to say, while you need the actuation of your spiritual leadership potential, the world also needs you to do so.

Every human being has a distinct purpose in life, a unique calling that will bring them fulfillment. In Sanskrit, it’s known as dharma. Your destiny has been formed by and is inextricably linked with Spirit. A power quickens within you when you dedicate yourself to your life’s purpose and proceed effectively into it. The dreams closest to your heart become possible, and as you realize them, you become whole, happy, and peaceful in a way that’s only possible by awakening this potentiality.

Have you sensed a divine and benevolent force beyond the material world? We are human, and we are also infinite, however, when those two aspects of each of us diverge too significantly, the result is devastating, tearing us apart. When the finite and infinite come together into a unified whole, though, the enlivening effect, and upliftment inherent in that union are as astonishing as they are liberating. Have you tried to help or guide people you care about, wanting them to suffer less, only to find that they reject your well-meaning overtures? Do you sense that you have a higher calling yet don’t know the path to realizing it? Are you simultaneously motivated to teach, lead, and inspire, though part of you feels unworthy, like an impostor? Are you afraid that you’ll be disregarded, disliked, or even ridiculed just for trying?

While my life’s awakenings have compelled me to share those experiences with others, my fear of rejection has sometimes cornered me into doubt and vacillation. Should I say something? How do I share so people want to listen? What gives me the right? Why would anyone heed me when my own life is so far from perfect? I’ve wished that I knew how to reach people, that some guarantee existed to ensure that my offerings would be welcome.

You’ll learn that your past pains, mistakes, and misfortunes are all the material you need to reach, teach, and uplift others. There is a luscious liberation in store for you as you find that your failures—far from disqualifying you from guiding others—are fodder for your leadership potential. The scars become your certification—the congruency that enables you to overcome that crippling impostor syndrome.

As you read the stories that illustrate the forty Spiritual Leadership Axioms, you will automatically and effortlessly begin to embody them. The rubber meets the road, though, when you take those lessons out for a test drive. What joy and freedom you’ll experience in obliterating your limiting beliefs and transcending your old stories! You will generate boundless energy as, guided by love, you retool fears into a fierce focus on your higher calling.

While you will incorporate the magic by just simmering in the stories, I’ll also encourage you to step out and explore. Please think of me as your coach and confidant. You see, I’ve struggled mightily to practice the principles laid out in this book. And I describe how I ran straight into many potholes, which means that you can learn from my mistakes, and so, your drive can be smoother than mine was.

This doesn’t mean that living up to your potential will be effortless, and indeed, at times, you’ll experience discomfort. Yet, we both know that you are stronger than you think. And the world is calling out for you to accept your role. As you move forward into spiritual leadership mastery, your reward will be a life of meaning and majesty beyond what you could have imagined.

The New Field of Spiritual Leadership

Let’s turn our work of defining this burgeoning field of spiritual leadership into an evolving conversation that we create together through your journey in this book, and which continues to blossom throughout your life.

One of the enthralling aspects of our age is the merging of science and spirituality. Quantum physics represents an evolution of our understanding of reality beyond the Newtonian view that prevailed for over two centuries. In much the same way, spirituality has emerged from religiosity and improves upon it, redefining and dramatically upgrading a field formerly fogged by superstition and tinged by fanaticism.

While there is still infinite mystery to the world, we’re now speeding into an era in which evidential understanding allows us to improve upon the efficacy of spiritual practices that have been around for millennia. Science and spirituality formerly were worlds apart; now, however, through exponential progress in quantum mechanics, epigenetics, neuroscience, and behavioral sciences, we’ve matured into a much richer rational understanding of spirituality. One could even say that evidence is the modern language of mysticism, a realm that was once considered inaccessible to research-based inquiry.

The materialistic orientation is losing its hold on people as we are increasingly able to realize that there’s more to reality than meets the eye. These advances on the scientific side explain much of what we have learned about spiritual practices, and they are empowering people to derive physical benefits from spiritual technologies. Once a phenomenon considered miraculous, spontaneous remissions are now more common and explainable, and they are becoming increasingly methodological via spiritual technologies.

What used to be the exclusive domain of yogis, mystics, and saints is becoming accessible to anyone. Caves, crystals, and mala beads are being replaced with seminars, meditation apps, and labs. Secularizing the spiritual and making its methods and benefits widely available has a strong positive impact on society and countless individuals. What it points to for improved health, well-being, and success for you, me, and the people we care about and serve is thrilling, and yet there is more, much more.

New Leaders, New Dreams

We live in intense times, poised on the cusp of a new era on earth, and the basic tenet of life—evolution—demands that more of us realize our potential. You do your part, and you will make it easier for the other aspects of the living organism to do theirs.

At my in-person trainings, I often ask the group to name characteristics of outstanding leadership. None of the responses would surprise you: patience, passion, caring, knowledge, commitment, integrity, excellent communication skills, empathy, courage, character, humility, etc. Once many people in the group have spoken, we turn the tables. I tell them that the qualities that they each have identified are precisely the ones that they individually need to develop and embody. No two leaders are the same, and just as everyone’s optimal nutrition depends on their biochemical individuality, so must each person lead according to their ideals and proclivities.

One of the significant challenges of leading is that there are no hard-and-fast rules, no definitive guidelines that tell us, "When x happens, do y." That’s because each situation is distinct: from the players’ perspectives to the stakes and the goals they are pursuing. The challenge is to take all the information and energetics involved and discover something new; otherwise, it would be following rather than leading. By definition, leadership consists of the exploration of new territory.

What qualities would you include on your list? What are the characteristics of an inspired spiritual leader? We know that leadership involves guiding and uplifting others. Expanding that definition to include a spiritual aspect means incorporating and addressing more than the physical, worldly arena. Spiritual leadership is about inspiration. The word comes from the Latin, inspirare, which means to breathe in, yet even deeper. It refers to the calling in of Spirit, the ineffable animating force.

A spiritual leader, then, fosters and advances a fulfilling vision of life, the hallmarks of which are joy, vitality, freedom, expansion, and love. According to that description, spiritual leadership may or may not exist in religion, politics, or business where it is so desperately needed.

Before we roll into the first chapter of our exploration, let us take a look at one of my heroes and a shining example of spiritual leadership: Nelson Mandela. Mandela’s crusade for civil rights and equality for the indigenous people of South Africa cost him twenty-seven years of unjust imprisonment by the apartheid regime.

His life and story have had a profoundly positive impact not just on South Africa but on the entire world. In the 2009 film Invictus, based on actual events, Mandela, as the newly elected president of South Africa facing the seemingly impossible task of uniting a racially and economically divided nation in the wake of apartheid, meets with South Africa’s rugby team captain, Francois Pienaar. At this point, Pienaar does not know why the president has asked to see him.

Tell me, Francois, Mandela asks, what is your philosophy of leadership? How do you inspire your team to do their best?

I’ve always led by example, sir.

That is exactly right. But how do you get the team members to be better than they think they can be? That is very difficult, I find.

The captain was silent in response.

Mandela continued: Inspiration, perhaps. But you tell me, how do we inspire ourselves to greatness when nothing less will do?

The president then told the captain how the Victorian poem Invictus had helped him during his prison struggle, which led the coach to share how he uses song to help motivate his team before matches.

We need inspiration, Francois. We must all exceed our own expectations.

Nelson Mandela led one of the greatest triumphs of the Spirit that the world has ever known. To survive, having been unjustly imprisoned and brutalized for twenty-seven years, would alone have been an incredible accomplishment. Yet to have then modeled forgiveness for those who had jailed and tortured him, knowing that to unite his country, to create peace, he had to personify that forgiveness and peace—that’s nothing short of astounding.

Just as Mandela inspired Pienaar to lead his rugby team to the unlikely underdog victory of the Rugby World Cup hosted in their homeland that year, may that same message inspire us across the illusions of time and space.

We must exceed our expectations!

New Dream

From Malala to Mandela, Oprah to Maya Angelou, Mother Theresa to Abraham Lincoln, we are blessed with spiritual leadership exemplars. You’ll meet many of humanity’s leading lights in the pages ahead, including one of my role models, Martin Luther King Jr., who is best known for the advances he spearheaded in civil rights and for his I Have a Dream speech. However, in the last stage of his life, his attention turned to eradicating poverty, to animal rights, and ending the Vietnam War. While some people criticized him for diluting his civil rights efforts, Dr. King knew that we must move beyond the stark inequalities, cruelty, and violence that have set the stage for racial discrimination. These tendencies have too long undermined humanity’s progress towards a more humane world.

A famous piece of advice councils that if there’s a rifle hanging on the wall in the first chapter of your work, someone must fire it by the end of the book. There are so many ways that our world is just such a dangerous place bursting with armaments, bioweapons, cyber-attacks, and other acts of aggression. There’s a saying about the word crisis: in Chinese it’s made up of two characters, one indicating danger and another meaning opportunity. The perils we face now are so severe that we must change the script away from age-old conflicts, or we will soon end up destroying ourselves and other life on this planet.

President Mandela was enlisting Pienaar and the South African rugby team to go beyond what they thought they could accomplish on the field. That rugby team became infused with a symbolic meaning: it is now and forever a beacon of light shining on how to rise above our skepticism at the possibility of outperforming our preconceived limitations. Everyone expected that rugby team to lose, and few might believe that humanity can live without conflict and war, yet win they did, and strive for peace and justice we must!

No doubt you’ve heard of Mahatma Gandhi’s admonition that you must be the change you wish to see in the world. It is along the lines of: as within, so without, and as above, so below. So, as Gandhi said, we must become what we wish to see, and as Mandela emphasized, we must first live what we are calling upon others to emulate. By combining spirituality and leadership, we can energize the movement toward a thriving world of peace and love that few of us even dare to imagine. That field of infinite connection also changes us as we affect it, imbuing us with those qualities that we wish to blossom around us. It goes both ways. Another way of saying it is that as you believe in this new world and devote yourself to accomplishing the realization of that potential, even without knowing whether we’ll succeed in creating it, just energizing that vision transforms and uplifts you.

You can recognize what spiritual leadership is when you see it in action. In the pages ahead, you’ll meet more exemplars, even if, in the past, we wouldn’t have referred to them as spiritual leaders. You’ll learn about some of my mentors, and maybe they will inspire you, as they have me, to exceed your expectations. Along the way, I will invite you to inquire into whatever it is that might slow or weigh you down as you become the hero of your own story, the personification of the transformation we wish to bring about in the world. As you explore and enlighten, with each step on this journey, you will remove obstacles through examination and awareness; it’s like setting down a heavy backpack.

At the heart of Spiritual Leadership is the belief that through remembering and living from our divine origins, we have the capacity, even the duty, to offer ourselves in the worthy endeavor of uplifting our world to reveal ever-expanding beauty and vibrancy. And as we give our lives to creating heaven on earth, so we come to manifest our greatness and perfection.

It’s time to cut the cord, release the sandbags of doubt and fear; it’s time for the balloon of your greatness to rise and be seen.

Chapter 1

Braveheart, Water Ways, and Facing Fear

I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. The brave man is not he who does feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear.

— Nelson Mandela

The room is full of the usual noises: silverware clanking, voices mixing, laughter popping through. It’s lunchtime, and a full wave of sunlight stands like a sheet opposite where my feet are planted on this linoleum-floored box of a dining room.

My breathing must be labored, panicky, and yet I don’t notice. I’m focused on playing my role, on saying what I must, on showing up. I want to get it over with as fast as possible, yet I’m also driven to perform my part well—an unconscious dilemma.

I’ve painted half of my face blue. An old red-and-green-checkered tablecloth has become my kilt, and I’m shirtless. I hold a six-foot piece of PVC pipe in my hand. Now I bang it on the floor. A few people who stand frozen in the entrance have looked at me, yet not enough of them have noticed. Getting their attention is part of it.

Two more loud raps on the floor with my staff turn most of the faces in the room toward me. I am Braveheart. I’ve come to dine with you, and freedom is what tastes best. I pound my free hand across my chest and look up dramatically at the bank of windows over the diners’ heads.

Shouts go up. Someone says, Welcome, Braveheart, in the same cave-dweller tone I’ve adopted. My heart is thumping inside my bare chest, less from the eyes fixed on me than from my inner eyes, the paranoid gaze that had always been part of my world, seeing my own belly as if from somewhere outside myself. Worse than the angst eating me is the knowledge that I chose and paid for this experience.

Mercifully, Annie, who is by my side, takes the focus off me by informing the lunch guests that she is a cat. She meows and says something else, though I do not hear it.

It’s 1999, and the venue is a radical therapy and recovery center in Holland called Humaniversity. I’m up to my neck in the personal and spiritual transformation experiment of my life.

I can’t tell you what a victory that short Braveheart performance was for me. In part, because in that heart-pounding moment of belly exposure it hadn’t become one yet. Even costumed, the grumpiness I wore was apparent, as were the changes that were happening in me regardless of my resistance. In fact, it’d be several more days before my grumbling about the role I had been assigned, and about the whole program, turned into a smile.

That said, you will come to understand it, and more importantly, what it means for you.

The truth cannot be said; if it is said, it is not the truth.

— Lao Tzu, author of the Tao Te Ching

While the truth cannot be stated, we do have the capacity to hear it, to apprehend it. We upon the earth are here to point, to gesture, to pound our staffs, and to raise our voices in laughter. There is nothing I can tell you that you don’t already know. It’s my greatest hope that the words and stories you find here awaken the realization in you of who you truly are, of what you’ve always known and felt most deeply, and that with each turning page, you come to know that truth in your belly and in your heart-of-hearts.

. . .

A few days after leading my first Yoga teacher training course, my assistant Rebecca and I read the feedback we’d collected. Lukas, an unlikely yogi from Austria, had written: This is not an ordinary Yoga teacher training, but rather a way of realizing that you are amazing. He had more to say about learning the physical practice of Yoga and our teaching methods, but what stuck with me were those lines. Lukas had just given us our first Spiritual Leadership Axiom. I emphasize those words because we will uncover forty such lessons during our journey together. You know them already, as they are part of our divine coding.

The stories in this book will serve to illustrate those axioms. As I elucidate these laws, and you take them in, your innate wisdom will help you implement the truths they contain. I’ll also give you opportunities to put that learning into action.

Spiritual Leadership Axiom 1

You Are Amazing

If I tell you that you are amazing, it may sound like flattery, trite, a platitude. If you tell someone with anorexia that they are thin enough, they just can’t hear it. If I do my job well, though, we will uncover your amazingness, and you’ll realize it for yourself.

If this were a scholarly article or a thesis, I would set out to prove to you—in no uncertain terms—that you