A Leadership Healing Framework: From Violence to Regenerative Wholeness
Jules Tavernier, The Volcano at Night, ca. 1885–89. Oil on canvas, 19 x 36 in (48.2 x 91.4 cm). - 2014 via Wikimedia Commons
Introduction: Violence as a Symptom of Disconnection
Violence saturates our world — visible in war, oppression, political polarization, organizational dysfunction, and relational breakdown. And yet, violence itself is rarely the root problem. It is the symptom of something deeper, something woven into the very fabric of our personal and collective lives: unresolved trauma, disconnection, addiction to control, fear, shadow, binary thinking, and collective fields of unhealed pain passed across generations.
If we are to understand and heal violence — not only within individuals, but also within organizations, societies, and nations — we must descend beneath the surface into the full ecology of forces that generate harm. Only then can we begin to access the pathways that lead not simply to the absence of violence, but to the emergence of true regenerative wholeness.
The Anatomy of Dis-Integration
At its core, violence emerges when systems lose integration — when coherence within the self, within relationships, within communities, and within the greater field of life itself breaks down. This fragmentation opens the space for trauma to remain
unprocessed, for fear to become dominant, and for addiction, control, and projection to take root.
Trauma, as Bessel van der Kolk and Gabor Maté both emphasize, is not defined by the external event itself but by what happens inside us when we remember and witness what has not been addressed. Trauma disconnects us from ourselves — from our bodies, from our capacity for regulation, and from our capacity to perceive reality clearly. In its wake, we develop survival strategies to manage the unbearable vulnerability that trauma leaves behind. Often, these survival adaptations become rigid and unconscious, guiding our behavior without us even realizing it.
Mark Wolynn shows how this process doesn’t end with the individual. Traumatic patterns — grief, guilt, rage, and fear — can be passed down generationally, embedding themselves into families, communities, and entire cultures. Thomas Hübl describes these as collective trauma fields: invisible energetic structures that silently govern how entire groups behave, relate, and react to one another.
It is within these collective trauma fields that violence often erupts — not as isolated acts of cruelty, but as the logical outgrowth of generations of unprocessed pain.
The Addicted System: Fear's Attempt to Control
In trying to manage this unbearable vulnerability, entire systems adopt addictive strategies. Anne Wilson Schaef teaches that addiction is not limited to substances — it is any system’s attempt to control reality in order to avoid feeling what it cannot bear.
Addictive systems seek safety through domination, crisis, perfectionism, denial, dishonesty, and control. They operate from the deep belief that vulnerability equals danger and that safety lies in managing outcomes, controlling others, and suppressing dissent. In addicted leadership systems, those who hold power demand loyalty and obedience, while those who serve the system surrender autonomy in exchange for perceived safety. Both the addict and the co-dependent are locked in a mutual symbiotic fear loop, feeding off one another’s need to avoid the unknown.
This dynamic plays out in personal relationships, within organizations, and on the geopolitical stage. Authoritarian governments suppress dissent to maintain order. Employees submit to dysfunctional leadership to avoid retaliation. Communities comply with oppressive regimes in exchange for survival. Violence becomes not only permissible but inevitable, as control feeds anxiety, anxiety feeds projection, and projection feeds aggression.
Shadow and Projection: Externalizing What We Cannot Face
Carl Jung explains that what we cannot face within ourselves, we project onto others. The more pain, shame, and fear we carry but refuse to acknowledge, the more likely we are to see these very qualities reflected back at us in others — turning them into threats that must be controlled, excluded, or eliminated.
The person who has not faced their own vulnerability will interpret disagreement as betrayal. The leader who cannot acknowledge their own insecurity will label dissenters as disloyal. The nation that refuses to confront its historical violence will project its guilt onto outside phenomena perceived as a threat or danger.
Violence arises when these projections calcify into rigid ideologies, in which others are no longer seen as human but as existential threats to be neutralized.
Cutting Through Fear: Meeting What We Resist
As mentioned above, at the core of violence lies fear — not just fear of others, but fear of our own pain, loss, vulnerability, and shadow. Traditional responses to fear often attempt to suppress or conquer it, but this only perpetuates the cycle of projection and control.
Lama Tsultrim Allione, building on Tibetan Buddhist Chöd practices, offers a radically different approach. In her method of Feeding Your Demons, she teaches that healing begins when we turn toward fear itself — personifying the demon not as an enemy to be destroyed but as a disowned part of self longing for acknowledgment. By offering compassion to the very energies we resist, fear is metabolized into integration. The demon dissolves not through suppression but through relational presence.
This capacity to turn toward fear — to face, feed, and integrate what once threatened us — mirrors the larger systemic work of dissolving violence itself. What we meet with compassion no longer requires externalization. What we embrace no longer drives projection. What we integrate no longer feeds violence. In this way, the personal act of integrating fear reflects the broader dynamics of consciousness itself — where the evolution from fragmentation to wholeness determines whether violence or healing emerges.
Consciousness: The Inner Architecture of Violence and Healing
At its heart, violence lives within specific states of consciousness. David Hawkins and Richard Barrett both offer frameworks that map how human beings — and entire systems — operate from different levels of emotional, psychological, and spiritual development. The lower the consciousness, the more likely fear, shame, and projection will govern behavior; the higher the consciousness, the more integration, compassion, and relational wisdom become possible.
At the lowest levels of consciousness, leaders and systems are trapped in fields of shame, guilt, fear, anger, pride, and blame. Here, difference is dangerous, complexity is intolerable, and domination appears necessary. These are the fields where violence lives and thrives.
Yet there is a tipping point. Hawkins identifies this as the level of Courage — the first emergence of willingness to face truth rather than avoid it. In Courage, individuals and systems become capable of reflection and responsibility. Here, the projection of blame begins to loosen, and the first steps of healing become possible.
As consciousness continues to evolve, leaders move into states of Neutrality, Willingness, Acceptance, Reason, and eventually Love — where conflict is no longer a threat, but a teacher; where others are no longer enemies, but fellow participants in a shared unfolding; where power shifts from domination to stewardship.
Barrett’s leadership levels parallel this process. In the early stages — survival, relationship, self-esteem — leadership is fear-driven, exclusionary, competitive, and reactive. As leadership ascends toward transformation, internal cohesion, purpose, and service to humanity, violence dissolves naturally because systems no longer require it to stabilize themselves.
A map of levels of consciousness aligned with behaviors (Hawkins, Barrett)
Violence, in this view, is not merely an ethical failure — it is a developmental stage that has not yet matured into coherence.
Nature: The Great Integrator
Nature offers us the clearest mirror for what integrated conflict can look like. In natural systems, conflict is not eliminated — it is metabolized into balance. The lion hunts not for domination, but to maintain the health of the ecosystem. Wildfires burn not as an act of destruction, but to clear space for new life. Storms release pressure to prevent collapse. Mycelial networks beneath forests share nutrients across vast root systems, creating resilience that transcends individual survival. The reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone National Park controlled overgrazing deer populations, which allowed forests and waterways to regenerate — an integrative effect through violent means. In our own human-nature body, through targeted cellular destruction (apoptosis, inflammation, phagocytosis), the immune system eliminates threats while protecting and integrating the larger body into equilibrium. Like Pele’s molten rivers, the volcano’s violent eruption is also an act of creation — destroying and renewing the land in one continuous gesture of integration.
In nature, conflict is never pathological. It serves life. Destruction is nested within regeneration. There are no addicts or co-dependents in nature — only dynamic balance.
When leaders return to nature — not to dominate but to listen — they experience a profound shift. Nervous systems regulate. Reactivity softens. The capacity to hold complexity is restored. Nature reawakens our original belonging to a living field far greater than the isolated self.
Transcending Binaries: Moving Beyond Either/Or Thinking
At the heart of much human violence is a collapse into rigid binaries. The mind, when governed by fear, instinctively simplifies complexity into either/or oppositions: victim or perpetrator, right or wrong, friend or enemy, addict or co-dependent, us or them. These binaries offer the illusion of safety through clarity, but they fracture reality into opposing camps that fuel conflict rather than resolve it.
True healing, however, does not emerge by choosing one side over the other. It arises through the difficult but necessary work of transcendence — not by denying difference, but by integrating it into a larger, more complex whole.
This capacity to hold opposites is not new. It is deeply embedded in Indigenous relational worldviews, contemplative spiritual traditions, and systems thinking. Many Indigenous cultures, for example, speak of the "middle world" — not a compromise between polarities, but a sacred space where multiple truths coexist without needing to annihilate one another. Similarly, in Taoist philosophy, yin and yang are not opponents but interdependent aspects of one continuous reality.
In the realm of leadership, this transcendent capacity means learning to hold paradox without collapsing into reactivity. It means recognizing that personal healing and collective repair are not separate processes but reflections of the same field of integration. It means honoring both analytical insight and embodied wisdom, both reason and intuition, both individual responsibility and communal interdependence.
When leaders develop the ability to stand in this expanded field, they are no longer trapped in the exhausting need to conquer or submit. Instead, they create space for co-creation — for emergent solutions that neither side could fully see alone. They become facilitators of complexity rather than defenders of fixed positions.
Violence dissolves when we no longer require opposition to stabilize our identity. The work is not to pick a side but to expand the field of seeing itself.
Tuning Into Wholeness: A Return to Beauty and a New Story
Ultimately, healing violence is not merely a psychological or political task — it is a spiritual return to wholeness itself. Brian Swimme reminds us that the universe is not a machine, but a living process of creativity, beauty, and attraction. Life organizes not through force, but through allurement — the deep pull toward connection, complexity, and unfolding creativity.
The more leaders attune to this larger field, the more beauty becomes a guide, awe becomes a teacher, and belonging becomes not a goal but a given.
This return to wholeness is also a return to a new story of who we are. As Apollo 14 astronaut Dr. Edgar Mitchell reflected after his journey:
“I realized that the story of ourselves as told by science — our cosmology, our religion — was incomplete and likely flawed. I recognized that the Newtonian idea of separate, independent, discrete things in the universe wasn’t a fully accurate description. What was needed was a new story of who we are and what we are capable of becoming.”
From his vantage point, Mitchell gazed back at Earth and saw the entire planet as fragile, unified, and interconnected — beyond all national, racial, or political divisions. From that perspective, violence makes no sense. Only wholeness remains visible.
This is the vision that regenerative leadership calls us to embody: not a mastery over life, but a deep participation in its sacred unfolding. Leadership becomes an act of attunement — aligning with the coherence that is already present in the living web of existence. From this place of attunement, we are invited into an even deeper participation — into the living field where the heart becomes the gateway to wholeness.
The Field of the Heart: Participating in the Living Web
At the deepest level, healing violence calls us back into full participation in the field of the heart — the field of creation itself. This is not simply an emotional state, but a living, relational field in which all of life is interconnected and breathing together.
Each life is wired into this web — into the breathing fabric of the universe. We are not isolated individuals navigating a hostile world; we are participants in a sacred process far larger than the self. When we learn to attune to this field, we begin to perceive how deeply interwoven we are with all life.
In this field of the heart, miracles can happen. Not because we force them, but because we open ourselves to the regenerative intelligence that is already at work beneath the surface. As we align with this field — as we step into coherence with life itself — even small acts of healing and coherence ripple outward in ways we cannot fully comprehend.
Every act of courage, every moment of integration, every refusal to collapse into projection sends waves through the field, shifting narratives and reshaping the larger whole. We may never see how far our influence travels, but we participate nonetheless — responsible for the field we hold, yet trusting the intelligence of the web we inhabit.
In this, regenerative leadership becomes not simply a set of practices, but a posture of deep participation — rooted in the field of the heart, in service of life’s unfolding wholeness.
The Hummingbird’s Principle: Shifting the Field One Drop at a Time
The work of healing violence is vast, but it does not require grand heroic solutions. It requires humble, steady, embodied participation.
In the Quechua story, while the forest burns, the hummingbird carries drops of water into the flames. When questioned, it replies, “I am doing what I can.”
In the same way, every act of personal coherence — every moment of trauma integration, shadow work, conscious leadership, and relational repair — becomes a drop that shifts the collective field. We may not see how far our drops travel, but they ripple through systems in ways we cannot predict.
Regenerative Leadership: The Path of Wholeness
The work of regenerative leadership is this:
To reconnect with nature as teacher.
To integrate trauma across personal, organizational, and collective levels.
To release addiction to control.
To reclaim shadow as part of wholeness.
To transcend binaries into relational complexity.
To lead from beauty, awe, and belonging.
To trust the regenerative intelligence of life itself.
We do not fix violence by erasing conflict. We heal violence by restoring integration — where conflict is metabolized into evolution, not domination. The opposite of violence is not simply peace or safety. The opposite of violence is full participation in the sacred, regenerative field of life.
Leadership Apothecary Practice: The Regenerative Leadership Reflection
Here are a series of questions to reflect on:
Meeting Fear and Trauma
Where am I still protecting myself through control or avoidance?
If my pain were a being, what would it look like? What do I want it to know?
Facing the Shadow
What parts of myself am I projecting onto others?
What is the quality of this projection? What is its smell? Its taste? How do you know?
Transcending Control and Binary Thinking
Where am I still trapped in "either/or" thinking?
When I am in this space, what do I hear? What do I see? What is possible?
When I expand and hold them both and stay in complexity, what do I hear? What do I see? What is possible?
Aligning with the Field of Life
Where in nature am I aware of healing?
When I am able to trust, what does my body say? When I let go what does my body know?
Activating the Heart Field
When I drop into my heart, what becomes visible beyond fear or control?
How does my personal coherence ripple into the larger field I lead and live within?
The Hummingbird Practice
What small act of coherence or repair am I being called to take today?
When I trust that even my smallest actions contribute to the healing of the whole, what becomes possible?