Warning: This article refers to violation of women. Please take care of yourself and tend to your needs.

The Epstein Files have made visible some of the most violent behaviour from many of the world’s most visible, and in some cases respected and trusted, leaders.

The Chopra-Epstein dialogue in particular has shaken me to the core.

For details of this exchange, Dr Scott Mills has summarised it here: https://drscottwmills.substack.com/p/the-silence-inside-the-chopra-epstein

From the moment I heard about this I knew this was related to my work in the world as a regenerative leader, and as someone supporting others to develop regenerative leadership capacity, and I want to be brave and share about this.

I attempt here to name what I’m feeling as I see this, and to make sense of what it means going forward for me, in case it is supportive of anyone else going through the same process.

HEARTBREAK FOR THE UNNAMED

I feel heartbreak for the girls who were victims, who are referred to repeatedly as “the girls” but never named.

Never named. Pieces in a power game. Dehumanised. Exploited.

I wish I knew their names. Who they were. What their stories were. What their hopes might have been and how their path led them to where they were. How they might be feeling now that the system they were in is being exposed.

I feel a longing for their voices, and also honour that they may not want to speak about their experiences. The public dialogue is mostly focused on the powerful men, while the women’s stories and voices are absent.

The women whose names we don’t know experienced an alive patriarchal power dynamic in colonial Western culture at one of its most extreme expressions; powerful men reducing women to sexual objects. Most likely they were controlled and manipulated in ways that found them trapped. Women dissociating from their bodies to survive as their bodies are violated by powerful men. Psychological barriers broken. Sense of self warped.

It’s feels compelling to keep looking outwards at this pattern and keep the focus on those involved. But for regenerative leaders in these times – or anyone engaged in systems transformation work – we must always also bend the beam of observation back towards ourselves and notice what this is bringing up within our own system and spaces.

Despite having done many years of work to unravel an internalised patriarchy, I know that patriarchy is still alive in parts of my body-mind. The unravelling work rarely completes itself; it continues.

Questions I’m sitting with now:

• I ask myself where the power dynamic above might still be alive and enabled within my body-mind.
• Where might these often-hidden patterns of behaviour be alive within systems that I am associated with and part of? And how might I know that?

VIOLATION OF TRUST AND ABUSE OF POWER

I feel a sick feeling in my gut that feels like violation – because Chopra was a teacher I had some respect for and whose book Abundance I bought and read some years ago. In recent years I had sensed him moving heavily into a disembodied, overly abstract quantum philosophy that I found harmful, and I disengaged. But earlier, I had listened to him and allowed him to teach me.

Earlier today I found myself scanning my bookshelf and asking: who else of these people – authors, teachers – that I have allowed to inform my worldview, my knowledge base, my work, my being, my choices – could also be a “Deepak”?

Sadly, there were three authors where my instincts said “maybe”. Such judgement within me about these humans, who may be ethically solid and genuinely loving. And cynicism present within me too.

While judgement and cynicism are often inner experiences I seek to lean away from and towards curiosity and compassion instead, within them here might also be an important new layer of discernment emerging for the path ahead.

I feel a hopeful, innocent part of me grieving that feels like a kick in the guts.

I am questioning my inner mechanism for sensing who to trust, who to allow to teach or guide me, and whose written words I grant the power to shape my learning and my psyche.

I feel my whole inner trust-sensing system being destabilised. It seems that for the times ahead this will support an inner rebuild of that system to increase my sovereignty and discernment. I already feel it weaving into my approach to the design of the spaces that I hold.

A pattern I’m sensing, for myself and for our culture:

• The age of the powerful “guru”, the one who knows all, is dying.
• The age of circular wisdom cultivation, with an increased focus on human sovereignty and agency in the learning process, is growing.

Learning experiences where learners accept what the “guru” or “teacher” is teaching as truth are dying.

What is emerging is the need for “teachers” to be hyper-conscious of their power and, rather than abusing it, to co-create learning experiences that support the learner to develop their own sense of truth, wisdom, direction, and language.

This is precisely the philosophy behind coaching that I appreciate. And yet even those who call themselves coaches abuse power all the time.

Questions I’m sitting with:

• How do we discern who we learn from in this time?
• What sits behind the need to learn and read books written by others?
• What is the balance between reading the words and ideas of others and the creation of my own words?
• What is the value of wisdom teachings in this time? Are they dying? Is collective, circular, embodied wisdom re-emerging as how wisdom is stored and shared? Are we moving back towards Indigenous oral traditions?
• Who do I allow to influence me and why?
• Where is the patriarchal pattern of needing a white male teacher to validate and teach me still alive within me?
• How can I allow the learnings from this to flow into my coaching practice?

RAGE

I feel a sick rage at Chopra for the disgusting contradictions. Teaching divine feminine to women and abusing women. Teaching love, compassion, kindness and violating female human rights at a level that would psychologically break them.

I want to burn his book that is in my home. I have stopped myself many times. I still might do it.

But part of me senses that burning the book is not the right action to take. I did learn some helpful things from it. So I’m holding off. For now.

But the lighter sits next to the book on my desk as I write this.

Questions I’m holding now:

• What is the value of learning if it has come from the human in question?
• What is the deepest learning for me in this?

WHAT DOES THIS MEAN FOR REGENERATIVE LEADERSHIP?

Here are my thoughts.

Right now, the destabilisation of the Western colonial relational fabric and power structures is accelerating. This is the quickening of the dying of the old system. The time we are here for.

Our work of being present, looking at the horrors, and holding space for the metabolising of this grief for ourselves and others is needed more and more. We must tend to ourselves as part of this process – which is what I am attempting to do here, in part, through my writing.

But there’s more.

Our work of midwifing the new amongst the breaking down of the old is needed more and more. Amongst the grief, sickness, and recalibration of relational and power patterns, we must remain open to the seeds of the new. The seeds of the sovereign. The seeds of the undefined.

Our work of nurturing co-creative processes in ways that honour the agency of all, and allowing that creative process to shape who we become, is needed more and more.

Our work of being in our bodies, feeling our emotions, sensing our intuition, and being brave enough to speak our truths is needed more and more.

Our work of being our fittest, healthiest, strongest, most whole selves on all planes, so we are strong for the revolution, is needed more and more.

While the Epstein Files are one of the most sickening revelations of my lifetime, I can see that they – and other destabilising human forces in the world right now – are a catalyst for what Joanna Macy calls the Great Unravelling and the Great Turning.

I also believe that this law of physics applies to the current moment for our species:

For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.

That means for me, I believe that while the Great Unravelling continues, the Great Turning is accelerating at the same pace – an equal and opposite reaction.

So, if we can, my invitation for regenerative leaders is not to be silent or to avoid, but to lean in, feel, and step into conversations and places where we can be this kind of leader in the world right now. To hold tensions and allow the emergence of the new to be born between them. To continue to show up as a death doula for the Great Unravelling and a midwife for the Great Turning.

So that the next evolution of our species can emerge from this tension, that is reconnected to and in service of Life.

This is my invitation for us in this moment. For all tensions. And likely, in all moments.

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Jenna Robertson is the Founder of Gaia’s Evolution, providing regenerative leadership development for purpose-led leaders and organisations. She is a coach, facilitator, consultant, educator and threshold-opening speaker. She is also an award-winning singer and filmmaker. www.gaiasevolution.com