In this segment of the "Leadership" series, Rúna Bouius reflects on the evolution of conscious leadership, noting how mindfulness has moved from a fringe concept to mainstream acceptance. She argues that the COVID‑19 pandemic serves as a powerful catalyst, forcing leaders to pause and turn inward, accessing an "inner guidance system" that complements outward leadership. Drawing on her shamanic training, Rúna describes the "council ways" and the medicine wheel, where wholeness emerges from integrating heart, mind, and gut. She suggests that ancient wisdom is resurfacing because people increasingly experience its truth through practices like meditation and emotional awareness. Ultimately, she frames the pandemic as a gift that can awaken humanity to its evolutionary role, posing the question whether we will awaken and evolve or remain asleep and disappear.
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I first want to say to Marc, I totally understand you having spent 10 years trying to get the message of your book out. We often say in the conscious leadership movement that mindfulness was a woo-woo thing to talk about 10 years ago. Today mindfulness is mainstream. And we are waiting for the tipping point of conscious leadership, which is leading from the heart, to become mainstream. And I literally think that this pandemic is going to help us because it's coming from, from the root, as you say, from the people. But I also think this is such a big jolt for so many leaders. It's so big, the challenges that they are dealing with, not only at their home front but also in their companies and with all the people's lives, that I would be surprised if not some of them would really start to connect to their own heart and start to realize that there is a leadership, like an outward leadership, but there is also something we can call inward leadership. And this forced pause that we are invited into now, I think, is an opportunity to go inward and start to explore our own inner guidance and own inner guidance system. And in shamanism that I was trained in, we very much focus on what we call the council ways, which is the circular leadership. And the center of the circle of the medicine wheel is wholeness. And wholeness is when we integrate heart, mind, and gut. And I literally think that what Lisa is saying, that that's the stage we are coming into. We are bringing the ancient wisdom and principles back, back in. And I think many people are craving it and more and more people are craving it because they understand, they feel, they feel the truth of it when they start experimenting with meditating or experimenting with identifying their feelings. So I think that this virus is actually an ally and a gift to us, to consciousness. I think it's maybe consciousness playing a trick on us in terms of waking us up to what we need to do as humanity in order to be able to follow evolution, because evolution is going to go on. The question is, are we going to wake up enough to to be a part of it, or are we going to stay asleep and just vanish?
