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Episode 138: Rewilding Your Inner Wolf with guest, Ina Gjikondi
What if the secret to restoring balance in our lives mirrors the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone National Park? Join us as we explore the fascinating intersection of ecology and coaching with Dr. Ina Gjikondi, Director of Executive Education at George Washington University and founder of the ECO Leadership Coaching Program.
Drawing from her doctoral research on ecocentrism in coach education, Ina introduces us to the concept of rewilding – not as something new we must learn, but as remembering what we've forgotten. She shares the powerful story of how wolves restored balance to the Yellowstone ecosystem and uses this as a metaphor for our own journey back to wholeness. "We have an ancient body with a modern mind," Ina explains, highlighting how our disconnection from nature has affected both our personal wellbeing and the planet.
The conversation takes a practical turn as Ina offers simple, accessible practices for reconnecting with our wild nature, even from the 32nd floor of an urban high-rise. By engaging our heart intelligence, awakening our senses, and asking open-ended questions like "What is wild in me today?", we can access forgotten wisdom that resides in our bodies. She emphasizes the importance of honoring our first intuitive responses rather than analyzing them, allowing our instincts to guide us rather than our executive function.
Particularly moving is Ina's discussion of storytelling as an ancient practice that helps us bear witness to each other's humanity and build community. Through these practices of remembering and reconnecting, we not only heal ourselves but potentially contribute to healing our relationship with Earth. As Ina powerfully concludes: "The wild is not lost. Like the wolf, it is waiting to return. Will you answer the call?" This episode offers both the inspiration and practical tools to help you take that first step.
Watch the full interview by clicking here.
Find the full article here.
Ina has provided a Free Gift to choice listeners to practice for Connecting with the Wild Wolf Archetype to use for coaches for your own development, or use with clients as needed. The Wolf Within: A Leadership Apothecary Practice for Rewilding
Learn more about Ina Gjikondi here.
Link to learn more about Elisabet Sahtouris
Grab your free issue of choice Magazine here - https://choice-online.com/
Welcome to Beyond the Page, the official podcast of choice, the magazine of professional coaching, where we bring you amazing insights and in-depth features that you just won't find anywhere else. Hi, I'm Garry Schleifer, your host, and I'm excited to expand your learning as we delve into the latest articles, have a chat with the brilliant authors behind them and uncover the learnings that are transforming the coaching world. Take some time to join our vibrant community of coaching professionals as we explore groundbreaking ideas, share expert tips and techniques and make a real difference in our clients' lives. This is your go-to resource for all things coaching, so let's dive in. In today's episode, I'm speaking with teacher and speaker Ina Gjikondi, who is the author of an article in our latest issue Climate Consciousness and Coaching ~ Making the Connection. The article is entitled The Call of the Wild Wolf ~ Coaching as a Path to Restore Wholeness in Ourselves and the Earth.
Garry Schleifer:A little bit of Ina. She holds an EDD, an MPS and is a PCC. As I said, she's a teacher, a speaker. She's also a mother and a poet, who embodies creativity and innovation in every aspect of her work. As the Director of Executive Education and Coaching and the Founder and Director of both the ECO Leadership Coaching Program and the One Humanity Lab at the George Washington University Center for Excellence in Public Leadership, Ina is dedicated to co-curating transformative learning experiences that expand consciousness in the world. Her research and teaching delve into innovative approaches in coach education, emphasizing whole person and whole system leadership to foster deeper understanding and growth in individuals and communities alike.
Garry Schleifer:Ina, thank you so much for joining me today and I kind of get an idea why you wrote this article, but I want to know more about what brought it up. To be honest, it's not our usual kind of article, but then this isn't our usual kind of issue either. It really came out of somebody else's suggestion and love of coaching and the planet, but I want to hear how you arrived here.
Ina Gjikondi:Yeah, I was really excited to actually see and the timing of it. So for the past five years I was working on my research and dissertation at George Washington University. You know I'm a coach educator, as you said. I started a coach education program over seven years ago at the university and I was always looking for the ways to bring this more whole person approach which we can talk more about.
Ina Gjikondi:But my dissertation and research was looking at the study of ecocentrism in coach education. So this idea that nature holds agency and then everything is connected to everything else. That was kind of the phenomenon and I wanted to observe and see how do coaches who are educated with these principles, what do they do? What is their experience? And there's not a lot of research that has been done on the experience of those who are being educated. There's a lot on the impact of the coaching on clients and I was very curious to explore that so literally I had just submitted my final draft of the dissertation and we were in the process of scheduling a defense which I defended this past December.
Ina Gjikondi:I get an email from a colleague, a coach colleague, and says Ina, have you seen, choice Magazine is doing an issue on coaching and climate consciousness. And I hadn't talked to this person in a very long time. Maybe it had been five, six years and I saw the email. I said you should be good to write an article for them and I'm like how odd the timing of it and the moment and I said you know what this feels so right. And I will tell you, I was so burned out with being in the research for a very long time I didn't want to write a thing anymore. But this felt right. It was like something moved in me and I said, no, I'm supposed to write this. And I wrote it and I sent it to you guys. And I even remember and I know you're very thorough in your criteria and what you're asking and I said I'm going to send this out. I tried my best to stay in the criteria, but send it out and see what happens. If it's going to happen, it's going to happen. And I will tell you I was very excited to see the article published because I didn't put any effort, it came with ease and so that tells me it was meant to be and meant to be put in the world. So thank you.
Garry Schleifer:Well, thank you. I mean it's really is impactful, an amazing story. I mean you tell the tale of the wolf and the Yellowstone project? I mean I was like, wow, how amazing that one animal can impact an entire ecosystem. So for our listeners that have not, maybe not read the article, there's a story in there about the destruction of all wolves in Yellowstone Park in 1929.
Ina Gjikondi:Yeah, something around that time.
Garry Schleifer:And the impact it had on the ecosystem, like almost destroying it, and somebody realizing in the 70s that ecosystems are necessary and the reintroduction of the wolf, and so that's just blows me away story. You know, it reminds me of the game Jenga. You know where it has the bricks and you keep pulling out a brick and if you pull out the wrong brick, everything falls. That's what went through my mind when I was rereading it this morning.
Ina Gjikondi:Well, that's kind of how it is. I mean, we're a field of human experience and non-human experience and this field holds so much memory. I think what the article, in a way, is speaking to is, in a literal form, yes, when something is taken out of that field of remembrance in a way, then we're longing for it, we're seeking to bring it back. It's in our system, because our bodies are that system. We hold so much remembrance. I was thinking about, you know, the wild, this idea of the wild. Like what is the wild? It's not just the wild wolf in the ecosystem. It's parts of us that have been maybe tamed, forgotten, not remembered, ignored. When I was a little girl, I I spent a lot of time in nature with my grandparents. They lived up in the mountains in Albania and that was the time that I felt the most alive, because my senses were so happy. I could smell the fresh milk, you know, I could smell the roses, and those memories are in my body. They're there. And then you go on through life and you go through. , I moved to United States states. I remember feeling where is the smell, where are the scents? And they are everywhere. But that longing was always in me. , to restore that into the system, to bring that back, that sense of aliveness. It's not that hard, but our modern lives are not designed to be a feast for the senses. Let's say, you know.
Garry Schleifer:we started off this call about declaring where we were. I'm on the 32nd floor of a sixth floor of a building Like. where's the nature, where's the senses, the stimulation right?
Ina Gjikondi:And you know, nature is not the only way to stimulate the senses, because it's a shortcut, a great shortcut to come to our habitat. Even the word nature and humans feels like a separation, because we are nature. You know, this is our habitat, we're part of it. We've evolved a certain way and that's part of the problem because we've created this instrumental value system where we're using nature in ways that we're not always honoring the non-human or our habitat, and that's part of some of the disasters that we have in the world and climate. We don't need to go into that because there's so much research.
Garry Schleifer:And in a certain way, that's why this issue right?
Ina Gjikondi:Yeah, absolutely, and we get sick.
Ina Gjikondi:I mean, we've gotten sick, yeah.
Garry Schleifer:Well, look at the perfect example of COVID and the impact on nature for us humans is not being out there in our cars and in industry. Animals coming back into cities. Well, animals coming into cities that weren't normally in cities, like bears and elephants and things like that. You touched on the word rewilding, so you draw powerful parallels in your article between ecological rewilding and the rewilding of our inner lives. What are some of the biggest barriers faced in reconnecting with their wild nature? But I mean actually first explain what you mean by rewilding. How's that?
Ina Gjikondi:Right, yeah. Well, the rewilding is really another way to say it is remembering. It's coming in touch with the parts of us that know that we have missed, that we have forgotten that need that primal connection with the land, that need that primal connection with the experience, the senses. You know, in the article I talk about the Pinnacola Estes, and she talks about the archetype of the wolf. That's why the wolf was used and you know, as awakening that part of us that is awakens the instincts, other ways of knowing, or rather more than human ways of knowing, because, for many reasons, whether that is the, you know, our education system, the scientific management, our dominant ways of knowing, which are mostly anthropocentric, which puts human at the center. Tat was part of my research to looking at more ecocentric ways of knowing. When we look at, maybe, indigenous science or new materialism or eco-phenomenology, they have a more holistic way of looking at the world that is not just human-centered and I think we've adopted. Our modern lives have become so complex and complicated that we forgot them and we forget. And so the rewilding for me is remembering, coming back into our senses. I have a personal story with this.
Ina Gjikondi:You know, when I mentioned earlier, I moved from Albania here years ago to come to GW to do my studies and at some point, I think it was 2015 or something, I got really sick. I got really, really sick and it was a significant burnout. I had to rewild myself, I had to restore myself and I got to know myself in a new way. But that came by connecting to myself in a new way, connecting to nature in a new way, understanding my biology, my body in a new way. Like who knew that part of me?
Ina Gjikondi:There is a mitochondria that is billion years old, so there's still in there. You know, we have a ancient body with a modern mind. It just doesn't work. So it does work because we have to make it work. But that's the point of rewilding is not doing anything new, is acknowledging that we have in our humanity something bigger than what's in, and our bodies are the vehicle for that. And so to come to that self-servory wilding is to remember that we are part of this bigger field, that we are part of the animals and the trees, and they are our ancestors. They are our friends, so they're our community.
Garry Schleifer:Yeah, well, and you said it too, we are one, right? And it's remembering. I love that you said rewilding is also synonymous in this context with remembering. So, speaking of people on the 32nd floor, how do people like us in this modern world, with our modern minds, incorporate rewilding on a regular basis?
Ina Gjikondi:Yes, we said nature is a great way, you know. But we are in the 32nd floor, I'm in the sixth floor. I have found that the best way to do that is to come to our own bodies, because our body, as I said, is part of that expanded nature. We have been losing touch with our body. We've put so much effort into our executive faction of our brain right, and that's good, because that makes humans intelligent, critical thinkers. So this is not a bad thing. But we have ignored our instincts and we've ignored our bodies. So the easy way it's to come to the field of the heart and as simple as just closing your eyes and just listening to the beat of your heart. Yeah, we're doing it right now. It feels like that's how it is doing it for me now. And everybody has their own color, their own rhythm. But what does that do? Because, and I do a lot of, in fact, today I'm teaching at a program here at the university. We have a youth development program and this morning we were just checking in and talking exactly about how to break the cycle of trigger and how do we connect with our bodies. And the way of connecting with bodies, or well, just take a little breath. I mean, we've overheard this and it feels like, oh, just a breath. But that's our way in. That's our biology. It's who we are as humans. What does a breath do? It sends a signal to the body that you're safe. It gives you a little breathing, a little space between that stimulus and response, so you can make a choice. That's what it does.
Ina Gjikondi:And there is something else special that I have found about the heart. That the heart has a huge field, much bigger than the body itself. In fact, Heart Math Institute has done a lot of research on the field of the heart, and it connects us with other people. And there's a lot of wisdom, traditions that speak about the heart itself. And, it's been known that the heart shows up as the first in embryo. It's the first organ that gets formed in the embryo, after 72 beats appear. So think about the beauty of that. So when you connect with your heart, you're actually coming to your source, to that sense of source. Oh, I'm honoring myself, I'm connecting. So that's one way, Garry, that just like in the moment, and then when we do, we can throw in an open-ended question.
Ina Gjikondi:As coaches, we love that's those are the spaces for clients that are super important is being curiosity, because an open-ended question gives breathing room to possibility, doesn't limit you, doesn't put no how's. And so when we put our hand and we say, okay, well, what is wild in me today? What does this wild heart want of me today and just feel into it. And I love always asking clients, and I do more these days do a lot of teaching of coaches who are becoming or getting into the profession, I always invite them to go into the five senses question. What do you feel? What do you taste? What's the taste of the wildness in your heart? You know what is it. And then sometimes it's like, oh, we're not used to thinking of tasting. Well, what does it smell? If you touch it, what does it look like? If you have a picture? Because this gives us more choice, more access points and it again awakens our senses, and we go into a different field, we enter the field of the heart rather than our conscious mind. And when we're in the field of the heart, we let go of our ego, we let go of judgment, we're more present.
Ina Gjikondi:I mean, that's the simple one and you know, the other thing we shouldn't ignore is, and these should be super basic, is eat good food. I mean, eat food that is alive. You know, your greens, your veggies. Eat food. I tell this because I grew up in Albania like that, and when I moved here it was so different. I just couldn't understand why are we eating this way? And then sleep. That's the other thing. Sleep and set your intentions and take care of your dreaming. Really, like note your dreams. Pay attention because our inner worlds are unfolding at night in a new way, so that wild nature of us at night has a new taste for us.
Garry Schleifer:Back to taste. I love it.
Ina Gjikondi:Yeah, so back to taste. Yeah, I've given you some ideas.
Garry Schleifer:And for our listeners in the article, Ina has some reflective questions. Some of what she said today, like how does wild feel like in your body, taste, sight, that sort of thing, and also practices for rewilding the wolf within which we've spoken about again. Awakening the senses, listening to instincts, inviting the non-human as teacher. And when I read the part about listening to instincts, your instinct to write the article and then claim it was too easy, right, it just flowed, it was like. But that means you were in sync with your wild, with your nature, right?
Ina Gjikondi:Totally.
Garry Schleifer:Right.
Ina Gjikondi:That's a beautiful way, that's a great way of weaving it Garry because that's the point. I mean, it doesn't mean that we can't do hard things. Look, I mean I went through that process as I was saying, of my dissertation. It's a different field, and I had my own pockets in that process of how to come back to the center. I mean, I knew that if I had to be in the flow, I needed a little Carlos Nakai music, for example, and I needed to be in that flow in order to help me be in the field. So we have ways to do it. But yeah, if we're resisting, there's a reason why we're resisting something, and that really requires a lot of attention and an open-ended question. Is this the thing for me to do now? Okay, maybe it's another time.
Garry Schleifer:Or really simply what am I resisting? Why am I resisting?
Ina Gjikondi:Exactly. Yeah, let's feel into that resistance. If that's a being. What does it look like? Oops, my scarf is going there. Yeah he wants a little rewilding too, you know.
Garry Schleifer:I love it. Another aspect of your article that I want to talk to you about. In your article, you weave together mythology, ecology and personal information transformation rather seamlessly. So tell us more about storytelling and how it can help us restore balance within ourselves and our relationship to the earth.
Ina Gjikondi:Yeah, well, you know, storytelling is one of the most ancient forms of human community. We gathered around the fire to tell stories. This is how we build our humanity. This is how we'll build our beingness, and I see this live with people that I work with and teach here at the university. In any program that we host, the first day of the program will always be about building the community and telling stories, because when we tell stories, we are not only sharing our humanity, but we're bearing witness to our humanity. We are communing. We are cooperating. You know, we start seeing connections, we start seeing parts of us, we start seeing perspective.
Ina Gjikondi:And I remember years ago I was talking with Elizabeth Sartoris, who was an evolutionary biologist, and she would say this is the era of communing, of coming together as a species. And she said the early bacterias knew how to do it. They cooperated because they bonded together so that they could use less energy and thrive. That was their way of thriving. We've transcended yeah, that's it. And, by the way, her work has been very transformative for me. She passed away last December, but really beautiful work and very simple and profound, and she's done a lot on systems thinking as well.
Garry Schleifer:Remind me, what's the name again?
Ina Gjikondi:Elizabeth Satouris Elisabet Sahtouris. So I can put it also in the chat for you.
Ina Gjikondi:Yeah, I had several conversations with her in the past and I remember also her focus was supporting young people. That was a big, big part of her legacy and I think she supported me in my own thinking and as a mother. So communing is our way of bearing witness to one another and I think even in coaching spaces, when we work with clients, that's what we're doing. We're holding space, we are allowing them to bring their story, their sense of being in the world, their inquiry, their questions, and we hold space. We create a field together and in that field, things evolve, things emerge, things happen.
Ina Gjikondi:I've had clients where, at times, they've spoken straight for 20 minutes after we set our goals and the agenda, and then they're like, okay, I know what to do now. And I said, wait a minute, how did I do that? Like, what happened? A lot happened. It's not that me as a coach, I didn't do a thing. I didn't say a word, but the word is nothing right. Because we say a lot by our beingness, by the way how we hold our energy, how we stay present. We don't have to say it in words.
Ina Gjikondi:There was this National Geographic journalist, who lived two years with the tribe of Mayoruna and they communicated telepathically. They didn't know the language. They only spoke through through this field. How is that possible? Very possible, because you know, language came after. Language evolved after. So words and language, or what Maya Angelou used to say, it's not what the person said, it's how the person made me feel. Cause you feel it.
Ina Gjikondi:And even the research in The Heart Math Institute, they had this research where they would show pictures, different kinds of pictures to people and they were all wired up, you know, and th e heart knew when something was really triggering to the heart before they saw the image. So if there was, like a very disturbing picture, there was more movement, a certain movement. If there was a beautiful lake, the heart rate variability was more stable, was more smooth. So, yeah, so that's why I think storytelling is a form of connection, is a form of witnessing, and when we hear ourselves in that space, we connect to the parts of us again that maybe have been not noticed, forgotten, and we remember, so yeah.
Garry Schleifer:Wow, thank you, and just that powerful story about the wolf. I'll never forget that one. I won't remember the details necessarily, but I'll remember the story of the wolf. And then that's the beauty of storytelling. You tell it to me, I tell it to somebody else, I tell it to somebody else, and it evolves and changes and serves when it serves right.
Ina Gjikondi:Absolutely, yeah, absolutely. There's something else I want to say about story is that it's meant to be, it's the experience of the story. Just what I was hearing from you. It's not so much, oh, the details of it, but perhaps when you read it, it's the experiencing of it. It's oh interesting.
Ina Gjikondi:I see I'm in a new experience. In fact, on the wolf thing, as I was doing my research, I had been reading different authors and Aldo Leopold was one of the authors that I had been exploring on his land ethic. And he talks actually, I forget it's on the mountain or it's about the mountain, it's a famous essay that he wrote, but he depicts a moment when he saw a wolf, a green wolf, that was in that moment of death, and he remembered that moment and that was so much. He became so much alive in his body that it shifted the way he was thinking about the land and the way he was thinking about the wild. So, same way, Arnie Neese talks about the interaction with an insect. You know, how the whole world opens up.
Garry Schleifer:So, yeah, so that's great. Well, thank you, and thank you for writing this article. I mean seriously, it's very memorable. There's some really great points to read, process, learn, reflect on and little things that you can do for yourself and for the planet. So thank you. What else? What would you like our audience to do as a result of the article in this conversation?
Ina Gjikondi:Well, I really would invite people to, I mean, I mentioned a few things that you can do immediately, but it would be really wonderful if they could even just take a moment to notice the wild in them and use those little prompts of the senses and close your eyes when you do it and feel into it and give it a chance. And actually this is the great tip, and I say this when we, when we do the learning in our classrooms, honor the input and the information that comes to you in the first 30 seconds. So, if you're closing your eyes and you're saying what's the wild in me wants right now. Okay, I just saw a picture that came right away. It's like a yellow buttercup, like a little yellow buttercup flower that came to me in this moment and it was kind of leaning a little bit to the left. Fine, this is the point.
Ina Gjikondi:I'm not going to interpret this now. I'm not going to say, oh, I saw yellow buttercup, I'm going to learn all about the buttercups and you know. No, stop there, right there, just write it down. Oh, I noticed the yellow buttercup. I don't know what it is, doesn't matter. Let's stay with it and stay and feel then later what that might mean for you, because we are going to make a little meaning of it. But the silliest the thing or the answer, the information, the better, because that's what gets us out of our head and back to the instinct. If you find yourself, if you do these prompts and you're telling a whole story about it, then you're not in the field.
Ina Gjikondi:Then you're not in your heart, you're in your head, yeah, and you can make stories after. I mean, I know, if I'm starting to think of the yellow buttercup, I'll think of the song what is the Buttercup? There's a song that it's coming to me. There's like a yellow butter, I don't know, it's coming to me, it doesn't matter, but to follow it, to follow it.
Garry Schleifer:And it takes you out of the here and now, puts you in a different place.
Garry Schleifer:Like you said earlier about take a breath or touch your heart or ground your feet. Don't make it mean anything, just help it take you away and then introduce the conversation, perhaps about the wild right, using the wild. I want to thank you and close with something you said in your article. The last sentences. The wild is not lost. Like the wolf, it is waiting to return. Will you answer the call?
Ina Gjikondi:Yeah.
Garry Schleifer:There we go. What a great way to end. Ina, what's the best way for people to reach you?
Ina Gjikondi:LinkedIn. Actually it's the best. Yeah, I'm very active there, I write there. So, yeah, the best way to reach me.
Garry Schleifer:Thank you, and thank you so much for joining us for this Beyond the Page episode. It was really interesting. I was excited when I was getting ready to talk more about this rewilding in particular, so I'm going to take that on myself too. So thank you for the reminder of rewilding to remember.
Ina Gjikondi:Thank you, Garry, and thank you for being bold and for putting this issue out there. I'm really excited to read the magazine. I've been a subscriber for a few years now and I love the freshness of it and what it brings to the coaching profession. So thank you for your contribution.
Garry Schleifer:You're welcome and thank you. That's it for this episode of Beyond the Page. For more episodes, subscribe via your favorite podcast app. If you're not a subscriber to choice Magazine, like we both are, you can sign up for your free digital issue by scanning the QR code in the top corner of the screen if you're watching, or by going to choice-online. com and clicking the sign up now button. I'm Garry Schleifer. Enjoy the journey of mastery.