Actually, Organizations Can Have Dark Nights of the Soul, Too

Organizational leadership isn't a distraction from your spiritual calling - it's the advanced course.

You became a spiritual teacher, activist, or change-maker because you felt called to serve something larger than yourself. You developed deep skills in holding space, guiding transformation, seeing the sacred in the struggle.

Then you found yourself running an organization.

Now you're drowning in competing stakeholders, impossible choices between idealism and pragmatism, and a constant stream of crises. Things that previously worked have stopped working. You feel ineffective and insufficient, using skills you don't have for a job you never wanted.

It's time to become the spiritual advisor to the soul of your organization and steward its transformation.

The 3-Way Bind No One Talks About

You're not just managing competing priorities. You're caught in a three-way bind that no leadership development addresses:

Your Spiritual Leader Identity - where you're skilled and experienced at taking up space to teach, heal, and guide transformation - but the risk is taking up too much space in organizational contexts

Your Privilege and Power - where you need to step back to create space for people with historically underestimated identities - but the risk is either taking up too much space OR overcorrecting into invisibility and ineffectiveness

Your Organizational Leadership Role - where you need to be right-sized and power-sensitive, neither too big nor too small, so other leaders can share their skills and gifts instead of you doing it all (which builds organizational incapacity and seeds your inevitable burnout)

The place you want to land is being a right-sized, power-sensitive leader who can navigate all three dimensions skillfully.

But where do you get this training?

Business leadership training focuses on organizational demands but ignores your zone of excellence and power dynamics.

Activist organizing addresses privilege and power but doesn't prepare you for sustainable organizational leadership.

Spiritual development nurtures your gifts but avoids the messy realities of institutions and shared power.

No field teaches you how to navigate all three simultaneously - which is exactly what your role requires.

The Reframe That Changes Everything

Instead of: "I'm failing as a bureaucrat - this isn't what I signed up for"

This is: "I've been given the sacred assignment of stewarding this organization's soul through its transformation"

Yes, this is management. It's also a spiritual assignment.

Your organization is a living entity going through its own spiritual crisis. The chaos, the competing demands, the feeling that nothing works anymore - this is what a dark night looks like for an organizational soul.

You're not drowning in the dark night. You're the spiritual director helping guide the organization through it.

You Already Have More Skills Than You Think

As a spiritual guide, you know how to:

• Hold space for transformation without controlling the outcome

• Maintain loving presence during someone's darkest moments

• Trust that authentic expression wants to emerge

• Remove obstacles rather than force solutions

• Practice loving detachment while staying deeply engaged

• Navigate the bind between individual needs, community needs, and larger purpose

These are exactly the skills organizational stewardship requires.

The key is developing the same caring but non-enmeshed relationship with your organization that you have with your students.

You care deeply, but you're not drowning in it.

You have perspective.

You can see the larger pattern of transformation even when daily reality feels chaotic.