To Make The World A Better Place Put Your Efforts In The Right Place
Many of us want to make the world a better place. But we may not know the right place to put our effort. The good news is we don’t have to look far. Credit: Alexas Fotos, Pexels
By Ginny Whitelaw
Originally published on Forbes.com on February 1, 2026.
Visionaries of every generation have looked out to the world and wanted to make it a better place. But such positive intent seems all the more urgent in these chaotic times: when cruelty is breaking hearts and communities, when facts are made to look false and falsities are regurgitated as facts, when rule of law is falling prey to the power of greed, when irreversible planetary tipping points are passed unnoticed and when ever-more capable AI is quietly gobbling jobs. It would be hard for a leader of heart and awareness to take all this in and not want to make the world a better place than we find it today.
But where do we put our effort? How do we sense what’s worth doing and lead with the right timing and actions? How do we make a better, more loving and coherent world? As written about elsewhere, leaders can seed greater coherence amidst chaos by a combination of inner work and outer work: finding their practices, communities and purposes. While the importance of inner work is widely recognized, given its inner nature, it’s up to each of us personally to figure out what practices we want to do. The challenge is that most of us don’t come from a “practice” culture—unless we’re musicians, athletes or such—and we don’t have a clear understanding of how the inner work shapes the outer work. So, it’s easy to undervalue or be unclear about practice, and sandwich it into whatever bits of time are left over after our outer work has pretty much exhausted us. In truth, the inner work is an essential place to apply our effort if we want to make a better world. But not any inner work will do. The work to be done is to hone our antenna—our receiving and transmitting selves—for sensing and manifesting the better worlds that are ours to create.
This is fundamentally physical work. It is mind-body integrating work, by which head, heart and hara (i.e., lower abdomen) come into coherence. Without inner coherence, our sensitivity is garbled and we don’t detect subtle signals about what’s ready to happen, or our transmission is garbled and we don’t clearly act and enlist others in bringing it about or, most likely, both. Rollin McCraty at the HeartMath Institute has done wonderful work in measuring and building awareness around the importance of head-heart coherence. Indigenous elders, such as Ilarion Merculieff, have been wonderful voices for the importance of getting out of our heads and feeling into our hearts. Head-heart connection and coherence are essential, for sure. Yet it is the deeper link with hara that extends coherence through the whole human being and connects our walk with our talk. It not only brings integrity and authenticity to our actions, but, in the words of Durckheim writing about Hara, it makes us “clear-sighted, strong, and shockproof.” Not a bad starting point for facing the world of today.
Hara-based practice has equipped leaders to face difficult situations for centuries. It was the training of Samurai in the Japanese culture, through tireless practice in breath- and swordwork, both of which centered on hara. Hara development has been passed through the line of Rinzai Zen that shaped me through more than 40 years and is foundational to Zen Leadership. In working with leaders in the West, I see the price they pay in stress and the messes they make for living in a culture that has no concept of hara, much less practice. Leaders today would be ever so much better equipped to create a better world if they were fueled by an inner practice that gave them, not just a concept, but a felt sense of interbeing.
Hara connects us with the ground of Being. It is an in-dwelling source of insight, connected with nature and life’s patterns. Our ability to survive, draw sustenance from our earthly mother and Mother Earth, and our primordial enteric nervous system all came online before we ever developed an ego that could think itself separate. In connecting with hara, we re-experience ourselves as connected human beings. But there’s more. Coherence from hara to heart and head further connects our differentiated nature—our sense of a self with its unique relationships, feelings, thoughts, goals and purpose—to this ground of Being. Actions from this integrated state are simply better integrated with life’s patterns. Hence Durckheim’s observation that “only that done with hara succeeds completely.”
If one is a professional musician, one practices with their instrument for perhaps hours a day to be at peak performance. If one is a professional athlete, one has a daily workout regimen related to their sport that supports them on game day. If one is a leader, hara development is the practice that supports them in reaching the peak of their game and making a better world.
So, what might a hara development practice look like? While the particulars will differ for every differentiated human being, there are three commonalities that mark this path of practice: (1) breath slows down and is physically regulated by muscles in the lower abdomen, (2) points of tension and stuckness are cleared away, which relaxes the body, and (3) increasingly we trust the intuition coming from hara and our body learns to act hara-first. These are not linear steps from which we graduate once and for all, but an ongoing process of practice to accompany a purposeful, high-performance life.
Exhale Slowly, Breathe from Hara
The lungs can’t move themselves; they need help from muscles. The main muscle that helps them out is the diaphragm, but they may also get an assist from muscles above or below it. Using muscles in our chest to pump the lungs is highly inefficient. We have to breathe often, with only a little air getting into the lungs each time, and the very process can be anxiety producing. A vicious cycle ensues, where shallow breath makes the body more tense and up in its head, which makes the breath even more shallow. As a childhood asthmatic, I breathed this way for 19 years.
Slowing down the exhale and inviting more movement into the belly to regulate breathing is key to turning this around. Exhale is the relaxing part of the breath cycle, stimulating the parasympathetic nervous system, and the slower we make it, the more we settle down. It’s easiest to get this feeling of shifting movement from chest to belly breathing while lying down. Placing one’s right hand on the chest and left hand on the hara, one can feel how breath moves in the body and gradually invite more motion into the left hara-hand. It’s also easier to lengthen the exhale when hara is able to draw in a deep inhale, as taught by Ken Kushner Roshi and Ellen McKenzie in Hara Foundations.* The laboratory for testing the quality of our breathing is Zen meditation. As breath slows down and deepens, the head grows quieter and the conditions for samadhi ripen.
Ultimately, the muscle that pairs with the diaphragm to regulate our deepest, slowest breathing is at the very base of the hara—the perineum on the pelvic floor. But getting relaxed, conscious access to this base generally calls for the next step.
Clear Out What’s Stuck
The particulars of a hara development practice will differ for every person at this stage because each of us has our own sticking points arising from our shadow-side, trauma, fears, and other conditioning. Sexual trauma or dysfunction, sexual attitudes, irritable bowels, eating disorders and other maladies can make us cut off from the lower abdomen. The diaphragm itself is often stuck, storing too much tension and unable to move freely in its effort to hold everything together. Tension around our heart and in our chest is often associated with self-protection and grief. Tension in our shoulders can be an unconscious response to carrying life’s burdens. Indeed, all of our sticking points tend to lie beneath conscious awareness; i.e., relegated to shadow, at least initially. Being willing to surface them, release and relax these sticking points—at least enough for breath and energy to flow—is the work of this phase of practice.
The forms of practice will vary. In my own experience, deep-tissue bodywork (such as the Zen Bodytherapy work of Dub Leigh) was essential to this step. Also Feldenkrais work, Hanna somatics, yoga and ChiGong breathing exercises played starring roles. In Zen Leadership, we also approach this through naming and locating fear triggers in the body, breathing into those areas and letting them expand and release.
This step takes patience and persistence. Nothing opens or releases in the body until it’s ready to. Regularly returning to our laboratory of Zen meditation, we can better sense what feels stuck (i.e., what’s preventing the breath from deepening) and may be ready to open next.
Sense and Act from Hara
The third part of a hara practice is to physically practice using hara. On the sensation side, this means listening from hara. This isn’t listening for a chattering storyline in our head, but rather that kind of listening we do when we’re trying to catch the beat of a song or the rhythm of a wave. When head, heart and hara are in coherence, the head can readily translate the intuition of hara into thought and language. But such thought comes with a different provenance than the usual mind chatter. It arrives on a different frequency.
To practice acting from hara we need to do something that is clearly done better when coming from hara in order to give us feedback. And we need to do it again and again and again. For the Samurai, swordwork filled this bill. Walking hara-first in a way derived from sword practice remains a powerful practice in our present-day Zen training. We’ve also added activities like martial arts, chopping wood, moving heavy rocks, or throwing clay on a ceramics wheel. One can do these activities using upper body strength, but one can’t do them well. Experiencing the difference of doing them from hara is a repeating “aha” that further encourages hara-first action.
A practice in hara development is never wasted effort. Indeed, it is exactly the right place to focus our effort to be more resilient, even shockproof, and have our actions be more enduring because they match life. Conventional leadership relies on the head to look out into the world, see trends and patterns and pick a course of action. As with horse races and stock picks, sometimes it hits, often it misses. Hara-first leadership listens from hara, translates intuition into ideas ready to be acted upon, and moves spontaneously in timing with life. At times it misses because life is never certain. But more often it makes things better. Visionaries of every generation have wanted to make the world a better place. Rather than flailing about with externals that are uncontrollable, may the visionaries of today focus a share of their effort into the one place that makes a better world arise through them.
Ginny Whitelaw is the Founder and CEO of the Institute for Zen Leadership.