Your Best Antenna For Wayfinding In Climate And Other Disasters
We’re equipped with antennas that can sense the whole picture, find our way within it and enact what is exactly ours to do—our purpose—at full strength. But it takes practice to hone our most reliable antenna and it’s not where you think. Credit: Casiana Malaia
By Ginny Whitelaw
Originally published on Forbes.com on May 1, 2026.
The returning Artemis II astronauts offered up rich examples of what has been called The Overview Effect—seeing the earth from space. “You don’t see borders, you don’t see religious lines, you don’t see political boundaries,” as Christina Koch put it. “All you see is Earth and you see that we are way more alike than we are different.” In Jeremy Hansen’s words: “We live on a fragile planet in the vacuum and the void of space…And our purpose on the planet as humans is to find joy, to find the joy in lifting each other up, by creating solutions together instead of destroying.” Victor Glover spoke to bringing that experience home. “You come back to sea level, and then you have a choice. Are you going to try to live your life a little differently? Are you going to really choose to be a member of this community of Earth?”
The Apollo-era images of the earth from space gave a taste of the Overview Effect to non-astronauts and are often credited as being one of the wake-up calls for the environmental movement. Katharine Wilkinson, bestselling contributor to Drawdown, the All We Can Save anthology and her latest book, Climate Wayfinding, had an earth-bound wake-up call. While attending camp as a high school sophomore, she came upon a ridge in the Pisgah Forest of North Carolina, completely denuded, clear cut to the ground, breaking her heart in layers of tragedy. She wrote three lines in her journal that would shape her adult life into what Time Magazine would later recognize as one the 15 women changing the world around climate: “Want to help the world. Be connected with the Earth. Change the way I live.”
What Wilkinson’s experience and those of many astronauts have in common is seeing through to the truth of our connectedness and letting it change us. This perspective flips leadership from being what’s-in-it-for-me serving of self to being a bigger whole to which this self-in-a-skin is in service. A key role for leaders is to chart a course through wildly uncertain times, amidst converging social, political, technological and climatic crises. For leaders committed to serving or helping this world, this flip is critical for finding our way in alignment with larger forces, life patterns or source wisdom, what we could call the Way of things, worthy of a capital “W”. The science of resonance and the practices of Zen Leadership give insight and practical guidance for such Wayfinding. What we discover is that our physical body is the antenna we can use for sensing and motoring along the Way when we know how to tune it and listen to the right channel. Here’s a hint: it doesn’t start in the head.
Climate Wayfinding
For Wilkinson, it started with heartbreak, a felt fissure in her body. And so it is that difficult, heartfelt emotions often accompany our determination to find a better way as we grapple with what has been lost, layers of injustice, and progress reversed. Wilkinson saw so many of her colleagues in the climate movement burnt out and discouraged and wondered how to take care of people who are taking care of the climate? She recounts her own journey and journaling that started metabolizing the overwhelm into clarity, the anxiety into hope, the rage into joy, awakening to the human being as a nature-based solution and her own role as “an essential part of Earth’s abundance.”
Climate Wayfinding is Wilkinson’s compelling walk-along guide to engaging the questions, possibilities, people, and our own gifts in service of being nature-based leaders ourselves. Three lenses guide the journey: Look inward with care, look outward with curiosity and look forward with courage. To look inward with care is to work through difficult emotions arising in the body, welcoming them as something stirring, something asking to be righted. We can then metabolize them into power and joy which is none other than life force flowing through us. To look outward with curiosity is to see, not with the dissecting eyes of an analyst, but the holistic spirit of an artist. It is to be curious where wonder might lead us into community and fields of possibility. To look forward with courage is to feel into the specifics of how we steward a desired future into the present guided by a compass of specifics (why, what, with whom, etc.) and the compass that we are.
She points to the need for collective, contemplative spaces for doing this work and the role of Indigenously-inspired circles for collective sensing and coherent action. The science of resonance and the practices of Zen Leadership have a great deal to offer in this regard, as they illuminate the principles behind successful change efforts and give leaders the contemplative spaces and physical bodies to carry them out.
The Resonance of Wayfinding
Hearing a magnificent pipe organ or an amped-up band, we experience how the vibrations of sound don’t just resonate in our ears but can vibrate our whole body and move us emotionally as well as physically. This, along with all of our senses, shows that our entire body is an antenna (or an array of antennas), capable of resonating, i.e., vibrating with, a range of frequencies in our environment.
Resonance is a universal principle for how energy changes form and forms emerge from energy. It operates from the infinitesimal scale of high energy physics, where “resonance hunting” is used to find the right energetic conditions for producing a particle, to the cosmic scale of organizing the orbits of planets, solar systems and galaxies. It certainly operates at the human scale from how all of our senses work to the phenomena of tipping points for large scale social change. Resonance is how islands of coherence (i.e., where vibrations add up to something bigger) evolve chaotic systems to a new, higher order.
Resonance reminds us that everything arises only in co-vibration with something else. Put another way, not a thing exists or happens on its own. This is obvious for living systems, as life has to metabolize energy to keep living. But it also applies to more subtle forms such as thought, ideas, the vibes of a relationship, human potential or future possibilities. All of these subtle forms that we experience inwardly co-arise with energies that surround us. Moreover, our actions create vibrations in the outer world that resonate into chain reactions.
It’s worth remembering this principle of resonance when it comes to Wayfinding because the ego has a way of thinking it stands apart, having its own unique inner experience, somehow isolated from the rest of life. For example, we say things like, “I have an idea,” believing it came out of nowhere but our own cleverness. The reverse is far closer to the truth, paraphrasing Winnie the Pooh, it’s more like, “An idea got me.” When we stand apart from life as an ego-I, we can get thoroughly confused and lost, especially at times like now when our maps are outdated and habits of thought based on the past fail us. When we sense ourselves as part of nature, fully equipped with an internal compass and other antennas that can pick up on life signals and resonate with them as we go, we’re better outfitted for Wayfinding.
Zen Leadership and Wayfinding
Zen Leadership practices and places support Wayfinding in several pivotal ways. First, they help us see through the ego-I to the wholeness that we are so that we increasingly act as a part of, not apart from. This holistic view gives us something of an Overview Effect here on earth. It differs from our ordinary way of looking (hearing, feeling, etc.) as an ego-I feeding a headful of thoughts from which we construct our identity, our story. In Zen meditation, a foundational practice for Zen leadership, we slow things down enough to catch the ego in its act, increasingly learning its habits and having choice around its attachments. With practice comes deeper, more frequent and longer experiences of samadhi, where we don’t feel separate at all, but rather one-with the whole picture. While the ego may try to interpret such expansive experiences as its own special achievement, in fact, holes are being poked in the ego’s claim to our identity.
The embodied skills of Zen Leadership also make the ego more flexible, for example, able to use any of four patterns in our nervous system, rather than be stuck in one or two habitual patterns when they’re not working. Or the ability to embody empathy and “become the other” whereby we can heal relationships and lead others with influence and care. As the ego becomes more visible, porous and flexible, eventually, we can see through it. Instead of trying to find our way blindly using the ego’s conditioned habits, we can function one-with nature, which is also our true nature.
The second way Zen Leadership supports Wayfinding is by honing the sensitivity and attunement of our antennas and particularly hara as the power center in our lower abdomen. Hara is a most reliable antenna or compass for sensing the Way because it is our umbilical to life, our connection to the ground of Being. Developmentally, hara was online and functioning well before our seemingly separate ego even formed (around the age of two). Hara is also our most powerful transmitter when it comes to the action side of Wayfinding, as it is both our center of power and connection to the vital energy of life. As martial artists and sports players know, our most powerful physical movements come from hara. Even when the arms are the apparent actors, (as in throwing a punch or swinging a golf club), the real power comes from the hips. Moreover, refined practices from Chinese and Japanese arts for cultivating “fire in the belly”, that is, vital energy or chi (in Chinese, ki in Japanese) have been passed down through the centuries, finding their way into our line of Zen and Zen Leadership. Wilkinson points to power and joy as the life force fueling our Wayfinding journey. Physical practices that cultivate hara increase our power, and joy becomes the natural result of hara-centered coherence.
Which brings us to the third way Zen leadership supports Wayfinding, which is building coherence between head, heart and hara. Literally, vibrationally, that means we’re adding up and not interfering with ourselves; i.e., getting in our own way. Functionally, it means our head is listening to and aligned with heart and hara, whereby our thoughts, feelings, and sensing of the field are attuned with life, as are our words and actions. Dancing to the beat of larger forces and contributing our unique gifts, joy naturally arises, just as it did when we were children learning how to match the frequency of a swing set and found ourselves going higher and higher. This joy of being completely attuned and completely ourselves, which head will interpret as living on purpose, is us at full strength. It is the most reliable way to a better future. It is also how we attract and coalesce with others into islands of coherence that create collective futures of a higher order, a better world.
Wayfinding through a time of converging crises and chaos is the work of leaders today. We do this well in as much as we open to our capacity for sensing the wholeness and interbeing of things and enacting nature-based solutions. Few of us will have the opportunity of the Artemis astronauts to wow our heads from the overview of space into seeing, as Christina Koch put it: “Planet Earth: You. Are. A. Crew.” But all of us have the opportunity to wow our hara from the ground of Being and let it function as our most reliable antenna for finding a better Way on our Earthly home.
Ginny Whitelaw is the Founder and CEO of the Institute for Zen Leadership.