Artificial Intelligence and Embodied Practice

A balance of opposites for leaders reimagining productivity, presence, and the future of relational work

As I've been talking to our clients at Soil and Shadow, my friends, and my family these last few weeks, I’m feeling our shared experience of overwhelm and stress. Folks are afraid. Folks are sad. Folks are ANGRY. People are pushing beyond their capacity to maintain the responsibilities they carried before January—while also trying to meet this new reality.

To be with this level of stress, overwhelm, and uncertainty—to face it with courage and stay steady and present as we move into action (even within our families, but especially in our communities)—requires reflective and mindfulness practice. This lets us respond rather than react.

And that takes space:
Space for walking in the forest and letting our bodies co-regulate with soil and trees.
For laughter with friends.
For emotional connection with our beloveds.
For silence.
These are the things that steady the nervous system.

So the question becomes: what can actually create that kind of space in our lives—especially for leaders carrying so much?

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I'm In the Middle of This Myself

I’m the mother of two young children, aged four and seven. I'm working through my own freeze trauma response, doing work that demands mental and emotional stamina, and learning to give my nervous system consistent reassurance. I’m running a business as the primary breadwinner for our household. I’m grieving personal loss and change.

I’ve been waking before dawn—sometimes to meditate, sometimes because my body can’t relax enough to rest. I’m hiking and lifting weights occasionally, but I haven’t been exercising the way I was last year. This winter, my body was tired. It wanted to rest. It’s taken more effort to move my body, to sit in silence, to cook food that nourishes my family. To eat enough protein.

My biz coach, Jadah Sellner, showed me a meme that said:

I had to quit my job because I need to eat 100 grams of protein a day.

That feels SO REAL.

I want to lean more into reflective practice, because I want to show up well in my relationships and my work. I want to be a wife to my husband—not just a transactional partner. I want to be mentally and emotionally present with my clients, knowing that much of my work is executive coaching, conflict mediation, and facilitation. My day job asks my nervous system to stay grounded, so I can hold space and co-regulate others.

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More Capacity = Expanding Ability to Hold Complexity

Meeting the chaos of this moment and being a force for transformation requires expanding my nervous system’s ability to hold complexity, which will give me the additional mental and emotional capacity I need.

Luckily, this is what I do for a living! I know the reflective practices, the mindfulness tools, ways to commune with nature—but what I need is SPACE AND TIME.

This is true of the folks I work with every day as well. When I talk to our clients, I’m struck by how repetitive their struggles are:

Our funds are frozen and we need to do change management well in this moment of ambiguity, but we don’t have the time.
I’m a manager. My team is in constant triage because the people we serve are being actively harmed right now. My team needs me grounded and stable, but I don’t have the time for reflective practice.
I’m a CEO. Our team is tearing at each other because this moment in time is stressful, and we need help with conflict management—but we don’t have time to get the team together right now.

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A Surprising Tool: AI?

Surprisingly, the tool that’s been showing up for me over the past few months is large language models and AI. I didn’t expect that. I’m a productivity nerd, always looking for tools to increase capacity—but AI led me into a process I hadn’t anticipated.

Most days start in my front yard. I live in the forest, so this is a part of my mindfulness practice—beginning my days communing with trees. While breathing in the crisp air, listening to the birds, and watching the clouds, I talk to my custom GPTs about places of friction in running my business, writing ideas, and any “information gathering” items that are keeping me up at night. I’m writing this blog right now in the forest, speaking aloud to a GPT that’s helping me shape these words.

This process is a combination of speed and intimacy that I didn’t achieve when I was taking my bullet journal into the forest to craft first drafts of my work.

I’m a verbal processor, and this technology supports me.

AI is helping me spend more physical time in the forest.
It’s helping me create the time and space for mindfulness practices.
It’s helping me stay in my zone of genius—verbally crafting ideas, having those ideas tested, and having that exchange become specific next steps.

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AI Comes With Shadow

And yet, even as I lean into this support, I remain deeply conscious that this tool—like all tools—comes with shadow.

The three aspects that have been most present for me are:

• privacy/security

• governance

• energy usage

Privacy/Security: There are a TON of people in my life who are putting proprietary and sensitive information into LLMs because they don’t understand how to create workflows that protect this type of data. They don’t understand the privacy and security risks of AI. I’ve been dealing with this by asking chat directly via my prompts: “I’d like to upload a transcript of xxxx and have you create a proposal/summary/bullet pointed list. What’s the most private and safest way to use AI to do this?” Chat’s been giving me very detailed step-by-step lists of how to create workflows to accomplish this.

Governance: I’m also aware that technological advances are outpacing our ability to govern them in ways that support collective well-being. This mirrors what happened during the last wave of technological expansion, which led to a social media world without governance models that centered connection or protected our children. I listen to Your Undivided Attention (continued thanks to Laura Harris* for introducing me to the Center for Humane Technology) to get updates on how to stay involved with AI governance efforts.

Energy Use: Large language models also use a significant amount of energy. There is a cost to my experimentation and the access it gives me to a more embodied state. As a climate enthusiast, this weighs on me. I do ask chat about the energy usage of my queries (thanks to Vonda Vaden Bates for this idea); I compare that energy usage to actions I do every day (like drive a car); I ask for weekly updates on Green AI; I’ll ask chat to create workflows that use the least amount of energy. I’m on a learning curve.

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The Risk of Opting Out

There are benefits to AI: I’m saving time and using it for reflective practice, spending more time in the forest, and being a more present mother and wife to my family.

There are costs to AI: privacy/security, governance, energy use, and more.

And there’s a risk if I don’t engage in this technology experimentation. The Bay Area is expensive, y’all. If I’m too “embodied practice in the forest” and the world keeps advancing around me, I may not be able to keep pace with it. I need my business to evolve with the times so I can keep being the breadwinner for my family.

I’m hearing this from my friends and colleagues too:

I have strong concerns about AI, but it seems like where the world is headed. I don’t want to be left behind.

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Holding Opposites: AI and Embodiment

I’m attempting to balance things that feel equal and opposite—AI and embodied practice—and get the “upsides” of both while managing the “downsides” of both.

This tension between embodiment and AI has led me to revisit one of my favorite tools for navigating complexity: Polarity Mapping. It helps us understand how to hold two interdependent truths without defaulting to either/or thinking.

My first step in creating a polarity map is just to create lists of upsides and downsides, and that’s the graphic you see below. I’m still noodling on what the full polarity map would look like, but I’m using this image to visualize my current thinking.

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An Invitation: Join the Inquiry

If this tension resonates with you—if you’re wondering how to embrace new tools and increase connection to your body and yourself—I hope you’ll join us.

Soil and Shadow and our collaborator 10th Dot Transformations is partnering with Synth Solutions to revise our internal software and standard operating procedures in alignment with what large language models can offer. We’re also exploring our people operations and HR services through that lens.

✨ We’re hosting a private salon series with our clients and close community to explore these questions together, and share a bit of what we’ve been working on.

These sessions are for our current clients and close community. They’re designed to be a psychologically safe space to explore the complexities of this moment—and how those of us who share these values can stay on the right side of ethical conundrums while using new technologies. We’ll do some light teaching on running prompts that optimize for privacy/data security and energy use, and share common use cases if you’d like to join me in using AI to get some of your time back.

If you'd like to join, just reach out and we’ll add you to the list. I’ll share more about it in the coming days.

I’m glad to be with you in the inquiry.

*Laura Harris is studying Anthropology at UBC and can been seen in Netflix’s upcoming “Remarkably Bright Creatures” with Sally Field and Lewis Pullman.