I pick up small things intuitively, long before most people notice them.

A meeting that has yet to happen will feel wrong, so I cancel it, and the reason I was right to cancel reveals itself later.

I walk toward a coaching session, and I already know the real direction it will take, before a word is spoken, before the person in front of me has named what they came to say. I read the shift in a voice, the half-second of hesitation, the unspoken truth beneath what is being said.

For most of my life, I treated this as a quirk. Now I understand it as alignment, one of the truest ways a leader can know.

What lets me feel a meeting before it happens is the same force that moves a team, an organization, and eventually a world. So let me follow it all the way out, from the most personal thing I know about myself to the largest thing I believe about leadership.

It begins with understanding what that force actually is.

The sensing has a name, and the name sounds like it is about women and men. It is about energy. The oldest wisdom traditions describe two primordial currents that compose all of life.

Shakti is the divine feminine, the active and creative principle, energy and movement, the force that brings the elements of the world to life.

Shiva is the divine masculine, pure consciousness, the steady witness, the ground that holds. One is the power that moves. The other is the awareness that gives that movement direction and form. Held in union, they create everything.

Both currents live in every person. The yogic tradition maps them precisely. Two channels spiral around the central column of the body, Ida the lunar feminine current and Pingala the solar masculine, crossing and weaving until they meet, and consciousness rises only as both come into balance. This is the image carried in the caduceus, the two serpents spiraling a single staff.

The sensing I described is Shakti awake in me. I sense the way I sense because I am living in the spirit of the Divine Feminine, and the work of a leader is to let that current rise and meet the awareness waiting at the top of the climb.

That rising is the whole story, because it is also how a leader is made.

What the rising looks like

For a long time, I described this as the feminine leading and the masculine following, because in so many of the rooms I sit in, the person reaching for healing and honesty and a new way of being is a woman. The pattern looked clear, and the traditions seemed to confirm it, since everything moves through Shakti while Shiva gives that movement form.

A deeper truth lives beneath it.

Transformation begins with whoever is most willing to face reality first.

That willingness is the feminine current rising, regardless of whose body it rises in. It has so often looked like women leading for a reason worth naming. For generations, women were given more permission to explore emotion, intuition, healing, and inner life, while men were handed achievement, control, and the weight of holding everything together. The current stayed awake in one half of humanity and was asked to sleep in the other. What we are living through now is the current return to everyone.

In the body, this return has a precise shape. Shakti sleeps coiled at the base of the spine, and when she wakes, she rises through each energy center in turn, dissolving what is held there, until she reaches the crown and unites with pure awareness. She returns to the same places with a deeper understanding each time, spiraling upward. This is the shape of leadership development. The intelligence a leader grows are centers on that spiral, each one waking as the current reaches it, each one making the next one possible. The climb starts at the ground of a person and ends where they touch something larger than themselves.

It begins with the capacity to see yourself.

Conscious Intelligence sits at the base, where the rising begins. The leader becomes the witness of their own state, feeling the reaction before it fires, sensing the signal beneath the noise. This is Shiva meeting Shakti at the very ground of a person, and it is the soil from which everything above it grows, because a leader who can witness their own state has made the inner space where the next capacity can take root.

Out of that space, Emotional Intelligence rises. The moment you can witness your state, you can hold what moves through it, and emotion becomes information that flows cleanly. The leader feels fully and stays free within it, and a regulated nervous system is contagious, so safety rises in everyone nearby.

That steadiness is what makes real contact possible, and so Relational Intelligence opens at the heart. A leader who can hold their own emotions can finally meet another person as they actually are, and real contact replaces performance. The heart is where the two currents first truly meet, the place a leader holds another while remaining whole.

Meet one person in truth, and you can feel the truth of a whole room, which is Social Intelligence. The leader senses group dynamics directly, feels where the energy of a system is moving, and speaks what a group can receive at the moment it can receive it. The intimacy of the heart becomes the reach of the field.

Feel many people and forces at once, and you begin to perceive how they connect, which is Integrative Intelligence. The leader sees the pattern that links what others hold separate. Here, the feminine question, what wants to be born, joins the masculine question, how do we build it, inside a single mind, and vision and structure become one capacity in one leader.

Hold the pattern in the present, and you can feel how it moves across time, which is Systemic Intelligence. The leader senses how every part moves the whole and how a decision ripples outward through the years. This is Shiva’s gift fully expressed, the witnessing awareness now wide enough to hold the entire field.

Hold the whole system across time, and the boundary finally thins, which is Spiritual Intelligence at the crown, where Shakti completes her rising and unites with Shiva. The leader senses what is coming before it arrives, knows before they can explain how they know, and leads from a felt connection to something larger than themselves. This is where my own sensing lives. Energy and awareness become one current, and the leader leads from oneness.

This is the union the whole climb was moving toward, and the traditions are careful about what it means. The masculine initiates and the feminine manifests, and only together do they create harmony. Shakti gives Shiva life. Shiva gives Shakti form. The image given for full awakening is the wave recognizing itself as the ocean while remaining a wave. For a leader, this lands very directly. The part of you that senses what wants to be born is the same source as the part that builds it. When I cancel a meeting that has yet to happen, the sensing is Shakti, and the discipline to act on it is Shiva, and both are mine. The leaders who change anything hold both at once. They feel the shift, and they give it shape. They receive the vision, and they protect it long enough for it to become real.

The same rising, larger

Zoom out from a single leader, and the same spiral appears across civilizations.

For centuries, the world ran on the solar current alone. Achievement, hierarchy, competition, productivity, visible and measurable success. The masculine ran ahead while the feminine stayed quiet, which is the very imbalance the traditions name, consciousness moving without the energy that gives it life.

We are living through the return of the other current, and it is observable. Emotional intelligence has moved to the center of how leadership is taught. Even the workplace has begun to recognize what the wisdom traditions always knew, that people thrive when they feel safe enough to be fully present. Servant leadership, trauma-informed leadership, stakeholder capitalism, and well-being as a business priority have all entered ordinary organizational life. The research keeps naming the same direction, away from authority and control, toward empathy and relational awareness, and the conditions in which people hold together. Read those trends as one motion, and a pattern emerges; the qualities of the feminine current re-entering the places that ran so long without it.

This reaches deeper than any contest between women and men. The feminine principle is rising in humanity the way Shakti rises through a single body, and every leader is being asked to let her rise in them and meet the awareness waiting at the crown. Humanity is recovering a way of knowing it once set aside.

The pattern is the same at every scale. The one who feels it first sets the change in motion.

The question I keep returning to is whether the feminine current leads because it is designed to, or because it has simply been more willing to enter the unknown before the rest of us felt safe enough to follow. Those are different ideas, and they ask different things of you. Either way, if you are the one who feels it first, in your team, your family, or your work, that is the current rising in you before it rises in the others. The invitation is to let it move all the way up, through every intelligence, until awareness and energy meet, and you lead from union.

I learned to trust the small things I pick up as I stopped treating them as noise and recognized them as my being. That same willingness already lives in everyone around you, waiting for someone to go first.

Go first.

Going first is easier alongside others who are doing the same. The Oneness Leadership Circle is a community of leaders who sense it too, learning to let the current rise through every intelligence and to lead from union. If you felt yourself in these words, you belong in that room. Come join the Circle.