Tinku and the organisation - a tale of goddesses, gods and business strategy

“The latest incarnation of Oedipus, the continued romance of Beauty and the Beast, stand this afternoon on the corner of 42nd street and Fifth Avenue, waiting for the traffic light to change”

Joseph Campbell (“The Hero with a Thousand Faces”)

I couldn’t feel my legs. They felt disconnected from the rest of my body. Sometimes my arms would move abruptly and violently when I was trying to sleep. I remember the time when I woke up with a flash of energy in my chest, strong enough to sit me up in one go. “No neurological damage” said the doctor, after inspecting the MRI results. “I will refer you to a psychiatrist”, he said, while I was looking at him with utter incredulity. What was he on? A psychiatrist?? How could reactions that were so evidently neurological and physical have anything to do with my mind! Ridiculous!

A few weeks later and a number of additional tests confirmed the suspicion the first physician had mentioned – panic attacks! I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t explain them either.  I was going through some intense moments after leaving my City job, and I was concerned about the future, but from that “normal” feeling to having panic attacks felt like a twisted joke to me. My mind didn’t feel panic, but my body obviously did. My mind knew how necessary leaving the City was for me. My body was apparently petrified. I had no control over it.

To cut a long story short, after a few months, the attacks had disappeared. What was left was a feeling that I had so little control over deep elements and fears in my psyche. The existence of the subconscious was of no surprise of course but experiencing its unfiltered power did give me a very different understanding of its true dimensions. It was also clear that there was something in leaving security behind that was very terrifying to those uncontrollable elements in me.

Surely, I thought, if there is something in me that values security, it must be a question of having a clear plan to go back to a job after one or two years and all that fear would go away. I felt even tempted of saying to myself one of those sentences – “honor and accept who you are and provide yourself with what you need”. Despite those thoughts, every decision I kept making took me in a different direction. How would spending one year living in the forest of the Sierra Nevada in Granada, Spain, help with getting more security? I kept asking the same question whilst practicing theatre with a group of 20-year olds at an artistic school in Granada or spending endless walks in the mountains, with no person in sight, or practicing psychodrama with a group of 10 psychologists and social carers from Andalucia. At the same time, the world I came from kept moving in its usual direction and kept sending condescending messages about the self-sabotage I must have been experiencing.

There was something in me that kept pushing for an experience that was very different to what my mind and my body were telling me I needed. A force that I couldn’t understand or describe. Yet, I learned to listen to it. In retrospective, I realised that the same force had taken me out of the comfort of my hometown in Quito and thrown me in London, with all the complexities one can expect from such a change. I arrived in London not being to speak English. The road to becoming a director in a listed entity in a highly specialised industry was full of difficulties and moments of doubt about why I was putting myself through something so counter-intuitive.

There is nothing esoteric in those forces inside of me. I am talking about the same stuff Joseph Campbell is talking about in the sentence I quoted at the top. It talks metaphorically about the universal human experiences that have evolved over thousands or millions of years and transcend individuality. They are in all of us. We were born with them. In Campbell’s quote, the complex love-hate relationship with a mother or with a father is not the remit of a Greek myth only, or the continuous internal confrontation with our animal instincts is not just the subject of fairy tales.  They exist in fact in any person, anyone waiting for the traffic lights to change in any corner, of any avenue of the world. 

These forces, to call them somehow, are within us, and we have little control over them. You may think that your rational mind is more powerful than any of these ancient forces, say rage. Think about the experience of certain soldiers, who have developed post traumatic stress disorder (PSTD) partly as a result of confronting the level of rage and destruction that they have been capable of experiencing given specific circumstances. Another example is falling in love. Not something that we decide to do. It just happens, or not. When it does, we feel almost possessed by a force that takes over, no matter what we try to do. The list of examples is endless. Next time you go to bed, think about whether you decide the mood you will wake up to.  

Carl Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist, described these forces as archetypes, existing at a subconscious level that is not individual only, but also collective.  W.H. Auden, the British-American poet, described this beautifully – “We are lived by powers we pretend to understand”.

For those readers who are more intellectually minded, there is an entire field of study and practice, behavioural economics, that looks at how to “influence” these subconscious aspects within us to lead them to a particular outcome. Governments have now entire teams of specialists advising them on how to approach the introduction of legislation in a way that is psychologically and emotionally supported by the population. These practices have been used to take entire countries to war or in campaigns such as Brexit. The techniques used, not the purpose of this paper, can be seen in practice in something like the global hysteria behind the current Corona virus. Next time you see a banking add ad that uses cartoon characters for example, there is nothing cute behind it. It is trying to connect with one of these archetypes within you (with your inner child in this case), without your conscious mind interfering. Some may call this practice manipulation.

Despite the fact that we have little control over these forces that inhabit us, we are still responsible for our decisions and for our life. No victim syndrome supported in this space. How can we be responsible for something for which we have so little control? That seems to me a fundamental existential question linked to a life with purpose, lived with courage and character. None of these aspects are given to us. We need to earn the right, through our actions, to understand them, define them and experience them, in a way that we navigate through life and through our hidden elements with accountability, dignity, determination and an element of direction.  

This is where I believe we currently fail to take full responsibility of our fate. Think about the last time you gave yourself the space (emotional, psychological and even physical), to explore your inner forces. Think about your reaction on the face of aspects of yourself that seem to clash with the standards you have learned to respect as acceptable.  How do you treat those aspects within you that seem contradictory between themselves? How do you react when you find those unacceptable traits in you reflected in another person that acts as a mirror? The list of such questions is endless.

“As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods. They kill us for sport” wrote Shakespeare, a master creator of characters-archetypes. My reading of this quote refers to the inability of human beings to navigate through these god-like forces within us. They are in full control. We have become mere flies.

“The Gods have become our diseases”. This quote by Carl Jung offers further clarity on why we are failing victim of these forces. To explain it, think about the “tinku” tradition in southwestern Bolivia, where every May, the local indigenous population asks for Mother Earth’s (Pachamama’s) blessing for the year’s harvest, by having a bloody communal fight, under the watchful gazer of police officers. You are not allowed to wear a helmet, to kick your opponent or to carry objects made out of iron during a “tinku” (which means “physical attack” in the local language, Aymara). The rest is all allowed during the fight. The more blood flowing, the better the harvest will be, apparently.

 After the 3 or 4 days of Tinku are over, people go back to their communities for another year of calm and prosperous interactions between them.

Leaving aside however barbaric you may think the celebration may be, or the mystical aspect of the tradition for the local population,  the interesting link to the points I am making is that “Tinku” can be seen as a ritual honouring some of the forces I have been referring to – rage and violence in this case. These tribes have opened “controlled” spaces where rage can be expressed, with rules and support, which ensures a rage free interaction the rest of the year. This is in essence no different to ancient rituals honouring some of these “gods”. The rituals may have been experienced as mystical activities, but from a psychological point of view, they represented spaces that allowed for these powerful forces to be processed in a conscious manner. The legacy of those spaces is very present, even in something as mundane as the names of days of the week, and the gods and goddesses that were honoured during each one of them – Monday (the moon, the mother, emotions, sense of emotional security), Tuesday (Mars, war, rage, impulse), Wednesday (Mercury, intellect, communication), Thursday (Jupiter, Zeus, expansion, wisdom, luck, philosophies), Friday (Venus, love, sensuality, joie de vivre), Saturday (Saturn, Kronos, time, the tough wise master that teaches us the key lessons in life), Sunday (the Sun, the ego, the father, our purpose and inner energy).

Back to Jung and his quote about gods and illnesses. We do not open those ritualistic spaces anymore. Rage is not expressed anymore. It becomes an illness – ulcers, heart attacks. There is little space for imagination, fluidity and fantasising (represented by Neptune), in a world that is so scientifically minded. The rigidity of the body, of joints, back issues may be the consequence. In a society that is more politically correct and intolerant by the minute, where communication has to be so carefully managed to avoid offending one group or the other, it is not improbable that throat issues are the result. The link to other unprocessed emotional issues and the impact in our physical and emotional health is endless.  The gods may have effectively become our diseases, as Jung said.

Organisations and academic institutions have become the new temples, where most of us spend the vast majority of our conscious (and subconscious) time.  They are the places where these goddesses and gods run at large, creating marvelous results and havoc in equal measure. In our wisdom, we associate success to our skill, and havoc to market conditions. The whole purpose of this paper is to advocate for more spaces of exploration to be courageously opened in organisations for bringing these forces to consciousness and take more responsibility for our individual and collective fate.

Human development programs have developed immensely in the workplace, yet there is a tendency (heavily influenced by coaches, thinkers, influencers and “monks who sold their Ferraris”) to focus on the positive, creative elements of our nature. Nothing wrong with all the techniques for empowering individuals, being present, setting goals, feeling love, vibrating on high energies and frequencies, forgiving ourselves and those who offend us and the rest. Focusing on these aspects though will not make the other forces within us disappear. Just think about the level of micro and macro aggression, silo operations, territoriality, lack of accountability, excessive use of power and the rest that are daily occurrences in organisations (in parallel to the good, positive, successful interactions that also occur, of course).

I firmly believe that organisations can no longer expect all those forces to be left at the door and promote standards of professional behaviour that suppress emotional expression. The requirement of stability that organisational structures require comes at the cost of important elements of our human experience and as a result are no longer sustainable. This is not only a call for more humanistic spaces to be opened in those structures. It has a very clear business benefit in my mind. The lack of spaces of emotional exploration have resulted in my opinion in the deceases of organisations (an analogy to Jung’s quote). Think about organisations that were very successful say 20 or 30 years ago…. Some of them do no longer exist. Even some of the big players 5 years ago are in clear decline and are likely to shrink and disappear in the last few years. Think about the massive entities that have disappeared in cases of corruption or malpractice (Enron, Lehman Brothers, Andersen, and others). Think about the reasons for the financial crisis of 2008 (greed that took the form of dubious business practice and that transcended controls and regulation). Think about the fact that in essence none of the things that brought that financial crisis to live have changed and that the next crisis is a matter of time. You may make business arguments around the reasons for those collapses. I make an argument that those business reasons may have well been the result of an inability to process the darker aspects of the human spirit. Those entities and systems just exploded when the pressure brought by those forces became unbearable.

So, turning a blind eye, focusing on our virtues or expecting people to leave their demons at the entrance door, will just not cut it. I have come to believe that nature will always push for evolution, transformation and maturity. It is just how the flow goes. If one resists it, life will keep presenting experiences that push us to maturing. The more we resist them the more painful the experiences become. 

There is a significant amount of ancient wisdom behind a recommendation to explore our darker aspects voluntarily, at our own pace, before life puts a crisis before us. There is a big difference preparing in advance to something like a midlife crisis and just experiencing one out of a divorce, the loss of a job, illness or something similar. Organisations are no different in my mind. Have you ever seen an organisation that seems successful in their numbers, market share and prospects, yet there is a sense of tension, physical illness and even dead inside that is difficult to link to the apparent success? Have you seen organisations that adopt the wrong strategies, operational platforms, technology and other practices just because the most aggressive and problematic voices or the most fragile/strong egos overpowered the options that were most favourable to the business and its people? Still think that “Tinku” is just a barbaric activity that takes place in Bolivia only?

Opening regular, safe enough spaces of exploration to aspects that bring tension to daily interactions, will avoid big breakdowns, will provide support to the key business objectives and will ensure that organisations occupy their rightful place as key contributors to individual and collective emotional development. It really brings humanism and business together. A no brainer in my mind.

It took me a long time to finally understand why the forces inside of me had taken me from Ecuador to London and to the forests in Granada, and out of the City and back with a proposition that may seem controversial to some. These were experiences of maturity, and not of the professional type only or mainly. The difficulty and intensity of these changes were proportional to the significance of the emotional evolution I needed. Nature would not just let me stay in my area of safety, difficult/comfortable as it may have been. Had I ignored those calls, the infantile, fearful, un-integrated aspects of my psyche would be running my life, the equivalent of an emotional paralysis, something that you may recognise around you  (even in presidents or prime ministers of big, powerful nations). This is a very personal statement but universal in nature, I believe.

A final quote, as a way of saying goodbye for now….

“I always notice the dysfunctional dynamic of human relationships because most places where you encounter it, people are trying to pretend it isn’t happening”.  

                                                                                                Sophie Hannah