Meg Wheatley’s name had traveled to my ears for years—spoken with the kind of reverence reserved for people whose work has quietly shaped everything around it. When the chance came to spend an hour with her over Zoom, I didn’t hesitate.
The connection ran deeper than admiration. Meg co-founded The Berkana Institute, where NewStories founder Bob Stilger once served as co-director and where the Two Loops framework that now informs Great Transition Stories first emerged.
“I would be content to disappear.”
It’s not the answer you expect from someone who has spent five decades shaping how the world thinks about leadership, community, and what it means to be human. Thirteen books. Millions of readers. A Hall of Fame induction. Three years advising an Army Chief of Staff. And now, at nearly 82, Margaret “Meg” Wheatley says legacy is simply not something she thinks about.
“To become free of needs is to become more available to the needs of the world,” she says. “I want to be the best person I can be right now and contribute maximally according to my gifts. After that, there’s no legacy to my work that’s important at all.”
A Life in Full
Meg has lived many lives inside one. She served in the Peace Corps in Korea in the late 1960s, teaching English to classes of 65 students in a post-war culture where everything was unfamiliar. She earned a doctorate in organizational behavior and change from Harvard. She co-founded The Berkana Institute in 1991, a global nonprofit dedicated to supporting life-affirming leaders everywhere. She has worked on every continent except Antarctica, learning from people as varied as Indigenous elders, the Dalai Lama, small-town ministers, aspiring young leaders, and senior government leaders.
She has also spent nine winters in long silent retreats, nine years of internal work she describes as essential to who she is now and what she is able to offer.
The newest evolution of her work is to incorporate the ancient and universal teachings of the Sacred Feminine in order to restore balance to the paradigm of control and exploitation that is destroying life. On June 20th, as part of this work, she is offering a three-hour exploration: “Fierce Compassion: The Power of the Sacred Feminine.”
Three Kinds of Compassion
Idiot compassion, as Meg teaches it, is the impulse to help that harms both the helper and the helped. You extend yourself until there’s nothing left. It’s the cape-rushing impulse that feels like devotion but ends, reliably, in burnout. Quoting Teddy Roosevelt: “We do what we can, where we are, with what we have. But as a vehicle of compassion, we must attend to our own well-being so we can continue to do our part.”
The second kind is loving kindness, genuine partnership with another, a meeting of spirits that strengthens rather than depletes.
The third, fierce compassion, is what she believes most of us are missing.
“Fierce compassion is compassion without aggression,” she says. “It requires clear-seeing, free of fear and judgment, to discern what is needed. It comes from true discernment—knowing when to say no and create boundaries without guilt. That is the compassion of the divine feminine—the fierceness.”
She points to the visual language of Eastern spiritual traditions: the Dakinis, Durga, Kali—feminine deities depicted in flames, holding swords not as weapons of aggression but as instruments of clarity. The sword of compassion, she says, “cuts through illusion—stops something on behalf of life.”
The precious outcome, as she describes it, is feeling more present and confident in difficult situations. “We want to be there, we want to respond, we trust ourselves to embody the Sacred Feminine.”
I don’t let the grief stop me. I want to know who you’re going to be once you recognize we’re always sad.
We Are Always Sad
In the Buddhist Shambhala tradition Meg practices, joy and sadness are not opposites. They are two faces of the same full presence, what it feels like to be genuinely alive and genuinely open.
“In our state of basic awakeness, you’re always going to feel both,” she says. “And they feel the same. It’s not a polarity. It’s two sides of the same coin of being fully present to life and letting it in.”
An invitation to stop fighting what’s already here. To stop treating sadness as a wound to be traced to its source or a problem to be solved before moving on.
“I don’t let the grief stop me,” she says. “And this is a radical statement, because everyone now who is trying to be awake in the world is focused on their grief. I want to know who you’re going to be once you recognize we’re always sad.”
The Stable Mind
Meg has spent decades teaching leaders, activists, and concerned citizens how to develop what she calls a stable mind. Not a mind without thoughts. The mind will always generate thoughts, the way the heart beats and the liver purifies. The point of meditation, she says, is not to eliminate thoughts. It’s to learn to observe them without immediately following them.
“When thought stops, there’s a gap,” she says. “And in that gap, you could experience pure beingness, pure consciousness. And then the mind comes back in. The practice is enlarging that gap.”
Awareness, she says, is a muscle. One that can be strengthened through practice and brought to bear on the moments that matter most. The goal is not perfection. The goal is noticing.
“I notice when my emotions shift. I notice when I’ve gotten triggered.”
That capacity to notice becomes the foundation for everything else.
When Meg describes what she most hopes for the people who move through her teachings, she doesn’t talk about achievement or mastery. She talks about confidence—not confidence rooted in certainty, but confidence rooted in self-knowledge.
“A level of confidence that is a real core strength. The confidence that I know myself well. I know my strengths. I know my triggers. I know where I screw up.”
Central to this is self-awareness and self-compassion. The willingness to recognize when we’ve fallen short, resist the instinct toward self-condemnation, and return to our deepest aspirations.
“You can’t change anything until you notice it,” she says. “And how quickly you notice it matters.”
Most of us learned to treat mistakes as evidence that something is wrong with us. Meg sees them differently: as information.
“When I screw up, I’m going to notice it, and I’m not going to beat myself up for it. Thank goodness I saw this, because that’s not who I want to be.”
Over time, she says, this simple practice changes us. Not through force, but through repetition. Notice. Learn. Choose a fresh alternative. Repeat.
This is the work of what she calls Warriors for the Human Spirit—not people who seek to conquer others, but people willing to cultivate enough awareness, honesty, and discipline to remain useful to life itself.
Re-Storying the Human Spirit
“I think the work of Re-Storying is one of the ways I could now define my work,” she says.
At its core, Re-Storying is realizing you have created this one story and you have the capacity to choose a different one, one with more beneficial outcomes. Not imposing meaning, but creating the conditions for people to discover it for themselves.
“What is the new story about the human spirit that is available to you if you consult your own experience? When have people surprised you with their generosity, creativity, or kindness?”
It’s also, she notes, the kind of work she couldn’t always name so plainly. For much of her career, certain words weren’t available to her. “We couldn’t even use the word human spirit a while ago,” she says. Leadership culture had its own permitted vocabulary, and spirit wasn’t in it.
Age has changed that. “I can say anything I want now at this age, which is a great liberation and a big responsibility.”
Not recklessness—she’s too disciplined for that—but the freedom that comes from having earned your knowing through direct experience rather than inherited belief. The freedom to finally call things by their true names.
The Divine Feminine — Fierce, Not Soft
Meg has no patience for the soft version of the divine feminine, the one that gets reduced to gentleness, intuition, and unconditional warmth. She finds that version incomplete and actively misleading.
“Teaching women how to be strong is the motivation,” she says.
Meg argues that feminine-based cultures that were creative, generative, non-hierarchical, and non-weaponized, present throughout Europe, the Mediterranean, and Egypt, for thousands of years, were systematically dismantled beginning about 4000 BCE. “We are reclaiming and remembering a power that has been deliberately eradicated,” she says. “Expunged from sacred texts, Burned at the stake. Suppressed. And now we are at the height of the destruction and aggression of the male paradigm.”
What she hopes women will reclaim is older and more grounded than aggression: the courage to speak when something needs to be said, the confidence to hold ground without guilt. “Express it in ways that aren’t angry. Speak from your clarity without aggression,” she says. “And speak what needs to be said, even if others don’t accept you or the message. “
Jane Fonda once noted that for a man to be called ruthless, he essentially has to destroy an organization. For a woman, all she has to do is put you on hold.
“And that has not changed,” says Meg.
The Work Is the Message
For all her influence, Meg is remarkably uninterested in legacy.
It’s not false modesty. It’s the natural consequence of a worldview she has spent decades cultivating. The point is not to be remembered. The point is to be useful.
“To become free of needs is to become more available to the needs of the world,” she says.
Meg often recalls Gandhi’s response when asked to define his message: My work is my message.
“I’m here at this time,” she says. “I’m timely in the gifts and skills I have. And they make no sense in a different time.”
There is something profoundly liberating in that perspective: no empire to build, no reputation to protect, no obligation to outlive oneself.
Just the work.
And then letting it go.
If what Meg has built across five decades of accompanying people through the hardest passages of leading and living is any indication, the message was never hers to keep. It belongs to whoever needs it.
Meg Wheatley’s “Fierce Compassion: The Power of the Sacred Feminine” seminar is June 20, 2026. To learn more about her work and upcoming offerings, visit margaretwheatley.com.
One Response
The 4 stages to Compassion –
1st Pity
2nd Sympathy
3rd Empathy
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Finally “Compassion”
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