> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.leadingfrombeing.org/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Beingspace: Cultivating Space for Leadership - URL: https://www.leadingfrombeing.org/beingspace/ - Published: 2026-08-24T13:00:13.000Z - Updated: 2026-08-29T10:27:34.000Z - Description: The foundational essay. Start here if you're new to this work. - Author: Cameron Martin - Tags: Beingspaces, Being-Centered Leadership, Becoming, #core-reading-1 I have been contemplating one specific word pretty much every day for the past six years. In truth, before I heard it for the first time, it wasn’t a word at all. So, I created it…or perhaps it is more accurate to say that I *received* it. One day in 2020, the idea popped into my head like a flash of lightning: ## **Beingspace.** And I thought: “Okay, what is that?” I pondered for a few moments. *A space for Being. An energetic space to exist in. A container for becoming.* *“What…what is this?”* Little did I know that this word was going to become the foundation of my life’s work. --- As a young boy, I was always sensitive to energy around me. I could easily pick up people’s true intentions, their fears, when they were lying, and when they were manipulating. I had very little interest in spending time with children my age and, instead, preferred the company of adults. Frankly, I thought they were more interesting. I was very emotionally attuned to others and I had an innate ability to read people like books. Spiritually perceptive, psychoanalytical, and “wise beyond my years,” as you can imagine, I definitely didn’t fit in easily with others. Despite sensing so much, I grew up in a household where we didn’t express our feelings, where passive-aggression prevailed, and where I was taught that “children are meant to be seen, not heard.” So, naturally, I learned early that you can’t really be forthright with everything you’re perceiving underneath the surface of things. And you have to keep a lot of shit to yourself. *(As it turns out, people don’t like being read like open books).* As I got older and started to realize I was gay, I kept a lot of things inside. My fears of rejection, of being alone, and of not being loved influenced the way I showed up in the world, in some surprising and some not surprising ways. Mainly, I put on The Achiever archetype, determined to be successful at all costs, while neglecting so much of who I really was. I kept my true self from others. Hell, I kept my true self from myself. When you spend your life trying to hide who you are from the world, you learn to navigate energetic spaces with the stealth of a sniper. I was so afraid that, at any moment, someone would ask me about my sexuality, that I actively managed most interactions. If I even slightly sensed that conversation was going to “go there,” that shit got redirected…fast. This energy management wasn’t just a skill I developed: it was a survival mechanism built for a world of judgment and ignorance. But, as it turns out, when you live like this, there is no space for you: the real you. You feel like you don’t belong anywhere. With others. Or even within yourself. You can’t even if you try. And trust me, I tried. By the time I was twenty-four years old, I felt like I was suffocating under the weight of my secret, my feelings of shame and unworthiness, and the stresses of a life I wasn’t really sure I wanted. I was sick of feeling like there was no place for me to just be honest. And that’s when I finally came out for the first time. The challenges I faced in accepting myself as a gay man laid the groundwork for what was to come. I know what it means to actively reject your Being. I know what it means to achieve at all costs, hiding what’s really happening under the surface. I know what it feels like to be so afraid to accept who you truly are. The pain is almost insurmountable at times. And it’s incredibly lonely. Admittedly, I have lost count of the times I cried myself to sleep over the years because I didn’t feel like there was space to be truly me. I felt like I wasn’t allowed to really take up the space I was meant to in the world. I share this with you to give you a picture of the life experiences that have influenced my work. And to illustrate why I’ve spent a shitload of time in contemplation and reflection. So back to that… ## What is a Beingspace? Over several years, the meaning of this word revealed itself to me. **A Beingspace is the energetic field that gets generated the moment consciousness meets anything: itself, another, or a group.** Put simply, it is the energetic container where Being expresses itself. Beingspaces can created consciously, but more often than not, they are created without anyone noticing at all. Beingspaces exist at three levels: *within, between*, and *among*. ### **Within:** **The first type of Beingspace occurs within yourself.** Within you is a whole tapestry of experience that is generated from the ongoing field of your own heart, body, mind, and habitual patterns of thought. Your emotions, your desires, your trauma, your personality patterns―which is all an expression of your relationship to yourself―creates your internal Beingspace. Your thoughts, your fears, your inner dialogue, your beliefs about your self-worth, your connection to the Spirit within you…this is the Beingspace within yourself. Your most intimate Beingspace is your own inner world. ### **Between:** **The second type of Beingspace is created between each other.** When two people engage with each other, whether that be conversationally, creatively, emotionally, sexually or through a simple glance, they share energy and they create a Beingspace between them. In many ways, the Beingspaces between ourselves and others are the easiest to observe. Whatever passes between you and another in any interaction (no matter how significant or insignificant it may seem), is creating a Beingspace. From an anniversary dinner between spouses of thirty years to a momentary smile exchanged with a stranger on the elevator, we create Beingspaces through our connections with others. There is a saying that goes: *people may not remember what you said, but they remember the way you made them feel*. This adage gets at the root of the essence of a Beingspace between people. We know how we feel with others. We can describe it. The energy that exists between us and another has texture that we can sense and know within our Being. Whether our relationships engender trust, love, compassion and empathy or whether they are filled with trauma, fear, uncertainty, and pain, these experiences are co-created. The energy we share with another is a co-created Beingspace. Your relationships are an expression of the Beingspace you create with another person. They are the product of what two fields of consciousnesses generate when they meet. ### **Among:** **The third type of Beingspace is created among groups of people.** This is the energetic field that a group of three or more people generates. Families, work teams, cross-functional departments, sports teams, residents of a city neighborhood, and even entire countries are Beingspaces. Group norms, company missions, codes of ethics, belief systems, political affiliations, behavioral expectations, and even the language people speak all influence collective Beingspaces. A team of people who have resigned itself to quiet quitting because they don’t feel respected by the company owner. A church community that comes together to support neighbors after a house fire. A championship soccer team. A book club of retirees. Worshippers gathering at a mosque, drawn together five times a day by the call to prayer. These are all examples of Beingspaces being created among groups of people. --- ## **Why Do We Need a New Word?** Our reality is experienced through space. Every space is energetic, and nothing exists in a vacuum: every interaction alters the energy of the space it occurs in, and that energy precedes behavior. We need language, then, for the spaces where our Being lives. This isn't unstudied territory. Transpersonal and humanistic psychology, contemplative traditions, and personal development have spent decades on the space within: how we relate to our own heart, mind, body, and spirit. Communication studies, attachment theory, and family systems therapy have mapped the space between: the patterns two people build together, often without either one choosing them. Sociology, anthropology, and leadership studies have taken on the space among: how groups cohere, fracture, and construct shared meaning. But when we look closely at what each field is actually studying, a gap appears. These fields study behavior, pattern, norm, and structure. Every one of them is looking at what an energetic field *produces*, not the field itself. None of them has a word for *the thing* generating the behavior, the pattern, the norm in the first place. Beingspaces names that thing. It's the word for what all of them are downstream of. This matters because the experience of a Beingspace itself isn't a novelty; it's very real to our existence. We just haven't had the language to engage with it directly. Someone walks into a room and feels something is off before anyone says a word. That's not intuition working on nothing. It's a real field, with its own consciousness and its own energy, distinct from any single person in it. Without a word for that energetic field, we can only ever respond to what it produces after the fact: the tension, the withdrawal, the dysfunction. We treat the symptom as the reality. We disown the field itself, and with it, our part in creating it. With the word, something changes. We can turn toward the energetic spaces of our lives while they're being created, not just after they've hardened into behavior. We can notice a Beingspace within before it becomes a pattern we act out. We can notice a Beingspace between before it calcifies into resentment or distance. We can notice a Beingspace among before it becomes the culture everyone blames and no one owns. And, as a result of our awareness, we can co-create Beingspaces consciously. Beingspaces are real, felt, everyday phenomena that have been going on unexamined, for lack of a word. Something small enough to point at and say: there. That. We are co-creating Beingspaces constantly, in every direction, at every level. The question was never whether we're doing it. The question is whether we're doing it consciously. ## **Reflecting on Your Beingspaces** We’re co-creating energetic space constantly, whether we mean to or not. Reflection is what turns unconscious creation into conscious creation. Noticing allows us to take responsibility for our lives. Notice the boss who barks and threatens, replaying a trauma response that has nothing to do with the person standing in front of him and everything to do with a version of himself that learned, decades ago, that this is how you stay safe. He has no idea he's doing it. He thinks he's managing a team. He's actually generating a Beingspace of fear that outlasts every meeting he runs. And he's the last person in the room who can feel it. Notice the family at the holiday table, where the same unspoken tension shows up every year, never named, never addressed. Just absorbed and passed around the table like a dish nobody wants but everyone takes anyway. This Beingspace got built over decades, unconsciously, out of everything that was never said, and it will keep getting built the same way until someone in that family finds the language to name it. Notice the couple who, after a fight, doesn't let the silence do the talking. They sit back down to ask what actually happened between them: what each one brought into the room, what got misheard, what old wound got touched that had nothing to do with tonight. Neither one is fully at fault and neither one is fully innocent, and both of them know it. They're taking responsibility for their contribution to the Beingspace they built together, on purpose, before it has the chance to calcify into distance. Notice the sound bath practitioner who arrives an hour before her guests, clears the room, and prays before she opens the door. She spends this time deliberately, so that she creates an intentional atmosphere for people to walk into. Different people, different levels, and one difference between them: some are generating Beingspaces without knowing it, and others are generating theirs on purpose. ***So, what do you notice in your own life?*** What is present in your Beingspaces right now? What are you creating consciously? What have you created without meaning to? What's the energetic residue you tend to leave behind, in your home, in your closest relationships, in the rooms you walk into? And if you were to create it more consciously, what would you actually do differently? Reflect at all three levels. - What's the Beingspace within you, right now, in your own heart and mind? What is the texture of your inner world fee like? - Think about the Beingspaces you’ve created between you and the people closest to you. What characterizes these relationships? - What are the Beingspaces among the groups you belong to: your family, your team, your community? What does it feel like when these people come together and what is your part in it? This is the practice: pointing your own attention at what your intuition is already sensing, and asking you to consider what you’re creating within the energetic spaces of your life. ## **A Space That is Meant for Us** I began this essay by telling you that I came to understand all of this because I grew up in spaces that had no room for who I actually was. I learned to navigate energetic spaces with real skill, not to belong, but to hide. I could read a room faster than almost anyone in it, because my psychological safety depended on it. But we’re not meant to manage our lives from the outside. We’re meant to take up space in this world. To create―within ourselves, between others, and among groups―without editing down to what a room can tolerate. We're watching this play out at a civilizational scale right now in the various fights for LGBTQ+ rights, for BIPOC communities, for women, for disability rights, and for every movement demanding diversity, equity, and inclusion. Strip away the specifics and they're all making the same claim. Every human being deserves to take up space, as they actually are. To express their Being honestly rather than performing a version of it that a space finds acceptable. By investigating and questioning the Beingspaces that have been created until now, we put ourselves in the driver’s seat of our future. We take responsibility for our role in co-creation and we leave the identity of victim behind because we know that our Beingspaces are ours to build. This is why the greatest act of leadership isn't strategy, or vision, or command. ### **Leadership is an act of creating space for people to Be.** Or, put another way: leadership is about consciously directing Beingspaces. Under this definition, a leader's job is to develop the capacity to participate in a Beingspace, at any level, and hold it steady enough that the people in it can finally stop managing themselves and start being themselves. And if we can navigate the Beingspaces of our personal lives more intentionally, we can change what those spaces make possible. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/67/79/67799ec9-67f8-470d-ba17-5f6681ad35be/content/images/2026/08/PP-0903--1-.jpg) I wish my younger self had known this one thing: There was space for him after all. There always had been. \-Cameron --- *If this essay named something you've been sensing but didn't have words for, that's exactly the work at the center of the *Leading From Being Mentorship & Mastermind*. We're not just talking about Beingspaces. We're learning to navigate them, consciously, as leaders. If you're curious,* [*you can learn more here.*](https://www.leadingfrombeing.org/mentorship/) ---