Working in social transformation requires empathy, compassion, boundaries, and role and systems clarity, and somatic embodiment is a key to doing that well.

As a changemaking leader, is it really all about your brain? In purposeful work, heart, body and soul are a part of every day’s actions… and yet we operate within power systems that deny this. 

Constantly in overdrive, seeing endless urgent deadlines, its only the brain that leads, pushing us with sheer will. Do Do Do Do Do.

Changemakers and social purpose leaders are burning out everywhere.

Continue the logic-path? Can’t, they’re saying.  Won’t do it this way anymore, is what I’ve been told, by national Indigenous women leaders, health directors, politicians, and entrepreneurs.

The change is a choice that so many movers and shakers are heeding, because their bodies are saying, No More.  Me too. 

A massive collective releasing is underway. Folks are going down to the bones, to the essentials, just like winter, this winter. 

Our structures are exposed. Our root cores are what we’re encountering.  Our souls, hearts, and depleted bodies are right behind us, and they’ve been waiting for us to remember them, and listen.

I’ve noticed that changemakers tend to sense the world deeply and widely. Many are supersensors. Something in their experience points them to deep empathy, seeing system imbalance and better possibilities, and to taking action. But that embodied knowing-being-relating-creating so often gets left behind in the rush to get things done.

With the drive of passions fuelled by righteous justice, as changemakers in overdrive we can stop sensing, stop seeing our roles clearly, and stop seeing our communities and people as whole.

Operators become saviours….

And suddenly, partnerships slide into victim-rescue dynamics, the bane of the social services sector that sets up co-dependency and ultimately, tyranny. Hello supremacy!

Somatics enable sensing of whole people, whole communities, and whole systems, with clear boundaries, as we all shift and grow.

Our whole selves have immense capacities for sensing and communicating that are mostly missed by our logic half brain. Tapping into embodied wholeness, we not only replenish ourselves for the work, we are sourced to make more grounded, more inclusive, more systems-transforming innovations.

In this time of incongruence and denial, changemakers who have been giving and giving for years are worn out. And there seems to be few answers of what to do next, as we reject the old, automatic power over systems. Now what?

Slow down. Sleep. Gentle restorative and joyful movement. Connect with Collective. Make things together.

Sing together – that’s my thing, chanting in choir every week, because I want to also revel in the pleasure of what we’re building with learning and delight.

Perhaps that’s exactly what our systems need. What we all need. This collective releasing into rest may be the next phase of our system transformation.  

Listening to our bodies, somatics enable us to listen to our deepest knowings, relationships and vision. Engaging my somatic consciousness is how I live, breathe, work, create and play.

It takes rigour to learn these practices. We’re re-growing synaptic pathways that have been mostly unattended since our embodied childhoods. And then with practice, one day, somatic exploration becomes beingness – true embodiment –  and the practices – meditative whole body reflection, movement, and inquiry – a beloved time and space that enables clarity, vision, and wholeness.