Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Regina Lawless Toney. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Regina , appreciate you joining us today. If you had a defining moment that you feel really changed the trajectory of your career, we’d love to hear the story and details.

There was a moment when the life I had so carefully built no longer made sense to my body or my soul. From the outside, my career looked successful by every conventional measure—executive leadership at Instagram, influence, visibility, and impact. But internally, I was exhausted, disconnected, and quietly grieving. The sudden loss of my husband in 2021 broke me open in a way no professional achievement ever had. In the grief and personal reckoning that followed, I could no longer ignore what my body had been signaling for years: that the version of success I was living required me to abandon parts of myself that were authentic, intuitive, and vital.

That moment marked the beginning of an unraveling—and a remembering. I stepped away from the relentless pace of corporate achievement culture and turned inward, toward practices that had once lived at the margins of my life: yoga, meditation, devotion, and deep listening. What began as personal survival became a spiritual initiation. I started to understand how deeply conditioned many high-achieving women are to override their own wisdom, equate worth with productivity, and postpone their wholeness. My career didn’t end; it transformed. The work became less about performing leadership and more about embodying it.

The defining lesson from that moment is this: burnout is not a personal failure; it is often a soul-level refusal to betray your inner knowing. When we listen instead of pushing through, something truer can emerge. That realization became the foundation of my spiritual work and the emergence of a new philosophy I call Restore HER—a call to return to the body, to desire, to stillness, and to a form of leadership rooted in wholeness rather than depletion.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

At my core, I am a guide for women who have achieved what they were told would make them fulfilled—yet still feel disconnected from themselves. My work sits at the intersection of leadership, embodiment, and spirituality, shaped by nearly two decades of experience in corporate leadership and a deeply personal spiritual awakening that changed how I understand success, power, and purpose.

I began my career in human resources and organizational development, spending over 18 years working inside Fortune 500 companies, including Target, Intel, and Meta, where I ultimately led diversity, equity, and inclusion at Instagram. Along the way, I helped shape cultures, develop leaders, and navigate complex human systems. This journey, and the personal transformation that followed, became the foundation of my debut book, Do You: A Journey of Success, Loss, and Learning to Live a More MeaningFULL Life, where I share my story and the lessons that emerged from redefining success on my own terms.

Today, I work as an author, yoga teacher, and spiritual guide. I offer teachings, practices, and experiences designed to help high-achieving women return to themselves—physically, emotionally, and spiritually. This includes embodied practices like yoga and meditation, contemplative teachings, written and spoken transmissions, and immersive experiences that invite stillness, self-trust, and reconnection to desire. Rather than “fixing” women, my work helps them unlearn the patterns that taught them to override their inner knowing in the first place.

What sets my work apart is that it bridges worlds that are often kept separate: executive leadership and spiritual devotion, intellect and intuition, achievement and surrender. I don’t ask women to abandon their ambition or their impact. Instead, I guide them to lead and live from a place that is more sustainable, truthful, and alive. The philosophy at the heart of my work, Restore HER, is both a personal and collective invitation to remember what has been lost in our pursuit of success, and to reclaim a form of leadership rooted in embodiment, wisdom, and wholeness.

What I’m most proud of is not a title or role, but the moments when women tell me they feel like themselves again, sometimes for the first time in years. I want people to know that my work is not about striving to become someone new; it’s about returning to who you’ve always been. If my work resonates, it’s likely because you’re already hearing that inner call and you’re ready to listen.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

One of the most important lessons I had to unlearn was the belief that pushing through discomfort was a sign of strength. For most of my life, I equated resilience with endurance which meant being capable, reliable, and composed no matter what was happening internally. That mindset was rewarded in corporate culture and reinforced my identity as a high performer, but it also taught me to ignore my body, override my intuition, and treat rest as something I had to earn.

The unraveling of that belief began slowly and then all at once. Years of subtle burnout signals were followed by the sudden loss of my husband, which stripped away any illusion that control or achievement could protect me from grief. In that season, pushing through was no longer possible. And for the first time, I began to listen. I learned that what I had been calling strength was often self-abandonment, and that true resilience requires presence, honesty, and the willingness to slow down enough to feel what is actually happening.

Unlearning that pattern changed everything about how I live and lead today. It became the foundation of my spiritual work and my emerging philosophy, Restore HER, which I view as an invitation to return to the body, to trust inner knowing, and to release the belief that worth is something we must constantly prove. I explore these themes often on my podcast, The BlissFULL Life, where I reflect on what it means to live, work, and lead from joy and desire rather than depletion.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

For me, resilience didn’t look like bouncing back or powering forward. It looked like allowing my life to collapse and quietly witnessing the pieces. It looked like staying present when everything in me wanted to escape. After my husband died, there was no roadmap for how to grieve while also letting go of an identity I had built around achievement and certainty. I had to learn how to sit with not knowing, to let myself be changed by loss rather than rush to make sense of it.

In the early days, resilience meant choosing very small acts of self-trust, like stepping away from environments that demanded more than I could give. This was the case when I decided to extend my bereavement leave to three months so I could focus on healing. It also meant returning to my yoga mat when I didn’t want to get out of bed, and allowing stillness to be okay in ways my old productivity mindset couldn’t comprehend. I stopped asking, “why me?” and started asking, “Who am I being called to be now?” That shift required a different type of courage; a quiet bravery of letting life reshape me.

That period taught me that resilience is not about surviving at all costs. It’s about remaining connected to yourself in the midst of change. It’s about allowing grief, desire, and intuition to guide you toward a truer way of living. That understanding continues to inform my work today, whether through my writing, my teachings, or the conversations I share on The BlissFULL Life. If there’s one thing I hope readers take away, it’s this: resilience is not something you force—it’s something you allow when you stop abandoning yourself.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/reginalawlesstoney/
• Linkedin: https://linkedin.com/in/reginalawless
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@reginalawless
• Other: https://link.cohostpodcasting.com/e9e57d2b-eac9-442e-adbd-80c015fa1e1d?d=svAXkhmz7

Image Credits

Mandela Castaneda