We recently connected with Emily Nascimento and have shared our conversation below.
Emily, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Do you have any thoughts about how to create a more inclusive workplace?
Embodied leadership is a style of leadership that emphasizes the role of your body in shaping thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. It involves being present and aware of your physical sensations and emotions, as well as those of others, and using this awareness to guide leadership decisions and actions.
Our body’s sensations are Life’s fundamental language – energy – moving through us. When we are aware and attuned to Life’s fundamental language, we are engaging in a holistic dialogue that includes mind, body, and Spirit.
As a leader, this gives us access to additional information that is critical for decision making, communication, and creating positive and inclusive environments. This information is trans-rational – it exists beyond the rational mind – but we can partner with our mind to make sense of it in a way that is practical for our leadership needs.
Your body is also a powerful tool for self-awareness and sustainable transformation. It points you in the direction of your most authentic self: your longing, your desires, your values, your purpose, your vision. Your sensations give you clues as to what matters the most to you on the deepest level.
Your body also shows you where you still require healing, where you store your trauma, and all of the ways that you armor yourself against the world.
When engaged mindfully and with intent, your body is a potent resource for creating lasting transformation. Instead of mind-training and will-power domination, you can leverage the intelligence that already exists in your body. You can allow your body to show you the path to change, instead of trying to force your body to come along with the mind’s strategy. You can build a partnership between body and mind that serves you instead of drains you.
When we are authentically embodied, making aligned decisions and actions, and taking responsibility for our healing, we naturally create outcomes that are more intentional, generative and life-affirming.
Life will always aim to create more Life, or create conditions in which Life can thrive. When you are creating outcomes from that place of deep aliveness in your body, your leadership results will likely benefit all beings and the planet.
Moreover, when you lead from this place, you become exponentially more magnetic, influential and empowered. Not only are you purposeful with your actions, behaviors and results. You are also more capable of collaboration, partnership and authentic relating. People want to help you bring your vision to life because their deep aliveness resonates with yours.
By being more attuned to nonverbal cues and listening actively, you can better understand the perspectives and needs of your team members, family, partners, stakeholders and colleagues. You naturally build high-trust relationships and inclusive environments that thrive on collaboration.
To summarize, embodied leadership is about being connected to the deep source of aliveness that exists in your body. This connection gives you access to information and resources that help you find your purpose, hold a compelling and life-affirming vision, create outcomes that matter, build high-trust and inclusive environments, and collaborate with others.
Emily, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
I thrive in the intersection between psycho-spiritual development and leadership. I help you embody your calling so you can live and lead authentically while having a positive impact on the world.
I got into leadership development coaching over seven years ago. I was young, ambitious and I wanted to leave a positive impact on the world. I was looking for leaders with a vision compelling enough for me to commit my life to, and I was terrified and angry at what I saw. A mentor told me to “become the leader I longed for” and that advice changed me on a cellular level.
I began an earnest an eager attempt to discover what kind of leader I wanted to be. It started with discovering my authentic nature. A lifetime of hustling for belonging had me weighted down with thousands of masks that were never mine to begin with, and while I was terrified of what would happen if I let them go, I could sense that it was vital for my path to continue.
What I discovered is that when you start to ask the Universe to show you who you are, it responds in kind. It also sends you experiences that help you discover all the ways you have abandoned yourself as a means of survival. What started as a process of self-discovery soon led to a deeply embodied process of grieving and healing.
Through the peeling back of these layers, slowly discovering who I am underneath all the conditioning and trauma, I found a deep resource in the home of my soul and my body. My exploration was no longer one of mere awareness, transcendence and cognitive storytelling, but one of embodiment, soul and a deep engagement with every living being.
Reconnected with the animal flesh of my body, I discovered a deeper body that I belonged to: the Earth and cosmos. I discovered my place in the ecology of Life itself. I found that my authentic nature and soul purpose are not only important, but VITAL to the health of the larger system.
This drastically changed my perspective on leadership. Suddenly it was no longer about the leader I wanted to be, but the leader that Life needs me to be. My scope of vision exploded, and an urgent desire to support others in discovering their place in the ecology of Life started to seed in me.
Now, I aim to help people through the process of self-discovery, healing, embodiment and creating outcomes that matter to all beings and the planet. This is a practice of being congruent; what matters most on the inside is reflected in the actions we take and results we create.
I’m here to help you show up fully for your life. Because it’s vital for our evolution.
Our world is calling for leaders who are in touch with their purpose and values, actively working to heal past hurts that hold them back from truly living their purpose. These leaders create positive and meaningful outcomes for the greater good of all beings and the planet.
Finding freedom from our struggles comes when we courageously face the truth of our human experience. By embracing our emotional wounds as gateways to our inner selves, exploring our bodies as vessels of self-discovery, and connecting to the cosmic story of life’s evolution, we pave the way for healing and growth.
As a somatic leadership coach specializing in guiding individuals towards embodying their soul’s purpose and healing, I navigate the journey of emotional healing, self-discovery, and embodiment with my clients. Together, we clarify their soul’s purpose, address emotional blockages, and apply the wisdom gained to create a life in service to a greater purpose.
The world’s existing systems are crumbling, causing imbalances in natural systems and widespread environmental degradation.
Leaders must step up with a new approach. Grounded, healed, spiritually guided, and committed leaders can be the remedy our world needs. They possess the ability to meet the challenges of today with purpose and vision, collaborating effectively and creating positive change on a larger scale.
For leaders dedicated to this transformative work, having coaches who have walked the same path is crucial. I offer support based on my own experience in healing and growth.
Any advice for managing a team?
Leadership literature and research indicates that leadership effectiveness is correlated highly with two competencies: having purpose and vision, and teamwork (Mastering Leadership, Anderson and Adams, pg 221).
When managing a team, it’s important for the manager to lead from a deep sense of purpose, articulate that into a clear and compelling vision, and to enroll and build alignment with key stakeholders, collaborators and co-conspirators to realize that vision.
I believe that leadership is is about stewarding our collective capacity to create the future.
From an evolutionary perspective, leaders see that they are co-authoring the next chapter of our collective story with Life itself, and they take responsibility for their role in that.
When leaders are authentically embodied, making aligned decisions and actions, and taking responsibility for their healing, they naturally create outcomes that are more intentional, generative and life-affirming.
When you are creating outcomes from that place of deep aliveness in your body, your leadership results will be more meaningful and sustainable.
Moreover, when you lead from this place, you become exponentially more magnetic, influential and empowered. Not only are you purposeful with your actions, behaviors, and results, you are also more capable of collaboration, partnership, and authentic relating.
People want to help you bring your vision to life because their deep aliveness resonates with yours.
By being more attuned to your own and others’ embodiment and listening actively, you can better understand the perspectives and needs of your team members, family, partners, stakeholders and colleagues. You naturally build high-trust relationships and inclusive environments that thrive on collaboration. This goes a long way in maintaining high morale.
At its most rudimentary form, Life is energy. Everything that ever has and will exist is made of this energy, and that same energy that created the universe courses through your body. It is your body.
And this energy speaks to you through sensations.
Building your awareness of this energy, and your capacity to be present with it in real-time, is an essential practice for fulfilling, meaningful, effective leadership.
It’s also essential for having influence. The beautiful thing about this animating life-force energy that speaks to us through our bodies, is that it’s evocative. It’s activating. When you live and lead from this place, it’s naturally magnetic and moving for others.
Speaking and creating from this place creates an energetic field around you that is alluring, interesting, and attractive.
People can’t help but feel something in the presence of a leader who is tapped into this.
That’s because the same energy that is awakened and quickening in you, exists in them. It may be entirely unconscious to the people you lead, but they feel something in the presence of a leader who leads in this way.
It awakens their own longing to grow and be of service to the vision. It initiates their desire for a life of aliveness, wonder and purpose. It gives them the possibility and permission to live life this way.
Perhaps you are remembering a leader who impacted you in this way right now. Someone who you admired for some indescribable yet palpable reason. Someone who inspired and encouraged you to become the best version of yourself.
[Bonus points if you take a moment to savor this feeling of recalling a meaningful leader in your life. Notice how your body responds to that memory. Extra bonus points if you reach out them and share your appreciation.]
In this way, leading from this place of aliveness and purpose is a win-win-win. You are fulfilled in your service, Life gets to keep creating more Life through you, and the people around you are nourished on a soul and cellular level just by being in your presence.
What more could you ask for?
We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.
On April 4, 2019 I got the phone call that my stomach warned me about for years.
Dad was in the hospital. I wanted to hope that it was nothing, but I could sense even then that it was the beginning of the end.
I’ve experienced many challenging life experiences. Nothing compares to watching my father journey to his death and take his last breath.
Our stories were so enmeshed; his wholeness dependent on mine. My cells literally believed that once he ceased to exist, so would I.
I recall a period right before we put him on hospice. I was my dad’s power of attorney and medical advocate, which was essentially a second full-time project management job. I woke up with despair sinking in my chest every morning.
My body remembers this time; I can still feel the residue.
I kept having this recurring image come into my consciousness: I am walking along a wooded path and someone grabs my ankles from behind and drags me backwards, fast. I desperately grab for tree roots to steady me but it is futile.
My body and subconscious knew: It was a mythical underworld abduction and I resisted the whole way.
On August 2, 2019 I flew back to Montana to be with him while he took his last breath.
Timelines collapsed as I held his hand, told him it was okay to let go, that he did a good job, and he gets to go home now. Some day, I will write about the beauty of this moment.
My whole system was shocked that I was still alive. I couldn’t imagine a world where I lived, and he didn’t.
But here I was, living. Who was I going to be now, without him, and without the anxiety of being his daughter?
At this point I had over 6 years of spiritual practice under my belt, but the grief invited something deeper to come forward.
I felt the most urgent desire to ground into my body. To find comfort in the divine feminine. To be held in nature. To wash myself with grace. To learn what true aliveness really means.
Philosophy and theory were not going to get me there. The pain of loss was cataclysmic and created tectonic shifts in my being. I needed something Earthy that could hold this composting.
Spirituality is an industry, and I was bought in. But it failed to meet the deep, painful parts of my humanity with the grit and stamina that I needed.
Transcendence spirituality showed me that I am the Universe. It did not teach me how to be with the very real, sensory, embodied experience of despair and hopelessness.
I wrote back then:
“I learned that something happens when we invite our shadow to tea, when we allow our soul’s agony to be felt, witnessed, moved. It’s horribly painful, but it seems like with each agonizing moan, with every trembling weep, we are emptied.
There is a hollowness there that used to scare me, but now I see how vital it is to be hollowed our by grief to be filled with love and gratitude. In every single experience I’ve had where I’ve allowed myself to be fully engaged in my grief, at the exact moment of surrender, just past the edge of that hollowness, when the pain seems most unbearable, is the infinite love and compassion that I am weeping over losing, and it’s within me. In being fully undone, I realize with certainty the wholeness of life exists at these edges. This is where we meet Grace.”
It wasn’t until I surrendered to my grief and the mythical journey that followed that I found the body of work I needed to be with this, and I daresay the body of work that I am meant to cultivate in my lifetime.
If you’ve ever lost someone in this culture you will know how extremely inept we are at holding space for grieving people in a way that matters to the grieving person.
Michael Meade, Megan Devine, Ram Dass and Pema Chodron normalized what I was experiencing and helped me see that this was a radical opportunity to be initiated.
To be initiated means to embody the essence of our soul. Grief taught me that soul-encounters happen from a place of descent. We must go deep: into the earth, into the underworld, into our bodies, into our wounds.
Grief showed me that the depths of our lives are where the magic is, not only the expanded states of transcendence.
It wasn’t until I began to dig into the very ground of my being with bare hands that I learned what true wholeness and Unity are, and how it’s expressed through us.
At this point, remembering the essence of my soul and embodying it with courage was my highest priority. I sought teachers who spoke about initiations, rites of passage, underworld journeys, and the dark side of wholeness. I wove what I learned into every aspect of my life. I found great success in my career and fell in love with someone equally committed to their wholeness.
As the years go on, I have been initiated into deeper layers of myself. Through the pandemic, career changes, relocations, and navigating toxic workplaces, I continue to return to the resources and teachers that fed me during the hardest time of my life. I continue to build resilience and stamina for life’s complexities.
The more I dig into the ground of my own being, the more I see how vital it is that my personal soul and spirit work is reflected in the social systems that I operate in. I believe our essence is a critical part of the ecology of Life, and an essential component of my personal fulfillment and resilience means that my sacred body of work is a service to the world that benefits all beings and the planet.
I don’t pretend to have the answers. But what I do have are what I believe to be very important and meaningful questions, and the commitment to continue asking them as long as I live in this body on this planet.
Contact Info:
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Image Credits
Noel Jeannine Photography, https://noeljeanninephotography.com/