Embodied leadership begins with belonging—to ourselves first. Through cultural navigation and cultural humility, I’m learning that holistic leadership isn’t about perfection, but about honouring the confluence of our experiences. This is my practice of rest and re-rooting – a holistic approach to belonging.
In the spirit of belonging to myself, I am learning to introduce myself differently now. From a place of groundedness rather than explanation.
Not with the polished edges of what dominant culture tells us leadership should look like, but with the texture of what is real.
Marilynngujunga. Innuvunga ammalu Polish-Ukrainian.
In my anaana’s (mother’s) language—Inuktitut, the language I am re-learning – these words ground me. These words are more than introduction. They are remembering. They remind me that I am of the creation of two wholes that converged to make a new whole.
I carry two rivers in my body. One river – my Inuk mother from Kinngait, Nunavut. The other river – my father- a Ukrainian born in Poland, carried across oceans and generations. For years, I believed this made me fractions of two wholes. Divided. Fragmented pieces.
While I am learning and unlearning from nuna (the land), I am reminded that I am whole. I belong. I matter. Spending time on the nuna, I am honouring my journey.
The Holistic Wisdom of Two Rivers: Cultural Humility in Practice
Where two rivers meet, there is turbulence and vulnerability. And there is also abundance and fertile land. The creation of an ecosystem of rich environments and habitats that support biodiversity. The ecosystem that grows at the confluence – the meeting or convergence of two rivers – allows for coexistence. This is the wisdom my body has been whispering all along.
Witnessing the Learning Gap: Two Decades in Education
For nearly two decades, I moved through K-12 education system witnessing a pattern that hurt to see: children, families, communities, staff receiving the message “You don’t belong here.” In classrooms. In curricula. In the absence of faces and stories that reflected them back to themselves. In the absence of people – who look like me or carry similar experiences of being ‘othered’ – in positions of influence and impact. In policies. In funding.
I knew this message intimately. I had absorbed it through my skin, through questions like “What are you?” through the silence where my wholeness should have been reflected.
I shared some of my stories about these experiences of ‘Being Seen and Heard in Community’ in my conversation with PowHERHouse change-makers How for H.E.R podcast.
Rest as a Practice: The Beginning of Re-rooting
When the pandemic arrived, something in me finally cracked open. My body spoke in a voice that I could no longer turn away from. It said: “Enough. We can’t continue this way.” Enough holding space for everyone else while abandoning the care and nurturing of my roots and ecosystem.
So I have been resting and began the slow work. Re-rooting. Re-connecting. Listening to what had been trying to speak through exhaustion, through depletion, through the distances I had created from myself.
This is the work of remembering: that we belong to ourselves first. That we are worthy not for what we do, but for what we are. That we matter because we exist, not because we prove our value over and over.
Therefore, I have been choosing to slow down. To practice and embody what I have been learning from the wisdom The Nap Ministry shares about rest as a form of resistance and rest as reparations. In this rest, I am re-connecting my heart, mind, body and spirit.
I am learning to be in right relationship with myself. Along with being in right relationship with others and the land. Moving from a space of human ‘doing’ to becoming whole as a human ‘being’.
A Holistic Approach to Belonging: Leading From Wholeness
My guiding purpose has always been: For people to know there is a space and place for them in this world. To know they belong. They are whole. They are enough.
Walking Alongside: Embodied Leadership as Cultural Navigation
But I am learning now to extend that knowing to myself first. To let that knowing take root in my own soil before offering it to others.
If you have ever felt like the “only” in your space—if you carry work that chose you rather than work you chose —I see you. Not to fix or save, but to witness and walk alongside.
This work of re-rooting moves at the pace of seasons, not urgency. I am learning to trust this.