In this podcast, Madelanne explores the ways the body enables us to connect with the natural world.

What does it mean to bring leadership somatically? What does it mean to engage embodied practice to liberate ourselves and each other? And particularly, what’s the skillset required to do so in European and Euro-colonial cultures? These are the core questions that Madelanne holds as she creates this space for fellow practitioners to meet each other, to learn together, and to feed this powerful conversation.

Body-Informed Leadership Practitioners are group facilitators, coaches, and culture-shapers of all kinds who engage an embodied relational skillset at the very heart of their practice in order to partner with complexity, challenge outworn dynamics, and potentiate a more just, joyful, and interconnected world.

Podcast with EmmaB and the GrowFree Community (April 21, 2021)

Talk for Forest School Association (November 18, 2020)

Dominance is a nightmare. It is founded in a dysregulation and distortion of our neurobiological, psychological, and spiritual design as human beings. It perpetuates disconnection when the very thing we are most fundamentally wired up to do is to connect.

The emergent field of Cultural Somatics looks at how particular mind-body states (such as defensive Nervous System activation, dissociation, or calm presence) are encouraged – even embodied – by human cultures.

Because I am a white-bodied person and I hold space from the perspective of my own life experience as such, some aspects of Body-Informed Leadership centralise the white body experience.

At its heart, I see Body-Informed Leadership as a somatic Allyship practice; that is, as a practice that enables those of us who are conditioned by Domination Dynamics to release them at the somatic level, and to cultivate instead the somatic skills and practices that enable collaborative interconnection – with ourselves, and with each other.

I grew up in the big city of Toronto, Canada. I was blessed to have loving parents and a stable home; and yet, from my earliest days, I carried a feeling of disorientation which at times utterly overwhelmed me.

This is the second in a series of articles that explore why practicing embodiment – that is, slowing down and looking at the moment-by-moment ways we experience and relate to our bodies – is such a necessary step towards dismantling White Supremacy.

Like so many people, I’m feeling deeply impacted by the recent events in Charlottesville. I am touched and stirred by the voices of People of Colour (like Layla Saad’s in her letter, I Need to Talk to Spiritual White Women About White Supremacy, Part One), urging white people to step forward and take their share of responsibility for changing the status quo.