Embodiment: From DEI to the Revolutionary Act of Belonging to Yourself

 I have been in my body my whole life, but I didn't understand what that meant until I made a decision that was entirely mine.

Most people discover embodiment through yoga, meditation, or trauma healing. My path was different.

It began with a surgical decision that nobody around me understood—the choice to remove my fallopian tubes at 35, not for medical reasons, but as my preferred method of birth control.

This wasn't a journey that started with breathwork or somatic therapy.

It started with the radical recognition that my body belonged to me, and that belonging to myself was the foundation for every other kind of liberation I would later explore.

What I discovered through that choice, and the consciousness questions it raised, would fundamentally shift how I understood the relationship between body, time, agency, and freedom.

It would become the bedrock of everything I now teach about embodied liberation.

The Surgery That Awakened Everything

For years, I thought the daydreaming I did as a teenager was just how my mind worked. I would drift into elaborate inner worlds, lose track of time, and float through experiences without feeling fully present.

It wasn't until I studied psychology as an adult that I learned some people would call this dissociating.

That realization was my first introduction to understanding the body as a source of our experiences, not just a vessel for them.

In the fall of 2021, I opted to get my tubes removed.

I had been thinking about this decision for months, becoming 150% certain this was what I wanted.

I never wanted to experience pregnancy, suffer a miscarriage, or have an abortion.

I was tired of birth control and how it was impacting my body hormonally and energetically.

What intrigued me most wasn't the social pushback—it was the consciousness questions the surgery raised.

I had never been under full anesthesia before, so I peppered the anesthesiologist with questions: What happens to consciousness while I'm incapacitated? Where does awareness go when the body is unconscious but alive?

She told me I was going to "time travel." When I went under, my IUD that I'd had for five years would be removed, my tubes would be gone, and I would be sterile.

What felt like five minutes later, I woke up, and it was done.

The strangest part wasn't the physical recovery—it was realizing that my body had stopped recording time.

My body was present, alive, breathing, but somehow my consciousness had been elsewhere. How could my body be here while I was alive, but not record the passage of time?

After I woke up from my surgery, I felt like the rest of my life was truly mine for the first time. And something unexpected began happening—I started hearing signs and messages that I'd never been privy to before.

Learning the Body's Intelligence

I am a scientist through and through, naturally skeptical about things that can't be seen.

But I was beginning to have spiritual experiences that were disrupting my sense of materialism.

On a walk shortly after my surgery, thinking about finally investing in my coaching development, I asked the universe: "If I start this path, will you accompany me?" I felt a great gust of wind surround me, and I sensed my father and my great aunt—both of whom had transitioned—saying "Yes. We're with you."

I signed up for a coaching program called "Coaching Evolved" on the very last day of enrollment. ]

It was all women, women-led, and coincided with me returning to work after an eight-week sabbatical where I had created my own curriculum around artistry, DEI, emotional intelligence, and relationship management.

In this coaching program, we were asked where we felt our feelings and what we noticed in our bodies as we described our wishes and goals.

That was the first time I started to realize that the body was a source of intelligence.

I learned that my menstrual cycle was something to be attuned to, that my body was an intelligent being whose cyclical nature should be valued rather than ignored.

For the first time, I began to appreciate what my body had allowed me to experience on this planet, instead of focusing on all the ways I had told myself it wasn't good enough—wasn't pretty enough, white enough, thin enough.

During this same period, I was part of a massive research study at Deloitte analyzing thousands of data points about how people define their best leaders.

What I discovered aligned perfectly with what I was learning: the qualities people described in their best leaders weren't necessarily results-oriented.

They were about relational skills and seeing people in their full humanity. My intellectual understanding and my embodied learning were converging.

From Personal Liberation to Collective Transformation

Fast forward a few years. I had left my job and was in the community building Queen Mindset Leadership®—my approach to living in a liberated way.

I was exploring what yoga calls the five koshas: not only mindset, but emotional capacity, spiritual connection, energetic awareness, and connection to something greater than myself.

During a trip to Egypt with my mom for my 38th birthday, I realized that these ways of being fully integrated—being attuned to nature, the cosmos, and a higher sense of duty to humanity—have ancient roots.

Queen Mindset Leadership® felt like a legitimate way of leading focused on coexistence rather than domination, building alliances instead of enemies.

As I started teaching and exploring outside corporate environments, I realized how disconnected institutional DEI was from people on the ground. People were completely unaware of these concepts.

If DEI doesn't carry beyond corporate walls, is it really effective?

What felt missing was embodiment.

How can we talk about making space for diversity, equity, and inclusion of others when we don't know how to do that within ourselves?

We don't see ourselves beyond being intellectual beings.

We don't see our bodies as sacred, our energy as sacred, or believe in the immaterial even though quantum physics and philosophy have long explored these forces.

Liberation and domination show up as hierarchy about who we are and what we offer.

It's in how we belittle others, judge others, and fail to realize that other people are our mirrors.

When I started seeing that the body in all its identities was like the character our spirit chooses to experience the world through, I realized we have a responsibility to express what we see because it's a unique perspective that will never be repeated.

If it's a one in 400 trillion chance of existing in the body form you're in, how could your expression be an accident? It's imperative that you express.

Belonging to yourself means realizing you are the co-creator of your bodily experience.

You incarnated in this form to get to know and express the world through you.

That's why I advocate for creative liberation—because yes, you belong to yourself, but part of your purpose is to teach, express, and show up in what you see, because nobody else has that point of view.

Reflection for You

Take a moment with these questions:

• How present are you with your own body right now? What messages might it be sending you that you've been intellectualizing rather than feeling?
• Where in your life have you made decisions based on others' expectations rather than your own embodied knowing? What would change if you trusted your body's intelligence?
• What aspects of yourself have you been taught to see as "not enough" rather than as unique expressions of your spirit's chosen experience?
• How might your understanding of liberation shift if you approached it as belonging to yourself first, then extending that belonging to others?
• What would you express in the world if you truly believed your perspective was unrepeatable and essential?

Embodiment isn't just about being present in your body—it's about recognizing that your body is the sacred vessel through which your unique expression enters the world.

When you belong to yourself fully, you create permission for others to do the same.

The revolution begins with the radical act of coming home to yourself.