I partner with people who care deeply about their work and the world and who have seen that the power of good ideas is not enough. Together, we can grow your capacity to act in integrity with your values and leverage your power to make your most meaningful contribution.
“One of the things I appreciate most about Briana’s style is her ability to adapt her approach and material to meet the needs of participants in the moment.” - Byram Simpson, BSW, Training Program Manager, YouthCare
My Work
Since 2004, I’ve been working at the intersections of personal and social transformation with the organization, generative somatics (gs). With gs, I teach courses nationally and locally on embodied leadership and trauma healing, and I integrate an understanding of embodiment into all of the ways I train, facilitate, and coach.
I’ve been on my personal path of healing and leadership development throughout this time, and I have guided many others on their paths along the way. I’ve seen that our brilliant analysis and critiques of oppression, privilege, and even trauma, are not enough. If we don’t have the embodied skills and practices to live, relate, and lead in liberated ways, we often end up recreating breakdowns and practices of domination in spite of our beautiful ideas.
Embodiment Project Highlight
In Spring of 2018, I co-taught an Embodied Leadership intensive with the Leadership Collective of Coalition of Anti-Racist Whites (CARW). Over the course of 4 days, we explored how whiteness manifests in our bodies, individually and collectively, and practiced towards embodying sustainable and accountable solidarity with POC-led movements for racial justice.
About Embodied Leadership
Our entire history lives in our bodies. This means that we carry with us the incredible resilience of the people we’ve come from, as well as the wise survival strategies that have kept us alive, but that can become incredibly confining over time. Embodied Leadership is a methodology and set of practices in which we take responsibility for the ways we’ve been shaped by our histories, and we commit to healing our old ways of being so that they don’t hold us back from the life-affirming communities that we are committed to building.
We have often become dis-integrated and numb in the face of trauma and oppression. As we learn to return to our whole selves, we shift from a fundamentally objectifying understanding of ourselves, rooted in dynamics of oppression and privilege, to an enlivening relationship with our humanity and interdependence. As we build our capacity to feel more deeply, we encounter some of the harder parts of our life experience, but we also find the deepest sources of our power that have been bound up and are longing to be expressed. We are faced with the possibility of being fully accountable to what matters most to us, and of acting more and more consistently in alignment with our values and visions.