Individual Coaching
Focused on Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC)
What would it feel like to be free?
At My Invisible Knapsack, I believe in coaching from an intersectional, liberatory lens because the systems and culture of oppression we live in have gaslit Black, Indigenous, People of Color into believing that we are not enough.
This gaslighting may show up in your life as:
- You know something is off but you don’t know how to articulate or verbalize that feeling just yet.
- You’ve done what you’re “supposed to,” but you know you’re not being true to your authentic self.
- Insomnia, tension, tightness, fatigue, or even numbness may be showing up in your body.
- It feels like you’re waging an internal war between all the different “shoulds” and “coulds” in your mind.
- You’ve played by the rules (mostly) and masked parts of yourself to fit in, to be successful, and to make other people proud. Yet, you’re miserable.
- You might feel stuck, resentful, insecure, or unworthy.
All of the symptoms above are a perfectly normal reaction to trying to survive an oppressive world that wants to dehumanize and exploit you.
The truth is, you were born worthy of love, belonging, connection, and respect
Let me help you reclaim your wholeness
You can go from constantly needing to prove your worth to just being enough, as you are
You can stop betraying yourself to honoring your inner, authentic Self
You can stop judging yourself harshly to begin embracing all parts of yourself with compassion and self-love
You can move towards inner liberation through transformational, liberatory coaching
What is transformational, liberatory coaching?
Liberatory coaching is about tending to the wounds of our dehumanization. It’s about exploring the root causes of what is causing the pain, and naming the energy of white supremacy culture when it is present in order to unhook it from our psyche.
It’s the work of diving deep and unpacking what’s in our “invisible knapsacks.”
Internalized white supremacy, such as the examples in the image, can also manifest as the desire to override your body’s messages and just “push through.” As a result, you end up betraying your own needs and values in order to grasp at any sense of belonging and safety.
Coaching helps you call a truce to your internal conflict and helps all your parts align into one team. That team is led by your highest self, rather than the voices of other people’s expectations.
Instead of gaslighting yourself into believing what “should” be, coaching is about building your capacity to sit with and accept what is. In essence, it is about learning to hold space for yourself.
I serve as a guide to the process, but you are the expert of your own experience. Through coaching, I can help you identify what’s numb, disconnected, and stuck. By doing the inner work, you can reconnect with your body, feelings, and humanity so that new possibilities can emerge.
It is through this emotional and somatic work that you can choose to show up with the authenticity, compassion, and resilience necessary to embody liberation in your daily life.
What I Do
- Honor your culture, lived experiences, and ways of knowing
- Serve as a guide, while you steer the ship as the captain for the journey
- Name the energy of white supremacy culture, capitalism, and other forms of oppression
- Hold a non-judgmental and compassionate space for you
- Name ancestral energy when it feels present
- Ask for your consent throughout the coaching process, and honor your “no’s” or “not yets”
- Collaborate with you to develop action steps, and gently hold you accountable to your commitments
What I Don't Do
- Assume I know what is “right” or “wrong” for your life or journey
- Prescribe solutions or give you “the answer”
- Pathologize or blame when you are exhibiting the effects of systemic oppressions
- Diagnose you (because I am NOT a therapist)
- Shame or guilt you into taking any specific actions
- Try to make you feel better by coddling your ego
- Pressure you into coaching if it’s not a right fit or you don’t need it anymore
As a client, you can expect to:
Transform your relationship with yourself as you allow yourself to be seen, held, and witnessed
Gain clarity on how internalized oppression is keeping you stuck and afraid
Learn when ancestral trauma is present so you can tend to that pain and understand how it’s showing up in you
Develop foundational (and rarely taught) embodiment practices that are essential for healing and self-leadership
Take action from a place of self-trust and alignment rather than react from a place of fear
All sessions are confidential!
Frequently Asked Questions
Coaching and therapy use similar tools, but there are some important differences. Coaching is focused on personal development, tends to focus on the present, and more goal- and action-oriented. Therapy more often explores the past to understand root causes of present symptoms. Coaching strives to be a relationship of equals (the client is the expert of their lived experiences), whereas therapy can have stronger power dynamic (the therapist is the expert) and can involve a formal diagnosis and treatment of mental illness.
Coaching and therapy can feel similar in that you are being held, seen, and witnessed, which is often healing.
The main goal of the discovery session is to consciously create a co-equal relationship and see if we are a good fit for each other. After sharing some initial boundaries, I coach for a bit, then share more information about my coaching approach. I am here to hold the space with compassion, curiosity, and courage, and the your role is to let me know where you want to go with coaching. You are the expert of your own lived experiences, and you have the choice to say no, or not yet. Co-creation also means that at the end of the session (or after), we ask if we would like to work with each other. It is a deliberate practice that challenges all the white supremacy norms.
Coaching sessions are less structured than the discovery session, and each session begins with me asking what you would like to be coached on. I listen deeply, both to what is being said and unsaid. I reflect back what I hear about your needs and values and ask empowering questions to help you gain greater awareness of what is present within yourself. I invite you to reconnect with your humanity through embodied and somatic exploration (asking what you feel in your body, and/or asking you to embody what you are feeling). We explore how internalized white supremacy shows up and how ancestral trauma may be present. Coaching often feels like peeling back the layers to uncover what’s at the core, not just intellectually, but also emotionally and through the sensations of our bodies. At the end of each session, I strive to serve as an accountability partner – what do you want to do with the insight from today’s session? And at our next session, I check in to see how that commitment went.
Absolutely! As a coach, I also encourage clients to seek therapy when there is trauma that is outside my scope of expertise shows up during coaching.
I do ask clients to sign an agreement to coach for 6 months, however there is no penalty for ending the coaching relationship early. All I ask is that we meet one final time to formally close the coaching relationships.
When I started my business, I actually focused on serving white clients! However, this took a significant emotional and energetic toll on me. After a lot of reflection, I realized that the clients that brought me the most joy were BIPOC and so I decided to focus my energy on working with those most impacted by systems of racial oppression.
