AN INVITATION TO HEALING-CENTERED LEADERSHIP
- Lana Jelenjev
- 4 days ago
- 9 min read
Weaving neurophysiology, relationality, ancestry, and healing into the heart of leadership.
Leadership, activism, and social change are breaking under the weight of trauma-led systems. We find ourselves in landscapes where the urgency to act has superseded the depth to feel, where doing has outrun being, and where the systems we’re inhabiting reward productivity, transactionality, and performative presence over relational integrity, rest, repair, and responsiveness.
We forget that beneath every behavior is an entire landscape of histories, nervous system responses, inherited patterns, and unmet needs. Many leaders are carrying unseen fractures, inherited wounds, unprocessed anger, internalized oppression, and sacred grief that has never been allowed to name itself. We’re taught to move fast when our bodies are asking us to move in our own rhythms. We’re praised for pushing through when our spirits are begging for realignment.
For too long, we have normalised urgency, saviorism, and extraction as conditions for doing good in the world. We even forget that culture itself is shaped by what remains unprocessed, oftentimes unrecognised, and unattended to.
Resmaa Menakem wrote: “Trauma decontextualized in a person looks like personality. Trauma decontextualized in a family looks like family traits. Trauma decontextualized in people looks like culture.”
And I believe the inverse is just as true:
Healing integrated into a person looks like personality.
Healing integrated in a family looks like family traits.
Healing integrated into people looks like culture.
It’s time to reposition healing not as “nice to have” or an accessory to leadership, but as its foundation. When healing is absent from leadership, we see the ripple effects across individuals, teams, organisations, communities, and even Mother Earth is drastically affected.
This is the heartbeat behind what I call the Healing-Centered Iceberg Model—a map for leaders who want to move from urgency to attunement, from saviorism to stewardship, and from pathogenic practices to salutogenic ones.
Healing is not a personal endeavor. It is a cultural one, and when healing sits at the center of leadership, everything changes.
CARE AS THE BEDROCK FOR CHANGE
In my healing-centered ecosystems framework, I believe that our commitment to care is imperative for us to put healing at the center of our purpose, processes, planning, and policies.
Care is our capacity to express the values of compassion, dignity, and respect to ourselves and to others (both human and more than human). It is the foundation of love, attachment, and belonging. Care is a deep concern and tending of the self, the us, the others, and the bigger field. It can strengthen relationships, promote systemic sustainability, and lobby for just practices and policies.
Care is also the bedrock for activism and altruism. It is the fundamental value that underlies our purpose, values, and mission. Care is an essential component of societal values, moral leadership, and citizen responsibilities. Sufi leader Cheikh Bentounes thinks of humanity as one unique body, with our overall health connected to the health of all our body parts. Our commitment to care for ourselves, for others, and for the planet ensures the health of all systems and, therefore, our survival.
Most movements today are filled with people who care deeply but whose bodies are depleted, dysregulated, or carrying intergenerational patterns that have never been witnessed with compassion. Without healing, leadership slips into:
urgency masquerading as commitment
saviorism posing as service
over-functioning is taught as love
numbness mistaken for professionalism
extraction framed as efficiency
reactivity interpreted as passion
We cannot build liberatory systems with bodies stuck in survival.
Healing is not peripheral to leadership. It is the soil from which life-affirming leadership grows. We need resourced leaders, change agents, and activists in our movements.
The Healing-Centered Iceberg Model
I designed this model as a gentle but radical reframing of the Satir Personal Iceberg. It is a way of bringing neurophysiology, relationality, ancestry, and healing into the heart of leadership.
The Healing-Centered Iceberg Model reveals what sits above and below our visible behaviors. Rather than focusing on behavior alone, the model invites leaders to understand the deep structures shaping their responses. It mirrors the unseen terrain beneath our behaviors: the narratives, histories, wounds, wisdoms, and embodied intelligence that shape how we show up in the world. The model illustrates how awareness, attunement, alignment, and agency flow into one another as part of a holistic, embodied process.
It moves through four interconnected spaces:
Awareness (Head) - deep sensing and noticing of patterns in the relational fields.
This is the entry point: becoming aware of behaviors, attachment tendencies, and coping patterns such as fight, flight, freeze, fawn, or flop that lead us to over-functioning, avoidance, perfectionism, blaming, carrying emotional labor, and stretching our nervous system till we feel frayed to the edges or worse, burned out and depleted.
But healing introduces another way of attending to emergence: flow, flock, soften, stop, surrender.
Awareness is noticing without judgment. It helps leaders pause and say: Something is activated here. What’s underneath this? “What pattern is here? And what is it trying to protect?” Without this notice-work, we continue to operate in autopilot. Yes, results may come, but the relational and systemic costs remain hidden.
Attunement (Heart) - we drop from the mind into the felt sense and the emotional texture underneath our behavior.
Attunement invites leaders to delve deeper into their feelings, developmental histories, and the stories that shape their perception. It includes:
Neuroception — how our nervous system constantly scans for safety or danger
Neurophysiology — how our senses and bodies shape our internal landscape
Interpersonal neurobiology — how relationships co-create our identity and patterns ( like the histories shaping how we interpret safety and danger or the relational patterns we learned growing up that formed the ways our nervous system contracts or relaxes when engaging with others)
This is where leaders practice pakikiramdam, the Filipino core value of deep attunement to self, others, and the collective field. It requires softness, curiosity, and presence.
WHEN WE USE PAKIKIRAMDAM, WE…
practice sense-making
surface feelings and needs
notice and attune to signals around us
improvise and pivot based on what is emerging
help in emotional regulation and co-regulation
clarify and ambiguous/ and/ or critical situation
align actions with inner perception (intuition)
raise minority voices in the space
become aware of our patterns when engaging with others
listen to what is not being said
check in with others
pick up on the energy in the room
In my interview on “Decolonising Ourselves & Healing-Centered Ecosystems,” I shared how I shifted from “service = self-less” (from my Filipino upbringing) toward self-fulness: the practice of attending to my needs and presence while still caring deeply for others. I moved from being the exhausted caretaker to a settled body that can settle bodies.
What is important to note is that practicing attunement can be as simple as “checking in” with yourself and with others. This practice helps us understand our capacities and the ways in which we can engage with ourselves and with others coming from our “self-fullness.”
After my cancer journey, I began doing daily “internal weather checks.” My children would see me pause mid-task, close my eyes, breathe into my belly. When my son asked what I was doing, I told him, “I’m checking in with myself.”
That one practice shifted our family’s entire emotional culture. When we practice attunement, it transforms our leadership from performance to presence.
Alignment (Soul) - a remembering and return to essence.
This is the terrain of ancestry, epigenetics, cultural narratives, and fundamental human needs. The place where we ask:
Is this belief mine or inherited?
Which story am I living that no longer fits?
What part of me is asking to be reclaimed?
Alignment is decolonization at the level of the nervous system. It is remembering who we were before our trauma-led systems taught us to fit in and contort ourselves. It is the return to the wisdom of wholeness. Without alignment, actions can feel hollow, disconnected, or unsustainable. Alignment anchors leadership in truth, coherence, and dignity.
Agency (Embodied Action) - opening possibilities, and taking congruent next steps
Agency emerges when leaders act from their Resourced Self, grounded in:
Ancestral wisdom
Communal wisdom
Earth wisdom
This is leadership that moves slowly enough to be in right relationships with people, with land, with possibilities. It honors the body’s natural rhythms, relational webs, and ecological interdependence, rather than timeline-driven output models.
Agency is not just about doing differently; it is about being differently. It is about encouraging ourselves and others to cultivate spaces where settling the nervous system is a common practice. Thus, encouraging co-regulation, not reactivity. Agency without embodiment is disembodied hustle. Healing-centered agency is grounded in presence, relational attunement, and ecosystem care. When leaders root into their essence, decisions become richer, more congruent, and attuned to relational well-being.
Together, awareness, attunement, alignment, and agency are a practice of leading from essence rather than activation. The Healing-Centered Iceberg is not a fancy overlay or a “nice to have.” It is a foundational shift. It asks us to honour the hidden systems within and around us.
Weaving the Model into Practice
Here are some practical suggestions to bring the Healing-Centered Iceberg into your leadership or your organisation:
Introduce “below-the-surface” check-ins in team meetings: e.g., “Beyond the agenda, what is alive in our bodies right now?”
Embed pause rituals: Begin every gathering with a 3-minute body scan or grounding breath.
Create restoration-spaces (refugia): Build in bi-monthly (or quarterly) weeks of slower rhythm, reflection, and sense-making. Taking some time to pause without the usual deliverable pressures.
Asset-based focus: Ask: “What’s strong here?” rather than “What’s broken and needs fixing?”. It is not about toxic positivity; rather, we use the amplification of strengths to support in tending to our challenges.
Leadership check-questions: Before a major decision, ask:
“What is the body’s response to this?”
“Which relationships will this affect (and how)?”
“What rhythms does this require?”
“How might this decision reverberate five years out?”
Stewardship language vs. saviourism: Replace “I must fix” with “How might we tend? What needs tending here?”. Check out this free resource on From Colonial Patterns to Regenerative Practices: A Self-Assessment and Guide
Build recovery culture: Normalise repair, grief, and recalibration as collective practices. Teach teams that we heal to lead better.
Our movements, our leadership spaces, and even our liberatory work often move from wounded urgency and not through embodied stewardship. Healing-centered leadership widens the abundance of opportunities. Placing healing at the center isn’t soft. It's structural. It's courageous. It's disruptive.
Healing is also contagious, fractal, culture-shaping.
When healing is at the centre of leadership, organisations become ecosystems of repair, belonging, and regeneration. When leaders are resourced, regulated, rooted, and relational, the ripple effects are profound: healthier teams, deeper connections, more sustainable change, stronger alignment with community and planet.
It shifts us from:
extraction → reciprocity
saviorism → stewardship
urgency → attunement
hyper individualism → collective care and coherence
reactivity → relational responsibility
This is how we nourish ecosystems that can sustain joy, resistance, imagination, grief, and transformation. Because if trauma can become culture, so can healing.
READ MORE:
BENEATH THE ICEBERG: A Healing-Centered Model of What Shapes Our Behaviors
HEALING-CENTERED RESPONSES WHEEL: Mapping Our Resourced Responses
RESOURCING IN THE MIDST OF COLLAPSE: How We Stay Rooted When the World Feels Too Much
THE FIRST RUPTURES OF BELONGING: On Power, Rank, and the Rise of a Hegemonic Worldview
REIMAGINING HEALING: What would a healed ecosystem look like, sound like, feel like?
What I am dreaming of…
A dedicated space for leaders to be in collective inquiry, practice, and connection as we explore healing-centered leadership and healing-centered ecosystems.
A rhythm of learning, gathering, and being together.
A space for remembering our wholeness.
If you are a leader, facilitator, founder, organizer, educator, healer, or community builder who feels the ache of trauma-led systems with all its intense pace, the pressure, the saviorism, the extraction, this might be a space your body has been quietly longing for.
This Community of Practice is a year-long remembering.An invitation to bring healing into the center of our leadership.To practice stewardship instead of saviorism.To lead with attunement instead of urgency.To root into kapwa, our shared humanity, and build pockets of Refugia wherever we are planted.
Join me starting January in a dedicated space to reimagine, re-align, and remember.
THE HEALING-CENTERED ECOSYSTEMS COMMUNITY OF PRACTICE
A gathering for leaders who want to lead from rootedness, repair, and relational wellbeing.
This is a tending place for leaders who want to lead differently.
Because we cannot build liberatory systems with dysregulated bodies.Because relational change requires leaders who can feel, notice, repair, and restore.Because culture shifts when leaders remember their essence, not just their roles.Because healing is not individual work, it is deeply communal, interdependent, and relational.
Who This Is For
This is a home for leaders who want to:
center healing in how they lead
deepen their relationship with their nervous system
practice kapwa and pakikiramdam as leadership strategies
deepen awareness of colonial patterns and how to shift to regenerative practices
hold grief, rage, joy, and longing with compassion
embed repair and reconciliation as core leadership practices
build relational, healing-centered cultures
rehearse futures that feel safe in the body
root into ancestral wisdom and embodied stewardship
What You’ll Experience
Each month includes:
1. A Live Practice Gathering (120 minutes)
A grounding space with:
somatic arriving
a short story or teaching
a guided practice
small-group reflection
communal harvesting
These zoom sessions move gently but deeply.
2. Refugia Circles (Self-organized small groups)
You’ll join a small trio/quartet that meets between sessions. These circles are pockets of warmth where you practice the monthly ritual, reflect on what’s alive, and support one another in integration.
3. Monthly Practice Guide
You will receive:
a grounding ritual
a somatic or sensory practice
reflection prompts
a relational exercise
This community is a tending place, a Refugia space for your remembering.
If you feel called to be in this space with me, do join me! Read more about the proposed 12 arcs for the monthly gatherings by clicking on the link or the image below.
