Today we’d like to introduce you to Heather Rebecca Wilson.
Hi Heather, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
First of all, thank you so much for this opportunity to share my story! Doing this interview feels like the completion of a powerful cycle of personal healing, growth, and evolution at this point in my life. I am deeply grateful for this chance to reflect on and digest all of the transformational, energetic shifts that have allowed me to arrive here.
My journey to becoming a Transformational Leadership Coach, Embodied Empowerment Coach, Ancestral Healing Guide, and Inclusive Culture Catalyst was a healing spiral that began in childhood, though of course, none of it made much sense until much later in life. As the middle child of a multiethnic, blended family with a Filipina mother and Black father, I have had to navigate complex issues of racial identity development and challenging relationship dynamics from a very young age. Looking back, it’s no surprise that I gravitated towards coaching and diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging work – it was and still is an essential part of my own healing journey and how I share my intuitive gifts with the world today.
I was born on unceded Piscataway/Monacan/Cherokee territory, also known as Washington, D.C. and grew up in the Northern Virginia suburbs of Arlington and McLean. My maternal ancestors are from the Visayan islands of Leyte, Samar, and Iloilo in what is now known as the Philippines. My paternal ancestors are from West Africa, primarily Nigeria and Ghana, as well as the British Isles.
I started coaching in 2015 as a result of becoming disenchanted and frustrated with the limitations of diversity, equity, and inclusion work (DEI) in the realm of independent school education at the time. And specifically at the school that I attended from ages 7 to 18, where I was employed officially as the K-12 Service Learning Coordinator and “volunteering” as the DEI Liaison for the Upper School (high school).
Returning to the place where so much of my racialized identity trauma took place, the “scene of the crime” so to speak, was absolutely necessary for my healing. I did have a number of racially traumatic experiences there, and they were horrible. Full stop. At the same time, I also have many happy childhood memories and some lifelong friendships that developed during this era of my life that I continue to treasure to this day.
As an employee of the school, I got to see everything from a different perspective, which was a gift. Some of my favorite teachers became beloved colleagues and friends. In my role as DEI Liaison, I was invited to attend the NAIS Diversity Leadership Institute and National Diversity Directors Institute, where I obtained language and a framework for understanding my multiracial identity development experience on an intellectual level.
After being surrounded by 70+ other educators from all over the country in a multiracial affinity group (where everyone self-identifies in the same way and no one has to do engage in the emotional, intellectual, and spiritual labor of teaching about their lived experience) at the NAIS People of Color Conference (PoCC) in 2014, I felt empowered and inspired. I wasn’t alone in my experience of feeling as though I never belonged in any one group.
Growing up in the very white world of the D.C. area independent schools, I never felt white enough for my white friends at school, Black enough for relatives on the Black side of my family, or Filipino enough for that side of my family. Being around so many others with a similar experience of not “belonging” at PoCC was like medicine for my soul. I had found my “people”.
When I returned to work after that conference, I announced that I wanted to give a presentation on “Multiracial Identity Development” to the entire Upper School community, and that is exactly what I did about three months later. I knew it was going to be emotional for myself since I was going to share so vulnerably about my own life and in the very place where so much pain was visited upon me, but I was struck by how evocative it was for other people. It seemed as though my ability to articulate what had been unsaid for so long in that community helped many people feel seen for the first time. Over the days that followed, I received many thoughtfully written cards and tear-filled embraces of appreciation from students and colleagues alike, and something just clicked. “This is what I’m supposed to be doing”, I thought to myself.
Later that year, I found myself back at PoCC, but this time as a presenter. I facilitated a workshop for educators called “The Impact of Storytelling on Diversity Work” and had a blast doing it. The feedback from participants was again, incredibly positive and encouraging. However, as I expressed my desire to do more in my role as the DEI Liaison confronting privilege and cultural superiority at work and actually get paid for it, it became clear I had reached the end of my journey there because they were not interested. This is when I began to transition into pursuing coaching as my full-time gig.
My first life coaching offering was geared towards empowering other multiracial women, but it fell flat. It even became a running joke among some of my coaching friends who were also building businesses (all of whom were white at the time, by the way) that people didn’t want to talk about race and that I should shift my focus if I wanted to make money as a coach. So, not wanting to look like a “loser” who was never going to make it as an entrepreneur, I did just that. I dropped the DEI lens in my coaching business and went back to the drawing board.
After a few years exploring different coaching niches such as supporting “aspiring female entrepreneurs” and “female creatives”, in 2017 I was intuitively guided to a women’s empowerment and embodiment coaching program where I first learned how to hold space for clients to transmute s*xual trauma into creative potential. Of course, in order to coach clients with integrity, presence, non-judgment, and compassion, I had to go through my own healing journey inside the program. As a result, I was forever changed on a mental, emotional, spiritual, and physical level.
With Hillary Clinton losing the 2016 US presidential election, along with the rise of the Black Lives Matter and #MeToo movements into our collective consciousness, conversations were getting very heated in the online coaching space. So in 2018, the founder of that coaching program reached out and invited me to teach a class for the next year’s cohort on diversity and inclusion in the online coaching world, where I shared how to be inclusive and sensitive to race when working with clients across different identities and cultures. She was aware of my background in DEI because of a short conversation I initiated with her at one of our in-person retreats the year before.
Guiding 100+ coaches through this presentation was a huge turning point in my career. My body was literally shaking once I signed off after Q & A at the end. Again, I received enormous positive feedback from the attendees. I also started getting tagged in many toxic conversations around race that were happening inside different coaching Facebook groups. Wanting to keep up with the momentum from the workshop, I felt pressure to “strike while the iron was hot” and started to weigh in with my perspective.
Doing this unpaid emotional, intellectual, and spiritual labor online, along with being in a toxic relationship with a partner who was not only lacking in racial awareness but actually became hostile and aggressive whenever confronted with his own unconscious biases, I was overcome with acute anxiety and depression. I felt like I was living in my own personal hell (we finally broke up in early 2021).
Due to my parents’ own internalized oppression, I was raised to coddle white people as a survival strategy to get a “seat at the table”. However, with a newly activated and highly sensitive nervous system from the deep somatic work I had done during my training, I could no longer numb myself to the emotional, psychological, and spiritual violence experienced by people of color – especially in the self-proclaimed “woke” communities online and off (in the past couple of years this word has been co-opted by far right extremists, but that’s a whole other conversation).
The cruelty, contempt, and dehumanization permeating our discourse around racism and other systems of oppression felt like too much to bear. Feeling our collective pain-body of slavery, colonization, racism, s*xism, and misogyny in my body and waking up to more layers of my own internalized oppression was the biggest heartbreak of my life. Disgusted with humanity, I had never been more disappointed with the world.
All my relationships shifted at once in different directions, threatening my sense of safety and belonging. I felt disoriented and isolated. It was actually quite scary. Even with all of my resources and specialized knowledge, I considered suicide.
In what felt like drowning in grief and sadness, I felt removed from and outside of normal times. Everything around me was moving so fast and I was in free fall. Whatever was moving through me was on the verge of obliterating me. Energetically, I was bursting at the seams.
Thankfully, I was privileged enough to have access to resources and the support of a wonderful community of family and friends. I listened to my intuition and got myself in the healing hands of my wonderful acupuncturist here in LA, Gianna de la Torre.
I crawled onto her table in a puddle of tears. Totally drained and desperate, I begged her for relief. In the blur of it all, I do remember saying to her, “I can’t hold this any longer. I don’t even want to be here anymore, I’m just so sad.”
She helped me to realize that I was experiencing a massive energetic clearing, processing deeper layers of ancestral and multiracial identity development trauma and thusly, a shift in consciousness.
Taking meds did help. I felt calmer and was able to finally get some sleep. I stopped taking them after a week but continued with herbs and CBD. I increased my visits to my energy healer and acupuncturist to once a week and received my first Reiki treatment.
I reached out to supportive friends and family and began going to Agape International Spiritual Center twice a week for services, meditation, and sacred activism ministry gatherings.
As I started to feel some relief, I became very present to how much money I was spending on my healing. I am not going to lie – it was a lot! I started to wonder what other women of color could do to ease their suffering when they did not have the same access to the same resources and knowledge that I did.
I asked myself, “what do I have available to me now that I already possess that can support my healing? In what ways can I heal myself? In what ways can women heal each other?”
I was guided back to the embodiment practices I had learned as part of coaching training. Using my intuition and resources from this program, I created an empowering and holistic healing plan for myself to begin to dismantle internalized oppression that addressed the body, mind, energy, and spirit.
As part of my own healing process, I was also called to start holding space for other women of color (WOC). That’s when I approached my neighbor, Paula Mallis, founder of WMN Space in Culver City, about facilitating my first “Women of Color Healing Circle” at her beautiful venue. Thankfully, she said “yes”, and I was off and running with monthly gatherings. I eventually felt strong enough to hold consciousness-raising “alliance” spaces for female-bodied beings across lineages and cultures, in addition to WOC and Filipinx affinity spaces, online and off. Then the pandemic happened.
After witnessing and holding sacred space for transmuting ancestral, racialized, and s*xual trauma into creative potential inside these healing circles, as well as my own 1-on-1 private coaching practice, I began to realize the profound need for more healing spaces, and as such, facilitators with the capacity to hold the depth of container for real transformation and healing.
In order to fulfill this need, especially in light of the collective traumas of the global pandemic and racial justice protests following the murder of George Floyd, I created 9-month group coaching program, “High Priestess of the Heart: The Art of Evolutionary Sacred Space Holding” for female-bodied, coaches, healers, and holistic leaders in 2020. Inside this program I helped participants move through their unconscious biases, limiting family patterns and energetic blocks so that they could expand into a higher and deeper level of embodied leadership in these uncertain times.
Since then, I’ve continued with my private 1-on-1 coaching practice. I’ve also expanded my leadership capacity to serve forward-thinking, innovative and legacy organizations in the tech startup and healthcare spaces as a site coach and consultant for fostering trauma-informed workplaces and developing trauma-informed leaders.
Most recently, I’ve amplified my influence to impact even more people this year by appearing as a featured expert on the BIPoC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) episode of a new television show, “Reality of Love”, with celebrity Love Coach, Nicole Moore, on bspokeTV, to share my perspective on dating and relationships as an empowered multiracial woman of color.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Needless to say, after sharing all of the above, it has NOT been a smooth road! However, all of it had to happen in order to be where I am today, which is very happy and fulfilled in my work and with my life partner, Thomas, who is also multiracial (Black and white).
For sure, being slapped in the face by institutional racism and classicism at nine years old was the core traumatic event that inspired my life’s work. In the late ’80s, I found out from my peers at school that a “dance class” I wanted to attend required that I be “invited” first. After I begged my parents to find out how I could be “invited”, they called around and were told “maybe next year”. It turned out that this organization openly discriminated against Black people. Even worse than that, this seemed to be OK with everyone. I don’t think my friends at school knew I was Black (my Dad is very light-skinned with red hair and freckles), so you can only imagine what people (throughout my life) felt comfortable saying around me thinking they were “safe” to be as racist as they wanted to be,
In this moment, I lost my innocence. Up until then, I thought I was the same as everyone else. What I gained was a powerful unconscious belief that I would never be accepted or belong and that I needed to be perfect in order to be loved.
Sadly, my parents’ internalized oppression was so deep and insidious that they encouraged this striving for absolute perfection as a survival strategy.
Out of love and a desire to protect me in the only way they knew how, they raised me to enable and accommodate “white fragility”, which controversial author and white anti-racism educator Robin D’Angelo explains is “the inability to tolerate racial stress. Racial stress is triggered when our positions, perspectives, or advantages are challenged. White fragility functions to block the challenge and regain white racial equilibrium.”
As an immigrant who grew up aspiring to achieve the “American Dream” and the product of colonial education, my mother was conditioned to associate “whiteness” with success and was therefore mainly concerned about her children conforming to standards of “whiteness” in order to fit in. In this way, we would be “real” Americans and enjoy all the abundance she could only dream about as a child.
With this in my mind, it is easy to understand why I was never taught to speak my mother’s native tongue, Waray, one of the many languages spoken in the archipelago now known as the Philippines.
My dad was born in Silver Hill, MD and grew up during the Jim Crow era in which he has distinct memories of using “colored only” water fountains and bathrooms. This time period was essentially an evolution of slavery in so far as the ideology that Black people were less than human remained unaddressed in the collective consciousness. Black people had little to no access to resources, opportunities, or wealth and had to be in constant survival mode out of fear of violence.
Resilient and adaptive, he cut himself off from his emotions and instead focused on academic achievement and establishing a career as a doctor. I was raised to take the same defensive posture, in which anything less than being twice as “good” as everyone else was unacceptable.
This was my foundation. The inheritance of my family of origin. Or so I thought. It turns out this was just another layer of trauma that was stacked upon generations and generations of historical trauma on both sides of my family.
I also think that these traumas instilled in me the idea that I didn’t deserve to be happy, which I now know for me means feeling fully seen in my relationships. This is why I attracted and put up with unsuitable romantic partners for the vast majority of my life before I engaged in this work of healing my own racialized trauma and shedding colonial patterns of codependency and enmeshment. The ongoing process of decolonizing for me has primarily been boundary work. I had to put a stop to allowing myself be drained and exhausted by people who would never understand me and in the worst moments even attempt to “gaslight” me by claiming I was being too sensitive about race, it was all in my mind, and I needed to just “get over it”. Being with Thomas has been such a wonderful breath of fresh air. I can now do my DEI work, come home, and not have to fight with or teach anyone. I can relax, receive, replenish, and know I deserve it! It’s one thing to be with someone who has empathy for the multiracial experience, but something else entirely when they have lived it and know what it feels like in their own body. I don’t have to teach or explain anything to him around race or racial identity because he’s lived a similar experience. It sounds really cheesy, but I’m dead serious when I say that my soul is singing a song I didn’t even know it needed to sing. I never in a million years thought I could be this happy, so I am truly grateful for him and for my own courage to do the “inner work” of transformation that was necessary for us to come together in a healthy, conscious relationship.
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know?
I am a Transformational Leadership Coach, Embodied Empowerment Coach, Ancestral Healing Guide, and Inclusive Culture Catalyst. Inspired by my own holistic healing journey to dissolve internalized oppression, I empower forward-thinking individuals and organizations to embody transformation of deep cultural programming and conditioning and shifts to higher levels of consciousness for a more just, peaceful, and compassionate world.
What sets me apart from others is that I am walking the path of healing the ancestral lines on both sides of my multiracial family and becoming a responsible steward of my indigenous spiritual traditions and wisdom. My purpose, as part of my own healing journey, is to support others in healing their ancestral lines as well. Enhanced intuitive and psychic abilities have been the natural outgrowth of the ancestral healing and embodiment work I have done, so that is woven into everything that I do and the way I serve my clients. I truly believe that your capacity to hold space for the unresolved grief of your ancestors is what grounds your in your leadership practice and opens the doors for each of us to receive the divine, intuitive gifts of our lineages. True, healing transformation occurs when we create a “new reality” on the level of our nervous system. As such, my signature process involves healing on all levels of your being – mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual.
My offerings include 1-on-1 coaching for female-bodied individuals who are serious and ready to dive into real transformational healing, consulting packages (that can include 1-on-1 transformational leadership coaching) for forward-thinking individuals and organizations that desire to foster trauma-informed, inclusive cultures of belonging and well-being, and “Legacy of Compassion” my 12-week embodied leadership program for female-bodied coaches, healers, facilitators, and conscious people-leaders who want to embody a new leadership identity and amplify their influence to connect with the people they are meant to serve in this lifetime (starts January 10th, 2023 – enrollment is now open). I also offer single sessions such as 45-minute Intuitive Energy Readings, 75-minute Ancestral Insight Sessions, and 90-minute Life Path Astrology® Readings.
What would you say have been one of the most important lessons you’ve learned?
There have been so many lessons along this path. If I had to pick one, I would say that it was learning that I am the caretaker of my own energy and that the world around me is a reflection of my internal state. That is, if anything, anyone, or any situation came into my life/energetic field that I didn’t “like”, I shouldn’t push it away, reject it, or label it as the “other” or “not me”, but rather be open to how the universe is showing me a part of myself that is unhealed and ready to be integrated. Having said that, this must be balanced with the fact that there are systemic, structural, and oppressive forces out there working against a lot of people – remnants of colonialism and superiority culture. So, I don’t think it’s only up to individuals to do their own healing – there is collective healing work that needs to happen as well. I think the point is it’s OK to start small. Your life is a microcosm of the macrocosm. Be present to what is in front you. Trust that you will be divinely guided to the “right” next thing and that your energy and presence make a difference.
Pricing:
- Private 1-on-1 Coaching Packages (Start at $6K)
- Legacy of Compassion Embodied Leadership Program ($3,497.00 – Payment plans available)
- 90-Minute Life Path Astrology® Reading ($444.00)
- 75-Minute Ancestral Insight Session ($250.00)
- 45-Minute Intuitive Energy Reading ($111.00)
Contact Info:
- Website: www.heatherrebeccawilson.com
- Instagram: @heatherrebeccawilson & @embodieddiversity
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/heatherrebeccawilson
- Other: www.embodieddiversity.com
Image Credits
Photos by Caroline White @carolinewphoto 3 photos total – the one of me in the black and white outfit with glasses, the one where I’m sitting on the floor with tarot cards, and other one where I’m standing in a field with yellow flowers wearing a hat.
