Grounded Women Series — Week 3: Vashti Murphy McKenzie + Josephine Truxton Ridgley

Shepherds Who Lead With Presence:
Faith Beyond Performance

This essay is part of the Grounded Women series from Embracing Me by Stacie J. Whitaker-Harris. Please share with attribution. Reproduction without permission is not permitted.

Last week in our series, we explored the emotional courage modeled by Taraji P. Henson and Brené Brown, two women who remind us that vulnerability is not weakness, but strength. They challenge the idea that we must appear well while quietly carrying the weight of unresolved pain.

But vulnerability does not stop with awareness.

Eventually, it asks something more of us.

How do we live from that truth?
How do we lead our lives and our communities from a place that is grounded, honest, and whole?

This week I want to explore spiritual leadership.

Not the kind rooted in titles, platforms, or performance, but the kind that grows quietly within us as we learn to lead ourselves first.

Because before we shepherd others, we must learn how to sit with our own souls.

Two remarkable women influenced me with this kind of leadership: Bishop Vashti Murphy McKenzie and Bishop Dr. Josephine Truxton Ridgley.

Their leadership modeled something I deeply needed: space for authenticity, curiosity, and healing.

My Spiritual Journey Didn’t Start in a Church

When I think about my spiritual faith journey, it did not begin in a sanctuary or during a sermon. It began when I was eight years old, sitting in my living room, contemplating life and death. It was the first time I experienced suicidal ideation.

Of course, at eight years old, I did not know what to call it. I just knew something heavy had settled into my mind. In that same moment, I also experienced something else: an encounter with God that would stay with me long after the moment passed.

Even though those thoughts resurfaced later in life, that encounter did something important for me.

It kept me honest about my feelings. It softened me enough to stay open, vulnerable, and sometimes even vocal to a fault because society often tells us to quiet our pain.

“Hush now.”
“Life isn’t that bad.”
“Look at people who have it worse.”

Our experiences often minimized, our feelings dismissed, and we are told to push through.

But my relationship with God never allowed me to pretend I was okay when I wasn’t. Instead, it led me into a lifelong process of learning and unlearning.

For me, walking with God has meant studying the Bible, asking questions, and developing a personal relationship outside of rigid systems.

To some, that might look like rebellion. For me, it has always been the process of discovering my true identity. The one given before the formation.

When a Book Opens Something in You

Sometime around 2008, I picked up the book Journey to the Well by Bishop Vashti Murphy McKenzie. I will not lie. That book opened something in me. It exposed my guilt, my shame, and the brokenness I had been carrying quietly for years. But it also gave me the courage to keep moving forward in whatever way I could.

Standing.
Crawling.
Sitting.

Or even lying down while the process unfolded, because healing is not linear.

For years, I wrestled with the language and traditions I had inherited in religious spaces. Some practices encouraged growth, but others asked me to shrink. Stay quiet. Push through exhaustion. Ignore my needs. Serve without rest.

Eventually I realized something important.

Leadership that requires you to disappear is not leadership rooted in love. It is performance.

Leadership That Makes Room for Humanity

Later in my journey, I became a minister at Called to Action Church under the leadership of Bishop Dr. Josephine Truxton Ridgley.

She did something many people had not allowed me to do. 

She allowed me to show up as myself.

She welcomed questions. She encouraged learning, community, service, and rest.

She corrected me when I needed it, which I welcomed, because no one is above accountability. But correction came from love, not control.

She also allowed me to lead Bible studies, which deepened my hunger for learning and studying even more.

During that season, I needed that kind of leadership more than anyone realized.

At the time, my life felt like it was unraveling.

I was homeless.
Working endless hours.
Separated from my children in ways that still break my heart to think about.

In order to make sure they were safe; we had to live in separate households.

While I was trying to survive, the wounded little girl inside me was still making decisions from unresolved trauma.

I was still searching for love in places that could never hold it.

That little girl carried daddy issues and trauma so complex that she did not even realize she was creating chaos in the grown woman’s life and in the lives of her children.

It is strange how survival can convince you that you are making the best decisions available.

Only later do you look back and cringe at the choices you were making along the way.

I have spent a lot of time apologizing for that version of myself. Not because I carry shame anymore, but because I now understand the impact of unresolved trauma.

Learning to Live Without Chaos

When I left Baltimore and moved to Georgia, something began to shift. That is where my healing journey began to settle.

My Grace New Hope family surrounded me with kindness and support. Pastors Randy and Anita Rainwater walked alongside me in ways that helped me begin building healthier foundations.

They taught me something that once felt unfamiliar.

Boundaries.
Self-love.
Peace.

But when you have adapted to chaos for a long time, calm can feel uncomfortable, even suspicious.

Healing often requires learning an entirely new rhythm.

For me, that rhythm continued to deepen when I later moved to Arizona.

When Healing Finally Finds Its Doorway

My Kaleo community in Arizona helped carry me even further into the work of healing. My mentor Gayle helped me see something I had never fully understood before.

I was not struggling to heal simply because of what others had done to me.

I was struggling because I had not forgiven the little girl inside me.

She was scared. She had survived the only way she knew how. Letting go of old patterns felt terrifying because they were familiar. Trauma had become part of her identity.

Without it, who would she be?

Not the titles.
Not the roles.
Not the hats we wear.

Just being.

And learning how to exist without performing survival was one of the hardest lessons of my life.

Why Embracing Me Was Born

Looking back, I believe this is why the vision for Embracing Me formed in my spirit many years ago, long before it became a blog.

Embracing Me is more than a platform. It is a journey of self-discovery, healing, and honoring the divine within.

Here I share my life experiences, the beautiful, the broken, and the still unfolding, to remind others that healing is possible.

For years, I hid my gifts and my stories out of fear. Through faith, I have chosen to embrace who I am and share my God-given talents with the world.

Through essays, poetry, coaching, and peer support, my hope is to guide others toward wholeness, learning to live fully and freely in harmony with mind, body, and spirit.

Because Embracing Me is not just about my journey.

It is about yours too.

We all deserve to experience wholeness.

Sacred Self-Leadership: A Personal Inventory

This week I invite you to pause and sit with yourself for a moment. Not to rush toward answers, but to explore what leadership might look like in your own life.

Leading Yourself

What emotions have I been taught to silence or minimize?
What would compassion toward my younger self look like today?
Where in my life am I performing instead of being honest?

Leading in Community

Do the spaces I belong to allow room for curiosity, questions, and growth?
Where am I shrinking to maintain acceptance?
How might my presence, not my perfection, serve others?

Healing and Spiritual Grounding

What beliefs about faith or spirituality am I ready to examine or redefine?
What parts of my story still carry shame that need gentleness instead?
What practices help me reconnect to peace, love, and joy?

Looking Ahead

Spiritual leadership teaches us how to come home to ourselves. It reminds us that healing, honesty, and compassion are not weaknesses. They are foundations.

When we learn to lead our own lives with presence, something begins to shift. We stop performing survival and start building something more sustainable.

Peace.
Wisdom.
Purpose.

Eventually that inner work begins to influence how we move through life. It shapes how we pursue education, how we steward resources, and how we create stability not just for ourselves, but for the generations that follow.

Because leadership is not only emotional or spiritual. It is practical too. It shows up in the choices we make about knowledge, money, opportunity, and legacy.

Next week we will explore what it looks like when women step into academic and financial leadership.

Through the examples of Michelle Obama, Mellody Hobson, and Deborah Owens, we will talk about what it means to build a purse, a purpose, and a plan, and why financial sovereignty is one of the most powerful forms of leadership women can cultivate.

Because healing your life is powerful.

But learning how to sustain it is transformational.

Thoughtfully Yours,

Stacie J.

 

Grounded Women Series — Week 2: Taraji P. Henson + Brené Brown

Strong Women Feel Deeply: Emotional Intelligence as Leadership

This essay is part of the Grounded Women series from Embracing Me by Stacie J. Whitaker-Harris. Please share with attribution. Reproduction without permission is not permitted.

Strength is often misunderstood. 

For generations, women, especially Black women, have been taught that strength means endurance without expression. Keep moving. Keep performing. Keep holding everything together. Do not pause long enough for anyone to acknowledge the weight you carry, but emotional leadership tells a different story. 

Emotional leadership asks us not only to persevere, but to feel, reflect, and speak truthfully about what it means to be human. 

This week in the Grounded Women series, we explore mental and emotional leadership through the lives and work of two women who have reshaped the conversation around vulnerability and courage: Taraji P. Henson and Brené Brown. 

I chose these two women intentionally because their work reflects something I believe deeply: healing, leadership, and wholeness require honesty about the human experience. 

Each in her own way embodies an approach to total-body wellness that honors lived experience and vulnerability with purpose. They understand that not everyone will lean into the work of self-healing, and not everyone will be ready to hear the message. 

Yet they continue to stand tall and speak anyway, giving voice to those who often go unseen or unheard: the lost, the least, the lonely, and the left out. 

Where Their Work Intersects

At first glance, Taraji and Brené live in different worlds: Hollywood and academia; art and data; story and study. 

They meet in the same sacred place, and they both insist that what we bury does not disappear. 

It shows up. 

In our bodies. 

In our relationships.

In our parenting. 

In our leadership.

In our ability to rest.

In our capacity to stay soft without breaking. 

Taraji gives language to survival, the kind shaped by culture, responsibility, and real-life consequences. 

Brené gives language to inner freedom, the kind that comes when shame loses its grip and courage becomes a practice. 

Different lanes. Same destination: wholeness.

Taraji says: "This is what it feels like."

Brené says: "This is what's happening inside you, and this is how you heal without shame."

Taraji P. Henson: Storytelling That Tells The Truth

Taraji P. Henson is widely recognized as a talented actress, but her impact stretches far beyond the screen. 

What makes her leadership powerful is not simply her success; it is her willingness to use her voice to confront difficult truths about mental health, trauma, and emotional survival. 

Throughout her career, Henson has portrayed characters who reflect the complicated emotional realities many families live with but rarely discuss openly. 

Two roles in particular stand out as cultural mirrors. 

In Baby Boy, Henson portrayed Yvette, a young woman working through love, motherhood, and instability within a relationship shaped by immaturity, trauma, and economic pressure. The film did not shy away from the emotional tensions that arise when adulthood arrives before emotional readiness. 

It showed the strain placed on women who often find themselves carrying responsibility for relationships, children, and stability while partners wrestle with unresolved pain of their own. 

Years later, Henson would take on the now-iconic role of Cookie Lyon in Empire. 

Cookie is bold, complex, fierce, and deeply human. Her character enters the story after years of incarceration, attempting to rebuild a life and reconnect with a family fractured by ambition, secrets, addiction, trauma, and betrayal. 

Beneath the glamour and power struggles of the Lyon family lies something far more familiar: family wounds that were never fully addressed. 

Cookie Lyon was not a perfect character. She was protective and fierce. Sometimes wounded. Sometimes wise. Sometimes reacting from pain. That is exactly why she resonated with so many viewers. 

She represented the emotional complexity of women who are constantly rebuilding. Women who have experienced loss, made difficult decisions, and still find the strength to show up for their families. 

When the Performance Ends

What makes Taraji's leadership especially meaningful is that she did not leave these conversations confined to fictional characters. 

She brought them into real life. 

In 2018, she founded the Boris Lawrence Henson Foundation, named after her father with a focus on breaking stigma and increasing access to culturally competent mental health support, particularly within the Black community. 

Her message is simple but powerful: Healing cannot happen in silence. 

When public figures speak openly about mental health, they disrupt long-standing cultural narratives that equate vulnerability with weakness. They give voice to people who have been struggling quietly, and remind us that emotional pain does not evaporate simply because we refuse to name it. Taraji teaches this kind of emotional leadership from the ground level: not theory, but lived truth. 

Brené Brown: Research That Gives People Permission to Be Human

If Taraji's work shows us what pain looks like in real life, Brené Brown's work helps explain what pain does inside us and what it takes to move through it. 

Brené is a researcher and storyteller who has spent decades studying courage, vulnerability, shame, and empathy, translating that research into language people can actually use in real life. She is also the host of the podcasts Unlocking Us and Dare to Lead, where the goal is not performance, but honest conversation. 

More recently, she was named Executive Chair of the Daring Leadership Institute at BetterUp, but the most important thing about Brené is not her resume. It is her bottom line: 

You do not get to courage by going around vulnerability. You only get there by walking through it. 

That message matters for women who have been taught to bypass emotion in the name of "being strong," but especially Black women, who for too long have held the title and role as "The strong Black woman." And, especially when "strong" has meant: 

Do not need anything. 
Do not say anything. 

Do not feel too much. 

Do not fall apart. 

In The Gifts of Imperfection, Brown pushes against that performance-based living and points people toward wholeheartedness...showing up as you are, not as who you think you are supposed to be. 

The Balance Between Them

This is where their work locks arms. 

Taraji exposes the cost of emotional suppression, especially for Black women carrying family systems, community expectations, and generational pain. 

Brené provides a framework for what it looks like to stop performing strength and start practicing courage. 

Taraji says: "This is what it feels like."

Brené says: "This is what is happening inside you, and this is how you heal without shame."

Taraji normalizes therapy and culturally competent care as a justice issue: access, stigma, and survival. 

Brené normalizes vulnerability as a leadership issue: trust, connection, emotional agility, and braver cultures. 

Different tools. Same mission. 

Where I Enter the Story

Their work also intersects with my own because my story sits inside a family history of generational trauma. The kind that taught women to keep going no matter what, until the body eventually collected the debt. In my family, burnout did not just mean exhaustion. 

It showed up as physical breakdown. 

As illness. 

As women carrying too much for too long. 

As early death. 

As a quiet pattern no one wanted to name because naming it would force us to grieve it. 

When you come from that kind of lineage, you can start to confuse suffering with inheritance. 

You can start to believe you are "doing life right" as long as you are depleted. 

But I am working to heal and set a new precedent in my family. 

Not just by achieving. 

Not just by producing, but by practicing emotional honesty. 

By learning to rest without guilt. 

By getting brave enough to feel what I used to outrun. 

By choosing support instead of silence. 

By letting healing become the legacy. 

Taraji and Brené help me name what I am doing. 

Taraji reminds me that silence is not strength. 

Brené reminds me that vulnerability is not weakness. It is the doorway. 

Every time I choose to tell the truth about what I feel before my body has to scream it, I am breaking a cycle. 

What I Want Readers to Learn About Themselves

This March series is not simply "look at these incredible women." It is an invitation. I want readers, especially women, to see themselves and ask:

• Where have I confused emotional suppression with strength?
• What have I been powering through that deserves compassion, not criticism?
• What part of me is begging to be acknowledged: not fixed, not rushed, just seen?
• What would change if I stopped performing wellness and started practicing it?
• If my body could talk, what would it say about how I have been living?

Leadership is not only about how you show up for others. It is how you show up for yourself when nobody is clapping, when nobody is watching, when the old version of you would rather numb out than tell the truth. 

Taraji and Brené remind us: 

Strong women do not feel less. 

Strong women feel deeply and lead honestly anyway. 

Closing Reflection

Some of us were raised to be resilient, but resilience without release becomes a cage. This week, Taraji teaches us to speak what we survived. Brené teaches us to release the shame that keeps survival stuck in our bodies. 

I am learning that healing is not a single breakthrough. It is a series of brave choices. 

Sometimes the bravest thing you can do is admit you are tired. 

Sometimes the bravest thing you can do is ask for help. 

Sometimes the bravest thing you can do is stop "proving" you are okay, because grounded is not about having it all together. It's about being rooted enough to be real. 

Next Week in the Grounded Women Series

Next week, the series turns toward spiritual leadership and the women whose faith, conviction, and inner grounding changed how we understand purpose, resilience, and calling. 

Thoughtfully Yours, 

Stacie J.