Bridging Healing and Activism (w/ Noëlle Janka)

Mar 12 2024 • 40 mins

“Healing doesn't look like getting back to the way things were before, the way things were before made you sick.”

Noëlle Janka is a politicized career and healing coach dedicated to supporting social change leaders. For the past decade, she has brought together her personal experience navigating chronic illness with her passion for social justice and transforming systems of oppression. Noëlle recently published her book, Rebel Healing: Transforming Ourselves and the Systems that Make Us Sick.

In this conversation, Noëlle shares concrete ways coaches can support social change leaders to reconnect with their bodies, intuition, and a sense of interconnectedness. We explore how coaching can help prevent burnout by focusing not just on doing more, but on what needs to stop. And Noëlle opens up about embracing her role as a healer within social movements and how she navigates the tension between one-on-one work and large-scale transformation.

Check out the episode page for the transcript and the full list of the resources mentioned in this episode: https://widerroots.com/4

Key moments

02:04 - The Root Cause: What inspired you to write Rebel Healing?
06:41 - Doing work for justice with a more regulated nervous system
13:45 - Preventing burnout: Coaching can be about doing less, not more
17:23 - Healing: 30% repair, 70% transformation
21:51 - Serving 1-on-1: Embracing the role of healer within social movements
28:28 - Coaching Technique: Reconnecting with body wisdom and intuition in coaching
34:25 - Noëlle's sources of inspiration
36:52 - Closing