Description

Women's Leadership | Healing & Ancestral Wisdom | Mental Health & Burnout Recovery

Black women have always known how to transform what's in front of them—even when no one was watching, even when it wasn't called leadership.

Return to Presence is a podcast for women leading in high-stakes environments—whether you're running an organization, raising a family, building a business, shepherding a faith community, teaching, healing, creating, or holding your community together. If you're carrying the weight of other people's survival and your own, this is for you.

Hosted by Dr. Shawna Murray-Browne, LCSW-C—integrative psychotherapist, executive advisor, cultural historian, and womanist scholar—each episode draws on nearly 100 years of Black women's oral histories, from elders who lived through Jim Crow to modern-day changemakers, to explore what their wisdom can teach us about leading without losing ourselves.

For too long, women—especially Black women—have been expected to lead under conditions that shorten lives and diminish humanity. This podcast examines burnout, the weathering hypothesis, chronic stress, and the toll of leading through systemic barriers while offering pathways to healing and transformation. We explore what it means to prepare our children for uncertain times, to sustain ourselves and our communities, and to lead with our full humanity intact.

Each episode offers mental health tools grounded in cultural wisdom, spiritual practices backed by research, and embodied healing strategies.

This is Black women's wisdom. It's for anyone ready to lead differently.

Return to presence—to the quiet place where you can feel your essence, hear yourself clearly, and access the highest version of who you are.