“I thought I was teaching people how to breathe. I was actually teaching myself.”

For much of my life, I believed my work was about helping people move through pain, grief, transition, and uncertainty. Over more than four decades of cumulative experience, I have served in many roles—counselor, coach, ordained minister, author, facilitator, keynote speaker, corporate trainer, host, and community leader. Yet somewhere along the journey, I discovered that the practices I was offering others were also inviting me more deeply into my own life.

I thought I was teaching people how to breathe. I was actually learning how to become still enough to hear myself.

That realization became part of the foundation for Sacred Pause™, a contemplative practice rooted in a simple understanding: there is nothing to fix. Human beings are not problems to be solved. Sometimes what we call healing is really remembering—remembering what remains beneath trauma, fear, inherited stories, expectations, and all the ways we learned to survive.

Sacred Pause™ has since grown beyond an individual contemplative practice into an adaptable framework for leadership, organizational and team development, education, community well-being, and restorative experiences. I customize the practice to meet the people and purpose of each space—from Conscious Discipline team development with The Community Development Center and Breathe Before You Build with the Global Society for Female Entrepreneurs (GSFE), to university presentations, retreats, master classes, and community gatherings. Across settings, the invitation remains consistent: to create enough space between experience and response for awareness, discernment, connection, and a wiser reply to emerge.

My work today lives at the intersection of lived experience, scholarship, spirituality, culture, and community. My academic foundation began in Africana Studies and expanded through graduate study in Clinical Mental Health Counseling. I am currently pursuing doctoral studies in Psychology with a concentration in Consciousness, Spirituality, and Integrative Health, where my scholarship continues to deepen my exploration of belonging, meaning-making, spirituality, relational healing, contemplative practice, and individual and collective flourishing.

But education is only one way I have learned.

I have learned through accomplishments, grief, and caregiving. Through relationships and endings. Through faith and questions. Through motherhood. Through writing. Through counseling rooms, boardrooms, classrooms, community spaces, and conversations, people were finally ready to have. And I have learned through returning to Ghana, where ancestry, history, land, water, and belonging invited me to consider more deeply what it means not simply to survive, but to live.

My professional journey has allowed me to bring leadership, communication, professional development, and human-centered learning into corporate and organizational environments connected with Franklin Covey, Dale Carnegie, Aon, Ford Motor Company, Merck, New Horizons, and others. Today, that work continues across academic, community, media, and international platforms through keynotes, master classes, workshops, facilitation, radio and television appearances, retreats, panel discussions, and original programming through iRiS Inspires® TV.

At Saybrook University, I have been recognized as an Outstanding Student and invited to present Sacred Pause™ at the Dean’s Symposium. Internationally, my work in Ghana has included the Daughters of the Diaspora Return Home book signing and panel discussion at the W.E.B. Du Bois Center, alongside community, government, and traditional leaders; presentations and educational engagements at KNUST and Kumasi Girls' Senior High School; and master classes and community conversations. I have also brought this work into intentional restorative spaces, including the Release • Restore • Rise One-Day Retreat.

I am the founder of iRiS Inspires® and Center of inPOWERmeant™ Inc. (COINPM), creator of Sacred Pause™, and author of 19 books. Through COINPM, I work alongside a committed team to build sustainable bridges of hope for individuals and families experiencing transition while expanding community partnerships and mentoring relationships in the United States and Africa. For me, this work is ultimately about legacy, creating pathways that can be strengthened, sustained, and carried forward rather than continually rebuilt from the beginning.

Across every expression of my work, one understanding continues to deepen:

“Purpose wasn’t created through my pain. Purpose was revealed through my willingness to stay present with it.”

Today, whether I am writing a book, speaking from a stage, sitting in conversation, facilitating a Sacred Pause™, teaching a master class, supporting a family, conducting research, hosting a conversation, or building bridges through community work, I am still practicing what I invite others to practice:

Pause • Breathe • Notice • Inquire • Remember • Reply • Integrate

Because perhaps the next chapter does not always begin by doing more.

Sometimes, it begins by becoming still enough to remember what was already there.