Compassionate Leadership With Ella St. Hilaire

Interview by Chiara Christian Photographs by Carolyne Lorée Teston

Ella St. Hilaire is an artist, writer, teacher, visionary, and badass leader. After studying English at Duke University in North Carolina, she explored corporate careers at Vanity Fair and Christie’s, all the while developing her writing, art, and spiritual practices, ranging from reiki, kabbalah, Buddhism, to Kundalini yoga. After a year and a half of studying to become a doula, the Coronavirus pandemic hit, which put completing her certification on hold. When her plans got derailed to begin working as a doula, she went deep into meditation during quarantine, because “if you’re going to be inside like a monk, you might as well meditate like a monk, right?” After re-emerging from this period of deep meditation, she founded her business Bedrock Body, which is a community founded on the principles of non-violent embodiment. Here she shares cooking recipes, holds book readings, gives teachings on spirituality, creativity and the divine feminine. The Genius, a recurring virtual month-long course which guides you to “become an instrument of liberation”, was launched in September as part of her business offerings. The first month centers on compassionate leadership at the intersection of social justice and spirituality. I talked to Ella about the launch of her course, activism, spirituality, and what it takes to be a compassionate leader in a time when it’s incredibly needed.

How was The Genius birthed and how did the September course on compassionate leadership come about?

I studied for a year and a half as a doula and that name [Bedrock Body] I thought was going to be my Instagram. But then everything with this year happened and it was put on pause. I kind of had to rewrite my whole life. [After] George Floyd was murdered, what I saw was a huge outpouring and a huge need for leadership and for people to find a place where they could come to, to talk about what was going on, how to problem solve. I was getting direct messages [on Instagram] and I was like, “listen, I can make this into a business and I’ve got to figure out something to do with my time and my life anyway.” I’m someone who loves to work, loves to work with concepts and loves to work with people. So I was like I can organize this in a way that’s digestible. The idea for the course was inspired [by her friend’s online course] in terms of putting together all the different aspects of her interests and making it her own. I didn’t have to choose whether I want to be a doula, or a writer, or a painter, or a sculptor or an activist. I could really alchemise all these things together and give an offering for the people and then empower them in that way.

The Genius really came out of that, of wanting to empower people in different areas of alignment of what I believe is the vision for a really wholesome person and a really well-rounded human being. Someone who activates their intellect, who activates their body, who activates their spirit. The theme for each month is based on the chakras. I decided the first month of the course was going to be September because that was the earliest I could get it together. This month’s theme is the heart chakra. So I wanted to do something that was social justice based but had to do with the heart chakra. As soon as we open up our hearts to others we feel into the love and empathy we want in the world and can act on it. The course is at the intersection of that spiritual activation of the heart feeling, but also going one step further and going “how am I going to be a leader with this” and “what am I going to do with this feeling.” Through meditation I got all of it.

What does it mean to be a compassionate leader and what are the qualities of compassionate leadership?

Compassionate leadership for me starts with being compassionate for yourself and embodying compassion. I think compassion is where you meet empathy with action. So it’s not only that feeling in your heart of “I sympathise” or “I know how you feel.” Compassion goes a step further into action, into doing

At 27, Ella has lived all over the world from the United States, to Europe, Haiti, Canada, and parts of Africa. She currently resides in London, where she moved to from New York in September this year.

something about it, into problem solving, into logic and applying your knowledge and your skill set, and to really stepping forward. So that’s the compassion aspect I teach.

Leadership is about moving people and inspiring them with your charisma and your talent. That means embodying yourself as you are and showing up in the world and being vulnerable about your story, being knowledgeable and grounded, but also standing in your moralities and being the person you want to see in the world. If we see injustices, if we see something unethical, if we’re sad about climate change or whatever, it’s like “okay how can I reduce my waste?” That’s being a leader. It’s really just an embodiment of values and inspiring others to do the same.

I think the most challenging part for people to understand is the charisma part and how to show up fully in the world. I think a lot of people are fearful of speaking up and using their voices. That’s where the other months of the course come in, chakra by chakra. Next month is going to be throat chakra and that part of leadership is going to be about projecting your message into the world. It’s a step-by-step process and I think our best leaders have shown that it’s a journey, that it takes time, and that you can still be internally compassionate and internally loving and internally very non-violent as well. That’s the basis of the principles of what I teach, embodying non-violence—it really solves a lot of the problems in our world by being that gentle, loving person in everything that we do.

What are your thoughts on the I don’t believe that in order to have a successful movement in any intersection between spirituality area of the world that you can have social justice without spirituality. and social justice? Because spirituality is an embodiment of ethics, values, of being connected to one another, of being a deep and profound person, and of enjoying life and making life better, and making life worth living. I mean, why do we practice spirituality? We’re here to improve ourselves, to expand our spirits, expand our souls and be better—that’s spirituality to me. Without that, social justice is just empty demands. You need soul, you need spirit, you need to move people. You need to have a spiritual creed. It’s one of the things Dennis Dalton is teaching in the course. He was a teacher at Colombia for 39 years on non-violence. He actually met Malcolm X and Martin Luther King. He tells me that the three most important factors of a sustainable movement are one, leadership, two, spiritual creed and really standing by a spiritual ethos, and three, organization. So you need those things for sustainable movement and

what we do in the course is analyse the ways in which Black Lives Matter falls short in a certain way. The reason why it’s falling short, in Dennis’s opinion and I certainly agree with his analysis, is that we don’t have an extremely charismatic leader as we did with the Civil Rights Movement. We had Martin and we had Malcolm to compliment each other and to push people forward into inspiration.

There’s a quote by JFK, and even JFK you would think is an extremely charismatic leader right? But JFK said once, “when I make a speech people clap, and when Martin makes a speech people march.” That’s the difference and that’s what Dennis is talking about as well. He said when you were in the room with Martin or Malcolm there was an electricity, there was this force and power. I think that can only be explained by their embodiment of a spiritual creed and the fact they went through a spiritual purification and were connected to that source to be able to help people.

What is your take on optical ally-ship within the spiritual community?

*Optical allyship as defined by Latham Thomas, is “allyship that only serves at surface level to platform the ‘ally’, it makes a statement but doesn’t go beneath the surface and is not aimed at breaking away from systems of power that oppress.”

In terms of optical and performative allyship, what I told my students in the course is that performative ally-ship isn’t a problem in and of itself. It’s a problem with performative society. The ways in which we are extremely superficial with a lot of the things we do. So it’s not necessarily just ally-ship or just activism or just spirituality. It’s a societal problem and it’s a moral problem. It’s like how do you show up in the world? Are you profound? Are you deep? Do we show up for one another? Do we inspire one another? It’s in the small things. When a friend calls, are you available to be there for that person? Or are you just going to be like “I’m sending you support, love and light”? That’s performative, and it percolates into everything we do. If we do something meaningfully, and with all of our hearts and compassion and we really embody that presence and power that spirit gives to us, it won’t be performative because everything that we do will have the backing of true meaning to it.

How can we sustain our action and activism even when the ‘steam has blown off’ and our socials have gone back to normal?

For me a sustainable movement is a lifetime movement. It’s a dedication to bettering yourself for the sake of being of service to others. Sustainability is a day-to-day thing, and you have no trouble doing it because that’s your ethical moral position in life. It’s all about embodiment. It’s not about getting all hot-headed and going out into the streets and expressing all that anger and the next day being so drained and you can’t do anything. For me, the movement is my life. It’s in everyway that I talk with people, it’s in the way I consume goods, it’s in the way I choose to work, it’s in the way that I choose to lead a life. It doesn’t become an issue about burnout or sustainability when I think of it in that way because we simply just get to show up as the best version of ourselves and if every person does that, then we have a movement. What is profound and deeper and more long term is doing the work when no one is watching.

“Leadership is about moving people and inspiring them with your charisma and your talent.”

A foundational element Ella focuses on in The Genius course is “decolonising” our minds, which involves challenging the political, intellectual, and structural legacies of colonialisn and racisim.

We have this idea of leaders being perfect and never being human or messing up. How can we show up as leaders and be vulnerable, make mistakes, and then still retain some sense of integrity?

We have this idea of leaders being perfect There’s a quote from Malcolm X—“There is no better and never being human or messing up. teacher than adversity. Every defeat, every heartbreak, How can we show up as leaders and be every loss contains it’s own seed, it’s own lesson on how vulnerable, make mistakes, and then still to improve your performance the next time.” In that retain some sense of integrity? statement there’s something we can apply internally as well as externally. If you’re feeling a sense of opposition within yourself, if you’re feeling insecure, if you’re feeling imperfect, that’s an adversity you’re embodying. The only answer is to learn from it, what is it saying about you? It’s an opportunity for growth. What am I really insecure about? How can I really improve? And how can I really show up in the world with fearless courage no matter what and to continually show up? It’s really difficult. It’s really easy to give up on ourselves and to make excuses to not do the work. To just avoid the real grit, the real ugly, nasty parts of what goes on behind the scenes when no one is watching. But the way to show up vulnerably is to tell your story, to share with others, to connect with other people. Something that my teacher taught me is “don’t share the mess, share the message” and that really resonated with me. [On people over-sharing on Instagram] It can seem a bit messy at times, unless you got a message to go with it. To not share yourself for the sake of sheer exposure, but to actually deliver a message. Being vulnerable is an asset as a leader—it’s not a weakness. We all go through those moments and we want to connect and we want to feel like other people are also overcoming their personal situations. The difference between regular complaining and a leader is that the leader transmutes it into a powerful message and into a higher purpose and meaning.■

Follow Ella on Instagram at @ellatheorchid and her business @bedrockbody. For more information on her course The Genius, head to her website: www.bedrock-body.com/genius.