I did not design this work from the outside. I lived it from the inside.
I am Nompumelelo Sibalukhulu Runji, a political sociologist, transformation coach and author of the memoir How I Took Back My Power.
My own underground work was years long. It was recorded in journals I could barely read back, in flip chart diagrams tracing the roots of my own compaction, in the sessions with therapists and coaches where I interrogated every assumption I had made about what my life was supposed to look like and why. It culminated in a decision that changed everything — the moment I gave myself permission to leave, to disappoint, to defy — and in the memoir I wrote afterward, which was the first full account I gave of what that journey had cost and what it had returned. How I Took Back My Power was not a triumph narrative. It was an honest reckoning with the gap between the life I had been performing and the self I had been suppressing.
I developed this coaching practice and the philosophy upon which it is built — the Subsoil — from my own experience of doing the work. I have been in this underground. I know its specific quality of darkness, its particular loneliness, and what it asks of you to stay in it long enough for something to change. I do not accompany clients from a position of having arrived somewhere they have not. I accompany them from a place of having done the same work they are beginning. That is the only honest basis for this kind of accompaniment.