How a Near-Death Experience Led Me to Guide Women Leaders | Meet Emefa Boamah

May I speak with a transmission that reaches the right people that need to hear this. May my story be heard in ways that change lives. May the soul of my work speak through me to the right people. I mean, my inner child have a fun time while we're doing this. Hello, my name is Emma Fabwoma and I am a somatic and embodiment-based life and business coach for women. I often say that that's the Westernized way of describing what I do in the world. All that means is that I support women who are here to do big things in the world, to do that out of the fullness of who they are and not at their costs. What that looks like is guiding them with somatic and embodiment tools to help co-regulate their own nervous system with the nervous system of the soul of their work or their business or their movement, so they can co-create a sustainable life and business and make change in the world. The opposite of not co-creating, I will give an example. Most of our relationships in life thrive when there's communication. Which goes both ways. So co-creation in the context of how I use it in my work is sitting and having buy-in or having communication from the soul of your business. This is operating on a presupposition that everything in life has its own essence, has its own soul, has its own way of communicating. So co-creating is you coming in with your intention of what you want to do in the world, getting clear on what you, the soul of your work, looks like, and then the two of you sitting down and having a conversation about how do we work together to put this out in the world. What brought me here? I'll paint a picture for you. So it's December 17, 2020, and I'm laying in a hospital bed in Dallas, Texas. I had just gone through 6 weeks of being sick with COVID and I could not for the life of me understand what was happening. So I ended up being rushed to the emergency room, and that night I died. Oh, I feel like I had a near-death experience. And when I made it to the other side, as people say, I found myself in this field, and there was this entity or this presence that I call Coach. And I said to Coach, I said, Coach, I feel like you're taking me out of the game of life. If it's my time to go, that's fine. But if it's not, and you tell me what I'm here to do on this earth, I will do it to the best of my ability. And coach says, well, your purpose is to serve women. And being super excited to be given the opportunity, I was like, okay, deal. Is that it? Coach says, yes. So I turn, I'm heading back to life. And then coach says, wait, one more thing. I turn around and I ask, and I said, what is it? And coach says, I need you to reclaim your name MFR. I should have asked questions, but I was so elated that I said, okay, that's it. Now, before this, I went by Jocelyn. MFR is my native name. It means it is peaceful, or it is peaceful, or the peace runs deep. Jocelyn meant merry or extroverted or very external focused. So I said, okay, so let me clarify. My purpose is to serve women and, and to reclaim my name, Emefa Dun Dun. I opened my eyes, I'm back in the hospital bed in Parkland, Dallas, Texas, and I knew without an iota of doubt that my life had changed. And it felt really, really important because this is the very thing that I negotiated with my life to come back to. So the reason why what I do in the world is so sacred to me It's because it really, really literally is why I'm on this earth, to support women. Between that and getting training in more embodiment coaching, somatics, it just made sense for me to align the strategy of how I want to do this with intuitive parts of what I want to do so I can bring all of that to the women that are out in the world. I grew up with women in my household. We lived in a multi-generational household. So my grandmother, my mother, myself, and my little cousins all lived in the same house. And I was that kid in school that always raised my hand to do everything. I was considered a boy until I had boobs. I don't know if we can put that in here. I was considered a boy until I started to grow into a girl because of how fiercely I protected that everyone else felt around and how I was so unafraid. So in Ghana, mostly you get an English name because we're colonized by the British. So you get an English name, you get your traditional name, and then you get your surname. When I moved to the States about a decade ago, I worked at a hotel and we put our name there and where we're coming from. And I went by MFR, and there were so many people that would wait in line just to ask me where my name was from, where my accent was from. And in my head, to make it easier for them, I just decided to switch it to Jocelyn. So then the conversations just went down to being like, where's Accra? Where are you from? And as I look back now, it seemed like such an innocent thing, but I see how it was trading my worthiness or trading the essence of who I am to make myself digestible for other people. So to me, it was such a powerful experience when I was told, just reclaim your name and live out your name for the rest of your life. That's where Jocelyn came from. Ah, there are 3 values that guide my work. One is combining magic with method or strategy with spirituality. I live in the paradoxes. I believe in the power of both/and. So what that looks like when you come and work with me is that you hear me talking a lot about merging intuition with action, merging spirituality or the woo-woo with the practical and the strategy. Merging the masculine, as we call it, and the feminine, because it takes harmonizing both in order to live a fully, fully present life. The second thing that guides my work is that I create a space for people to reconnect or connect, whether that is between two people, right, in an organization or in a community, or for you to reconnect with yourself and come back home to yourself. That is such a core part because if you do not have a relationship with yourself or unable to connect with yourself, it's hard for you to connect with other people. And the final one, which is probably my favorite, is the childlike wonder and joy that I bring to my work. I say that healing and building a business is busy and intense enough as it is that if we do not connect to our inner children, the pure, playful, uninhibited part of who we are, then what are we building? Why are we building what we're building? So when you come and work with me, you get to connect to your woo-woo self and your spiritual self. Bring all of yourself. You get to reconnect with yourself. Do that with play, joy, and fun. Ah, overachieving, and they're just exhausted from doing all the right things and burning out because they have no life left to live and devote to their family, their friends. They're making all the money on the outside, but then they're dead on the inside. Or I get the people who resonate very deeply with my ancestral and intuitive path where they're like, I feel like I have a calling in my life and I want to be able to put that out in the world, but I'm overwhelmed by the business side of it. So how do you help me bridge that gap so I can put the medicine out in the world? And then the third part is that I'm a sexual assault survivor. So I get a lot of people who have experienced very, very profound trauma and have done a lot of talk therapy, but they're getting to a point where it's not working for them. Now, people might be like, these are, these are 3 very distinct people, but the common theme among all of them is the disconnection from self, the burnout from doing all the right things on the outside and not going anywhere. So when they come to me, the first thing I say that when something like that happens to you, For women, people in general, the first thing we do is we disconnect from our bodies because that's the safe thing to do. So we live in our heads, we try to generalize, and I call it logic bully ourselves into doing things. And then we realize like, okay, something is not working. So I help them get back into their body, and that's where my somatic training comes in, and also intuitively. And then the next thing that happens when trauma happens to us is that we lose our voices. Either because we can't figure out how to explain what's happening, we don't know how to find language, or we haven't seen it modeled for us before. After I help them reclaim their bodies, the next thing we do is reclaim their voice. And then we decide from that point on, do you want to actually amplify your voice for impact, or do you just want to live, you know, give yourself time to integrate the lessons, and when you're ready, how does that translate into building something that is beyond you? So I believe that my personal experience and my training just has a way of transmitting to people who are like, I see myself in MFR. I see where she's been in my storytelling. I see where she is. And my superpower is that to see people where they can be, reflects that to them, but also really honoring where they are and making the steps accessible to get to that version. Uh, in terms of tools that I use to support women, I often say that I'm not attached to tools. I describe myself as tools agnostic. However, I do have a toolkit from which I draw resources to guide women. In terms of my certifications, I'm a certified transformational embodiment coach. I'm a certified breathwork, emotional freedom techniques, and neuro-linguistic programming facilitator. I'm also certified in sound healing. I'm trauma-informed, and I'm also certified in psychedelics-assisted therapies. Now, the reason why I'm always curious about learning tools to support people is that while I have the talent, while I have the intuition, holding ethical spaces for women is very, very important to me. I have women who come to me that have been treated unfairly or unprofessionally, or have been wounded by another coach who didn't hold a space for them ethically. So for me, part of getting these certifications is not because I want to collect them, but I want people to know that it's important for me to have my own experience, but to also learn how to meet you where you're at, to know where I end and where you begin so I can fully support you. Yeah. And then I know you said that Uh, the different ways that I put my work out in the world and invite people to work with me. I work with people in one-on-one settings, and most of those, while there's a structure in terms of month or what to expect, there's also room for intuition to flow. So in those spaces, I work with women, um, either Sacred Systems, which is the core part of how we actually understand your business's nervous system through the 5 facets of being, which is the physical and energetic, emotional, mental, and spiritual, right? For both you, the person, and your business. So once we begin to understand that, then we co-create and ask, how does the business want to be expressed physically, energetically, emotionally, mentally, spiritually? The same way that we do for the human. And I find that that's usually a more accessible way for people to do that, because then instead of thinking of what is branding, what is my messaging, what is my— and that overwhelms them, they can actually break it down because it comes from a place of relating. So that's the sacred systems that they do with me one-on-one. I also offer those to organizations or groups within a certain timeline. It could be 3 months or 6 months, but we go into an organization usually when they're starting, when they're not really sure what they're doing or how they're doing it. It comes in and helps build a foundational part of what they do. I also work with women through what, uh, what I call rites of passage, which is such a beautiful combination of my ancestry and my modern coaching techniques? Rites of Passage is a unique program that was birthed through me, and it's a beautiful combination of my ancestry, my medicinehood, my priestesshood, and my training, and the desire that I was seeing, um, from my clients that were coming to me to find intentional pauses of moving from one stage of life or one stage of business to the other. I was noticing that most of them were rushing through life, always putting out fires, and in my work with them, every time we would actually find intentional time to sit down and clarify where they were, clarify where they wanted to go, and actually create actionable steps, it was less overwhelming for them and they could achieve their goals more while also balancing their lives and their businesses. Historically, rites of passage have been ceremonies that are held. I come from Ghana, so I'll speak to one of them where when a girl becomes a woman, there is a celebration that is held and everyone in the community comes, they see them, and then they initiate them into womanhood. So the three stages that happen are, the first one is separation, and I also add the part of embracing the call to adventure to it. That stage is when one realizes that the life that they're living doesn't fit them anymore. So something doesn't work anymore and something is also calling out to them, but they can't quite describe what the thing is that's calling out to them. So that stage really is identifying what am I ready to let go of? What do I want to call in? And we do that either through one-on-one settings or we do that in a group. Now, in the first month or that first stage, when we do it in a group setting, we have 3, we meet 3 times. The first one, we focus on the business. Sorry, the first one, we focus on the personhood. What in your life is not working? What in your life are you excited to move towards? The second week we meet and we talk about your business. What in your life and what is, what in your business is not working, what in your business are you moving towards? And then on the third week, we come together and have a coworking space because community is a very, very big part when everyone is going through a rite of passage, because people come and they support you and they witness you. And there's power in that. And there's also accountability. So those are the structures that happen each of the stages. The second stage is the liminality stage. Where what was is no longer, but what will be hasn't arrived yet. For every superhero movie, this happens when they face demons, and we're rooting for them because we know that they can make it. And this is the part where most women are— they knew that something had called out to them, and now maybe they've either left their corporate jobs or they've left an identity or they've left something, but they haven't quite reached what they know they have the capacity to reach. So it's usually in this liminal space where people start to doubt whether something actually did call out to them or whether it made sense to leave that space. So in our 3 sessions, we really sit with how do you increase the tools that you need to be able to sit in that space, right? How do you increase your nervous system capacity? How do we build community to support you? And that's what we mostly focus on. Most people assume that you have to find a way to move through to get to the other side, but the whole point of the liminal space is to build capacity to sit in the ambiguity, because ambiguity is going to come in your life and your business. But how do you build your own toolkit to support you during that process? The final stage is the reintegration or the emergence stage. And that is when in the superhero movie, they come back, they've defeated the dragon, everyone is clapping, everyone is excited. And what that looks like for the women that I work with is is at this point, we've been able to figure out what we were answering the call to. We've been able to increase our capacity to see, to sit in discomfort. And now we're coming with the wisdom that we've learned, the insights that we've learned. And then how do we integrate that into our lives and our businesses? That looks like whether it's getting clear on the fact that the way I'm building the business is not the way I want to build it, or I have the structures that fit my life and my business's life., or I have a community that I can lean on. And we usually culminate with a closing ceremony where we build a being board, and everyone gets to tune into the deepest, highest part of themselves and use those things that they see to build a being board to support them for the next 90 days. Life keeps changing. I know. When I work with corporate clients, a few things that I see as benefits from our work together are higher retention rates, fuller presence within the employees, between the employees and their direct reports, and between the employees and their CEO, because they finally have language to describe and ask for what they're needing, which is surprisingly not very hard to access, but I help them get language and how to describe that. They get higher capacity, they get time back because part of what I do when I go into an organization is review their systems and see where things could be automated to support them instead of doing everything manually. So if they have reports that they run, how can we streamline that, right? And build a way to give them time back. And the final thing that I see is just like pure reconnection to the why they started the organization in the first place. And I tell people when they, when they bring me in that you might not have your employees at the end, and that's not necessarily a bad thing. It just means that there's more alignment between you and the employee. And if they're not aligned with your organization, it doesn't help your overall bottom line. So I tell people jokingly too, that you may not get people at the end of it, but there's more refinement of where they align. With the organization, and that helps in the health of the organization overall. Ah, the most rewarding thing for me in what I do is seeing when the light bulb moment happens for women and when they realize, when they make a connection between two things that just like has their eyes bulging, and when they actually put it into action. In taking different choices, like in making different choices, because that reflects in their actions, reflects an improvement in their relationships, in their jobs. But there's always the moment, whether it's in a group program or with a client, that you see things— I see things start to click, that I'm just like, oh, there we are. And I often say to them, welcome home to your life, welcome home to your body. And that I would not trade that for anything in the world. Oh, if you're a woman who's hearing this and you're either feeling burnt out by all the actions that you're taking and not connected to a deeper why, or you are very, very certain that you know what you're here to do, but the business of the work is getting you overwhelmed, or you're coming out of a healing portal, don't know how to figure out what to do now that you're fully in your body, may this be an invitation from the depths of my heart to you. I invite you to reach out to me either on Instagram @imfobuoma, check out my website mfobuoma.com, Click that link to book a call with me, and I'll be honored deeply, truly to be able to sit in that space with you as you figure out how you want to get from where you are to where you want to be in a holistic way without sacrificing any part of yourself.