Mali Parke - RISE Culture Coaching

09/16/2026

🌿 Field Note: Somatic Both/And

I’m sitting at an airport this morning with a heavy and very full heart after leaving my youngest at college, noticing how many seemingly contradictory things we can hold at once.

For me this morning, it is “longing to stay and knowing it is time to leave” and “celebration and mourning”.

We encounter these seeming contradictions everywhere - in families, teams, and organizations:

Hope and apprehension.
Commitment and exhaustion.
Care and frustration.
Long-term vision and short-term demands.
Celebration and grief.
The need to stay connected and the need to be accepted as different.

Many of us learned to respond to complexity by choosing:

“This decision was necessary!”
(even as there is hurt to be heard)

“They meant well!”
(even as there was harmful impact)

“They need a consequence.”
(even as they struggle to hold the agreement)

“Just move forward.”
(even as remnants of pain still affect us)

And we can feel the rush toward the next movement:

Decide.
Resolve.
Fix.
Move forward.

These can all be important.

And yet rushed movement can add relational cost - and lose valuable information.

Either/Or isn’t only something we do with language. It can also be a somatic rush to step away from complexity and pain.

Contradictory truths don’t always need resolving. Sometimes they need enough room to belong together.

This is Both/And as somatic capacity.

I don’t want to reduce this to a mindset or communication technique. I want to begin with our breath, bodies, and complex truths.

🌿 A micro-practice:

Notice your body and breath.

What is rushing inside me?

What might I slow enough to welcome more of this situation - without that meaning I accept or agree with it?

Then ask:

What changes if neither truth has to disappear for the other one to belong?

What information becomes available when we don’t have to resolve it quite yet?

08/12/2026

🌿 Field Note: Power, Receiving & Response-Ability

We spend a lot of time teaching people how to communicate “better.”

How to speak up.
How to give feedback.
How to name concerns.
How to have courageous conversations.

But I keep returning to the other side:

Have we resourced the people with greater power to be spoken up to?

Because people learn very quickly what happens when they say:

“No.”

“I disagree.”

“This isn’t working.”

“Your impact on me was different from your intention.”

And systems adapt.

Some people get quieter.
Some hold back.
Some tell safer versions.
Some lose hope.

And some, when they haven’t been heard, amplify the signal.

Leaders are human nervous systems, too.

Conflict and disagreement can activate shame, defensiveness, withdrawal, urgency, control.

Understanding that matters.

Resourcing it matters, too.

Because the more power we hold, the greater the relational reach of our protective responses.

So here’s a practice I often return to:

When someone says something difficult for me to hear—

What happens in my body?

What do I want to do immediately?

Explain?
Defend?
Fix?
Withdraw?
Take control?

And what might give me enough internal space to have more choices?

A breath?
A pause?
More time?
Support from someone who can help me process my activation without asking the person with less power to care for it?

Sometimes response-ability sounds as simple as:

“I want to take this seriously, and I need some time to process. Can we come back to this?”

Resourcing doesn’t mean endless accommodation or abandoning boundaries.

Sometimes a resourced response is still a firm boundary.
A difficult decision.
A repair.
An acknowledgment of loss.

The invitation is to have enough capacity to stay in relationship—ideally WITH people—while discerning what comes next.

So perhaps leadership asks not only:

“Do people feel safe enough to speak?”

but:

“What happens in me—and between us—when they do?”

08/09/2026

This 👇👇👇 one day we’ll inquire “what is out of order here in the social or physical environment” that impacted-still impacts this person and force the to go into survival mode?

07/24/2026

🌿 Field Note: Thresholds

Today, my threshold happens to be an airport.

On my way to my other home, France, I find myself noticing how quickly we move from one familiar ground to another.

Home.

Rapid goodbyes.

The anonymous in-between of airports.

Then, somehow, we hope to arrive intact and settle in quickly.

It’s a bit like unrooting a plant and hoping the transfer to a different environment will be effortless.

Yet living systems—relationships, organizations, communities, and even our own bodies—do not leap cleanly from one state of being into another.

Sometimes they resist.

Sometimes they grieve what is being left behind.

Sometimes they discover nutrients that could only be found in different soil.

Sometimes they reorganize into something they couldn’t have imagined before.

Perhaps thresholds are not simply something we cross, but something we tend.

🌿 A gentle practice:

Pause for a moment today and ask yourself:

What am I leaving?

What am I carrying with me?

What might this threshold be inviting me to become?

Wishing you gentle accompaniment in whatever threshold you are crossing. 🤍

Thresholds

06/30/2026

🌿 Field Note

One question has quietly shaped much of my work and reoccured in some sessions lately:

Was enough gotten yet? Are you/Am I feeling truly gotten yet?

In conflict, we often move quickly toward explanations, solutions, apologies, or forgiveness even.

Yet if someone still doesn’t feel fully gotten, every attempt to move forward may arrive too soon - and solutions not sustain in the long-term.

Being gotten is not something we decide we have accomplished.

It is something only the other person can tell us.

🌿 So I invite us to two practices this week

When listening…

Before offering another explanation, solution, or even an apology…

Pause.

Ask:

“Did I get all of you? Do you feel gotten yet?”

See if more arrives on the table. 

When speaking…

Before allowing a conversation to move on… or hold the other person’s information

Pause.

Notice:  Do I actually feel gotten by them yet?

If not…

Gently interrupt the momentum.

You might simply say:

“Can we stay here a little longer? There’s something important that still doesn’t feel understood.”

Only once enough has truly been gotten does the next question naturally emerge

“What needs to happen now to make it right in this moment? Between us?”

🌿

06/22/2026

As another school year comes to a close, I want to wish all the educators in my community a deeply restorative summer.

Not simply as a well-earned break after months of dedication.

But because rest is part of the work.

Over the past months, sitting in circles with educators reflecting on conflict, relationships, nervous systems, accountability, belonging, and mattering, I have been reminded again and again that teaching is not simply an academic skill.

It is deeply relational work.

An often quiet, invisible labor of attunement, steady curiosity, care, and calling people into their own voice, responsibility, and place within their community.

Perhaps that is why one of the capacities I find myself returning to again and again—in coaching sessions, in my own life, and increasingly in my writing—is our capacity to receive.

Many of us are remarkably skilled at giving.

Giving attention.

Giving care.

Giving grace.

Giving energy.

Giving ourselves.

Receiving, however, is an entirely different capacity.

Receiving appreciation.

Receiving support.

Receiving joy.

Receiving enough.

Receiving Rest.

My hope for every educator—and truly every leader, caregiver, parent, and anyone whose work is rooted in caring for others—is not only that you find time to rest.

I hope you find moments where your body and diligent nervous system can truly receive that breath in.

🌿 A Practice

May we tend to our capacity to receive—
individually and collectively—
restoring body, spirit, and mind.

Wishing everyone a restorative summer.

05/26/2026

May you have some of these much needed inner medicines today! ✨🍃✨

Play, joy, and love are biological necessities. 🧬

The emerging science of epigenetics shows that your environment, your emotions, and your relationships can switch genes on and off, regulating everything from inflammation to immune function to how fast you age.

Your nervous system was designed for love and belonging, and when you deprive it of that, everything downstream suffers — your hormones, your immunity, your brain, your longevity.

Think of joy, connection, and play as part of your health stack; just as essential as what you eat, how you move, and how you sleep.

So laugh more, love deeply, and stop treating joy like something you have to earn after all the “real” health stuff is done.

It IS the real health stuff.

05/21/2026

In a circle with educators yesterday, before discussing student behaviors or interventions, we began exploring unexpected talking pieces I had gathered walking from my parked car to the school.

Plantain, clover, mint, dandelion, laurel, dock… growing quietly between sidewalks and city edges.

After identifying them together, I asked:
“What do these have in common?”

Eventually, one answer emerged:
Medicinal.

And in many ways, that became the heart of our coaching session.

Because classrooms — just like bodies at times — need practices that are preventative, restorative, regulating, resourcing, and healing, not only urgent in-the-moment interventions once distress or chronic patterns have already escalated.

We spent time reflecting on:
- nervous system states,
- unmet and met needs,
- chronic relational stress,
- and how to create sustainable relational environments rather than short-term fixes that leave educators over-functioning and carrying entire systems alone.

One educator ended the session saying:
“I am ready to talk to my leadership again.”

That sentence itself felt like medicine.

Because healthy communities are not built through isolated interventions or exhausted individuals over-giving to compensate for overwhelmed systems.

They are built through repeated collective practices of noticing pain, staying engaged through difficulty, and participating together in the remedies needed to restore balance, connection, and shared responsibility again.