At the Intersection of Strategy & Care: Holding Space for Human Rights for Kids

When the work is to change the world, the nervous system needs places to land.

Earlier this summer I had the honor of leading a staff wellness session for Human Rights for Kids—an organization I’ve supported for years as a founding board member and now, increasingly, as a wellness practitioner. It felt like a full-circle moment: the braid of my work in communications, strategy, and advocacy woven together with my calling to create spaces of rest, breath, movement, and repair.

I’ve always believed the quality of our impact is inseparable from the quality of our inner life. Youth justice work demands a lot: clarity, persistence, and an open heart in the face of complex systems and hard truths. Supporting this team beyond the traditional comms and marketing lane - into the realm of embodied care - felt like tending the roots that allow the branches to keep reaching.

What We Practiced Together

I designed the session to be simple, spacious, and doable—tools people can return to between meetings, hearings, and travel. We moved through:

• Grounding breathwork to signal safety to the nervous system and soften urgency’s edge.

• Gentle, functional yoga to mobilize the spine, open the hips and chest, and move stuck energy that accumulates over time, think cat–cow, low lunge with heart opener, a supported twist, and a long, restful savasana.

• A guided meditation for emotional unwinding: permission to release what doesn’t belong to today.

• A sound bath with Alchemy Crystal Bowls to invite deep rest, clarity, and a reset from cognitive overload.

• Micro-rituals for the workday: 60-second practices to interrupt stress spirals, reconnect to purpose, and return to presence.

  
  

Nothing fancy, just intentional. And that’s the point: sustainability is built through practices we can actually keep.

Why Wellness Belongs in Youth Justice

When your daily work is holding trauma-shaped stories and advocating for children in systems not designed for their flourishing, care isn’t a perk - it’s infrastructure. The body keeps score of the pace, the grief, the urgency. Without spaces to metabolize it, we start making withdrawals from our future energy.

Wellness, in this context, is not self-indulgence. It’s strategic capacity-building:

• Rest refines discernment.

• Breath expands our options.

• Movement clears residue and restores flow.

• Embodiment rebuilds courage.

• Community care makes resilience collective—not a solo project.

  
  

This is how we keep showing up with tenderness and precision.

Wearing Two Hats (and Letting Them Belong Together)

For years I’ve supported HRFK with storytelling, media strategy, and campaign shaping. I love that work. But this session reminded me that the stories we tell are also shaped by the state of the storyteller. When the team is resourced, we communicate with more compassion, creativity, and steadiness.

There’s a false divide that says strategy lives in the head and healing lives on a yoga mat. My experience says otherwise. Strategy is embodied - our timelines, our tone, our decisions - all of it is animated by our nervous systems. To serve a mission I love on multiple fronts felt like alignment in motion: advocacy meeting embodiment; communications meeting communion.

What I Witnessed

In under an hour, the room softened. Shoulders lowered. Breaths lengthened. After moving, breathing, resting, and listening, people looked noticeably “lighter,” “clearer,” “more connected.” We didn’t solve the world’s problems in a single session. We remembered we’re more than our to-do lists. That remembering is not small. It’s a turning point—the place where burnout loosens and purpose feels like a choice again.

Bringing It Home: Micro-Practices for Advocates

If you work in high-impact spaces, try one (or all) of these:

1. Inbox Pause (60 seconds): Before opening email, place a hand on your heart and belly; inhale for 4, exhale for 6, five cycles. Decide who you want to be before you see what the world wants from you.

2. Transition Ritual: Between meetings, stand up, roll the shoulders, do three rounds of cat–cow at your desk, exhale with sound, then name one thing you’re releasing and one value you’re carrying forward.

3. Two-Minute Sound Reset: Sit back, close your eyes, and listen to ambient sound—fan, traffic, birds—for two minutes. Let the world hold you.

4. Evening Unwind: Legs up the wall for 3–5 minutes, then one line of gratitude to your future self: “Thank you for showing up again tomorrow with care.”

Small is sustainable. Sustainable is transformational.

Gratitude

To the HRFK team: thank you for trusting me—first with your stories, and now with your breath and movement. Your commitment to children and justice is a beacon; it deserves a community of practices that protect your capacity to keep shining.

Doing This Work Together

If your organization is doing emotionally demanding, mission-driven work and you’re ready to support your staff with embodied tools, I’d love to collaborate. I offer custom wellness sessions—from yoga, breath, and sound to restorative movement and guided reflection—alongside communications strategy that honors your people and your purpose.

Experience a Vibrational Shift—in your team culture, your storytelling, and the way your work feels from the inside out.

—Johanna Olivas, Founder of Luna Serenity Founding Board Member, Human Rights for Kids

Bring this to your team: hello@lunaserenity.com | LinkedIn: @JohannaOlivas | Workplace Wellness Inquiries