Reflections from the Refugee Expedition, Session One: Essence
We came to the first session expecting to talk about leading. Instead, we were asked to begin somewhere quieter and closer to home: with ourselves. Before we explored how we lead, we were invited to sit with who we are, and to notice that the two have never really been separate.
That invitation caught many of us off guard. We are used to being asked what we do, how we manage, how we cope. We are less used to being asked who we are underneath all of it.
Beginning with ourselves
The session opened with Essence, the idea that leading grows out of the fullness of our lived experience rather than from a title or a position. We were introduced to seven pieces of Essence that women on earlier Expeditions had named: Motherness, Nature, Body, the Sacred, Ancestors, Trauma and Learning. But these were offered as a starting point, not a rule. We were encouraged to redraw the map in our own hand, to add what was missing and set aside what did not fit.
For many of us, the first thing we wanted to add was migration itself.
Our lives shape our leading
Some of the strongest conversation of the day was about how our histories keep shaping the way we show up for other people. Displacement, family, culture, trauma, education: none of it stays politely in the past. We spoke about arriving in new countries, learning new systems, holding uncertainty for ourselves and often for others, and how that had quietly built our confidence and our resilience.
We were not describing obstacles we had overcome and left behind. We were describing the very things that taught us how to lead.
There is no single way to lead
Julia Middleton’s conversation returned us to something many of us needed to hear: leading is not reserved for people with formal authority. As we talked, we realised how many of us had been holding families, communities and organisations together long before we would ever have called ourselves leaders.
That recognition shifted something. Leading stopped being a title we might one day be given and started to look like a practice we were already living.
The complexity of being ourselves
The hardest part of the day was also the most honest. Several of us admitted how difficult it is to find our authentic selves after years of adapting in order to survive. We had grown up being told to stay quiet. We had lived inside narrow expectations of what a woman should be. We had learned to become whoever the people around us needed. Many of us were asking, some of us for the first time, who we are beneath all of that.
For most of us, this was not about uncovering a hidden self. It was about slowly reclaiming parts of ourselves we had set aside to keep going.
What we are carrying forward
A few reflections kept returning through the conversation, and they feel worth holding onto. Leading begins with self-awareness, not technique. Trauma influences how we lead but does not define it. Resilience is a gift that can also make us harder on ourselves than we would ever be on anyone else. We are quick to see leading in other women and slow to name it in ourselves. And there is no correct Essence map: it keeps changing as our understanding of ourselves changes.
By the end, migration, community, culture, voice and joy had all found their way onto our maps, alongside the pieces we had been given.
What struck us most was how quickly the room moved from “my story” to “our story.” We were not offering each other solutions. We were recognising ourselves in one another. That recognition, it turns out, is where the work of leading honestly begins: not by becoming better leaders in the usual sense, but by asking whether the leading we have inherited actually reflects who we are.
We left with an invitation to begin drawing our own Essence maps: what feels central, what is missing, and what we would like to reclaim. The next session moves outward, into Elements, and how our Essence begins to show up in the way we lead.
About the author
Reem is a British Syrian scientist, peacebuilder and social activist, born in London and raised in Damascus. She holds a PhD in immunology from Université Montpellier II and a second in identity studies and peacebuilding from the University of Winchester, is trained in somatic trauma therapy and mind-body coaching, and spent five years as Programmes and Development Director at Common Purpose. A founding member of the Syrian Nonviolence Movement, she chaired the Syrian Platform for Peace-UK from 2015 to 2019, co-founded Manakin Cambridge CIC and serves as a trustee of the Cambridge Ethnic Community Forum. A writer in Arabic and English and co-author of The Arab Spring, Five Years On, Reem is also a single mother.
