The Origin Story of Humane in the Membrane

I've told you before how Humane In The Membrane, LLC  started. That was the short version — the practical one, the one about deciding to go out on my own. This is the fuller version. This one goes back further, to where the name itself came from, and it's the story I need to tell before I can tell you what HEART actually is.

It started in a professional learning session. I don't remember which one specifically — there were enough of them that they blur together now — but I remember the shape of it. The people I worked alongside were in the middle of trying to implement something they'd been trained on, and it wasn't landing. Some of them were confused. Some of them were flat-out refusing. And some of them were coming to me genuinely wanting to do the work, and just not knowing how.

I was sitting in that room as a learner myself, not just watching it happen to other people. And what I kept running into was this: there was no real space for me in that learning. I remember thinking it was just me — that maybe I was the problem, because I'm a mid-era, Black woman and a Neuro-Eclectic soul sitting in rooms that weren't built with me in mind. But then I started talking to colleagues who came from different lived experiences than mine, different learner experiences, and I realized we were all feeling some version of the same thing. Different edges of it, different specifics, but the same underlying absence. That was the first crack in it. I wasn't fully alone. Neither were they.

So the question I walked out with wasn't how do we get people to comply with the training. It was what would it take to build learning that actually has room for the people in it.

That question sat with me for a while before it had a name. Then COVID happened, and everything went sideways at once. We were working from home, watching the world come apart in real time, and somehow, in the middle of that, the push to get trained on equity didn't stop. People were saying the word constantly — equity, equity, equity — without, I think, really understanding the depth of what it requires. One night I had the news on, and I remember thinking: we're all losing it. What we actually need right now isn't another training. What we need is to be more humane...Humane... in the Membrane. EUREKA!

That's the phrase that came to me, sitting there. More humane. And then — because my brain does this — it turned into humane in the membrane, and something clicked. And yes, it reminds people of a famous Cypress Hill song - if ya' know, ya' know. I didn't sit down and workshop it. It arrived the way true things sometimes arrive for me, half a joke and completely serious at the same time. I wasn't looking for a business name. I was trying to name a need.

Here's the part underneath all of that, the part I don't always say out loud: I don't think unpacking your own learning is only a cognitive thing. I think it's spiritual. Whole-person. When I started this work, I went through a season of unlearning — I even have a podcast by that name — and it isn't just about updating what I knew intellectually. It's mental, it's energetic, it's a resetting of the whole self, not just the professional layer or the conditioned masks we wear.

Which brings me to the thing I believe most firmly. Asking someone to do trauma-informed work, or equity work, or any work based on an initiative that touches people's real lives, without ever having done that unlearning themselves — without ever having been asked to bring their whole self into the process — isn't just an incomplete approach. It's an injustice to the people they're supposed to be serving. We send people out to hold other people's humanity while skipping the part where they reckon with their own. Then we're surprised when it doesn't land.

That season of unlearning is also why I can now say we're carrying the humane blueprint. Not because we arrived somewhere finished, but because we did the resetting and rebuilding first — on ourselves, before we ever tried to draw something up for anyone else. You can't hand someone a blueprint for a house you've never built and lived in yourself.

That's where my HEART framework comes from. Not a management framework I built to organize a consulting practice. A belief, first — that real transformation has to include the whole person – mind, body, soul and spirit – not just the strategy or the systems around them. Everything I do now, every engagement, every tool, starts from that belief before it starts from anything tactical. The Humane In The Membrane HEART Framework is what it looks like when you refuse to separate the humanity from the work.

I'll walk you through what HEART actually means in the posts ahead. For now, I wanted you to know where it started — not in a boardroom, but in a room where I and others felt unseen, and then didn't. 💛