Episode Details
Back to Episodes
Trading Grind Culture for Nature’s Rhythm with Emily Greenway
Description
In this episode of Queerly Beloved, Wil speaks with Emily Greenway, a former clinical researcher who now works as a burnout and stress coach, energetic reader, and teacher of ritual and energetic mastery. Through Rise to Her and the ROOTED community, Emily blends her research background with archetypal wisdom to help spiritually conscious entrepreneurs and leaders question inherited systems and build lives rooted in their own power.
Emily shares her journey from growing up in a working-class Southern Baptist family in rural South Carolina to gradually dismantling the religious, patriarchal, and cultural expectations that shaped her understanding of who she was supposed to be. Through education, travel, spiritual exploration, and embracing her queerness, she learned to recognize when an old structure no longer reflected her truth, it was time to find the courage to let it fall.
Together, Wil and Emily explore how desire can become a compass when it’s separated from shame, morality, and the pressure to prove our worth. They discuss Emily’s concept of the “soul code”: the deeper themes, values, joys, and patterns that continually guide us back toward who we are beneath our conditioning.
The conversation also turns toward joy as a form of rebellion. Emily explains that joy doesn’t require bypassing pain or ignoring injustice. Instead, being willing to experience grief, pleasure, desire, and the full range of human sensation can help us stay connected to our creativity and power within systems that profit from our disconnection.
Together, they explore:
- Distinguishing authentic desires from desires shaped by capitalism and patriarchy
- Releasing shame and rigid ideas of right and wrong
- Understanding the difference between core human needs and a personal soul code
- Breaking structures that no longer support our truth
- Emily’s journey through religious deconstruction and queer self-discovery
- Why joy and grief belong on the same emotional spectrum
- Reclaiming the senses as sources of wisdom and discernment
- Working with the Wheel of the Year and nature’s cycles
- Disentangling our energy from grind culture, urgency, and endless productivity
This episode is an invitation to remember that we aren’t merely caretakers of the Earth—we are the Earth—and that our joy can help make us burn-proof in a culture determined to burn us out.
Connect with Emily
Visit Rise to Her
Explore the ROOTED Community
Connect with Queerly Beloved
Wil's Upcoming retreat in Costa Rica-
https://www.wil-fullyliving.com/awakened-hearts-nye