Founder of Your Right to Be
Meet erika chalkley
I believe…
I believe in heart-led, visionary women being radically resourced.
I believe that small, elegant businesses can have a world-changing impact.
And that we don’t have to sacrifice our well-being, our joy or our ethics to be successful.
The path that led me here.
The body as teacher
What I also want to share is that those thousands of hours in meditation halls were anything but easy for me. I have ADHD and lived most of my life undiagnosed. Traditional meditation was, and still is, incredibly hard for me. But that struggle became one of my greatest teachers. I had to find another way in, and I discovered it through the body and embodied practice.
Since then, I've trained with some of the world's leading embodiment teachers and spent thousands of hours bringing all of this together in service of women bringing their sacred work into the world.
The frontlines of human freedom
I didn't come to this work through a business course.
I spent over a decade as a community organiser and social worker in the UK's most deprived neighbourhoods, and later among Dalit women in India who were reclaiming their value in a society that told them they were worth nothing.
I hold an MA in Human Rights and have worked for the UK Parliament and world-leading NGOs.
I spent years on the frontlines of what it means to help women re-discover their dignity and power.
Over time, I became disillusioned and burnt out by the traditional corridors of power and frustrated with by limitations.
What those years taught me was that real, lasting change doesn't happen through policy papers (important as those are).
The meditation halls
In my mid-twenties, searching for something truer than the path I was on, I found Buddhism.
And in the Buddha's teachings, I felt, for the first time, I understood what true freedom meant. Freedom from the inside out.
I’ve spent over 15 years in serious practice, training toward ordination as a Buddhist Teacher.
Thousands of hours in meditation halls, deep study and radical community have brought me more peace, joy and creativity than I knew was possible.
