Borderless Belonging with Samina Vabo Ansari
What does it mean to belong when your roots span continents and your soul stretches beyond borders?
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In this third episode of Voices of Emergence, we sit with the luminous presence of Samina Vabo Ansari - an Afghan-Norwegian global citizen, impact strategist, and systems change facilitator whose life embodies the complexities and beauty of emergence. Samina carries a unique resonance: a feminine voice grounded in ancestral wisdom, spiritual sovereignty, and activist integrity.
What unfolds in this conversation is not just a story; it’s a soft invocation, an invitation to feel into the liminal spaces between identity, land, exile, and homecoming.
Between Lands, Identities, and Inherited Longing
Born in Afghanistan, raised in Norway, Samina grew up navigating the paradox of being both insider and outsider. From early on, she noticed the gaps between cultures, between what was said and what was unsaid, between the world’s linear structures and the soul’s cyclical understanding.
She speaks candidly about exile, not just the physical exile of migration, but the subtler forms of spiritual and cultural exile many of us carry. And she names with clarity the emotional labour it takes to reclaim belonging in a world that still privileges whiteness, patriarchy, and the rational mind.
“Our systems often reward performance and perfectionism over presence. But the body doesn’t lie. It remembers where we feel safe - and where we don’t.”
Feminine Wisdom, Sovereignty, and the Power of the Invisible
Samina’s leadership doesn’t follow conventional playbooks. It flows. It listens. It dares to disrupt gently, from within.
We explore her evolving relationship with feminine energy, not as soft power, but as sacred intelligence. She speaks of intuition as a compass, ritual as resistance, and the body as a portal to truth. This isn’t performative spirituality - it’s lived mysticism, shaped by daily discipline and deep devotion.
“I don’t just want to empower women to ‘lean in’ to broken systems. I want us to reweave the systems themselves - with beauty, care, and integrity.”
She reminds us that sovereignty isn’t about independence - it’s about interdependence. And true leadership means knowing when to rest, when to rage, when to retreat, and when to rise.
Culture, Collapse, and Reimagining the Commons
Much of our conversation turns toward the larger cultural field - what’s cracking, what’s composting, and what’s quietly emerging beneath the rubble. Samina brings a clear-eyed lens to the spiritual bypassing and emotional repression often found in activist and “conscious” spaces. She challenges us to hold grief and grace together.
“We’re not here to bypass suffering - we’re here to become tender enough to transmute it.”
Together, we touch on:
The loss of indigenous wisdom in modern institutions
The need for nuanced leadership in multicultural and post-colonial contexts
The rise of new feminine leadership models rooted in regeneration, not domination
And how the body - and the land - can help us remember what the mind forgot
Samina’s work across Norway, Afghanistan, the U.S., and beyond, is a testament to what becomes possible when we lead from liminality. When we embrace the edgewalkers, the shapeshifters, the ones who carry stories between worlds.
Belonging as Praxis
Perhaps the most moving part of this dialogue was Samina’s insight that belonging isn’t a status - it’s a practice. Something we cultivate through embodiment, through relationship, through remembering.
“Emergence begins when we let go of needing to be understood - and choose to be felt instead.”
In a world obsessed with certainty, Samina models something more potent: spiritual presence without pretence. Feminine power without apology. And a fierce commitment to co-creating futures rooted in remembrance.
🎧 Listen to Episode 3: Borderless Belonging – A Conversation with Samina Vabo Ansari, now on YouTube — Apple Podcasts — Spotify
🌿 Follow Samina on LinkedIn and Instagram.
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Voices of Emergence, co-hosted by Alex de Carvalho and Rudy de Waele, is a space for deep dialogue - where personal stories, inner work, and systemic transformation converge. We speak with both well-known and emerging voices to illuminate the often unseen or unspoken aspects of change-making. It’s a sensing field, a collective remembering, and a gentle yet potent invitation to align with life in more truthful and soulful ways.
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