The Innerwork Center Executive Director Rachel Douglas
The workday has just begun on a mid-May morning, and the setting could not be more fitting to talk about inner peace and contentment.
Just outside the window of a multipurpose room where I sit with Rachel Douglas, executive director of The Innerwork Center, a leaf blower drones loudly. We talk above the sound, after laughing about it, and Elizabeth Smartt, the center’s brand storyteller, recalls a recent Mindful-Based Stress Reduction class at the center during which she sought to find a relaxed state — despite that same nearby noise.
This is the state of modern existence: lives encroached upon, very often, by the boom and bustle of daily activity, news headlines, technology, politics, traffic, the phone.
Despite the promises of the vintage bubble bath commercial, Calgon will not take you away. This is an inside job.
And this is where The Innerwork Center finds its purpose, Douglas explains. The constant barrage of stimuli brings more and more people through the doors of the center, which relocated a year ago to the Museum District near Roseneath Road and Grove Avenue. Its new home is a former annex of the next-door Temple Beth-El.
Just as Innerwork pursues its mission — helping adults follow journeys of spiritual transformation — the 25-year-old nonprofit embraces its own evolution. It is rebranding and bolstering its outreach with more programs tailored to lead individuals deeper within and cultivate mindfulness throughout their daily lives.
“We’re only four years with a staff,” Douglas says, “which means that we’re old but we’re young.” For 21 years of its existence, Innerwork — previously known as The Chrysalis Institute — was an all-volunteer organization. Today, Douglas leads a staff of four, and many volunteers from years past continue the journey, serving as faculty of the center.
Innerwork began in 1994 under founder Nancy Millner, a Richmonder so motivated by spiritual discovery that she traveled the world exploring the beliefs and practices of other cultures and religions. She shared her experiences with friends back home, and when the group of fellow seekers in Richmond grew, Millner decided it would have more impact to bring lecturers and teachers to the city instead of going to them. Thus was born Chrysalis, a name that Douglas and Smartt note for its beauty as a metaphor for change.
The exterior of The Innerwork Center in the Museum District
Millner died suddenly in 2007, leaving a void that was filled by Priscilla Burbank, who “really carried it on her back for a very long time,” Douglas says.
Chrysalis was struggling when The Pew Center reported results from a survey that showed 30 percent of Americans identified themselves as “spiritual but not religious” — SBNR, in shorthand. “That research, for [Burbank], said [that] this is a really important organization for Richmond to have,” Douglas says. “We deserve to be in the world. People deserve to have a place in the world where they can go and explore spirituality without dogma, without judgment, without a framework — where it’s your personal authority [that] tells you what … a meaningful life [looks] like to you.” Then the organization, taking on a faculty and an emboldened sense of purpose, evolved into The Chrysalis Institute.
Four years ago, with the Pew research still motivating them, the institute’s board members sensed the need to expand its efforts in Richmond and decided to hire a paid staff.
“And they hired me as their first executive director,” Douglas says.
Douglas has a story all her own, of a young professional who bumped into the notion of spiritual discovery during a 15-year career at Virginia Commonwealth University, where she worked in the Division of Community Engagement in a program called Nonprofit Learning Point — VCU’s link to the nonprofit sector. “I thought I was going to be a VCU lifer,” she says. But like many of the SBNR respondents in the Pew Center’s survey, Douglas notes that she also had no meaningful spiritual awareness.
“I actually had absolutely no background in spiritual development, mindfulness, at all.”
A series of shifts in her job at VCU made her look more closely at nonprofit influencers with an eye toward emerging trends and new directions for her career. One lecturer impressed her with data pointing to mindfulness as a rising business value — that companies were recognizing a return on investment when they cultivated mindfulness in employees. This introduced an epiphany in Douglas’s spiritual awareness. “My life completely changed after that,” she recalls.
In relatively quick order, as fate would have it, Douglas bridged a gap from her university job to becoming the first paid employee of Chrysalis.
A little more than four years later, she is guiding a rebirth of the nonprofit with the hopes of having a meaningful impact on the region.
With Smartt’s guidance, Douglas says, Chrysalis has emerged as Innerwork — a new brand with a clearer mission. The four-person staff, all women, and board engaged in a process of examination, seeking a simpler way to communicate a vision of spiritual discovery.
“We’re able reach our audience now like never before,” Douglas says. “Our audience has grown tremendously. For example, when I started four years ago, we had under 200 members, and now we have over 600 members. So, the audience is finding us.”
The reason many are searching for meaning has its evidence in research, she says, making the mission and presence of The Innerwork Center more precious.
“The science is telling us: Loneliness is at an all-time high right now — feeling uber-connected through technology but disconnected socially and culturally,” Douglas says, “so I do think this is a moment for this kind of work.”
For more information about programming at The Innerwork Center, visit innerworkcenter.org. The fall semester theme is “The Transformative Power of Inner Work.” On Oct. 24, Dr. James Doty, neurosurgeon, author and founding director of the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education at Stanford University, will visit.
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