Dr. Shacunda Rodgers was nine years old the night her grandmother sat beside her and made her a promise. She had just tragically lost both parents earlier that day. She didn't have a home anymore, or a mother, or a father. What she had was a grandmother who pulled her close and said, simply, "Shacunda, I'm going to make sure that you have a really good childhood."
Thirty-three years later, at her grandmother's funeral, Shacunda would sum up what that promise meant to her. "Tragedy brought us together, but your love kept us from drowning in it.”
That's the whole shape of Shacunda's career, if you're looking for it. Not the tragedy. What came after it: a woman who has spent two decades making sure other people never have to face their hardest moments alone.
Learning to Hold Space
Shacunda majored in psychology at Vanderbilt, drawn early to a simple question: why do people do what they do, and what does it take to change it, a question rooted in that traumatic childhood experience that forever changed her life. From there, she went on to a doctoral program in Clinical Psychology at UT Knoxville. Somewhere between a predoctoral internship at the Yale-New Haven Psychiatric Hospital and a research postdoctoral fellowship at UC Davis, she realized academia wasn't where she belonged. "I really just wanted to be in spaces where I felt like I was working with people directly, clinically, and making a difference," she says. "If people are going through hardship, they shouldn't have to walk through those dark corridors by themselves."
After completing her training, Shacunda landed at a large HMO in 2006, where she was asked to co-lead a mindfulness-based therapy group. This experience reframed how she thought about healing. "My meditation teacher always says meditation teaches you to do two things," she recalls. "It teaches you to see more clearly and respond more wisely."
Around the same time, she took a short contract doing outpatient psychotherapy at a state prison. "What I walked away with was a lot more compassion," Shacunda says. She met people serving life sentences who had done more inner transformation than people who'd never spent a day incarcerated. "They were like,’Look, if this is where I'm going to spend the rest of my life, even though my body is imprisoned, my mind and my heart don't have to be,’" she recalls of that experience.
While building her private practice, Shacunda took on contract work traveling between nursing homes to counsel elderly patients, many of them isolated, some estranged from their own families. "Seeing people in various stages of contending with chronic illness, or even their own mortality, and being with people as they were transitioning, was also quite sacred," she says. When she eventually stopped working there, several patients kept reaching out. "They were like, ‘are you coming back? Because I don't have anyone to talk to.’"
Nursing homes. A prison contract. A packed private practice. On paper, it may seem as though none of it connects. In practice, it's the same move, over and over: showing up fully for people the rest of the world forgets.
The Root of It
When Shacunda was nine, her mother made the courageous decision to leave an abusive relationship, reclaim her freedom, and start a new life with her child. That decision cost her mother's life, and her father's too, in one act of violence. It's not a story Shacunda tells often. "I don't like to linger too much on the tragedy piece," she says, "because holding space is actually rooted in the love that put me back together."
That love came from her grandmother who gave Shacunda something she'd spend her whole career trying to give back. "What she had was loving presence," Shacunda says, "a willingness to sit beside me in my grief, to walk alongside me, and to love me back to life." It's the same phrase Shacunda now uses to describe her own gift. "I'm really good at offering loving presence to people," she says. "I don't actually, in large groups, say a lot. I am much more communicative one-on-one, but people will be like, ‘You didn't say anything, but I felt your presence the whole time.’"
By 2018, that instinct had a name and a mission. Shacunda started Melanin Meets Mindfulness, a monthly meditation group for Black women, after noticing she was almost always the only Black person in the wellness spaces she visited. "This work is so powerful. I think a lot of folks think that it's not for us," she says. "I just wanted to change that." Three women showed up to the first meeting. Eight years later, the group still meets monthly, and it became the seed for something bigger: Holding Space, her nonprofit wellness sanctuary serving the Black community through free psychotherapy, retreats, and organizational trainings rooted in "culture, community, and compassion."
"So much of that is about creating a space where people feel like they belong," Shacunda says. "Whoever it is I'm working with, a child with autism, a family who loves someone incarcerated, someone crossing the threshold from this world to the next, you deserve to have space held for you, and you deserve to have compassion."
Steal These Moves
Shacunda didn't set out to hold space for others. She was driven by a desire to understand parts of her own story and an instinct to show up for others the way her grandmother showed up for her. Here's what her path can teach you about your own.
A tragic beginning doesn't have to write the whole story. Shacunda's parents didn't get to write what happened next for her. She and her grandmother did. If something hard happened at the start of your story, you still get to decide what it becomes the origin of.
The support that saved you is worth rebuilding for someone else. Shacunda didn't just heal from what her grandmother gave her, she spent a career trying to extend it to others. Think about the specific thing that got you through your hardest season and who around you might need that thing now.
You can carry the weight of a story without needing everyone to see you carrying it. Shacunda has spent twenty years doing her most powerful work behind the scenes, one person at a time, long before she was ready to speak about any of it publicly. Impact doesn't require an audience to be real and meaningful.
It’s been forty years since the night Shacunda’s grandmother made that promise to her. She's still mostly private about what happened to her parents and still more at ease sitting with one person's pain than standing in front of a room, but she built an entire body of work out of the exact thing she needed most as a nine-year-old girl…someone willing to hold space for her. That's not a small use of a hard beginning. That's the wonderfully beautiful thing it became.
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