The Art of Acolhimento – A Story of Radical Inclusion

I often think about how much discrimination, rejection, and exclusion hurt.
Most of us don’t need convincing. We’ve felt it – not being chosen, not belonging, being judged before being known. Those experiences don’t just sit in the mind. They live in the body.

But for a long time, I didn’t have language for the opposite.
After finishing my Master’s, I left what felt like “first world” Australia. I had a job at the Greek Consulate, a good quality of life, and a clear academic path. And then, somehow, I found myself in São Paulo – this massive concrete city, intense and alive, full of contradictions. Wealth and poverty side by side. Beauty and brutality. Warmth and chaos.

I was flabbergasted. And something happened there that stayed with me.
At Instituto Evoluir, where I completed my counselling placement, I encountered a word I’d never heard before – acolhimento. At first, I tried to translate it. “Welcome” didn’t quite work. Neither did “inclusion”. Because it wasn’t something people said. It was something they did.

Acolhimento is what it feels like to be received without needing to explain yourself.
To be included before you prove anything.
To be welcomed as a whole person – history, accent, emotions, contradictions, and all.
To be held inside the group, rather than assessed at the door.
I wasn’t just welcomed.
I was taken in.

That experience left a mark on me – a positive one. A bodily one.
Looking back, calling acolhimento an act of radical inclusion feels right. Radical because it doesn’t wait for readiness. It doesn’t demand sameness. It doesn’t ask you to perform competence or coherence. It includes difference as difference.

In English, we reach for phrases like “holding space”, “unconditional welcome”, “being received with dignity”, “belonging without audition”. They circle the meaning, but they don’t quite land it.

In Greek, it gets closer.
Με δέχτηκαν όπως ήμουν – they received me as I was.
Με χώρεσαν – they made space for me.
Φιλοξενία – love of the stranger.
Still, acolhimento lived most clearly in the body.

Over time, I started to understand why this word exists in Brazil. A country shaped by colonisation and violence, by slavery and forced migration, by Indigenous displacement, by deep inequality alongside constant cultural mixing. There isn’t a single, clean origin story. So, belonging couldn’t be built on sameness. It had to be built on relationship.

When institutions are fragile, people learn to hold each other. Relational intelligence becomes survival intelligence.
Care lives everywhere – in families and communities, in churches and cultural spaces, in music and ritual, in humour, in the way time is shared. In the frequent churrasquinho that turns strangers into kin.

Acolhimento isn’t idealism.
It’s how people endure together.
Brazilian culture privileges warmth, emotion, physical presence, expression over restraint. So acolhimento isn’t procedural. It’s felt. It’s in tone of voice. Eye contact. Patience. Silence. The hug that isn’t half-arsed. The shoulder tap that says “you’re in”.

You don’t just hear that you belong.
Your body is told.
Coming from cultures where inclusion is often conditional, where professionalism can be distancing, where belonging is earned through competence, this felt radical.

Because acolhimento says:
You don’t have to arrive whole. We will hold you while you arrive.
That’s not soft.
That’s deeply political.

I want to be careful here. Acolhimento doesn’t mean Brazil is “better” or “more evolved”. It means Brazil has developed hard-earned relational capacities to live with rupture, mixing, and uncertainty. Some cultures learned control. Others learned connection. Each carries strengths and shadows.

What I encountered was one of Brazil’s human gifts.
And once you’ve been received like that, you carry the memory with you. It doesn’t leave. It stays in the body.
For me, it’s a gift I now want to offer forward – here in Australia and wherever my work takes me.

When was a time you felt belonging, inclusion, or kindness so deeply that it stayed with you?
Or a moment when you realised you had offered that kind of reception to someone else?

Those moments matter.