Just Because You Came Doesn’t Mean You Arrived

The orgasm is one of the most misunderstood phenomena in human history—worshipped in private, demonized in doctrine, and dissected in science without ever being fully understood. It is the only biological event that collapses time, ego, and speech in a single breath, yet its spiritual significance has been systematically erased.

That erasure was not accidental.

From the Doctrine of Discovery to the plantation breeding farms, colonial systems across continents invested in controlling not just land and labor—but the erotic. As Audre Lorde once warned, “The erotic is a resource… within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane” (Lorde, 1984). And what colonization could not control, it pathologized. What it could not pathologize, it rebranded as perversion.

The body became an enemy. Pleasure became criminal.
And orgasm—the one moment where the body might touch God—was flattened into function. Disconnected from Source.

But orgasm is not simply a biological spasm. In ancient Taoist sexual alchemy, it is understood as a gateway into shen—the Spirit. In the Huangdi Neijing, a foundational text of Chinese medicine, orgasm is described as a movement of jing (life essence) toward transformation, not depletion. Similarly, in Yoruba cosmology, sexual energy (àṣẹ) is sacred—an animating force used in ritual, creation, and spiritual transmission. Sex was never just for reproduction. It was the altar, the offering, the opening.

Western science, despite its best attempts at reductionism, has only recently begun to catch up. Studies from the Journal of Sexual Medicine have shown that orgasms trigger regions of the brain associated with mystical experience, including the prefrontal cortex and the limbic system—areas that light up during deep meditation and spiritual trance (Beauregard, 2007; Komisaruk et al., 2017). The same pathways used to pray are used to cum.

Ecstasy is not an escape from the Divine—it’s a direct encounter with it.

So, why does it take so much to feel, and so little to forget?

Because shame was carved into us by pulpits and patriarchs.
Because pornography fed us choreography before we ever learned connection.
And because trauma taught too many of us how to leave our bodies just to survive them.

Now we live in a world where people fuck to feel something, but rarely feel themselves.
Where bodies move, but spirits don't arrive.
Where climax is confused with communion.

The prostate, the cervix, the tongue, the perineum—these are not just zones of pleasure. They are instruments of revelation. They pulse with memory, with prophecy, with the remnants of things you never said out loud. They are archives of what happened, what hurt, and what healed.

Orgasm is not a release.
It’s a return.

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Most people don’t know who they’re sleeping with.
They recognize the face, but not the frequency.

Because sex is never just between two bodies. It’s between two timelines. Two sets of ancestors. Two karmic contracts. And all the unspoken agreements in between.

Mainstream society teaches us to treat sex like a transaction. A swipe. A sensation. A story. But in African and Indigenous cosmologies, sex is an initiation. To enter someone is to engage with their history. To open to someone is to inherit their memory. Not just the sweet parts—the ache, the rage, the unfinished business too.

That’s why the body keeps score long after the bed is made.
Why someone’s energy can linger in your chest years after they left your sheets.
Why your orgasms might start to sound like someone else’s grief.

We call it chemistry. But it’s often recognition. A cellular remembrance of trauma looping between two spirits that haven’t done their clearing. And when two unhealed people come together, what they produce is not pleasure. It’s emotional sediment.

This is what happens when attraction outruns discernment.

Spiritual traditions across the African diaspora have long warned about this. In Kongo and Yoruba systems, there are rituals to release the spiritual signatures of former lovers—cleansing not just the womb or phallus, but the energetic field around them. Because the truth is, your body can be clean and still carry someone else’s echo.

And yet contemporary spirituality has made sex a performance of freedom.
Put a crystal on it. Moan a little louder. Rebrand it as spiritual alignment and charge extra for the affirmation.

But how can it be freedom if you’re not present in it?

How can it be healing if the person you became to survive is the one doing the choosing?

Because the body doesn’t just crave touch. It craves truth. And the truth is, most people were never taught to inhabit themselves fully—so they reach for others as a way to return home.

Sex becomes a search party for a self we lost in childhood.
For affirmation. For approval. For power. For softness we don’t yet know how to give ourselves.

And that kind of intimacy doesn’t awaken—it anesthetizes.
It leaves the spirit more scattered than before.
It pulls memory from the body, but doesn’t give it a place to rest.

We talk about soul ties like they’re romantic. But most are unspoken contracts written in codependency, survival patterns, and fear.

And until you remember who you are, you’ll keep calling your trauma your type.

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They never taught me what to do with power that came from inside me.
Especially not the kind that pulsed through the hips.
Especially not the kind that made my eyes roll back while my soul came forward.
I come from women who learned to hide that sound behind their teeth.
Because where I come from, pleasure wasn’t celebrated. It was managed.
Whispered about. Prayed over. Shut down.
If it found its way into a girl’s body, it was treated like a symptom to correct, not a signal to follow.

I wasn’t taught to welcome the orgasm. I was taught to contain it.
To hold my breath. To look away from the miracle happening in my own flesh.
To feel it arrive like a storm passing through sacred ground I wasn’t holy enough to claim.
To shake and sob and pretend I didn’t feel closer to God than I ever had in church.

The first time I touched that place—the one that burned and broke and buzzed all at once—I thought I had done something wrong.
And maybe that’s the most political thing about the orgasm:
That it tells a truth we were never meant to carry without guilt.

Because what happens when you find God there—in the flood, in the trembling, in the part of yourself you were taught to fear?
What happens when your holiest moment is not kneeling at the altar but arching off the mattress?

This is what the system feared most—our pulse, our pleasure, our prophetic charge. They took land. They rewrote language. But it was the body’s unscripted Divinity that threatened them most.

“Eroticism is not outside of knowledge. It is one of its forms.”
— Nkiru Nzegwu, in African Sexualities: A Reader, ed. Sylvia Tamale (2011)

European colonial systems did not simply control sexuality through law—they criminalized and erased African and Indigenous sexual systems that were once rooted in ritual, fluidity, and reverence (Cambridge, Wikipedia).

Medical journals from the early 1900s labeled female orgasm as hysteria and pathologized Black sexuality as deviance, laying the groundwork for a century of bodily control disguised as science (Spillers, 1987).

The orgasm isn’t dangerous because it’s erotic.
It’s dangerous because it’s uncontrollable.
Because it cannot be colonized, predicted, or policed.

That’s why they tried to own it.
Why they forced it.
Why they denied it.
Why they hypersexualized us and sterilized us in the same breath.

The Black orgasm in particular is a site of resistance.
Because it was never supposed to survive the auction block, the missionary gaze, the medical table.
To feel good in a body marked by so much violation is to reclaim the very thing they tried to make untouchable: your Divinity.

And yet, we still hesitate.
Because the moment of orgasm—the moment the body dissolves and becomes light—is also the moment we’re most unprotected.

There’s no armor in the release. No filter. No strategy. No performance.
Just you. And Spirit. And whatever echoes through the opening.

It happened during a ceremony of the senses.
I was working with a priestess—someone who wasn’t afraid of what I was holding.
We weren’t chasing visions. We were just trying to feel.
To slow down enough to inhabit myself.
To stop managing and start melting.
To let my body be a body.

As the energy began to rise, I could feel my old reflexes kick in— the instinct to brace, to tighten, to hold back.
I murmured the words over and over with a softness that looped, part breath, part plea, part spell:
“Relax. Release. Let it go and let it flow.”

And then—something in me said yes.
A bolt of heat surged up my spine, like lightning wrapped in permission.
My chest opened. My jaw released. My root lit up like a fuse.
It rose like heat, like smoke, like thunder.

And then came the flood.
Visions. Voices. Memories I couldn’t name but somehow knew.
I could see everything.
Feel everything.
Hear the silence between every sound.

I was no longer just in the room.
I could see across timelines.
Hear the spaces between heartbeats.
Feel the pulse of my ancestors moving through me like song.

I didn’t cum, but it was the first time I understood what it meant to arrive.

After that moment, everything changed.
The way I saw, spoke, walked, tasted, touched.
The air smelled different. The world felt different.
I felt different.

I was seeing God in everything.
And everything was seeing God in me.

It was like touching every part of myself I’d been taught to fear— and realizing none of it was unholy.

The breath of every woman in my bloodline who was never allowed to arrive was breathing through me now.

That’s why I cried the first time I came with someone I loved.
Because I wasn’t ready for what came through me.
Because I heard my grandmother’s voice.
Because I remembered a death I never lived.
Because I didn’t know the orgasm could time-travel, excavate, baptize.

No one told me that climax could also be communion.
That it could be prophecy.
That it could deliver you back to yourself whole.

And now I know why they buried it.
Because every time we come fully, the orgasm cracks open the veil and calls your spirit by its true name.

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Let this be the year you stop confusing silence with sanctity.
Let this be the year you stop collapsing your power into the shape of someone else’s desire.
Let this be the year you stop performing pleasure for people who can’t hold your spirit.
Stop moaning on cue.
Stop faking the holy.
Stop pretending you don’t know what your body is here to do.

Because you do.
You’ve always known.

The orgasm was never meant to be discreet. It was designed to interrupt.
To baptize. To bring the Divine back into the body through the only language it never forgot: sensation.

And for those who claim this is too much— let them sit in the pews of their own denial.
Because we are not ashamed to know God through our pelvis.
To let truth rise through the cervix, the prostate, the breath, the base of the spine.
We do not apologize for our portals.
We do not apologize for our knowing.
We do not apologize for coming back to ourselves.

They taught us to climax quietly so we wouldn’t remember how loud God is.
But the body remembers.
The spirit remembers.
The ancestors remember.

And when you come fully, you do not just feel—you remember.
You remember who you were before doctrine.
Before shame.
Before someone convinced you your light needed permission to glow.

Orgasm is not the end.
It’s a threshold.
A moment where flesh meets Spirit and says: I’m ready.

To be felt.
To be filled.
To be fully here.

This is the resurrection.
Not the kind they preach about in tidy tombs and patriarchal pulpits.
This is the resurrection of the untamed feminine, the electric masculine, the spirit-beyond-gender that pulses through all of us.

It rises.
In hips that move without apology.
In backs that arch toward the sky like altars.
In voices that shake the room.

This is not about sex.
This is about presence.
This is about prophecy.
This is about power that no empire can patent and no algorithm can suppress.

You don’t need permission to arrive, to feel the Divine erupt through you.
You don’t need to wait until someone else sees you.
You only need to return.

So come.
Come for real.
Come like a spell breaking.
Come like your grandmother’s freedom depends on it.
Come like a prayer your body already knows by heart.

Because you are the altar.
You are the invocation.
You are the resurrection.

One love, ESS xo

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References

• Lorde, Audre. Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power.

• Beauregard, M. (2007). Neural correlates of the mystical experience. Journal of Sexual Medicine.

• Komisaruk, B.R., et al. (2017). Brain Activity Unique to Orgasm in Women: An fMRI Analysis.

• Nzegwu, Nkiru. Eroticism is not outside of knowledge. It is one of its forms. In African Sexualities: A Reader, ed. Sylvia Tamale. Pambazuka Press, 2011.

• Oyěwùmí, Oyèrónkẹ́. The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses. University of Minnesota Press, 1997.

• Spillers, Hortense J. (1987). Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.

• Cambridge University Press. Colonial Legal Duality and the Creation of Legal Codes for Indigenous Populations.

• Wikipedia. Colonial Roots of Gender Inequality in Africa.

Redemption Song

You don't erase a people by burning their books. Just silence their elders and teach the smoke like gospel.

Truth that remembers its source does not beg for volume. Redemption Song was Marley’s psalm of resistance—an acoustic transmission for the colonized, the censored, the spiritually severed.

When Marley asked, “How long shall they kill our prophets while we stand aside and look?”, he wasn’t searching for sympathy. He was indicting systems. Naming what the archive refuses to say out loud: that colonial powers didn’t just enslave bodies—they executed prophets. They burned the libraries carried in tongues. They outlawed the keepers of creation. The griots, the priestesses, the herbalists, the water diviners, the ones who knew the timing of storms by the sway of trees—all labeled witch, savage, pagan, threat.

This is historical record wrapped in breath.
Political memory scored in melody.

Marley’s lyrics enter the tradition of spiritual resistance that includes Queen Nanny of the Maroons, who used coded songs to lead her people to freedom. It includes Fannie Lou Hamer, who said, “I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired.” It includes poets like Lucille Clifton, who wrote, “won’t you celebrate with me / what i have shaped into / a kind of life?” All of them carried language that didn’t just name pain—it preserved a pulse.

Colonialism didn’t just break backs. It ruptured frequency.
It disrupted the line of spiritual succession. And in its place, it installed pulpits and protocols, borders and broadcast licenses, turning divine instruction into legal liability.

Bob Marley was not spared. He was surveilled. He was almost assassinated. He died with cancer in his toe, but the infection was in the air around him. The systems that later sold his face on T-shirts once tried to silence the very messages now played in yoga studios and beachfront cafés. This is what theorist Christina Sharpe calls “the afterlife of property”—where even the dead can be commodified, where the rebel can be sold as aesthetic once his truth becomes inconvenient.

But Marley’s voice refused conversion.

In Redemption Song, he did not chant down Babylon with a full band. He stripped everything away. One voice. One guitar. A return to the unaccompanied call—ancestral in function, instructional in purpose.

To sing is to remember.
To sing while exiled is to refuse the terms of forgetting.

And that’s what prophets do.
They don’t predict.
They remind.

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Our first songs tuned the body to the land. They taught us when to move, how to plant, where to pray.

Before captivity, before borders, before paper and pulpit, there were tones—held in breath, passed through bone, anchored in ceremony. Our ancestors did not sing to be heard. They sang to remember. To name the stars. To calm the storms. To teach the babies how to enter the world and teach the dying how to leave it. Song was creation before it was category.

Across the continent and throughout the diaspora, sound functioned as a coded archive. The Yoruba etched proverbs into skin. The Igbo named their children like poems. The Akan used talking drums to send messages across miles without ever touching ink. In the Americas, Indigenous nations turned every river bend into melody, mapping terrain through echo and rhythm. This was data. Doctrine. Direction.

Marley stood inside a tradition of sound as strategy—where melody wasn’t style, but instruction.

When he sang “Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery,” he didn’t cite the system. He confronted it. He was channeling Marcus Garvey, yes—but also the elders who knew how to encode instruction into breath. Marley didn’t just sing. He invoked. He remembered through vibration what had been redacted in print.

Audre Lorde once wrote, “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” Our ancestors knew this long before English translation. That’s why they didn’t wait for permission. They tuned their mouths to the pitch of land and blood and wind and bone. They passed down worlds without paper, without podium. This was curriculum. Sound as method. Song as map.

Even under surveillance, even in chains, the singing didn’t stop. It shapeshifted.

The Negro spiritual wasn’t a song of submission. It was encrypted cartography. Wade in the Water meant, move now. Swing Low meant, hold steady. The plantation heard praise. The people heard escape.

This is the lineage Marley stood inside when he picked up that guitar and stripped away the noise. In Redemption Song, he returns to the unaccompanied voice—the one before production, before policy, before performance.

This is sound, returned to its original function.

⸻

The system is fluent in appropriation. It knows how to turn resistance into retail, prophets into playlists, and liberation into lifestyle branding.

There was a time when the messages inside Redemption Song got people watched, fired, exiled, killed. Now they play softly in boutique hotel lobbies while candles flicker and eucalyptus burns. The industry that once feared Marley now sells him in box sets. The same powers that silenced his teachers, demonized his symbols, and raided his people’s homes now license his face for fragrance, headphones, and festivals.
It’s cultural laundering in real time—cleansing the message while selling the messenger.

Marley sang of mental emancipation.
The market responded with merchandising.

The clarity in his voice—once forged in survival and resistance—has been diluted into mood. Aestheticized. Neutralized. What once carried ancestral instruction is now sliced into twenty-second samples, drained of consequence, and sold as ambient culture.

You don’t have to silence the prophets if you can sell them first.

Scholar bell hooks warned us: “The commodification of difference promotes paradigms of consumption where desire is focused on the Other, but only so long as the Other can be commodified.” That’s why dreadlocks are policed in school, but praised on runways. That’s why African spirituality is feared when it’s practiced in ritual, but adored when it’s staged for content. That’s why prophetic Blackness is safe only once it’s been archived, packaged, and stripped of the fire that made it “dangerous.”

And still—some things refuse translation.

He wasn’t performing style—he was preserving signal. And even stripped down to one guitar, Redemption Song still refuses dilution. The tremble. The breath. The conviction behind each string. It resists commodification not because it is immune to consumption, but because it lives in a different register.

You can sample the sound, but you can’t sell the source.
You can remix the rhythm, but you can’t own the root.

Redemption, in its truest form, will never be marketable. It is too unruly. Too divine. Too ancestral. Too alive.

As philosopher Fred Moten writes, this is “the resistance of the object.” Even when commodified, some truths retain their refusal. They leak. They disturb. They disobey the terms of the transaction.

That’s the paradox we sit inside now:
The song plays everywhere—yet so few are listening.

⸻

Some songs never fade. They shape the air until someone with ears to hear breathes them back to life.
A tuning fork for memory. A call to right relation.

To hear Marley now is to recognize the song didn’t age—it aged us.
It found us in moments when we were still uncertain, still searching, still silent—and offered us not answers, but agency.

Because the work of redemption was never finished. It was always ours to continue.

The line “None but ourselves can free our minds” is the assignment.

Ancestral instruction doesn’t rest in melody. It moves through embodiment. Through the daily disciplines of remembrance: what we eat, how we speak, how we gather, what we rebuild. It reminds us that our inheritance is not just endurance—it’s design. Our task is not just to awaken—but to act.

Scholar and cultural theorist Sylvia Wynter reminds us that, “What it means to be human is no longer self-evident.” In a world of dislocation, automation, and curated disconnection, Marley’s voice becomes a spiritual benchmark—a return to the real. A reminder that freedom is not conceptual. It’s relational. Embodied. Rooted in how we see one another, how we carry the wisdom of those who walked before, and how we plant it forward.

This is the work now.
To build a future from the wisdom kept alive beneath the ash.

Because Redemption Song continues every time we use our voice with intention. Every time we protect the story of where we come from. Every time we teach the children to recognize a song not just by melody, but by meaning.

It is one thing to hear the song.
It is another to live it.

And still—Marley asks us:
Won’t you help to sing… these songs of freedom?”

What he left behind is a living map—etched in melody, encoded in song. A quiet instruction. A portal we are still learning how to walk through.

The song is not over.
It’s waiting for your answer.

One love, ESS xo

⸻

References

• Redemption Song – Full Lyrics

• Lucille Clifton – “won’t you celebrate with me”

• Fannie Lou Hamer – SNCC Digital Archive

• Christina Sharpe – In the Wake: On Blackness and Being

• Sylvia Wynter – “Unparalleled Catastrophe for Our Species?”

• Fred Moten – The Undercommons (Open PDF)

• bell hooks – “Eating the Other” (PDF)

• Audre Lorde – “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House” (PDF)

• Talking Drums – Encyclopædia Britannica

Where Are You Landing?

History didn’t teach us how to move.
We moved, and they started writing.
There is no such thing as arrival when you come from origin.
The land means nothing without the ones who move it with intention.

The earliest forms of knowledge weren’t written—they walked.
They moved across desert, through currents, under moonlight.
Our ancestors were the first to move in rhythm with the seasons and the stars.
They traveled as scientists and spiritualists, as seed-bearers and myth-makers—guided by memory, and returning by design.
They crossed thresholds not to escape, but to observe, translate, plant, and consecrate.
Movement wasn’t departure—it was data.
Every journey was a liturgy.
Every arrival, a recursion.
Movement wasn’t deviation. It was the deepest expression of connection.

This is movement as archive, as proof, as generational instruction.

But the record doesn’t tell it that way.
Because the record begins when we are already in chains.
It begins mid-sentence, mid-ceremony, mid-abduction.

It catalogs rupture and forgets everything that came before it.

And so we are forced to distinguish what never should have required separation:
There is the motion of the explorer, and the motion of the extracted.
There is the map made in dialogue with the land, and the map made in defiance of it.
There is the body that walks in search of insight— and the body relocated as possession.

To explore is to make meaning through relationship.
To be moved is to become resource.

This is the design of domination.

Still, the spirit is a historian.
It archives what the record omits.

Even when we were displaced, we moved like those who remembered.
Even when we were scattered, we traveled like those who still had coordinates.
There were whispers in our blood older than any flag.
Routes encoded in breath.
Maps tattooed behind the eyes.

True return requires no distance.
It is a circular intelligence— an origin carried forward through time, not backward through memory.
It begins not with location, but with recognition.
It is the moment the body says, this is it.
Not because it was found.
Because it was never left.

We are not coming home.
We are home.
Wherever we land, the ground adjusts.
Wherever we speak, the air listens.
Wherever we remember, the land remembers too.

So I ask again:
Where are you landing?

Not where are you safe.
Not where are you seen.
Where are you sovereign?

To land with intention is to proclaim authorship.
To stop wandering is not to settle— it’s to remember what the wandering was for.

⸻

There is a moment—just before descent—when the air thickens.

The light changes. The wind quiets.
The world does not pause, but it rearranges itself around your arrival.

You can taste it in the back of your throat like iron.
Like salt in a wound you didn’t know you carried.
You don’t feel it in your feet—you feel it in the soles of your teeth.

Landing is not a decision.
It’s a recognition.

Ask the griots why their stories begin with dust and not with names.
Ask the elders why they close their eyes when memory crosses the threshold.
There are coordinates more ancient than compass, and the body remembers them in taste, in temperature, in timing.

Somewhere along the line, we were taught to distrust what does not explain itself.
Told that if we could not articulate it, we must not understand it.
But knowledge does not always announce itself in language.
Sometimes it comes in texture.
In rhythm.
In a silence so specific it could only belong to you.

Among the Akan, they say
“The path is made by walking it.” (Akan proverb)
Not by asking for a map.
Not by watching for signs.
But by knowing when the ground beneath you shifts from waiting to receiving.

This is the science beneath instinct.
This is the architecture of knowing.

We were never meant to drift indefinitely.
We were meant to recognize the moment the ground says yes.
To step into it not with apology, but with presence.
With appetite.
With memory that lives in the tongue and the joints and the pulse behind the knees.

Where are you landing?

Not in what they see.
Not in what you show.
Not in what they can name.

Where is your body saying yes before you speak?

Because this is how the ancestors landed— through sensation, alignment, and timing so exact it made the earth respond.

Whimbrels migrate across hemispheres without hesitation.

They fly over 2,000 miles of open ocean, guided not by maps but by an inherited geometry— a pulse of direction that lives beneath the bone.
In 2020, one whimbrel flew from the Arctic to the coast of South America in five days,
crossing storms, heatwaves, and open sea with no pause for rest.
It did not question the route. It remembered it.
It returned with precision so old, even the weather made way.

This is movement made faithful to memory.
Design—carried through origin, affirmed by belief.

There are instructions embedded in the body that no storm can override.

And we, too, carry that design—though we’ve been taught to ask for proof before trusting it.

Landing is convergence.
A moment when what lives within meets what was always waiting.

Sometimes the place has been listening longer than we’ve been speaking.
Sometimes the signal isn’t loud. It’s exact.
Sometimes the call arrives not as language, but as quiet, as temperature, as a change in posture, as appetite returning to the body.

The whimbrel does not hesitate.
It moves with memory sharpened by repetition and unbothered by doubt.

And there is a version of you who already recognizes the moment when presence meets instruction.
That knowing lives in the body the way instinct lives in breath.

And it waits—patiently, precisely— for your agreement.

⸻

There are things you can only hear once you stop moving.

Like how much silence you’ve been translating into speech.
Like how many of your choices were permissions you gave to fear.
Like how often you called obedience wisdom because it kept you alive.

And you may find that survival taught you rhythm, but not rest.

That you learned how to navigate noise, but never learned how to live when the noise stopped.

Because the world does not reward quiet certainty.
It rewards pageantry.
It rewards resilience in the shape of self-abandonment.
It names you brave for staying where your spirit has long since left.

But what happens when you no longer need the applause?
When you no longer need to be understood, translated, proven, or explained?

What happens when your voice returns to its original pitch?
When you stop performing softness for access, and begin reclaiming the sharpness that was never meant to be dulled?

You begin to hear your name in places no one is calling it.
You begin to speak without preparing your exit.
You begin to stay.

Staying is movement of another kind.
It honours the ground that holds you.
It teaches the air how to carry your name.

Because the land remembers those who remember themselves.

And if you are still, truly still, you may find that the grief you’ve been calling ambition was just your body asking you to come back.

⸻

To return is not to go back.
It is to arrive with the weight of what you now know— and refuse to leave it behind again.

This is not a return to place.
It’s a return to power.

A moment when presence stops feeling like interruption.

Because knowing is no longer enough.
Recognition is not the destination.
We were never meant to live at the threshold forever.

And so we cross.

We cross with calloused feet.
With unspoken prayers tucked behind our teeth.
With blueprints etched into our sleep.
With languages that do not translate, but hold.

And this time, we do not ask for directions.
We ask the soil what it needs.
We ask the wind where it hasn't touched yet.
We ask our bodies what they are ready to release.

And we build there.

Not in the image of what was taken— but in the image of what was never lost.

That is the difference.

We are here to resurrect the future we were told to forget.

To make presence the infrastructure.
To make memory the method.
To make the ground a partner in the dream.

This is emergence, not escape.

The point where landing becomes legacy.
Where the act of staying becomes the seed of something sovereign.
Where you no longer fear being seen because you no longer fear being true.

You did not just come here to survive.
You came to return the world to itself.

And the first place it starts— is with you.

So I ask you again, for the last time:

Where are you landing?

One love, ESS xo

⸻

References

• Chasing Hope: Innovation And Taking Flight In Stormy Weather - Forbes

• Akan Proverbs – Adinkra Symbols

Open Legs, Open Portals

Sex is the most overlooked instrument of spiritual consequence—an unregulated exchange of memory, karma, and ancestral unrest, often performed with people we wouldn’t trust to guard our names, let alone our souls.

Your body may rationalize. Your mind may forgive.
But your field—the unseen imprint of your spirit—remembers every entrance.
And some spirits don’t pull out.

We were taught to protect ourselves from pregnancy, from infection, from scandal.
But who taught you to protect your energy?

Modern sex education emphasizes physical health and consent, yet often overlooks protection from psychic residue. It does not address what psychological studies have shown: that sex, especially when not aligned with one's internal values or emotional needs, can lead to anxiety, regret, even identity confusion. It’s not just about condoms. It’s about consciousness.

A seven-minute encounter can tattoo your field for seven years. Did you know?

That orgasm is not release—it’s ritual.
That climax is not the end—it’s a contract.
And every time you say yes to someone you don’t trust, you are giving them the key to your altar.

This world will teach you how to seduce.
It will not teach you how to cleanse.
It will teach you how to get naked.
It will not teach you what it means to be spiritually exposed.

You can’t decolonize your life and still fuck like a settler.
You can’t reclaim your power if you don’t reclaim your portals.
Because your sexuality is not a social construct. It’s an inheritance.
And somewhere buried beneath purity myths and pleasure capitalism, beneath hookup culture and patriarchal repression, is a truth so ancient it scares us:

Sex is sacred. Always has been. Always will be.

Before tantra was severed from its sacred roots and rebranded as erotic self-care for disembodied consumers, before sacred sensuality was emptied of Spirit and sold as wellness for the spiritually disengaged, we were fucking to remember God.
We were invoking Spirit through sweat and ceremony.
We were merging bodies to decode time.

In precolonial African societies, sex was revered as a sacred act integral to spiritual and communal life. Among the Baganda of Uganda, elder women known as Ssenga guided young women into embodied erotic education without shame or condemnation. In East-Central Africa, sexual practices were interwoven with spiritual cosmologies and fertility rituals, offering a holistic and unashamed approach to pleasure and power (De Gruyter).

Monogamy wasn’t the rule. Neither was polyamory.
The rule was reverence.
Who you shared your body with wasn’t dictated by religion.
It was governed by the understanding that sex is spiritual architecture.
And every lover is an architect.

But colonialism turned sacred lovers into sluts.
Turned spirit-work into sin.
Turned pleasure into punishment.

Now we lay with people whose names we forget but whose energy we can’t shake.
We wake up drained, not from orgasm, but from possession.
Because sex isn’t dirty—but some of your lovers are.
Not their bodies. Their karma.

This is a blueprint for those building temples inside themselves—and asking why they keep collapsing.

⸻

Sex has never been the problem.
It’s who enters your body without knowing what they awaken.

Because not all penetration is physical.
Some slip past the cervix and into the subconscious.
Some enter through the pelvis and rearrange the memory of who you are.
Some unzip something older than you—older than them—and leave it gaping.

We don’t talk enough about the distortion.
How intimacy without integration leaves your nervous system haunted.
How arousal without alignment reprograms your desire to chase what hurts you.
How sex, when misused, doesn’t just leave residue—it leaves splinters.
Small psychic fragments of other people’s grief, ambition, addiction, shame—lodged in the folds of your psyche.
And when enough of them accumulate, you start mistaking them for your own.

This is psychological displacement disguised as connection—an unregulated transfer of memory, pattern, and pain that rewires you at the level of Spirit.

Psychologists have long explored how our sense of self is shaped by external interactions. In Charles Cooley’s “looking-glass self” theory, the idea that we internalize how we believe others perceive us becomes especially potent during sexual intimacy. When you allow someone into your body, you also invite in their projections, their wounds, their chaos. And if you’re not grounded in your own reflection, you begin to morph into the fractured mirror they hold up to you.

Because the body is porous. The field is mutable. And the self?
The self is not fixed.
It’s responsive.
It molds to what it merges with.

You merge with someone whose soul is at war—and now you’re tired all the time.
You merge with someone who lies for sport—and now you’re second-guessing your own truth.
You merge with someone whose lineage is still processing violence—and now your joy feels unsafe.

There are names for this in many cultures. But English doesn’t carry them.
So we say “vibe.”
We say “drained.”
We say “off.”
What we mean is:
”I mistook proximity for connection—and now I carry the spiritual consequences of someone else’s crisis.”

Because consent is not discernment.
Chemistry is not compatibility.
And pleasure is not proof that someone belongs in your energy field.

And still, the wellness world calls it freedom. Still, culture calls it empowerment. But the truth is, more and more people are left feeling depleted and fragmented in the wake of sexual encounters that promised liberation and delivered something else entirely. As explored in The Love Central’s research, casual sex, when misaligned with emotional readiness, often results in unintended emotional attachment, spiritual confusion, and deep energetic withdrawal.

We give people the key to our most sacred chamber without checking if they know how to walk through a holy space without tracking blood on the floors.

And when the collapse happens—when your voice gets softer, your boundaries get looser, your sense of self gets foggier— you think it’s heartbreak.
But it’s not.
It’s energetic fragmentation.

You didn’t lose a partner.
You lost pieces of yourself that fused with someone unequipped to carry them.
And when those pieces return, they don’t always come back clean.

⸻

This is the price of mistaking chemistry for compatibility, and calling it liberation before reading the fine print.

You don’t need another bath in rose petals.
You need an exorcism.

What you are entering now is a sacred act of repossession.
An intimate recalibration of selfhood.
A psychic disentanglement from energies that have claimed squatters’ rights in your field.

A calling back of every version of you that got left behind in someone else's mouth.

That lover wasn't just a phase—they were a portal.
That "situationship" wasn't casual—it was karmic.
And your intuition knew.
But your trauma craved attention.
Your body yearned for softness.
Your loneliness longed to be held.

Not every climax brings you closer to Divinity.
Some bring you closer to grief.

This is energetic sovereignty in motion.
The severing of cords entangled with moments you’ve mistaken for meaning.
The nullification of agreements made in moments of ache.

What’s required now is the audacity to stop spiritualizing dysfunction.
To stop mistaking intensity for intimacy.
To stop calling unresolved karma a lesson.
And to fucking end it—with intention.

You are summoning yourself back from everywhere you've been scattered.
It’s a clean break in the direction of your own power, a split so precise it erodes your DNA.

You are the altar.
You are the gatekeeper.
You are the authority.

You are standing in the mirror, looking into your own eyes, and saying:

“I’m yours again.”

This is the new agreement: nothing enters without reverence. Nothing remains without reciprocity.

⸻

This is the return of conscious sex—the kind that expands you, not empties you.

You are not dirty for wanting.
You are not broken for enjoying.
But you are accountable for what you anchor into your field through that wanting.
Because some bodies feed you.
And others feed off you.

To rise is not to deny the body.
It is to return to it as a sovereign terrain.
To know that pleasure is not a sin—it is a living code.
The archive, the alchemy, and the authority.

This is when you stop mistaking erosion for electricity.
When you stop laying down to be devoured and start rising to be met.
When your need no longer negotiates entry, and your pleasure stops entertaining the unqualified.

This is sacred selection—because every body is a carrier, and not all energies are non-toxic, fair trade, or ethically sourced.

Choosing with awareness, not absence.
With presence, not projection.
With the knowledge that sex is not just sensation—it’s an initiation.
Because pleasure is power, and what you let inside helps shape what you become.

“Every time we claim our pleasure, we interrupt a system that seeks to erase us.”
— Alexis Pauline Gumbs

One love, ESS xo

⸻

References

• Psychological Impact of Casual Sex – Verywell Mind

• Sexual Pleasure in Precolonial Africa – IPPF

• East-Central African Sexual Cosmologies – De Gruyter

• Mental Health Effects of Casual Sex – The Love Central

• Alexis Pauline Gumbs – alexispauline.com

I Did It On Purpose

I used to whisper my dreams like confessions.
Half-formed. Half-felt. Half-mine.

Because somewhere between expectation and exile, not knowing who you are became synonymous with failure.
Especially if you’re Black. Especially if you’re brilliant. Especially if your gifts don’t fit neatly inside a career path or a LinkedIn headline.
We were taught to produce, not to become.
To obey, not explore.
To commodify a calling before we’ve even dared to name it.

But I’ve learned that purpose doesn’t always arrive with clarity.
Sometimes it shows up as a question, a tension, a life that doesn’t make sense to anyone watching—including you.
Sometimes purpose wears the face of a mistake.
A wrong turn. A heartbreak. A breakdown you survived by instinct and grace.

They’ll say you’re lost.
But what if the wandering is sacred?

Because I did it on purpose.
The wandering. The doubting. The delays.
Not because I had the map—
but because every detour has been part of the design.
Because what I’ve lived is not separate from my calling.
It is my calling, just not yet in terms the market knows how to measure.

No one tells you this:
You can live decades without the words for it and still be walking straight toward your purpose.

⸻

I once mistook visibility for validation.

Because when you’ve been invisible long enough, attention can masquerade as affection.
But some spotlights were never built to honor you—only to consume you.

They celebrate you when you’re digestible.
When your divinity is soft-spoken.
When your labor serves the system.

I’ve been called inspiring by people who would never survive what I’ve lived.
Praised for my strength by people who overlooked my exhaustion.
Seen—only when it served the story they wanted to tell.

And for a while, I let it happen.
Because attention gets mistaken for care when you’ve been conditioned to survive on scraps.
Because the spotlight can feel like shelter when the margins have been your only address.
Because applause can disguise control when you’ve never been taught to trust your own voice.

Purpose doesn’t demand proximity to power.
It requires proximity to self.

I trained in silence, behind curtains stitched from code-switching and careful smiles, in cities that seduce you with shine while draining you of substance.

“And that visibility which makes us most vulnerable is that which also is the source of our greatest strength.”
—Audre Lorde

The truth is—
you can be praised and still be perishing.
You can be chosen and still be off course.
You can be paid and still be starving.

I thought being unseen meant I was behind.
But I wasn’t behind—I was becoming.
Rooting. Rebuilding. Relearning how to move without performing.
And now I know I am aligned.
These days, I measure purpose in peace—not applause.

⸻

I used to measure progress by proximity.
To recognition.
To accolades.
To the version of success that someone else handed me.

But potential without direction becomes its own kind of cage.
And I nearly suffocated in the waiting.
Waiting for permission.
Waiting to be proven.
Waiting for a breakthrough that would make sense to someone else’s algorithm.

Now, I move differently.
Not faster—freer.
Not louder—truer.
I say yes where the yes opens me.
When the silence turns electric.
Where the no feels holy.

I’ve turned down rooms that shimmered with opportunity but smelled like erasure.
I’ve said yes only where my spirit could exhale.
Because what I’m building is oxygen.
It expands your chest and checks your ego.
It clears the noise.
It confronts everything that tried to silence it.

I move for clarity.
For alignment.
For longevity.

I speak what I know and let the truth do the heavy lifting.
I walk like I trust the contract I made with the Divine.
This is commitment.
This is devotion.
And I am living in agreement with my assignment—whatever it asks of me.

It doesn’t arrive—it assembles.
Layered through memory, gesture, and timing.
It speaks in pattern, pressure, precision.
Every time I followed, the ground met me.
Every time I trusted, it spoke.
I follow it without translation.
I hold it like truth.
And I keep choosing it—on purpose.

⸻

There is no missed purpose. Only a life that kept showing up in the places you were taught to dismiss—your rage, your restlessness, your refusal to settle.

You’ve been learning through experience.
Not wasting time—gathering it.
Not falling behind—building context.
Everything you thought disqualified you was actually preparing you.

We are not here to perform purpose.
We are here to perceive it.
To see the patterns in our pain.
To name the intelligence in our instincts.
To understand that the work we’ve done to survive is part of the architecture of what we’re here to build.

“When you get, give. When you learn, teach.”
—Maya Angelou

There is no formula.
There is no final draft.
Purpose is not a chase.
It’s a choice.
Again and again—in how you show up, how you serve, how you honor the question that won’t go away.

Every past version of you has been a rehearsal for this one— the version that no longer waits for clarity to be external.
As an embodied thesis:
As the moment you realize that what you’ve endured is your evidence.
That what you carry is already qualified.
That your survival is not separate from your assignment—it is the signal.

You are not lost.
You are not late.
You are being shaped by the very road that taught you how to walk.

Your story was already in motion long before the rules were written.
You’re not becoming who you are by accident.

You’re doing it
on purpose.

One love, ESS xo

⸻

References

• Audre Lorde – Poetry Foundation

• Maya Angelou – Official Website

Your Pastor Gets Paid, But Your Priestess Can’t?

The priest lives in a mansion. The priestess is called a fraud.
One collects tithes in silk robes. The other buries her power under her tongue and prays no one asks for proof.
He’s honored. She’s feared.
His labor is holy. Hers is demonic.
And yet—they come to her in secret.

They always have.

In the Caribbean, she was called Obeah woman. In Africa, the midwife, the diviner, the mouth of the village. In the Americas, she became a whisper, a warning, a superstition.
But when the pastor couldn’t fix it—when the prayer circle didn’t hit—they came anyway. Quiet. Desperate. Empty-handed.

And expected her to heal them for free.

Because we’ve been taught to pay men to speak for God, but guilt women for speaking with God.
Especially if that woman is Black.
Especially if her gift can’t be gentrified.

The first time I named a price, I felt my ancestors behind me. Not proud—protective.
Because they understood the cost.
They understood how quickly a priestess becomes a problem the moment she asks to be paid.

I descend from women whose medicine was outlawed. Whose rituals were criminalized. Whose power was feared precisely because it worked.
And when people flinch at the cost of my work, I don’t feel shame—I feel the weight of every woman who was burned for less.

Every woman who held the village together without a single offering.
Every woman who was called devil while the bishop built empires with tax exemptions.

Imposter syndrome didn’t grow in me because I doubted my calling.
It grew in me because I watched the world reward fraud and fear the real thing.

My altar is not a charity. It is a site of exchange.
This is ancestral labor. Generational calculus. Energetic debt collection.
And I’ve stopped offering myself at a discount.

⸻

They didn't just steal our gods—they monetized their replacements and sent us the bill.

Before they criminalized our rituals, they commodified them. The violence wasn't just in the burning—it was in the branding. What was once temple became tabernacle. What was once shrine became steeple. What was once oracle became ownership.

As Christina Sharpe writes in In the Wake: On Blackness and Being,

“What is lived in the wake of slavery is not only the catastrophe, but the afterlife of property.”

The Black body as resource. The Black gift as extractable. The Black woman as infrastructure—expected to birth, to hold, to heal, but never to invoice.

Religion didn’t just rewire our sense of the divine. It rewrote the divine economy. In pre-colonial West African societies, priestesses, oracles, and spiritual intermediaries were compensated for their roles in maintaining communal harmony, resolving conflict, and guiding public decision-making—and paid well. Payments included offerings of food, livestock, textiles, and other forms of wealth, reflecting a system of reciprocity that honored their contributions.

As Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí explains in The Invention of Women, many pre-colonial African societies—such as the Yoruba—organized spiritual and political power around relational seniority rather than fixed gender roles. Sacred work was respected because it served the community, not because it fit a colonial framework of authority.

But colonization didn’t just steal our land. It stole our ledgers.
It told us to pray to a god that doesn’t look like us for freedom while kneeling on our grandmother’s grave.

Suddenly, anything not sanctioned by church or state was labeled witchcraft. And anyone asking for compensation outside of those systems was accused of exploiting faith.
The priest could build a mansion.
The priestess became a warning.

We now live in a world where a televangelist can own a private jet and call it “divine favor,” but if I charge for my spiritual work, I am “taking advantage of vulnerable people.”
Where is that energy when megachurches take in over $6 billion annually and don’t pay a cent in taxes?

There is no shame in charging for sacred work.
There is shame in expecting sacred labor to be free when nothing else in this world is.

bell hooks once said,

“When we work without compensation, we signal that our labor has no value.”

But what she didn’t say—what I will—is this:
When Black women work without compensation, we reinforce the economic systems that were built to exploit us.

We inherit the fatigue of those who were forced to give everything and still be grateful.
We inherit the distrust of those who watched their holy be rewritten as heresy.
We inherit the silence of those who were too powerful to be allowed to speak.

Consider Tituba—the enslaved Afro-Indigenous woman at the center of the Salem Witch Trials.
History remembers the hysteria. It remembers the hangings. But it often forgets that the spellwork, the rituals, the “witchcraft” that terrified Puritan society were learned from her.

The women of Salem weren’t burned simply for practicing magic—they were burned because the magic traced back to a Black woman.

The fear was never just about the supernatural.
It was about who the power came from.

This is why I charge.
Not for the gift—but for the cost of surviving it.

⸻

Hatshepsut was Pharaoh. Full stop.

She reigned over a flourishing empire for over two decades. Ruled Egypt at the height of its wealth, built monuments that still stand, launched successful trade expeditions that expanded the empire, and governed with both spiritual and political authority. She was the highest seat. The head. The god-body in a crown.

And yet, after her death, they tried to erase her.
Chiseled her image from stone.
Smashed her statues.
Buried her legacy in dust and denial.

Because power in the hands of a Black woman has always been seen as a threat.

This happens time and time again. Each time a Black woman steps into sacred leadership, they either rewrite her—or ridicule her.

Ask Ms. Cleo.

Turned into a meme. A late-night joke. A parody of the very thing wellness culture now monetizes on TikTok. She read for a generation, but they never gave her the respect they gave the cards. She was mocked into caricature, then forgotten—while the industry she opened the door for now prints money in incense and irony.

This is how spiritual labor gets dismissed—when it challenges authority, when it defies institutions, when it comes from someone we’ve been taught not to trust.

I've felt the heat of that gaze. The suspicion. The smirk.
The "oh, you charge for this?"
The "how much?" that comes with a raised eyebrow.
The silence that follows when I say my rate like I mean it.

And so I’ve lowered it. More than once.
Not because the work is worth less, but because I was made to believe I was.

I’ve called it “energy exchange” just to ease the blow.
As if currency becomes sacred when we dilute the word.
As if money becomes less capitalist when it comes wrapped in spiritual guilt.
But let's be honest—"energy exchange" is how we undercharge with language that still hopes to be liked.

There’s a specific kind of grief that comes from being excellent and still underpaid.
A specific kind of rage that simmers when someone tells you “you should be doing this for the community,” while handing thousands to someone who just turned their first deck of oracle cards into a 12-week mentorship program.

I’ve stayed up late reworking pricing tiers, dissecting my offerings, searching for the flaw that makes my worth negotiable.
Wondering if one more bonus or deliverable might make my value easier to swallow.

What I do can build structure where confusion once lived.
It can clear out the noise, can anchor people in their truth, and reintroduces them to their own authority.
This is the kind of clarity that resonates through the body—subtle at first, then undeniable.
It changes decisions, direction, and destiny.

And still—still—I find myself questioning whether it’s “too much.”

Not because I don’t believe in it.
But because I’ve seen what happens when women like me speak too boldly, charge too confidently, own their power too completely.
Yes, some of us are getting paid. Yes, some are building empires. But it’s still the exception—not the norm.

We speak of sovereignty, but many of us are still negotiating with ghosts.
Scarcity stitched into our nervous systems.
Beliefs passed down like Grandma’s prayers: be generous, be invisible, be grateful for scraps.
The truth is, every priestess must meet her own edges before she can fully hold someone else’s transformation.

If the priest can profit off prophecy, then so can the ones he learned it from.

⸻

This is the part where I stop negotiating.

What I offer is the result of years spent refining my craft, trusting what arrives, and holding space in ways most systems won’t.
I no longer bend the terms of my agreement to match someone else’s readiness.
What I offer is consistent. What I hold is real. And I intend to keep it that way.
I price it accordingly—not for approval, but to sustain the integrity of the work.
I’m here to endure. On purpose. On rate. On record.

“If I didn’t define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people’s fantasies for me and eaten alive.”
— Audre Lorde

Period.

One love, ESS xo

⸻

REFERENCES

• Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, Duke University Press, 2016.

• bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism, South End Press, 1981.

• Audre Lorde, Poetry Foundation Biography

• Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí, The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses, University of Minnesota Press, 1997.

• Tituba – Wikipedia

• Hatshepsut – Wikipedia

Buried in Our Blood

There are things the body knows that the mind can’t name. A tension passed down like heirloom silver, polished and hidden. The way some of us flinch at blessings. The way others cry during sex and don’t know why. Memory does not end at the brain. It lodges in bone. In blood. In the invisible.

I did have mentorship along the way—guides who nurtured my gifts, who saw what I carried before I could name it. Their presence mattered. But I didn’t learn who I was through ceremony or curriculum. I learned it in the in-between—between sleep and waking, between ache and intuition. Between knowing something without proof and proof that never felt like truth.

No one tells you how violent forgetting can be. Especially when it’s not your choice. Especially when you are praised for your proximity to erasure.

I grew up watching women in church speak in tongues and fall to their knees, then walk out into a world that dismissed their magic. I learned to read energies before I learned to read books. I could hear things others called coincidence. Feel things they dismissed as paranoia. For a long time, I said nothing. Until silence began to rot inside me.

According to epigenetic studies, trauma doesn’t just shape behavior—it modifies biology. Descendants of displacement often carry molecular echoes of pain they never experienced firsthand. Scientists call it transgenerational epigenetic inheritance. But my grandmother would say, “di dead nuh dun talk. Is we who nuh listen.”

In the Western world, we’re taught that time moves in a line. But I never moved that way. My life has always spiraled—looping through languages I’ve never studied, visions I never summoned. What some call past lives, I’ve always experienced as parallel truths. I see the soul as an archive—layered, encrypted, remembering.

And some of us are born with the keys.

This gift—this responsibility—isn’t about spectacle. It’s about attunement. I don’t perform for approval. I listen. To what’s buried. To what never had the words. To the sharp pulse beneath someone’s shoulder blade that doesn’t belong to this lifetime. I trace their ache like a cartographer, through bloodlines and belief systems, to the original fracture.

And almost always, I find that what binds us is older than we think.

Before the chains. Before the ships. Before the shame. We mapped the stars. We built libraries from stone. We ruled kingdoms with our tongues and our hands. What I carry is not just memory—it is infrastructure. A soul-deep scaffolding of who we’ve been and what we still are.

Remembrance is a technology. It builds. It reconnects. It repairs.

To remember is to re-enter the contract that predates empire, scripture, and the linearity of Western time. A covenant encoded not in doctrine but in vibration. It is a return not to myth, but to method—systems of knowing and being that existed long before they were renamed, reframed, or erased. Belonging is not a destination. It is a frequency. Remembrance here is not a reaction—it is a recalibration. A reactivation of codes buried beneath conquest, now rising like heat through the body of the diaspora.

⸻

Some people inherit money. Others inherit fear.

But many of us—especially those severed from Source—inherit beliefs. Not consciously, not in language, but in sensation. We inherit shame dressed up as humility. Fear packaged as obedience. Scarcity mistaken for realism. We wear these beliefs like hand-me-downs, never questioning whether they were tailored for us in the first place.

And often, they weren’t. They were sewn by other lifetimes. Other bloodlines. Other traumas we were born into without context or consent.

I began to understand this not through theory, but through my practice. I’d touch a client’s hand and feel a heaviness in their chest that didn’t belong to them—or hear a phrase they always repeated that wasn’t theirs. “I have to do it all myself.” “It’s not safe to be seen.” “Love always hurts.” When I followed the thread, it often unraveled back through generations, or veered into lives they didn’t consciously remember—but that their soul never forgot.

Science is still catching up. In her groundbreaking book, The Ancestor Syndrome by Anne Ancelin Schützenberger, she describes what she calls the anniversary syndrome—the phenomenon where descendants unconsciously repeat emotional experiences, illnesses, or relational patterns on the same dates or life stages as their ancestors. These repetitions are not random. They are echoes. A kind of memory that survives without narrative—embedded in cycles, symptoms, and unspoken grief.

But there are truths that even science cannot yet quantify. This is where spiritual technology enters—not as a replacement for evidence, but as a parallel system of knowing. Modalities like past life regression, energy clearing, ancestral DNA repair, and intuitive mapping are not mystical indulgences. They are instruments. They help us locate what memory cannot verbalize. They give shape to the invisible.

I’ve seen people free themselves from lifetimes of unworthiness by naming the exact moment—three lifetimes ago—when they vowed never to speak again. I’ve witnessed women break generational patterns of betrayal by confronting an ancestral contract made during enslavement. These are energetic root systems—alive, layered, and responsive. And when we access them, we don’t just change our lives—we alter the instructions passed down through blood and energy.

In a world addicted to shortcuts, this work requires presence. In a culture obsessed with identity, it requires origin. And in a spiritual industry preoccupied with performance, it demands depth.

Not all wounds are yours. But healing them might be your task. Not all fears are irrational. Some are inherited. Some were survival strategies that calcified into personality traits. But beneath them, there is something older than fear. Something holy. Something waiting to be remembered.

⸻

Spiritual knowledge used to be held in ceremony. In bone. In breath. Passed mouth to mouth, dream to dream, guarded with care because misuse could maim. Now it’s filtered, digitized, stripped of its integrity, and made consumable in under sixty seconds.

What was once sacred instruction has been flattened into content. Practices that took generations to refine are now rendered aesthetic—tied to algorithmic performance, available for purchase, diluted for palatability. The ones who once carried spiritual technologies through migration, through slavery, through silence, now watch them recirculate in sanitized forms—divorced from consequence, divorced from context.

What gets called “new age” is often ancestral. What gets labeled “intuitive” is often inherited. The problem isn’t that these practices are being used. The problem is that they’re being unrooted.

There are people hosting moon circles with no understanding of the origins of lunar cosmology. There are “healers” calling down spirits whose names they can’t pronounce, offering tools that were once outlawed, commodifying traditions their own ancestors never had to protect. It isn’t just ahistorical—it’s spiritually reckless.

To invoke these systems is to enter into relationship. With the Divine. With the dead. With forces that don’t respond to branding, but to reverence. And reverence isn’t a trend. It’s a stance. A posture of humility before something older, wider, and far less concerned with your visibility than your alignment.

I don’t fear the popularity of spirituality. I fear its dislocation—its removal from the lands, languages, and bloodlines that shaped its function and forged its form.

This work asks for more than performance. It asks for spiritual depth forged through initiation—through rupture, through repair, through the slow, deliberate return to truths you didn’t learn but always carried.

To practice without origin is to risk opening what you cannot close. To teach without lived inquiry is to risk guiding others into terrain you have not survived yourself. This is soul-work, yes. But it is also skilled labor.

There is a responsibility in this work. Not just to those we serve—but to those who came before. To those who hid their altars in broom closets. To those who coded divination into dance. To those who swallowed their tongues to keep the magic intact.

This is why platforms like ESSOESS aren’t just important—they’re needed. When ceremony is stripped from context, and Spirit is stripped from structure, we need more than visibility—we need strongholds. ESSOESS is a conduit. A living system. A digital altar. A site of return for ancestral transmissions that were never lost—only interrupted.

There are voices rising. But what’s needed is precision. What’s needed is trust. What’s needed is the reconstruction of sacred infrastructure—deliberate, protected, and immune to trend cycles.

To hold this work is not to perform it.
To hold this work is to be accountable to what it came through.

⸻

There are truths I carry that were never taught to me. Names I’ve never heard that live in my mouth. Gestures my hands make in session that I never practiced. There are dreams that have followed me for decades. Fragments of lives that do not belong to this one—yet shape everything about how I move through it.

I used to question them. Now I document them. I build with them.

The work I do is not to convince, but to clarify. To mirror what others already know but have been taught to distrust. There is nothing extraordinary about being able to speak to the dead, or to feel the ache of a decision made three lifetimes ago. What’s extraordinary is that we forgot this was ordinary.

For those of us born into disconnection—into names not our own, into languages that no longer taste like home, into bodies trained to shrink—our remembering is a kind of uprising. Not loud. Not always visible. But cellular. It’s in how we grieve. How we gather. How we know things without knowing why we know them.

This is the work of ESSOESS: to recontextualize the sacred. To rehouse the ancestral. To give it language without translation. To give it form without dilution. To give it space to breathe without explanation.

This is a love letter. To those who feel displaced, not just geographically but spiritually. To those who’ve been made to believe their sensitivity is a liability. To those who’ve always known—but needed permission to trust that knowing.

And to the ones not yet born—may you never have to reclaim what was never taken from you.

“You are your best thing.”
—Toni Morrison

One love, ESS xo

⸻

References

• Epigenetic Inheritance – McEwen, B. S., & Morrison, J. H. (Nature Reviews Neuroscience):
  https://www.nature.com/articles/nrn3818

• The Ancestor Syndrome – Anne Ancelin Schützenberger (Goodreads):
  https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1331755.The_Ancestor_Syndrome?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_16

Between Ancestors and Algorithms

The internet is full of people calling in Spirits they don’t understand.

Lighting candles to deities they can’t pronounce. Packaging ancestral rituals into aesthetic routines. Selling “manifestation hacks” as if they weren’t born from cosmologies that once got our elders burned, chained, exiled, or erased.

An entire spiritual economy now runs on rituals our ancestors were punished for—and most of the time, no one even bothers to name where it came from.

I didn’t set out to build a media platform.
I set out to build a correction.

Because somewhere between the viral breathwork reels and AI-generated priestesses, I felt the fracture: sacred knowledge extracted, repackaged, and sold back to us—without context, without credit, without care.

ESSOESS came through that fracture.
Not as a brand. Not as a business.
As a reckoning.

Because technology was never meant to be soulless.
It became soulless when we let it forget who fed it.

⸻

The deeper I looked, the clearer it became:
what we now call "wellness culture" is often a curated remix of African and Indigenous traditions stripped of their roots.

Smudging, divination, crystal work, energy healing—all foundational practices in global Black and brown spiritual systems—have been filtered through whiteness and commerce. The result is a trillion-dollar industry that praises the ritual but erases the people.

According to the Global Wellness Institute, the global wellness economy was valued at $5.6 trillion in 2022. Wellness tourism alone was worth $651 billion. But none of these numbers track how often these rituals come from spiritual systems that were once criminalized—and still remain underfunded, unprotected, or mocked when practiced in their original form.

White sage is now endangered in parts of California due to overharvesting for mass-market spiritual kits, despite being a sacred medicine in many Indigenous cultures (California Native Plant Society). Ayahuasca ceremonies—once held by Indigenous shamans deep in the Amazon—are now sold out in weekend retreats hosted by influencers. Palo Santo, long used in Afro-Latin and Indigenous South American spiritual work, has become a scent in overpriced boutique candles (Beauty Independent).

This isn’t just cultural appropriation.
It’s spiritual laundering.

What happens when you build digital tools on top of stolen rituals, drained of responsibility, accountability, or origin?

You get platforms that preach healing without naming harm.
You get interfaces that track your breath but not your bloodline.
You get media ecosystems that tokenize Black diviners while building billion-dollar tech stacks off the wisdom they inherited.

ESSOESS isn’t here to compete with that.
It’s here to interrupt it.

⸻

If you study the architecture of today’s platforms, you’ll notice something:
they’re designed to distribute information, not to hold meaning.
They optimize for attention—not memory, not depth, and certainly not Spirit.

Every scroll is engineered to trigger, not to transform.
Every algorithm rewards speed over soul.
The most visible voices aren’t always the wisest—just the most clickable.

What gets prioritized?
Volume. Visibility. Virality.
What gets lost?
Ritual. Context. Ceremony. Time. sacredness.

That’s not a glitch. That’s the blueprint.

In 2021, former Facebook (Meta) employee Frances Haugen revealed internal research showing that the company’s platform architecture was amplifying outrage because those emotions kept users engaged longer (Time, Wikipedia). It wasn’t an accident—it was the business model.

But what happens when people seeking healing enter digital spaces built to fracture them?

When spiritual knowledge becomes content, it’s subject to the rules of that system:
flatten it, aestheticize it, feed it to the scroll.

But spiritual technologies require something else.
They require containment.
They require ceremony.
They require us to honor sacredness—to create space for what cannot be rushed, filtered, or monetized.

ESSOESS isn’t just a media platform.
It’s an invocation in code.

A digital altar. A ceremonial interface.
A place where the sacred isn’t stripped, it’s amplified—designed to hold complexity, beauty, contradiction, grief, glamour, truth, and time.

And where the Source is never forgotten—because the Source is built into the structure.

⸻

ESSOESS is a return to intentional systems.
It is built to hold power, not flatten it.

One that doesn’t dilute Spirit to make it profitable.
One that doesn’t flatten our stories into trends.
One where the Divine isn’t an algorithm—but the architecture itself.

ESSOESS is not the answer to the algorithm.
It is the refusal.
The resurrection.
The return.

A platform coded in reverence.
A vision authored by Spirit.
A system that doesn’t just distribute content—it protects culture.

Because we are not data points.
We are prophecy.
And we are no longer waiting to be archived by someone else’s system.

One love, ESS xo

⸻

References

• Global Wellness Institute – 2023 Global Wellness Economy Monitor
  https://globalwellnessinstitute.org/industry-research/2023-global-wellness-economy-monitor/

• California Native Plant Society – White Sage Protection
  https://www.cnps.org/conservation/white-sage

• Beauty Independent – Native Americans Troubled by the Appropriation and Commoditization of Smudging
  https://www.beautyindependent.com/native-americans-troubled-appropriation-commoditization-smudging/

• The Guardian – The New Age Looks Enlightened and Exotic Because It Borrows Freely from Non-Anglo Cultures
  https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2021/apr/26/the-new-age-looks-enlightened-and-exotic-because-it-borrows-freely-from-non-anglo-cultures

• The Guardian – Peyote is the Darling of the Psychedelics Renaissance. Indigenous Users Say It Co-opts 'a Sacred Way of Life'
  https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/dec/19/indigenous-communities-protecting-psychedelics-peyote-corporations

• Time – How Facebook Forced a Reckoning by Shutting Down the Team That Put People Ahead of Profits
  https://time.com/6104899/facebook-reckoning-frances-haugen/

• Wikipedia – 2021 Facebook Leak
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Facebook_leak

Premature Prophets

The new priesthood was born in a checkout cart.

There are those who walk with Spirit because they were summoned.
And there are those who walk with Spirit because it sells.

We are living in an age where a broken heart and a logo are enough to launch a healing business.
Where trauma is treated as credential.
Where initiation is self-declared.
Where spiritual work has become influencer performance—high on aesthetic, low on integration.

But sacred work isn’t for everyone. And that’s the part no one says aloud.
Some of us are here to hold space.
Others are here to learn how to sit with their own.

In today’s spiritual economy, readiness has been replaced by branding.

We are witnessing the rise of self-ordained seers—
guides with no grounding,
healers with no humility,
mentors with no memory of what it means to actually be a student.

They don’t wait for initiation. They declare it.
They don’t listen to Spirit. They leverage it.

The danger isn’t just misinformation—it’s misembodiment.
Because when we skip the journey, we skip the integration.
And when we teach from an unintegrated place, what we pass on is not wisdom. It’s residue.

This is about reverence.
This is about responsibility.
This is about remembering that some tools require time, tears, and tending before they are safe to pass on.

In spiritual work, the cost of false authority isn’t just confusion.
It’s karmic collapse.

And too often, it leaves someone bleeding on an altar they were never meant to build.

⸻

Spiritual maturity cannot be streamed, styled, or sold in six easy payments.

Yet the current landscape rewards performance over process. In a culture obsessed with immediacy, many mistake spiritual sensitivity for spiritual authority. They confuse intuition with readiness. Vision with integration. Presence with preparation.

But access doesn’t equal embodiment.

The Dunning-Kruger effect, a cognitive bias identified by psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger, explains how those with the least experience often overestimate their skill—and lack the self-awareness to recognize their deficits. In spiritual spaces, this manifests as “coaches” who haven’t done their own shadow work. Readers who channel but haven’t integrated. Practitioners who teach what they’ve barely begun to live.

And because we’re swimming in a capitalist current that turns everything into content, these voices get amplified—while the slow, quiet work of becoming gets buried.

Studies in spiritual narcissism—a phenomenon where ego latches onto spiritual identity—show that bypassing isn’t just misguided. It’s dangerous. According to Verywell Mind, spiritual bypassing can become a psychological defense mechanism: a way of using rituals, teachings, and language to avoid personal responsibility, suppress emotional work, and posture enlightenment. Add a ring light and a monetized link tree, and that becomes a business model.

We’ve created a marketplace where the metrics for leadership are aesthetic fluency, social media virality, and curated “vulnerability.”
Not depth.
Not embodiment.
Not lived initiation.

But spiritual technology—real spiritual technology—has never been safe in the hands of the unprepared.
What looks like a gift can be a liability when not grounded in time, practice, and deep ancestral accountability.

⸻

There is an intelligence in delay.
A wisdom in waiting.
A medicine in not being ready yet.

But our culture treats slowness like a failure. We rush toward mastery because we are terrified of being in the middle—where things are messy, uncertain, unbranded. Where there’s nothing to sell, only something to learn.

Yet in every sacred tradition that has survived colonization, commodification, and crisis, there has always been one constant: apprenticeship.
Time spent under the eye of someone who holds more than you.
Time spent in stillness, watching, tending, unraveling.
Time spent not performing wisdom, but being reshaped by it.

In many African and Indigenous systems, you are not permitted to lead spiritual work until your elders have watched your life—not just your rituals, not just your visions, but how you move through grief, failure, community. It is your being, not your branding, that confirms your readiness.

But in the rush to monetize the mystical, we’ve replaced that with click funnels and trauma-as-testimony.
We’ve made the sacred marketable.
And in doing so, we’ve taught people that spiritual power is something you can unlock.
Not something you must earn.

True readiness is not a certificate. It’s a frequency.
It comes not just through study—but through endurance. Through death and rebirth. Through surviving your own teachings before daring to offer them to someone else.

And no—
Not everyone is meant to teach.
Not everyone is meant to guide.
Not everyone is meant to stand at the front of the circle.

That doesn’t make you less powerful.
It makes you honest.
And honesty is the first altar.

⸻

We don’t need more courses.
We need more courage—
the kind that speaks truth even when it costs you a launch date.

We need teachers who know when to step back.
Healers who know when they’re not ready to hold anyone.
Leaders who understand that silence is sometimes the highest form of service.

There’s no shame in not being ready.
The shame is in pretending you are.

Because sacred work is sacred for a reason.
And the consequences of mishandling it don’t always arrive on our doorstep.
Sometimes, they show up in the people we claim to serve.

The altar doesn’t care about your aesthetic.
The spirits don’t care about your following.
But they will care how you use your voice.

So ask yourself—
Would you still want this if no one was watching?
Would you still offer it if you weren’t being paid?

Who called you?
And who confirmed it?

Because real power doesn’t announce itself.
It arrives when you’re quiet enough to receive it.
And responsible enough to carry it.

The spiritual work I do did not come through convenience.
It came through collapse. Through grief. Through years of being stripped down to the bone until only truth remained.
It’s rooted in real life—in loss, in listening, in learning to sit with things no one else could name.
It is the slow, unsexy, inconvenient, ancestral work of becoming someone who can actually hold what Spirit dares to give.

And if you’re just here to be seen—
if what you really want is attention wrapped in incense—
then step aside.
This work will chew you up and call it a ceremony.

But if you stay,
if you commit,
if you surrender to the kind of becoming that breaks you open just wide enough for the Divine to move through—
you will not come out the same.

You will come out forged.
Clear-eyed.
Called.
And finally, ready.

One love, ESS xo

⸻

References

• Dunning, D., & Kruger, J. (1999). Unskilled and unaware of it: How difficulties in recognizing one's own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 77(6), 1121–1134.
  https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/basics/dunning-kruger-effect

• Morin, A. (2022). What Is Spiritual Bypassing? Verywell Mind.
  https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-spiritual-bypassing-5081640

The Holy Ghost is Trans

If God is everything, why are we still insisting God is either/or?

What we call Spirit has always existed beyond the architecture of gender. But the human impulse to categorize, to control, to contain what makes us uncomfortable, did what conquest always does—it narrowed the infinite. It carved binaries into being and dared to call them Divine.

The Holy Ghost is not bound by biology.
It has no fixed form, no singular voice, no allegiance to the constraints of flesh.
It moves as wind. As fire. As presence.
And if I’m being honest, it moves like queerness.

But still, institutions try to make holiness legible—palatable.
They put the sacred in a suit and tie. They give it a father’s tone, a pastor’s cadence, a theology of walls.
And they call anything outside that boundary unnatural.

Yet before any of us could spell transgender, two-spirit, or non-binary, there were cultures who not only understood these identities—they revered them.

Among the Fon of West Africa, Mawu-Lisa was both moon and sun, male and female—creator and container. They understood the divine as dual, unified, indivisible. Holiness didn’t divide itself to be understood—it expanded itself to be felt.

Among the Navajo, there is nádleehi—one who walks in-between.
Among the Lakota, winkte, whose visions were trusted, whose roles were sacred.
In the Dagara tribe of Burkina Faso, dual-spirited people are seen as mediators between realms.
The Yoruba didn’t weaponize fluidity—they encoded it into the divine. Ọ̀ṣun does not explain herself. She simply is. And she is never just one thing.

Before queerness was politicized, it was praised.
Before it was punished, it was priesthood.

This is sacred memory—passed through story, through ceremony, through blood.
It’s a remembering older than the language trying to erase it.

The Holy Ghost is trans because Spirit has never needed to choose.
And maybe the reason that makes some people so uncomfortable…
…is because they’ve built their entire sense of holiness on the assumption that God looks just like them.

⸻

Before gender was boxed and labeled, it flowed—between bodies, across borders, through breath and ritual. It lived in those whose presence reminded the community that the sacred was never singular.

In Diné (Navajo) culture, the nádleehi—"one who is transformed"—embodied both masculine and feminine traits. They served as healers, spiritual guides, mediators. Their existence enriched the community, woven into the spiritual and ceremonial life of the people. (source)

The Lakota recognize winkte—those who move between gender roles, who hold spiritual functions no one else can. Winkte have long been respected as ceremonial leaders, dreamers, mediators—carriers of wisdom that lives between the lines. (source)

In Burkina Faso, the Dagara call them gatekeepers—individuals who live on the threshold of gender and spirit. Their presence sustains cosmic balance. They are tasked with bridging the seen and unseen, anchoring the spiritual health of the village. (source)

Within the spiritual traditions of the Fon people of Benin, Mawu-Lisa embodies a divine duality—Mawu, the moon goddess associated with night, fertility, and compassion, and Lisa, the sun god linked to day, strength, and power. Together, they represent a harmonious balance of feminine and masculine energies, illustrating that the sacred transcends binary definitions. (source)

In Yoruba cosmology, the orisha Ọ̀ṣun dances through contradiction—seductive and sovereign, nurturing and destructive. In her, gender is not a limit but a language. The divine doesn’t collapse into male or female—it expands. (source)

When colonial powers arrived, they did more than conquer bodies—they redrew cosmologies. Imposed hierarchies. Rewrote the sacred in their own image. What was once holy became forbidden. And the ones who once stood at the center were cast out.

But power doesn’t vanish. It adapts. It remembers.

Today, the flourishing of Black transgender and gender-expansive life is a revelation. A recognition. A sacred architecture being rebuilt in public view. And what people fear isn’t the visibility—it’s the vibrancy. The truth that wholeness doesn’t need approval to shine.

Naming and honoring these truths is an act of recognition. Of resurgence. Of returning what was never lost—only buried.

I write this not as someone speaking for trans and gender-expansive people—but as someone who honors them, learns from them, and knows that Spirit rises wherever truth is welcome.

⸻

Spirit has always adapted. It traveled in drumbeats and dreamscapes. It etched itself into scar patterns and language. And now—it hums through fiber-optic veins. It slides between screens. It speaks in 1s and 0s because it knows we still need it to speak.

For those the church exiled and the temple ignored, the internet became sanctuary.
Not a perfect one. But one where Black, trans, and gender-expansive bodies could begin again.
Where the altar wasn’t built of marble, but interface.
Where a livestream could hold as much power as a laying on of hands.
Where divinity didn’t ask me to apologize for being complicated.

These digital sanctuaries weren’t born from convenience.
They were carved from necessity.

When physical churches turned us away, we coded new temples.
When sacred texts erased our names, we wrote new ones—in blogs, on social media accounts, in voice notes between chosen kin.
When the systems refused to see us, we built mirrors that could.

Because Spirit has never required a building.
It requires truth.
It requires presence.
It requires a body willing to hold what cannot be defined.

Spiritual technology is more than apps and affirmations.
It’s memory coding.
It’s knowing how to make meaning in exile.
It’s making a ritual out of reclamation.
It’s turning digital space into devotional space—because when your existence is politicized, worship becomes reclamation.

And who better to engineer the future of the sacred than those of us who have always lived in the in-between?

This is the reemergence of the original code.
The sacred rising to meet us in every form we’ve ever taken.

⸻

There is nothing more threatening to a system built on control than the sight of someone it tried to erase—thriving.

To dance in a body they said should be hidden.
To love in a way they said was broken.
To call Spirit into a room and have it show up looking like you.

That is consecration.

Because joy, in its rawest form, is design. It remembers what the world forgot. It restores what doctrine tried to unwrite. It doesn’t just outlive shame—it rewires the frequency altogether.

Black trans and gender-expansive joy is not a side effect of healing. It is the healing.
Not a prize for survival, but a method of it.

This kind of joy doesn’t wait for permission.
It doesn’t ask if its softness will be palatable.
It doesn’t lower its volume to make others comfortable.

It anoints.
It takes up space.
It weaves laughter through the grief and says, “We’re still here. We’re still sacred. We’re still becoming.”

And in witnessing it, I learn too.

As a queer Black woman, I’ve watched how the binary limits not just others, but me.
How the rules about how to be “feminine” or “spiritual” or “good” don’t actually fit the mess and majesty of who we are.
And how the more I deconstruct what I was told holiness should look like, the more Spirit begins to resemble people I was taught to fear.

What if joy is the ceremony?
What if queerness is the prayer?
What if we are the ones building the altar—each time we choose truth over safety, aliveness over assimilation, soul over spectacle?

They don’t ask for answers.
They summon presence.
They open the door to the sacred already breathing beneath our names.

We were never meant to fit inside temples we didn’t build.
We were meant to be the temple.

To remember joy not as indulgence—but as data.
As design.
As divine.

One love, ESS xo

⸻

References

• Wikipedia. Nádleehi – Navajo Cultural Gender Roles.
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N%C3%A1dleehi

• South Dakota Public Broadcasting. The Winkte and the Hundred in Hand.
  https://www.sdpb.org/arts-and-culture/2016-06-06/the-winkte-and-the-hundred-in-hand/

• Rainbow Messenger. Gatekeepers: Gays in the Dagara Tribe.
  https://rainbowmessenger.blog/2018/06/23/gatekeepers-gays-in-the-dagara-tribe/

• Mythopedia. Mawu-Lisa.
  https://mythopedia.com/topics/mawu-lisa

• Taylor & Francis Online / Third World Quarterly. Decolonising Gender: Reimagining the Sacred.
  https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01436597.2023.2213171

White Sage, White Spaces

They burned my ancestors’ herbs and spoke our tongues with borrowed breath—then asked for my trust. My Blackness was welcome on the altar, but not in the room.

I was one of the few.
One of the only Black bodies in a room thick with the smoke of stolen plants.
A room lined with crystal grids, white gauze curtains, and dreamcatchers imported from Etsy.
A room where the ritual had been gutted and resold in pastel packaging, and the sacred had been stripped of its memory.
Where spiritual language was fluent, but cultural fluency was nonexistent.
Where “love and light” meant “don’t make it uncomfortable.”
I wasn’t there to be initiated—I was already encoded. My blood carried the blueprint long before the room called it ritual.

When I questioned the absence—of elders, of history, of representation—
I was met with a well-rehearsed dismissal delivered like gospel:
“Maybe this just isn’t the right space for you.”
“Maybe I’m not the teacher you’re looking for.”

No effort to widen the circle. No reflection.
Just an elegant form of exile.

Let’s be clear: representation is not a request—it’s a requirement.
Especially when the ideologies you’re profiting from were once punished.
Especially when the words on your altar come from tongues your ancestors never spoke.
Especially when the wisdom you teach was kept alive by people you never credit.

Because when whiteness repackages ancient practices as intuitive downloads, the Source gets lost—and so does the integrity.

They were right about one thing: they weren’t the teacher for me.
Not because I couldn’t meet their frequency—because they refused to raise theirs.

Because what they offered had no roots—only reach.

They didn’t crave connection—they craved access.
To the power, not the people. To the form, not the function.
They wanted ancestral entry without reverence or relationship.
Practice with no pulse.
Meaning without memory.

And when you center your comfort over someone else’s history,
you’re not holding space—you’re hoarding it.

⸻

Spiritual spaces don’t become exclusionary by accident.
They’re curated—consciously or not—by who is centered, who is credited, and who is kept at the margins.

Even in the most “inclusive” circles, whiteness often remains the default setting.
Wellness brands celebrate cacao but forget the genocide that tried to erase the Maya.
They host sound baths using singing bowls while never once mentioning Tibet.
They perform African drumming they can’t trace—with no ancestral connection, no acknowledgment, just a beat they borrowed and now sell as their own.
And they call it healing, when it’s extraction.

Author and spiritual activist Rachel Ricketts writes in Do Better: Spiritual Activism for Fighting and Healing from White Supremacy that

“Spiritual bypassing is when white folks weaponize spiritual tools to avoid accountability, perpetuate harm, and center their comfort while claiming it’s collective liberation.”

The aesthetics are sacred. The politics remain the same.

And when Black and Indigenous voices do enter the room, we’re often positioned as accessories.
Our wisdom is acknowledged only when it’s been curated, distilled, and made palatable—
Not too angry. Not too mystical. Not too loud.
We’re expected to inspire, not to lead.
Our medicine is welcomed, but our mastery is policed.

A 2023 plenary talk by Dr. Yolanda Covington-Ward at the African and Diasporic Religious Studies Association highlighted how Black and Indigenous spiritual voices are often erased or sidelined in spaces built on their cultural legacies—especially when those voices push beyond aesthetic to reclaim authority.

This is spiritual plagiarism—sacred knowledge rewritten without the authors.
Because in these rooms, proximity to the sacred isn’t the same as permission to teach it—
and yet the mic is often handed to those with the most distance from the Source.

This is how spiritual appropriation works: soft voice, hard silence.
It smiles. It smudges. And it erases.

⸻

For a long time, I thought the problem was me.

Before I ever entered the room, my body had already said no.
But I mistook my refusal as avoidance—because I’d been conditioned to believe that any friction I felt was proof I wasn’t evolved enough to receive the teaching.
I labeled it resistance.
I called it shadow work.

Because when you’re taught to spiritualize your discomfort, you forget how to trust it.

I sat in silence and called it maturity.
I ignored my instincts and called it growth.

These spiritual spaces have the ability to exploit your willingness to override your instincts.
They recode boundaries as blocks and call coercion a rite of passage.
What should be discernment is framed as resistance—
and when you flinch, they tell you it’s your initiation—this is the medicine.

But healing isn’t comfort.
And discomfort isn’t always a lesson.

Sometimes what you’re being told is a lesson is actually a mechanism—engineered to make you doubt your perception so the system stays intact.

“If you are silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it.”
— Zora Neale Hurston

That wasn’t growth I was being asked to lean into.
It was spiritual gaslighting.

⸻

I stayed in those spaces longer than I cared to admit.

Not because I didn’t feel the disconnect—
but because for too long, these were the only spaces that even spoke the language of ceremony—even if it was borrowed.

Because spaces where Black and Indigenous people teach our own traditions—fully, unapologetically, without dilution—are still too rare.
Because most altars are built on stolen soil, but few are led by the descendants it was stolen from.

I stayed because I was hungry.
Hungry for memory.
Hungry for meaning.
Hungry for language that sounded like where I came from—even if it came from someone who didn’t.

They invited me to bring my energy, my medicine, my resonance—
but not my questions.
Not my framing.
Not my critique.
They welcomed the symbols, not the system that made them sacred.

And when I spoke—when I asked where the elders were, where the origin was, where the integrity lived—
the answer was silence dressed in white.

Erasure has evolved. It doesn’t wear hoods; it wears hemp.
It sips from copper cups.
It burns sage and says “community” while avoiding everything that would make one real.

I don’t sit quietly anymore—not because I seek disruption, but because I finally trust the sound of my own discernment.

When I teach, I don’t translate.
I remember.
I invoke.
I protect.

Because I am not here to distill wisdom for mass appeal.
I am not here to soften the sacred for palates that refuse to do the work.
And I am not here to ask permission to reclaim what has always been inherited, rightful, and mine.

If a space demands your silence to remain spiritual—
it was never sacred to begin with.

One love, ESS xo

⸻

References

• Ricketts, R. (2021). Do Better: Spiritual Activism for Fighting and Healing from White Supremacy. Atria Books.

• Covington-Ward, Y. (2023). Plenary Talk - African and Diasporic Religious Studies Association.

• Hurston, Z. N. Zora Neale Hurston Official Site.

Touched Too Early

There are things I remember that I shouldn’t.

Not because I was too young, but because someone decided I was old enough.

I was five the first time I felt the air in a room change and didn’t know why. Six when I started noticing how certain adults looked at me—like I was already dressed in shame. Seven when I stopped telling people what I knew, because the truth was too loud and no one wanted to hear it from a girl so small.

The abuse didn’t just leave bruises.
It left questions—about the body, about the spirit, about the way intuition attaches itself to pain like smoke to fire.
When you’re touched too early, your nervous system becomes a prophet.
Your skin develops a memory before your language does.

I learned to read energy before I could read books.
I could feel danger before it entered the room.
I knew when someone was lying because my stomach would knot with a clarity I didn’t yet have words for.

And for years, I thought that made me broken.

But what I now know is this: being psychic in a world that violates girls is both a curse and a mirror.
It reveals everything people would rather keep buried—especially when the body starts telling the truth long before the mouth ever dares to.

⸻

The first time I felt someone’s desire press against my energy field, I was maybe six.
Too young to name it, but not too young to absorb it.

It didn’t just feel wrong—it felt sticky.
Like their energy clung to my skin and burrowed itself into places I didn’t know could be touched.
It followed me.
Slept with me.
Lingered in my breath.

That’s the part no one talks about.
That energy stays with you.
For years.
Seven, sometimes more.

Sexual energy isn’t neutral. It imprints.
It transfers.
It leaves behind codes and karmas that don’t belong to you but suddenly start shaping the way your spirit moves.

As a child, I didn’t just carry my own pain.
I was carrying theirs—their unresolved trauma, their shame, their hunger.
I’d inherited contracts I never agreed to.

And because I was already spiritually open—already reading the ether, already dreaming messages I didn’t understand—I became a vessel for what had no business being housed in a girl so small.

⸻

When a child is psychic and touched too early, something gets rewired.

You don’t just lose trust in people.
You lose trust in your own knowing.
Because your gift told you something was wrong—and no one stopped it.

You begin to question whether your sensitivity is a gift or a curse.
You start silencing the part of you that knows, just to survive the part of you that hurts.

And when you’re a Black girl, that questioning gets even sharper.

Because the world sees your body before it sees your humanity.
Because your intuition is mistaken for attitude.
Because your sensitivity is labeled as overreacting.

According to a landmark 2017 report by Georgetown Law, Black girls are perceived as more adult, more sexual, and less innocent than white girls starting as early as age five. This measurable bias does more than shape policy. It shapes perception.
It changes how we’re touched.
How we’re policed.
How we’re protected—or not.

So what happens when you are aware?
When you do know things?
When your intuition isn’t just a gut feeling, but a sensory experience—charged, vivid, terrifying?

What happens is you learn early how to hide.

You become fluent in quiet.
You fold yourself into smiles.
You stop telling adults what you see, because the last time you did, you got punished—or worse, ignored.

But your body doesn’t forget.
Your body records.
And eventually, it begins to speak back.

⸻

There is a point in every survivor’s life where silence stops feeling like protection and starts to feel like betrayal.

Mine came slowly.
Not as an epiphany, but as a return.
To the moments I had buried.
To the flashes I told myself were fiction.
To the ache in my chest that pulsed louder every time I walked past a mirror.

I had to relearn how to trust my knowing.
Not just the visions or the gut feelings—but the parts of my body that remembered before my mind did.

Because memory doesn’t just live in the mind—it lives in tissue.
In muscle.
In breath.

Scientists now confirm what survivors have always known: trauma rewires the body.
A 2014 review in Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience highlights how sensitive periods in early development are windows when experiences—especially adverse ones—can have profound and lasting effects on brain structure and function (source).
But long before I read about the amygdala and hippocampus, my shoulders were already tightening.
My breath was already shallow.
My pelvic floor was already whispering, not again.

That’s not intuition.
That’s intelligence.
Cellular. Energetic. Ancestral.

⸻

I stopped calling my triggers “overreactions.”
I started calling them warnings.
I stopped apologizing for my sensitivity.
I started naming it as refinement.
I stopped asking people to believe me.
I started listening to the part of me that never stopped believing myself.

This is what healing looks like when you’re psychic:
It’s not about returning to who you were before the wound.
It’s about integrating the wound into your wisdom.
It’s about honoring the child who knew something was wrong—and listening to her as the original oracle.

⸻

Reclamation, for me, has never been loud.
It’s quiet.
It’s daily.
It’s choosing to wear red lipstick without flinching.
It’s letting someone touch my arm without bracing.
It’s masturbating without guilt.
It’s standing in front of a mirror and saying:

This body is mine.
This knowing is mine.
This story is mine.

Not theirs.
Not anymore.

⸻

I don’t believe healing is linear.
I don’t believe in closure.
I believe in return.
To the body.
To the breath.
To the beginning.

There are still days when my body locks.
Still nights when I wake from dreams I didn’t ask to have.
Still moments when a touch—too fast, too loud, too familiar—sends a ripple through the girl I used to be.

But I no longer try to erase her.
I invite her in.
I let her sit with me at the altar.
I let her speak.
And when she cries, I do not shush her.

I thank her.

Because she knew.
Before anyone taught her.
Before language.
Before metaphor.

She knew.

⸻

Now, I write because I can’t unknow what I know.
I write because I’ve swallowed silence and spit it back up as flame.
I write because my knowing has outlived every hand that tried to take it from me.

Psychic gifts aren’t glamorous.
They’re heavy.
They’re intimate.
They are the sharp edge and the soft landing.

And yet—I love this gift.
Even with all it cost me.
Because it brought me home.

To myself.
To the ones who came before me.
To the blueprint I carry in my bones.

⸻

They say trauma lives in the body.
So does truth.
So does beauty.
So does power.

And when I feel it rising—
that old ache, that new clarity, that remembering that doesn’t come with words—
I don’t run anymore.

I stand in it.
I speak in it.
I root there.

Because I was touched too early.
But I did not stay broken.
I stayed open.

And the knowing I carry now?
It doesn’t ask for permission.

It enters a room like prophecy.

One love, ESS xo

⸻

References:

• Epigenetics of Trauma and Memory Retention
  Yehuda, R., & Lehrner, A. (2018). Intergenerational transmission of trauma effects: putative role of epigenetic mechanisms. World Psychiatry, 17(3), 243–257.
  https://doi.org/10.1002/wps.20568

• Adultification Bias and Black Girlhood
  Georgetown Law Center on Poverty and Inequality. (2017). Girlhood Interrupted: The Erasure of Black Girls’ Childhood.
  https://www.law.georgetown.edu/poverty-inequality-center/wp-content/uploads/sites/14/2017/08/girlhood-interrupted.pdf

• Sensitive periods in the development of the brain and behavior. Knudsen, E. I. (2014). Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience, 8, Article 143. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/systems-neuroscience/articles/10.3389/fnsys.2013.00090/full

• Somatic Symptoms in Childhood Sexual Abuse Survivors
  Trickett, P. K., Noll, J. G., & Putnam, F. W. (2011). The impact of sexual abuse on female development: Lessons from a multigenerational, longitudinal research study. Development and Psychopathology, 23(2), 453–476. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0954579411000174

There Was a Dead Chicken in the Middle of the Kitchen Floor

There was a dead chicken in the middle of the kitchen floor.

Wings out like surrender.
Feathers slicked in blood, like someone had tried to baptize it and forgot to say amen.
It wasn’t tossed.
It was placed.
Laid out like ritual. Like memory. Like a body someone wanted witnessed.

The blood didn’t just spill—it crawled.
Creeped between tile grout like it had stories to tell.
And I was five.
Wide-eyed.
Barefoot.
Rooted to the threshold like the doorway itself had chosen me.

The smell—hot iron and lime peel.
The sound—wax dripping, breath stalling, a bowl clinking against porcelain like a slow drum.
The air?
It was thick.
Sweating.
Holy.

⸻

The woman in white didn’t speak.
She didn’t have to.

She moved like smoke remembering how to be fire.
Like she wasn’t walking—she was returning.
She flowed through that kitchen like it had once been hers in another century.
And maybe it had.

She didn’t nod at my mother.
Didn’t smile at me.
She just looked around like she was counting ghosts.

She set her bowl on the counter like an offering.
Salt.
Lime.
Water.
Truth.

And when she poured it over me—
cold down my spine like new birth—
I didn’t cry.
I didn’t speak.
I just stood there.

Open.

Like a gate.

⸻

My mother never told me it was coming.
She never talked about it afterward.

She said it didn’t happen.

But I know the difference between fiction and forgetting.
And I remember the tension in her jaw.
The way her hands didn’t know what to do.
The way her gift curled up in the corner like a dog afraid to be beat again.

She had it, too.
The sight. The edge.
But church told her women like her were dangerous.
And she listened.

Still, when things got too heavy,
too tangled,
too loud—
she called in help from the side of the ether that doesn’t take offerings in English.

⸻

That’s when I knew.

I wasn’t learning anything.
I was remembering.

My gift didn’t arrive.
It stood up.

⸻

I walk through this world with every ancestor I’ve ever carried still whispering in my blood.

I feel death before it opens its mouth.
I taste lies like sugar with mold in the middle.
I touch someone’s hand and the room changes color.
I close my eyes and the spirits crowd in, shoulder to shoulder, waiting to be named.

I’ve seen beings too beautiful to be safe.
I’ve heard music no choir would dare try to replicate.
I’ve felt energy curl its tongue around my name and moan it.

And I don’t flinch.
I welcome it.

Because I was made for this.
Because I’ve done this before.
Because I’ve burned at the stake and still came back singing.

⸻

It would take scientists decades to articulate what Black women have always known.

They now call it intergenerational transmission of trauma—the idea that memory can pass through blood like inheritance (Yehuda & Lehrner, 2018).
They use terms like epigenetics and cellular memory to explain what our grandmothers already practiced with incense, prayer, and protective herbs.
Research from the American Psychological Association confirms that trauma, and its emotional imprint, can be biologically passed down—altering gene expression, shaping behavior.

But Black feminist scholars like Christina Sharpe remind us: "The past that is not past reappears... it animates the present.”

My body is not haunted.
It is active archive.
It does not carry ghosts.
It carries instructions.

⸻

This is not softness.
This is sovereignty.
This is what happens when Black women stop apologizing for being oracles

⸻

I wear gold because my bones asked me to.
I wear white to clear the static.
I wear red when I’m ready to call down the thunder and make love at the same time.

My fashion is not costume.
It’s code.
It’s communication.
It’s how my ancestors show off through me.

You see a ring.
They see a seal.
You see a wrap.
They see a crown.

⸻

I love this gift.

Because it doesn’t wait for validation.
Because it drags the truth out by its teeth.
Because it saves people who never thought they’d be seen.
Because it forces me to stay honest—even when it hurts.

I love this gift like an altar.
Like a knife.
Like a kiss that tastes like war and honey.

It’s not for show.
It’s for survival.

⸻

And I remember everything.

The sting of lime in my eyes.
The way the bowl steamed like it knew something.
The smell of wax and blood and sweat and silence.
My mother’s stillness.
The priestess’s presence.
The chicken’s body—posed.
The air—electrified.
My spine—straight.

There was a dead chicken in the middle of the kitchen floor.

And that was the night I met myself in full.

One love, ESS xo

⸻

References:

• Yehuda, R., & Lehrner, A. (2018). Intergenerational transmission of trauma effects: putative role of epigenetic mechanisms. World Psychiatry, 17(3), 243–257.

• American Psychological Association. (2019). Legacy of trauma. https://www.apa.org/monitor/2019/02/legacy-trauma

• Sharpe, C. (2016). In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Duke University Press.