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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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

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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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

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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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

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.

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.