Essays

ESSOESS ESSOESS

Buried in Our Blood

This editorial is a love letter for the displaced, the gifted, and the spiritually dislocated. Buried in Our Blood explores the psychic and cellular memories carried by the African diaspora—how past lives, ancestral trauma, and spiritual technologies shape who we are and the futures we’re building. It is a reclamation of power through embodied truth.

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

Read More
ESSOESS ESSOESS

Touched Too Early

What happens when a child with psychic sensitivity is exposed to adult energies too soon? This essay explores the psychic–sexual connection, Black girlhood, trauma memory, and the slow, embodied process of returning to truth on one’s own terms.

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:

Read More
ESSOESS ESSOESS

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

At five years old, I watched a voodoo priestess enter my kitchen and awaken something in me I’d never forget. My mother called it imagination. But my body knew better. There Was a Dead Chicken in the Middle of the Kitchen Floor is a visceral, poetic remembrance of ancestral power, psychic inheritance, and the kind of truth that can’t be silenced—even when it’s denied.

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.

Read More