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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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

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.

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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.

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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.

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That’s when I knew.

I wasn’t learning anything.
I was remembering.

My gift didn’t arrive.
It stood up.

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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.

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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.

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

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.