Essays

ESSOESS ESSOESS

Between Ancestors and Algorithms

A manifesto exploring what happens when sacred Black and Indigenous traditions are filtered through digital algorithms. It makes the case for ESSOESS—not as content, but as cultural memory and spiritual architecture.

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

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ESSOESS ESSOESS

White Sage, White Spaces

White Sage, White Spaces is a personal essay examining the silencing of Black voices in spiritual communities that profit from Black and Indigenous traditions. It reflects on what it means to carry memory in your blood while being treated as a guest of your own ancestry—and why true healing must include truth, accountability, and representation.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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References

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