Birth & World Making

Embodied decolonisation as a spiritual intervention of death & rebirth from an obsolete paradigm

Decolonisation can not be 'new-aged'.

I do not take the notion of revolution lightly, I never have. Nor do I romanticise the violence of war and the often bloody struggle of resistance.

Why would I? As I continue to witness and digest images and footage of the raw, uncensored and unfathomable and vivid terror waged on black and brown bodies in the multiple genocides unfolding in the world the more I call for revolutionary change.

Why not just a ceasefire I hear you ask. To quote my beloved ancestor Nina Simone, I have never been non-violent, ever. Because the colonial empire and its authoritarian myth of white-supremacy will never resign, this entity will not cease living or relinquish its pursuit of domination and so resistance is paramount to our survival. Death by its very nature leaves the soil fertile for new growth and life to emerge, though we have much to grieve we must honour the collective martyrs and become better acquainted with death.

I am a daughter of Oya, the primordial Yoruba Orisha mother of Egungun, which is the collective spirit of the ancestral dead. As a daughter of the warrior Queen of death, rebirth and transformation, a powerful force of nature that ushers in great change & protection for those wrongly persecuted, have no doubt that the roots of revolution are tethered to the umbilical core of my being. Tethered to the sacred and ancestral rage that has resided silently within the dark depths of my soul, only making the pilgrimage to the forefront of my consciousness in this last decade of my existence, preparing me precisely for this very moment in time.

The spirit of great change and transformation has been passed down to me over a multiple of generations, the last of which came via my own fathers Asé, giving me the divine gift and responsibility of the power to invoke death, initiate rebirth and catalyse embodied transformation. This much treasured divine inheritance is the source of my defiance and the roots of my refusal. The unwavering faith that pulses through my veins that fuels my ability to dream beyond these colonial fences, that gives life to the promise of afro-futurist imaginings and world making, that inspires my unwavering faith in the emergence of a new world via the portal of transformational healing.

We are being called to enter through the eye of the needle onto the foundations of a new world. We are being invited to accept the challenge of a triad initiation and commit to the world of decolonising the mind, body and spirit in support of this great rebirthing. Our capitalist driven value systems, societal condition and behaviours can not be carried into the new. We must purge our toxic inheritances whilst alchemising our colonial wounds.

The pressing question for us in the west is, what are we willing to sacrifice for our freedom? Our Palestinian kin have been terrorised for over 75 years, whilst our African kin and indigenous global family continue to suffer the terror of colonial extractivism and modern slavery. What does it mean to be 'human'? If the answer exclude any iteration beyond the construct of whiteness then it is time we stop limiting our imaginations by embracing and embodying the truth of our divine and infinite expressions.

I’m witnessing the term 'decolonisation' speedily becoming the buzz word of the moment but let's be clear, derivatives of decolonial methodologies are not what we need at this time. Whilst I am glad for decolonisation as a movement to be shifting from the peripheral margins of our collective consciousness and into more prominent focus, I'd like to take this opportunity to remind you all that this is not a 'trending' ideology, nor is it work that can be claimed or own by anyone. To engage in this work through a dominator/hierarchical and competitive lens (all by-product traits and colonial machinations) is to sabotage what in essence is a movement to shift us into collectivist ways of being. In layman's terms, you can not steward decolonisation work whilst embodying colonial behaviours and mentality. This work takes time and requires continued application and praxis, this is why our ancient ancestors returned to Earth based spiritual ritual, ceremony and sacred medicines systematically time and again to purge the ills of the ego, to reorient, recalibrate and fortify their mind-body-spirit.

As a care-provider, practitioner, facilitator or space holder of any kind, educating about 'decolonising a practice' requires that you step into a position of decolonial leadership. Embodied praxis is paramount which requires a decoding of the colonial-ego and a decolonisation of your mind-body-spirit in essence an complete exorcism and uprooting of the colonial imprint on your being & soma in order for your indigenous seeds to reroot again.

Decolonisation requires a process of embodiment as a methodology for re-indigenisation and an anti-colonial/supremacist value system, for those of us socialised and shaped by Eurocentric education and indoctrination in West this work requires the death of the egoic self and the spiritual birth and emergence of your collective consciousness.

This in essence is a radical ontological shift from centring the individualised identity to embodying collectivist approaches of being and relating to the world. To understanding how our capitalist-colonial conditioned tendencies contribute to supporting scaffolds of supremacist falsehoods.

To speak to decolonisation whilst simultaneously displaying and employing colonial/capitalist behaviourism is to remain blissfully ignorant or unconsciously deluded to ego centric contradiction.

Decolonisation can not be moulded or woven in, to fit neo-colonial, capitalist, current-paradigm methodologies, theories and systems precisely because decolonisation by its very definition requires not only a de-centering of colonial narratives, methods and systems but primarily because the work of decolonising is essentially the task of returning reverence to the origin, the bedrock and the root of our marginalised ancestral lineages.

Decolonisation is the foundational, ground work required to re-indigenise, to cultivate the soil of your inner terrain in preparation for the sustained seeding and growth from which actualised and authentic iterations of your unbound and liberated form to emerge.

This is not a fast-track application to 'old-world' and 'new-world' new-age rhetoric/logic. The theory and ideology for decolonisation established the 'right to resist' as foundational, in essence centring a refusal and unequivocal rejection of colonial categorisation by reclaiming multidimensional possibility.

This my friends is the unapologetic process of unshackling the psychological, spiritual and physical body from the colonial empire it had been captured and ensnared within. We can not ‘manifest’ a decolonised paradigm into being. This work requires sacrifice and a commitment to radically shifting your modes of living, relating and being.

To dream a new world into being is to co-create with the divine, to engage in world making and building is to participate in spiritual emergence and the cyclical intervention of death & birth, reclaiming and re-centering the sacred ways of our roots and origins, we must learn from the teachers & guides that came before us.