How Did I Get ✨Here✨?: A Brief Summary of My Spiritual Journey
My spiritual journey started once I stopped going to church. Nothing against Jesus or the saints who supported me throughout childhood—the southern, Black, Baptist church I grew up in is central to my story and set high standards for what a community can and should be, especially regarding the well-being and holistic development of children. But, as I got older, I found my issues with the-church-as-a-sociopolitical-institution and the-church-as-a-medium-for-spiritual-liberation utterly insurmountable and irreconcilable.
My spirit said I had no choice but to dip.
Structurally, I thought “the church” had strayed so far from the radical sociopolitical politics of Jesus—and even those of late-stage Martin Luther King, Jr.!—to the point that the institution had become counterrevolutionary and could be considered an enemy of the people in our ongoing struggle against state and systemic oppression. Like, if the church isn’t out here actively and intentionally decrying and serving as a counterforce against capitalism, imperialism and all its attendant divide and conquer -isms (racism, sexism, etc.)—then the message is irrelevant at best and insidiously inauthentic at worst.
Spiritually, I thought that the full, liberatory lessons of Christ-consciousness were being constrained and limited by “the church” into an exclusionary, overly rigid exercise in dogma. Likeeee, we seem to be getting a little too attached to the characters in these stories y’all, to the point where we’re not only missing the message it’s meant to convey*, but it’s eroding our capacity to find it. To the point where people are unable to discern truth, wisdom, love, purpose, healing etc. if it doesn’t come with the Christian logo on it.
Sigmund Freud snapped when he said, “The truths contained in religious doctrines are after all so distorted and systematically disguised that the mass of humanity cannot recognize them as such.” As did Joseph Campbell, who wrote that “Whenever the poetry of myth is interpreted as biography, history, or science…the life goes out of it, temples become museums, and the link between the two perspectives is dissolved.” And Malidoma Somé: “the narrower your perception, the less accessible to Spirit it is.”
I didn’t realize it at the time, but my Sagittarius 12th house was subtly shouting that the Bible is too small a spiritual pond for me to swim in!!, while my 9th house South Node was just over it with organized religion in general. The connection to Spirit was there, but it was a connection that had not been articulated or encouraged in my community, at least not that I knew of.
And Spirit said I had to make it my sense for me.
Opening myself to the broader mythological landscape gave me more ways to access, connect, commune with and understand the Divine, in ways that satisfied what my soul longed for—but never really got—from the church. I found so much healing and connection in spiritual practices that go beyond prayer—like meditation, yoga and communing with nature; immense resonance in mythological systems like astrology and Tarot; so much profundity in Buddhist philosophy and the poetry of Islamic mystics; and practical guidance for living life in pan-African cosmologies like those of the Dagara in Burkina Faso and, of course, from ancient Kemet.
The search itself has been so rewarding, revealing, healing and transformative for me—in ways that are both mundane, like teaching me how to structure my day, and magical, like reinvigorating my joie de vivre and aligning me with an unshakable sense of purpose in life.
And what do I believe that purpose to be? To help facilitate a Sankofa** journey for my people, conducting passage back in time to retrieve the intelligence, perspectives and practices of our indigenous ancestors so we can discern and then withdraw our energy from toxic patterns, practices, systems and institutions—on an individual and a collective level—while experimenting and investing our energy into perspectives, tools and practices that facilitate understanding of, connection to and sense of community ourselves, each other, nature and Spirit itself.
“The metaphors by which they live, and through which they operate, have been brooded upon, searched, and discussed for centuries—even millennia; they have served whole societies, furthermore, as the mainstays of thought and life. The cultural patterns have been shaped to them.
The youth have been educated, and the aged rended wise, through the study, experience, and understanding of their effective initiatory forms…we must understand that they are…controlled and intended statements of certain spiritual principles, which have remained as constant throughout the course of human history as the form and nervous structure of the human physique itself.”
I believe that doing so would help position us to—individually and collectively—re-align with the creative cycle, re-fortify our foundations for living, re-unify us as one and re-create the internal and external conditions required for harmony, peace and justice to prevail. And I believe it takes embracing the esoteric and re-integrating indigenous knowledge of the universe to get there.
So, no, I don’t call myself a Christian, but the saints will be glad to hear that I affirm and agree with the teachings and message of Jesus whole heartedly.
Do I “believe” in astrology, tarot, divination, etc.? No, I believe in Source Consciousness, which I sometimes refer to as Spirit, Source Energy or God.
Do I believe that astrology, Tarot, divination, etc. are highly effective tools for understanding, navigating and strengthening our connection with Source Consciousness? One hundred percent. I even believe that, when taught through an enlightened and allegorical lens, Christianity and other religious mythologies and cosmologies can do the same.
I’m not an expert or the authority on anything, but I like to think of myself as a philosopher in the way that Pythagoras defined it: “Whereas wise men had called themselves sages, or those who know, a philosopher is one who is attempting to find out.”
May the journey continue.
*The message being that the key to “heaven” is found within, and that truly experiencing life means fully embracing death.
**Sankofa is an Adinkra term for “going back to our past in order to go forward.”