A Love Letter to My Community About Spirituality, Action, Black Lives Matter, & Unity 🖤

To my beautiful TBB community,

I know we are all feeling so much right now. For me it has looked and felt like a lot of anxiety, pain, sadness, heartbreak, realization, inward reflection, overwhelm, glimmers of hope for change, and quite frankly astonishment at my own previous lack of awareness. Which I know is only a mere, teensy, barely-even-worth-mentioning fraction of what BIPOC are feeling right now and always. For that reason, it has been challenging to navigate my place in this conversation. I am gutted and ripped open by the lives lost and the heartbreaking injustices suffered in our country and our world for FAR. TOO. LONG.

I also feel a responsibility to SPEAK, even if I fumble (and I know I will). I have been sharing my life, healthy lifestyle, and spiritual awakening with you all for seven full years now, as of this month. After taking the last week and a half to learn, pay respect, open my eyes, and gather my thoughts and do pertinent, late to the game research and listening… I feel quite like I felt in the days after the first time I did plant medicine. Shocked, raw, and existing amidst shattered walls with what feels like brand new eyes.

Before I go any further, I want to preface this with a few IMPORTANT things: this movement, this awakening, this long awaited and really freaking late nationwide conversation IS NOT ABOUT ME, MY FELLOW WHITE HUMANS, OR OUR FEELINGS AT ALL. It is about BIPOC, their ancestors, their traumas, their deeply embedded generational injustice and struggle against white supremacy, and about the tragic Black lives lost both recently and throughout all of time… long before iPhone cameras were catching it on tape.

I share this message because I feel I have a responsibility and a duty to speak my heart with those listening and both those who are in a similar boat to me or are wildly ahead of or behind me within this conversation. Because I believe in unity and love and that we all stand together at the end of the day. And because to be very honest with you, as a Reflector, a writer, a public person, and a highly sensitive soul who can really only process her thoughts through writing… it feels negligent NOT to. It also feels terrifying, but that is okay because, again, this is not about me or my feelings.

As I sipped on my cinnamon cold brew in bed and read another chapter of Robin Deangelo’s White Fragility this morning, which is just about the only thing I have been doing lately because I cannot put it down, I couldn’t stand it anymore. I got out my computer to write. I couldn’t stand being silent as hard as I’ve tried for the last week and a half to keep my mouth shut (which I mostly plan to continue to do after this as I continue to learn and absorb). I know I can speak my heart to others who may be struggling to speak theirs. Maybe it will inspire some of you to do the same.

So here it goes… this is what I have been experiencing on a spiritual level. You guys know I really don’t feel that I am from this planet, take it or leave it, so being here in a human body is a rollercoaster. But I am in a privileged as f**k human body and I have never felt so lucky or grateful for that. I acknowledge that DEEPLY. This is what I wrote this morning while still in bed…

Waking up to my own white privilege feels a bit like it has felt to me to wake up spiritually. I have explored many different realms in my awakening journey but all of those realms have only been experienced through my own privileged lens. Now, my walls have been shattered. All notions of reality questioned. I see now that what I saw before was not the full picture. It was the illusion of reality but did not go beyond the veil. I see now. I see that there is a lot that I don’t see, that I will never see.

But my eyes are now open and I will not go back to sleep. I will do the work and remain committed. Just as I will forever be committed to feeling and seeing and knowing and exploring our eternal souls’ reality beyond this earthly realm, I will be committed to seeing beyond my own whiteness and my own privilege. The veil has been LIFTED. I recognize it took a long time for me to get here and for that I grapple with a range of emotions, but here we are.

I am changing. I am waking up. It is not an overnight process but seeing an innocent, beautiful, kind, beyond undeserving Black man scream “Mama…” as a white officer crushed his neck until he stopped breathing was enough to wake me the F up real fast.

Just like waking up to my own soul many years ago, beginning to speak to spirits, and seeing BEYOND every construct I had ever been taught or believed to be true, my entire reality has shifted. 

Do not mistake these words for me comparing myself or my emotions to those of BIPOC and their lived and generational experiences of pain and injustice and suffering, all of which I understand that I will never understand. This is not about me. This is what what I am waking up to, what BIPOC have been living for centuries.

I share this because I know I am not the only white woman in this position, having these realizations. Spirituality is and has for a long time been at the forefront of my life, and when I wake up to new aspects of reality part of my role here on this earth is to share that awakening. To transmute it with words and try to alchemize it into learned experiences that can be shared and felt as a whole.

I believe that Spirit is guiding us all into different roles at this time on earth. It can be terrifying to speak up and use your voice but if you feel called to, do it anyway. If you feel called to go inward and learn, do that. Do not allow anyone else to tell you how to do what in your soul you know is right. When you know, you know. And when you know, you can do better. It’s okay to learn and unlearn and admit fault. That is why we are all here on Earth school. 

I mean this with every fiber of my being when I say that I am sickened by what I did not know or previously see. My heart HURTS for what I was blind to and I feel legitimately gutted by the injustices and lives lost (George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and so many others) — and who cares really about how I feel because again this isn’t about me or anyone like me. For me and people like me, we can wake up. We can do better. Spirituality is an unlearning. Awakening is an unlearning. Recognizing our own white fragility and our lifelong and ancestral privilege is an unlearning.

This important work is not a comparison or a contest. What happens off of social media is an exploration of self and history and reflection and growth that can not be seen or felt or performed but only lived. If you too are beginning to see beyond the veil… step into it. Commit to it. Embrace it. Do it because your soul aches for it and because our Black sisters and brothers deserve it. Do it for any reason you feel called, not to perform or prove a point that you’re a good person, but because you ARE a good person. I believe that. Your Soul already knows. 🕊

Waking up spiritually has hands down been the greatest gift of my life, and waking up to new realities around me including the hard shit is something I am grateful for now. As unfair as it is and as LATE as it is taking place, I am grateful that our world is finally having this conversation. Things have needed to shift for a long time. It all starts with our own unlearning.

BEYOND all of this… there are many ways we can actively make change in our communities, our homes, our cities, and far beyond. That is not what this particular post is about but please know I am knee deep in books, courses, conversations, and research. Not because it’s trendy but because it’s important to me to do so and I can’t look away now.

I will be continuing to share resources here, on my stories, on the podcast, and more — but I will not be regurgitating info or saying what everyone else is saying simply to try to make a point or be perceived a certain way. I am not perfect and if you find fault in anything I have said or do not agree with me that is FINE. I ask you to please find compassion in your heart and have respect, because I am doing the absolute best I know how. 

I will continue speak up in a way that feels constructive and real and long lasting and not just right NOW. I will be highlighting Black voices and perspectives and am doing a lot of inner work on how to make both healthy living & spirituality more accessible as a whole. Are you with me? Would love to hear your thoughts. Love you all so deeply, and words don’t even begin to cut it. 🖤