about
Our History
Spirit School was founded in 2020 as a “decolonial learning and support container” and birthed from the inner journey of founder Eréndira after a decade of working and learning in socially powerful, institutional, religious systems. On the edge of burnout, anger, and mindbodyspirit unraveling, starting Spirit School served as a way for Eréndira to process the harmful and oppressive power dynamics that infuse and flow through spiritual spaces due to uninterrogated colonial legacies. Spirit School became a space to practice the personal undoings necessary to create the new imaginations that support liberation and transformation in individuals, communities, and the world.
As with any start-up, Spirit School has gone through many iterations in its first four years—a community support space, organizational consulting container, one-off workshops. All were necessary—with their many pivots, experiments, and approaching transformational work as process&play—to bring Spirit School into its current form: an evolving multi-media portal that bridges the space between Self, Spirit, and Story to explore and expand meaning-making in a shifting spiritual landscape.
While no longer exclusively speaking to decolonizing spirituality and church spaces, Spirit School continues to be grounded in a decolonizing framework even as our language has expanded to hold emergent visions of Identity, Purpose, Belonging, and their impact on individual and collective mythography, gathering, and rituals.
Our work currently holds a lens of spiritual anthropology and shares resources through zines, art books, podcasts, essays, audio courses, and workshops.
Our Team
Eréndira Jiménez Esquinca
Founder and Creative Director
Eréndira (she/they) is a Spiritual Companion, Transdisciplinary Artist, and Story: Teller~Gatherer~Guide.
With 20 years of formal and informal experience as both student and teacher of Spirit, Eréndira’s work emerges from the experimental and experiential—a throwing of the Self into moments that yield art, spirituality, and self-expression.
She is currently engaged in personal study of a shifting collective spiritual landscape, the impact of an emerging generation on conceptions of structure and tradition, the reclamation of identity/belonging/purpose through the fusion of mean-making systems, and the ways metamodernity can support the transformation of spiritual communities.
They hold a Masters of Divinity from Yale Divinity School, an M. A. in Spirituality from Bellarmine University, and continue to operate as an independent scholar/spiritual anthropologist of sorts.
You can find more about her at www.erendirajimenez.com
Why We Do What We Do
Spirit School is grounded in the belief that individually and collectively we participate in co-creating new futures that are free from the harms and oppressions caused by colonialism, imperialism, capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchy, hierarchy, and other harmful systems and structures.
We believe that the transformation, liberation, and flourishing of individuals, communities, and the world is possible through learning to honestly and courageously face discomfort, grief, and the death of the ways we continue to uphold beliefs and practices that are bound to harm and oppressions.
We believe this work begins in the body (an awareness of where traumas and sufferings are materially held) and moves in tandem through heart and spirit (an awareness of how the Divine is speaking to us in the present moment).
In this dance between body and heart/spirit we encounter the shifting of internal narratives that lead to the shifting of external behaviors.
At Spirit School we are motivated by the hope that the stories, practices, and patterns that shaped and formed us are not static and don’t lock us into predetermined futures.
Creativity, imagination, flexibility, and non-binary ways of thinking and being are our allies in moving from old patterns and stories into the possibility and potential of what could be. We attend to our stories with gentleness and compassion so that space can open up to the experimentation of new practices and actions.