I'm in the middle of experimenting with being in my decolonizing journey in a retrospective kind of way. It’s a re-posturing wherein I look back on my life so that I can look forward in creatively futuristic ways. I look back on my life to try to make sense of the movements, the patterns, the shadows that existed both within me and within those around me so that I can work towards cultivating practices, relationships, and communal spaces that are working toward liberation. It’s in the looking back, the re-turning through time, that illuminates where I continue to be locked into old ways and systems that are more concerned with maintaining tradition and structure than breathing hope and life into the collective.

I spent the first 30-some years of my life working, praying, gathering under the shadow of the colonizer’s imagination, as well as living with the colonizer’s legacy of oppression and constriction within my Self—in my body and my story. Part of the reason I no longer speak to colonialism in the same way I did five years ago, or even a year ago, is because I've removed myself from relationships—individual, communal, institutional, systemic—that had me confronting the effects of colonialism on my mindbodyspirit on a day-to-day basis. Pulling back (from social spaces, institutions, relationships) has been a release of the need to rely on social location/identity. I’ve thus become more multi-faceted apart from any system because I don’t exist in angry or volatile relation to it anymore.

The work that I do now pulls from trying to make sense of the lived experiences of the first 30 years of my life, all while stepping into playing with what a new life detached from those relationships could look and feel like. It’s a building of new structures, systems, and patterns that work for me, rather than the other way around.

I’ve reoriented towards recognizing that I have been imprinted on in many ways that have allowed me to see the world from a uniquely beautiful and particular lens and story, while also recognizing that this imprinting has continual room to be shed and transformed. What has been done in me doesn't actually have to remain as part of my story if it does not serve my Becoming toward a fullness of Self and Relations. The work for me now is extricating the remaining slivers of colonialism that made their way into my mindbodyspirit through formation in this compromised world. Decolonizing in this way means making space for a multi-faceted identity not in opposition to systems of power. This is liberation. I get to exist as I am.

Now that I have pulled back a bit from the old ways and old systems, I find myself asking, “What, then, is a decolonial life? What does it actually mean to be moving though life in a decolonizing sort of a way? What are the tools that are helpful in assisting this work?”

I’m concluding that I’m not sure those are questions that I can answer for anyone other than myself. What I mean is, these processes and journeys are deeply unique and deeply personal. I’m finding the best I can do is say, “Hey, these are the kind of the experiences that I'm bumping up against as I have shifted my own mentality, my own emotional frequency, my own spiritual container.”

This is why I find myself backing the idea that personal narrative is a most compelling way forward in this life-long work. I’ve noticed we don't have enough models for what decolonizing can actually look like in practice and can mean in a real, practical, embodied, lived-out sort of a way. And so, story-telling, story-sharing, oral wisdom can be the powerful tools for closing the gap of personal loneliness and a lack of journey directionality.

Again, this decolonizing journey is going to look quite different for all of us. We all have different histories. We all have different relationships. We all have different needs. What I want to provide here with Spirit School is a place for some of the unique stories that have the power and capacity to transform us all. What I envision and hope the Commons can become is that comfy couch where we exchange stories, ideas, hopes, griefs, and feel fortified by connection so that we can then continue on our respective journeys.

The Commons is not a space where we are necessarily drawn together in figuring out our questions in community (not yet, anyway). More so it’s the knowing that there is a place that exists where we can enter and express, “Oh, I am really feeling lonely in this way. Or I'm really feeling fatigued in this way. Or I'm feeling really restless in this way. Or I'm feeling really angry in this way.” And it’s the knowing that those emotions and those inner movements have been traversed by someone else before us. A space where we don't have to feel isolated in our inner lives.