Something that feels important to name as we're engaging in conversations about decolonizing is that this process isn’t accomplished through a series of exercises we complete to get to some kind of end result. We don't get to decolonizing through studying, learning, reading resources, creating frameworks, though they all may be helpful and supportive to our journeys. Ultimately decolonizing is about living a life with awareness, intentionality, integrity, courage, and vulnerability towards the end of undoing the hold of harmful, oppressive, and violent systems both without and within ourselves. It’s about experimenting with new ways of being and allowing an integration process to unfold around these unfamiliar movements.

Coming to this knowing has been one of the reasons that it feels important and encouraging to move Spirit School towards being less of a resource hub (though this will still exist) and more of a place to share stories. It’s becoming increasingly clear to me that we get to a decolonized world through the ways that we choose to practice our lives and make that known to the world around us. Decolonizing is ultimately an individual and mutative process. It is the internal shifts, which are then viewed and perhaps internalized by others, that ripple out to our communities, and serve to reshape the collective.

Of course, we can and should work on decolonizing systems and structures—working from the top-down to eliminate policies, procedures, structures that uphold all kinds of oppressive and harmful systems and practices. But ultimately, ultimately, this decolonizing is happening because of individuals. Ultimately, what changes in the big picture is happening because of changes—microscopic, individual changes—that are happening on a small-scale level.

I’m finding that the more I engage in any kind of decolonizing work, the more I see that it is actually just about getting back into my life, more about getting back into my story, and more about the digging and uncovering to unearth what is still bound to death-dealing and shadow-inducing ways of being.

Decolonizing is about being willing to step into a particular area of your life, go all in, and say, “Well, what about my conceptions of time? What about my conceptions of love? What about my conceptions of community? What about my conceptions of—” whatever it is that you feel is holding you captive or bound to ideas or ways of being that are not serving your flourishing and Becoming. It is about engaging the areas in you that are continuing to uphold restrictive, calcified notions embedded in you through formation in colonial ideologies and praxis. It is about asking “Where am I still stuck?” and then turning your Self toward that reality, entering the depths of your shadows, practicing new ways of being, and emerging with a wisdom that is uniquely yours.

Talking about decolonizing holds the acknowledgement that this work involves fluidity and flexibility. It’s about facing the energy of entropy, facing the dance between order and chaos, and knowing on which side to land on at any given moment. I have tended to dip in both directions and I think there is a lot of value in the ability to notice when our energy might need to shift so new growth can occur without judging these extreme modes of being because the extremity can be incredibly generative.

I know from personal experience, it’s been important for me to have the ability to jump into something that seems absolutely absurd, where I have no idea where it's going to lead me, so that on the other side of that I can come into a deeper understanding of what liberation and flourishing might mean. Which means this isn’t a mental understanding of “liberation” or “flourishing” that arises. Rather, through entering an experience of unknowable transformation, an embodied, somatic, intuitive understanding of what is possible emerges. And this is what I think we're hoping for when we're talking about decolonizing.

I think when we talk about decolonizing what we’re saying is that we're hoping for places of imagination and places of possibility that don't yet exist. It's not about a return to pre-colonization. It's about imagining futures that are not yet, but that, with some cultivation, are making their way to the horizon. And the way we get to those imagined futures is by practicing the new stuff now.

All this to say, I want to encourage myself and others to use the word “decolonizing” more broadly. To use the word in a way that is emotional and mutative. To use the word in a way that brings us back into our lived experiences. And in way that is willing to not know and that allows that not knowing to be the thing that drives us forward into unimagined and still yet unexperienced realities and futures.