During today’s conversation we explored something many people say they want, but few of us are actually taught how to practice.

Community.

Not the idealized version.

The real version.

The version that includes repair, tension, growth, and people learning how to stay in relationship with one another while things are still unfolding.

Community building sounds beautiful in theory.

But in practice, it asks something much more difficult of us.

It asks us to remain in relationship long enough for transformation to occur.

It asks us to leave space for repair.

And sometimes, it asks us to orient toward someone’s good even when the relationship itself is complicated.

The conversation opened with a reflection from Prentis Hemphill’s book What It Takes to Heal and a line that landed deeply in my body.

“I think love is when you will another’s existence.”

That definition of love stretches far beyond romance.

It shows up in parenting.

In friendship.

In community.

And in the ways we decide whether or not we are willing to make space for someone’s becoming.

Even when the relationship itself is still unfolding.

Leaving Space for Repair

During the live conversation, I shared a story from Shady’s birthday party.

Her father and I have a complicated history.

Separation, divorce, and new family structures often bring tension and unanswered questions about what relationships are supposed to look like afterward.

But during the party he video called her.

And when she saw his face, her whole energy shifted.

She lit up.

That moment did not erase the complicated parts of our history.

But it reminded me of something important.

Repair does not always arrive in perfect form.

Sometimes repair simply begins with leaving space for it to happen.

Leaving space does not mean ignoring harm.

It means recognizing the difference between being responsible for someone’s work and being responsible to the relationships that still exist.

I am not responsible for another adult’s healing or growth.

But I am responsible to my children.

Responsible to leave space for them to navigate what repair might look like in their own relationships.

That distinction changes everything.

🔒 Continue Reading

The rest of this piece explores:

• why orienting toward someone’s good changes how we approach community• the difference between responsibility and control• how matriarchal frameworks invite children into accountability and repair• and why liberation work must live in Self, Home, and Work

Paid subscribers help sustain the time and care required to hold these conversations. If you need a scholarship, please email [email protected]

Some conversations are not meant to be summarized.

They are meant to be sat with.

The live gathering this week began simply. No guest scheduled. Just a moment to pause together, reflect, and let the threads of recent conversations come into relationship with each other.

What emerged was something deeper than a casual conversation.

It was a return to a distinction that has shaped my work for years.

A shift that first landed for me in therapy around 2015.

A shift that many of us are still learning how to live.

The difference between being responsible for and being responsible to.

At first, it sounds subtle.

But in practice, it changes everything about how we understand care, power, leadership, and liberation.

And right now, many of us are standing inside a moment where this distinction matters more than ever.

Before we go further, pause.

Notice your breath.

Notice your body where you are sitting.

There is nothing here you need to solve.

Only something to notice.

Many of us were trained to believe that care means carrying.

Carrying other people’s feelings.Carrying other people’s healing.Carrying the emotional stability of the room.Carrying responsibility for the outcome of every interaction.

This pattern often hides behind language that sounds compassionate.

Helping.Supporting.Being the strong one.Holding it all together.

But over time, something subtle happens.

Care turns into over-responsibility.

And over-responsibility quietly reproduces the same power dynamics many of us are trying to dismantle.

Because when one person becomes responsible for everything, power concentrates there… YES…

Even when the intention was love.

Even when the intention was protection.

Even when the intention was justice.

Liberation work requires something different.

It asks us to shift from responsibility FOR to responsibility TO.

Responsibility to truth.Responsibility to relationship.Responsibility to our own integrity.Responsibility to the conditions that allow others to hold their own agency.

This shift does not reduce care.

It makes care honest.

The Responsibility Trap

The nervous system learns early that safety often comes through usefulness.

Many of us learned that if we could:

* anticipate needs

* manage emotional climates

* prevent conflict

* keep everyone regulated

then we would remain safe inside the systems we lived in.

Over time, that becomes identity.

The fixer.The stabilizer.The one who handles everything.

From the outside, this can look like leadership.

But inside the body, it often feels like exhaustion.

This pattern shows up everywhere:

in familiesin activist spacesin workplacesin community leadershipin relationships

And because it is often praised, it becomes difficult to question.

But liberation requires questioning it.

Because systems built on over-functioning individuals cannot become sustainable communities.

They simply create quieter hierarchies.

The Moment We Are In

Part of what made this conversation land so strongly this week is that many people are noticing a shift.

A subtle but undeniable moment of reckoning.

Something many have been carrying for others is becoming harder to maintain.

The emotional math no longer balances.

The body knows something is complete, even if the mind has not yet caught up.

Some people feel this as fatigue.

Some feel it as irritation.

Some feel it as grief.

Some feel it as a quiet clarity they cannot fully explain yet.

Nothing about that experience is accidental.

There are moments in the larger cycles we move through where truth becomes harder to postpone.

Where maintaining the old patterns requires more energy than releasing them.

Where the cost of carrying what is not ours becomes visible.

These moments are not punishments.

They are invitations to recalibrate responsibility.

What the Responsibility Shift Actually Means

Shifting from responsible for to responsible to changes how care operates.

Responsible for means:

* managing other people’s outcomes

* preventing discomfort

* fixing what others avoid addressing

* holding emotional labor indefinitely

Responsible to means:

* telling the truth

* honoring your limits

* allowing others their agency

* remaining present without over-functioning

This distinction protects relationship.

Because relationships built on responsibility for eventually collapse under resentment or exhaustion.

Relationships built on responsibility to allow power to distribute.

And liberation requires distributed power.

Not heroic individuals carrying the room.

🔒 The Work of the Responsibility Shift

Living Liberation Without Carrying What Was Never Yours

If you are here, something in this conversation likely resonated.

Maybe you recognized yourself in the pattern of over-responsibility.

Maybe you felt the quiet exhaustion that comes from always being the one who stabilizes the room.

Or maybe something in your body simply said:

Yes. This is the conversation.

Before continuing, pause again.

Notice your breath.

Let your shoulders drop even slightly.

Nothing in this section requires urgency.

The work here is not about becoming someone new.

It is about releasing roles that were never meant to belong to you forever.

The remainder of this companion article explores:

• the somatic patterns that keep us over-responsible• how moments of collective reckoning reveal what we’ve been carrying for others• the full application of the LIBERATE Framework© for this moment• embodied inquiry and reflective practice• Practice Your Praxis across Self, Home, and Work

Paid subscribers also receive access to:

• the full replay of the live conversation where this reflection began• deeper integration prompts to continue the work

This space is paywalled intentionally.

Not to restrict access, but to protect depth and pace.

Liberation work cannot be rushed.

It requires containers where reflection can unfold slowly, honestly, and in relationship.

If you are ready to continue the work, the door is open. If you need a scholarship to acess, please email [email protected]

Before you read further, pause.

Notice your breath without changing it.Notice your jaw.Notice your shoulders.Notice your seat beneath you.

If anything in this piece feels activating, you are welcome to stop.You are welcome to skip.You are welcome to return later.

You are not behind.Your body is not wrong.Your pace is intelligent.

This month, we are working with staying.

Not enduring.Not forcing.Not performing.

Staying.

What Staying Actually Means

In today’s live, we moved through three anchors:

* Staying in your body

* Staying without fawning

* Staying through tension builds community

Let’s go deeper.

Staying in Your Body

Most people believe they are staying in conversations.

Many are not.

They are mimicking listening.They are smiling.They are explaining.They are apologizing.

But internally, they have left.

Dissociation is not always dramatic.Sometimes it is subtle.Sometimes it is politeness.

When you leave your body, you cannot discern:

Am I uncomfortable?Or am I being harmed?

Those are not the same.

Supremacy culture trains us to collapse discomfort into harm.Or to override harm as “just discomfort.”

Neither builds community.

Staying in your body means feeling the chair beneath you.The floor beneath your feet.The tightening in your jaw.The heat in your chest.

And asking:

What is this?Where have I felt this before?Is this about now?Or then?

Capacity is built in that pause.

Not in toughness.Not in bracing.

Endurance says, “Just get through it.”Staying says, “I am here. I can choose.”

Staying Without Fawning

Fawning is the most socially rewarded trauma response.

It keeps the peace.It lowers your voice.It smooths the edges.It says “It’s fine” when it is not.

In the live, we named how this shows up especially across race and gender socialization.

Fawn collapses your spine.It tightens your jaw.It lifts your voice into performance.

You disappear.

And when you disappear, community becomes harmony without connection.

Harmony is not connection.

Harmony can sound beautiful and still be hollow.

Connection can hold tension.

Staying without fawning means:

You do not escalate.You do not shrink.You remain.

That is sovereignty.

Not domination.Not aggression.Presence.

Staying Through Tension Builds Community

Community does not fracture because of conflict.

It fractures because of incapacity.

Because we were not taught repair.Because we were not taught how to remain in rupture long enough to metabolize it.

Supremacy culture trains exit:

Sense of urgencyFear of open conflictDefensivenessRight to comfort

All of these pillars teach you to leave.

Conflict is not the threat.

Incapacity is.

The ability to stay in tension without collapsing or controlling is what makes repair possible.

Repair does not always mean reconnection.It means we did not run.

Staying is community infrastructure.

Without it, nothing sustainable can be built.

The Framework of Staying:

Who • What • When • Where • Why • How

Staying is not abstract.

It needs language.It needs discernment.It needs orientation.

When discomfort arises, instead of reacting immediately, you can move through six regulating questions.

Not as interrogation.As grounding.

Who

Who is involved?

Who am I in this moment?

Am I the child?The authority?The protector?The professional?

Who am I reacting to?The person in front of me?Or someone from my past?

This question interrupts projection.

What

What is actually happening?

Not what I fear.Not what I assume.

What was said?What was done?What is observable?

This question interrupts catastrophizing.

When

When have I felt this before?

Is this now?Or is this familiar?

When did I learn to respond this way?

This question interrupts trauma looping.

Where

Where do I feel this in my body?

Jaw?Chest?Stomach?Hands?

Where am I located physically?

This question brings you back to embodiment.

Why

Why does this matter to me?

Is this about values?Safety?Identity?Power?Belonging?

Why am I activated?

This question restores agency.

How

How do I want to respond?

Not react.Respond.

How can I keep my shape?

How can I stay without shrinking or controlling?

This question builds capacity.

Somatic Pause

Pause here.

Unclench your teeth.Drop your shoulders.Feel your feet.

You are not failing at this work.

You were not taught this.

You are learning it now.

If something in this piece is surfacing grief, let it.

This is grief work.This is trauma work.This is decolonization in the nervous system.

Take a sip of water.Look around your room.Name one object.

You can continue when you are ready.

PRACTICE YOUR PRAXIS

These are invitations, not assignments.

Take what supports you.

Self

When discomfort arises this week, ask:

Am I uncomfortable?Or am I being harmed?

Sit with the sensation for 90 seconds before reacting.

If it feels like too much, you can say:“I need to put a pin in this.”

That is staying without collapsing.

Home

Notice where harmony is prioritized over connection.

Is there a conversation being avoided?

You do not need to initiate it immediately.

Begin by noticing what your body does when tension enters the room.

That awareness is the first step toward repair.

Work

Where do you fawn in professional spaces?

Is your voice shifting?Is your posture collapsing?Are you over-explaining?

Experiment with one clear sentence that keeps your shape.

You are allowed to take up space in your own body.

Further Resources

If this piece stirred something and you would like structured ways to continue, here are grounded next steps:

• The 15 Pillars of Supremacy Culture — foundational language for understanding how urgency, defensiveness, right to comfort, and fear of open conflict shape our nervous systems and our communities.

• 2026 Astrology as Nervous System Orientation With Leah Tioxon — This year’s astrological landscape of liberation

• Somatic Sunday (First Sundays) — a donation-based, regulation-centered practice space where we build capacity in real time.

•The Inconvenient Truths of Community — A bi-monthly collaboration with Zawn Villines of Liberating Motherhood.

You do not need to engage all of this at once.

Capacity builds slowly.Layer by layer.

Conclusion: Staying Is Infrastructure

March does not ask you to be certain.

It asks you to remain.

To stay in your body long enough to discern.To stay in tension long enough to metabolize.To stay in community long enough to repair.

You do not need to endure everything.You do not need to reconcile with everyone.You do not need to collapse to keep peace.

You can stay and keep your shape.

That is sovereignty.That is capacity.That is how community survives rupture.

Take a breath here.

Feel your feet.Feel your spine.

You are not behind.

You are building something new inside your own nervous system.

A Note on Sustainability, Care, and Support

Today’s article is free.

Not because this labor is light.But because accessibility matters.

This is my work.This is my profession.This is how I sustain teaching, writing, facilitating, and holding nuanced space without burnout or urgency.

If this work supports you and you have the means, paid subscriptions help sustain the container.

If financial barriers exist, scholarships are available.

You can email:[email protected]

There is no pressure.

There is transparency.

Sustainable liberation requires sustainable labor.

And I am committed to building this in a way that honors both.

In solidarity and liberation,Desireé B. StephensEducator | Counselor | Community BuilderFounder, Make Shi(f)t HappenWriter of Liberation EducationSteward of Selenite & Sage Healing Homestead Co.Where Reflection Meets Transformation

Thank you Susan, Suz, Dinah Chapman, Joel Nevison, Ingrid, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.

A Reflection on Naming, Erasure, and the Refusal to Disappear

This conversation was never meant to be comfortable.

If you listened and felt your chest tighten, your jaw clench, your impulse to defend rise— good. That is not punishment. That is information.

As I said in the live: critique is not punishment, and conflict is not harm. Conflict is how truth reaches the surface when systems depend on silence to survive.

So before we go any further, pause with me.

Take a breath.Drop your shoulders.Move your body—just a little.Drink some water.

Not to escape the discomfort, but to stay with it.

Because staying is how solidarity is built.

Why #SayHerName Exists — and Why That History Matters

One of the central clarifications in the live was this:

#SayHerName is not a universal slogan for all state violence.It was created by Black womanists (thank you Phree DeGraphenreed for the correction) to confront a very specific and brutal erasure: the disappearance of Black women and femmes from public memory when they were killed by police and the state.

Black women were being murdered and then erased, reduced to mugshots, violent language, traffic stops, or not named at all. Their humanity was systematically stripped away.

Saying their names was a reclamation of personhood.

A name is the most human thing we have.It is why deadnaming is violence.It is why erasure works so efficiently.

That context matters, not as trivia to see who is the most woke, but as lineage.

When #SayHerName is used without regard for that history, it stops being a disruption of erasure and becomes something else entirely: a flattening of struggle that centers comfort over precision.

And precision is not divisive. It is respectful.

Renée Good Was Not Erased — She Was Killed

Renée Nicole Good was a 37-year-old U.S. citizen.A mother of three.A poet.A partner.A neighbor.

She was shot and killed by an ICE agent during a federal operation. Her life has been extensively documented, humanized, contextualized. Her family, her love, her community have been named.

This matters.

Because Black women were and are denied that humanity entirely.

As I said plainly in the live: Black women were never offered grace, never named mothers or community members. We were barely allowed womanhood at all.

To reflexively reach for #SayHerName here is not solidarity. It is narrative convenience.

It allows white women to bypass naming the violence of whiteness itself (especially the violence enacted by white men) by borrowing a framework that was never meant to hold that story.

And that avoidance has consequences.

What “I AM RENÉE GOOD” Refuses

This is where the refusal begins.

In the live, I named this clearly: “I AM RENÉE GOOD” is praxis.Praxis is where theory meets the body. It is what you do after you know better.

Saying I AM RENÉE GOOD does three critical things:

* It gives white women their own voice, instead of folding into another struggle.

* It names whiteness as a site of violence, not just privilege or protection.

* It directly opposes the patriarchal rally cry of “I am Charlie Kirk.”

White men have always named themselves. Loudly. Violently. With entitlement.

White women, by contrast, have been taught to disappear… into marriage, into movements, into other people’s pain.

“I AM RENÉE GOOD” refuses that disappearance.

It says:I see the violence.I name where it comes from.I will not hide behind borrowed language.

As I said in the live: if they are “I am Charlie Kirk,” then you are Renée Good, and the refusal to say that is how white feminine disappearance sustains patriarchy.

Solidarity Requires Location, Not Collapse

This work is not about separation. It is about location.

True intersectionality does not mean sameness.True community does not require collapsing difference.True solidarity asks each of us to name where we stand.

As I shared early in the live, even within Blackness, experience is not monolithic. Recognition of difference is how supremacy loses its grip.

So imagine this instead:

You say “Say Her Name” for Black women because you understand why it exists.And you say “I AM RENÉE GOOD” because you understand where you stand.

That is not competition.That is coherence.

Practice Your Praxis

Because embodiment matters, here is how this lands beyond theory:

Self

* Practice saying “I am Renee Good” slowly and notice what arises

* Journal where fear of conflict shows up in your body

* Ask: What am I being invited to face?

Home

* Talk openly about erasure vs absorption

* Model conversations where accountability and care coexist

* Practice staying present instead of “keeping the peace”

Work / Community

* Use language with intention and lineage

* Say #SayHerName with reverence for Black women

* Say I AM RENEE GOOD to name your own location

* Treat conflict as information, not failure

A Note on Sustainability

This work is my job.

If this writing, these conversations, and this holding matter to you, consider becoming a paid subscriber so this work can continue sustainably:

* $10/month

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If financial barriers exist, no questions asked scholarships are available at[email protected]

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Thank you for supporting this work.

Closing

Nothing will change unless it is faced… externally and internally.

Not through slogans.Not through erasure.But through embodied truth.

That is how solidarity deepens, not dilutes.

In solidarity and liberation,Desireé B. StephensEducator | Counselor | Community BuilderFounder, Make Shi(f)t HappenWriter of Liberation EducationSteward of Selenite & Sage Healing Homestead Co.Where Reflection Meets Transformation

Thank you Mariana Bissonnette, Anni Ponder, Michelle C. Funk, Karmic 🌹, Michelle, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.

There is a particular kind of disappearance that happens to mothers under capitalism.Not dramatic. Not sudden.Quiet. Incremental. Socially rewarded.

In this Friday with Friends conversation, Deidre Keller and I traced that disappearance, not as a personal failure, but as a structural demand rooted in capitalism, patriarchy, Protestant work ethic, and inherited legal frameworks that have erased mothers for centuries.

What emerged instead was something else entirely:a (re)membering of capacity, community, and love as liberation.

About Deidré A. Keller

Deidré A. Keller is the immediate past Dean of the Florida A&M University College of Law and a law professor currently teaching after previously serving as Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at Ohio Northern University, where she taught for ten years.

Her legal scholarship sits at the intersection of intellectual property, personhood theory, and critical race theory. Before entering academia, Keller practiced law in Atlanta, Georgia.

On Substack, she writes at the intersections of the personal and the political, exploring growth, care, and evolution with depth and clarity.

1. Capitalism and the Disappearing Mother

Deidré named what many mothers live but rarely hear spoken aloud:motherhood under capitalism is treated as a site of production.

Care is extracted.Endurance is praised.Presence is optional.

From grazing off children’s plates to being expected to hold crisis, success, work, and emotional labor simultaneously, the “good mother” is defined by how much she can absorb without breaking.

And when she does break, the system calls it personal weakness.

ReframeCapitalism does not only exploit labor.It extracts care, and mothers are expected to provide it endlessly, invisibly, and without cost.

What gets labeled strength is often just unsupported survival.

Reflection

* Where in your life have you been praised for holding too much?

* What has been called resilience that was actually necessity?

* What did your body carry last year that no one saw?

The Longest Night, and the Work of Staying

Before you read further, I want to offer you choice.

You are welcome to pause.You are welcome to skim.You are welcome to come back later… or not at all.

Nothing here requires urgency.Nothing here demands resolution.

If it’s available, take a moment to notice your body:

* where you’re seated or resting

* the temperature around you

* one place you feel contact or support

You are not behind.Your body is already doing the work.

This reflection comes from a recent live conversation during the solstice, shaped by grief, joy, nervous-system awareness, and the layered work of community

Community Beyond the Binary

We are taught (quietly and persistently) that community is about showing up for the good parts.

Celebrations.Ease.The moments that photograph well.

But real community lives somewhere else.

It lives in the in-between:

* when joy and grief share the same breath

* when love exists without fixing

* when discomfort doesn’t automatically mean danger

The solstice gathering I spoke about in the live was not clean or simple. It was layered. Tender. Awkward in places. Deeply loving in others. It required discernment rather than performance.

And that’s the part I want to name clearly:

Community is not proven by attendance.It is revealed by capacity.

Capacity to stay present.Capacity to tell the truth without centering yourself.Capacity to let grief exist without rushing it into a lesson.

Supremacy culture trains us toward binaries:good / badsafe / unsaferight / wrong

But the body doesn’t live in binaries.The nervous system lives in nuance.

What I witnessed (and what I was navigating internally) was the work of staying human in a space where:

* trust was built through honesty, not denial

* alignment mattered more than agreement

* grief was permanent, not procedural

Grief is not a process, but a permanent experience. Grief is love’s last offering. We should run to it, rather than from it. - Zawn Villines (from the article linked below👇🏽)

That is not accidental. That is practiced.

This recap/article is a wee bit shorter because the live truly complimented the article written, so as to not inundate you with my one million and one thoughts, I will embed the article that gave birth to the live:

🌬️Regulation Pause (Please Take This)

This is a good place to stop for a moment.

If it feels supportive:

* take one slow breath in through your nose

* let it out through your mouth or sigh

* gently look around the room and name three neutral objects

You are allowed to take breaks from depth.Depth will still be here if and when you return.

Practice Your Praxis

You do not need to do all of these.You do not need to answer them now.You may simply notice what lands.

SELF: Capacity Before Performance

Reflection:

* Where do you feel pressure to show up well instead of show up honestly?

* What sensations arise when you are near grief that isn’t yours?

* How do you know… in your body, when you’ve reached your limit?

Reframe:Self-praxis is not about being braver.It is about being more honest with your capacity.

You are allowed to stay and you are allowed to leave.Both can be acts of integrity.

HOME: Truth as Safety

Reflection:

* Where have you softened or withheld truth to keep the peace?

* What happens in your body when honesty is met with trust instead of dismissal?

* How do you prepare the people you love for complexity without fear?

Reframe:Safety is not created by pretending harm doesn’t exist.Safety is created through relationship, preparation, and choice.

Telling the truth (especially to children) is not harm.It is respect.

WORK / COMMUNITY: Discernment Is the Work

Reflection:

* Do you feel pressure to address every misstep immediately?

* How do you decide what needs confrontation versus what needs noting?

* Who benefits when you pause instead of perform?

Reframe:Not every moment requires correction.Not every discomfort requires action.

Community care is not purity culture.It is discernment, timing, and consent.

Repair requires staying—not rushing.

Journey Deeper

Become a paid subscriber of Liberation Education Newsletter

Paid subscription supports:

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This space allows me to write with you, not at you.

If access is a barrier, scholarships are available: [email protected] explanations required.Sustainability includes you.

Closing Integration

As you finish (or pause), see if you can return to your body again.

Notice:

* one place that feels softer than when you began

* one insight that doesn’t need to be acted on

* one permission you’re taking with you

The Season of Self is not about fixing or figuring out.

It is about learning what you can hold —and honoring what you cannot.

You are allowed to move slowly.You are allowed to stay human.

Happy Holidays, and Blessed Solstice

In solidarity and liberation,Desireé B. StephensEducator | Counselor | Community BuilderFounder, Make Shi(f)t HappenWriter of Liberation EducationSteward of Selenite & Sage Healing Homestead Co.Where Reflection Meets Transformation

Thank you Zawn Villines, Susan, Suz, Ana Sheree, Pega Love, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.

Most of us were taught that faith lives in the mind.Belief. Doctrine. Theology.

But long before Christianity told you what to think, it told you how to move.How to dress.How to sit.How to desire.How to discipline your body into obedience.

This piece isn’t about taking anyone’s faith away.It’s about telling the truth of how faith was used, and what it cost our bodies.

I didn’t realize how much faith lived in my body until I left home…

Growing up Irish Catholic, my body learned reverence before it learned choice.Knees on hard pews.Hands folded just so.Eyes lowered.Silence as virtue.

Church wasn’t loud. It wasn’t expressive. It wasn’t joyful.It was controlled.

Years later, I walked into a Black church in the South and felt the shock hit my nervous system first.Movement.Music.Bodies alive with spirit.

My first thought wasn’t curiosity.It was judgment.

That moment cracked something open for me, not because one expression was “right” and the other “wrong,” but because I realized how thoroughly my body had been trained to equate control with holiness.

That’s when it clicked: (years later)

Christianity didn’t just shape belief. It trained bodies.

Why This Piece, Why Now

This essay lives in the Season of Self, the winter work of slowing down, taking inventory, and tracing what lives in us that we didn’t consciously choose.

It also continues my ongoing arc through Decolonizing Faith, a series that asks hard questions about what we inherited, what we internalized, and what we were never told.

This is not an anti-faith essay.It is an anti-propaganda one.

Because propaganda works by flattening history, stripping context, and severing body from story.And Christianity (as it was weaponized through empire) did exactly that.

This work is about unflattening.Returning faith to its political, material, and embodied realities.And letting people decide freely what they want to carry forward.

Before We Go Any Further…

I want to pause.

During the live recording of Let’s Have the Conversation, Ariana shared that she had written a poem that mirrored our conversation and I asked for her permission to share it here because it captures (better than any analysis) the lived experience of what it means to have your body trained, surveilled, and disciplined long before you ever had language for it.

This episode ran longer than some of the others, intentionally. The Season of Self asks us not to rush. It asks us to let what needs to surface… surface. And sometimes that looks like silence, tears, poetry, and truth arriving sideways instead of neatly on time.

What follows is Ariana’s poem.

Please read it slowly.Let it land where it lands.

Family Resemblance

by Ariana Skeese

Mirrors have alwayshaunted me.

Your voicehas become my ownas I look at myreflection.

I have always avoidedthem when possible,but I can’t help butglance as I rid myselfof traveling germs.

“Stand up straighter.You look like ahumpback whale,”we tell me.

I comply to this demandas I always have.

“Comb your rat’s nestthis instant,”I hear as I rearrangemy wild curls.

We continue to pickme apart as I standat the airport restroom mirror,a layer of fingerprints,softening the tearsthat well upin the corners of my eyes

fine lines creeping in,making me lookmore like you each day.

“Those shorts arevery unbecoming on yoursoft thighs,”we remind me.

I notice the fleshy flapthat moves as I grabfor a paper towel.

I know we don’t like it.I should have wornlong sleeves.

I turn back,determined to findone quality we wouldlike in my reflection.

My smile iswarm and inviting,I can camouflagepain entirely.

My teeth are straightand a human shade of white.

There’s somethingwe don’t hate.

Before I turn,I hear our voiceremind me tonever wear this shirt again.

It always catches on thelittle roll just above my waist.

I quickly glance awaybefore it overwhelms.

On my therapists advice,where we talkabout you often,I try to find one morething we don’t hate.

I have grown strong and sturdy,just as you commanded.

I “stay under controlin all circumstance,”just as you demanded.

I am turning to leavewhen I glimpse youin the mirror.

I imagine it is your ghostback for one last punchto my confidence.

And that’s when I realizeit wasn’t a spiritbut a family resemblance.

I know now why youtore me apart.

Perhaps you saw Youin me too.

Somatic Pause — Letting the Body Catch Up

Before we move on, take a moment.

You don’t need to analyze what you just read.You don’t need to make meaning yet.

If it feels accessible, notice your body right now.

* Where did that poem land?

* Was there a tightening, a softening, a holding of breath?

* Did your shoulders rise, your jaw clench, your chest grow heavy?

If you’re able, place one hand somewhere that feels grounding—your chest, your belly, your thighs.Let your body know you are here with it, not to correct it.

Nothing needs to be fixed.Nothing needs to be explained.

This is what it sounds like when supremacy culture moves through generations—when discipline, shame, and survival get mistaken for love. And it’s also what it sounds like when awareness begins to interrupt the pattern.

Take one slow breath in.And a longer breath out.

When you’re ready, we’ll continue.

🔒 Paywall BreakThe next section moves from witnessing into analysis—from personal inheritance into the system that made this inheritance feel inevitable. We’ll name how Christianity, once aligned with empire, became a technology for bodily control—and how supremacy culture learned to live inside us.

Paid subscribers receive the full essay, including:

* a historical and embodied unpacking of Christianity as bodily governance

* the specific supremacy culture pillars at work

* reframes that return dignity to the body

* and practices for reclaiming agency in the Season of Self

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When you’re ready, you’re invited to cross the threshold.

It’s All Shadow Work: Grief, Colonial Christianity, and the End of the World as We Were Taught to Know It

Before Christianity became empire,before it became doctrine,before it became justification for conquest,it began as a story of liberation.

Bethlehem was not a seat of power.It was a small village under Roman occupation.A people longing not for heaven later, but justice now.

Somatic pause:Take a breath.Let your shoulders soften.Feel where this story lands in your body.

Because the version of Christianity most of us inherited did not remain in Bethlehem.

It moved…through Constantine,through empire,through colonization,into the systems we are still living inside today.

And that movement created shadow.

From Bethlehem to Constantine: When Liberation Met Empire

What began as a relational, Jewish liberation movement was absorbed by Rome in the 4th century under Constantine.

This was not just a theological shift.It was a political one.

Christianity moved from the margins into the machinery of empire.Doctrine replaced relationship.Hierarchy replaced kinship.Control replaced care.

And in order for empire to survive, something had to be suppressed.

Grief, doubt, embodied spirituality, and ancestral memory, what could not be regulated was buried.

This is how shadow is formed.

Somatic pause:Notice if your jaw tightens or your breath shortens here.That’s information.

Colonization Creates Collective Shadow

Colonial Christianity did not only steal land and culture.It trained bodies to suppress in the name of salvation.

What couldn’t be expressed became buried:

* grief

* rage

* ancestral wisdom

* communal ways of knowing

* body-based spirituality

That buried material didn’t disappear.

It became shadow.

Today, that shadow shows up as:

* perfectionism framed as holiness

* disconnection from the body framed as morality

* spiritual bypassing framed as faith

* internalized inferiority and superiority framed as divine order

This is not a personal failing.

It is the inheritance of colonial Christianity.

Somatic pause:Place one hand on your chest or belly.Ask quietly: What was I taught to bury in order to belong?

Reframe:Shadow work is not about fixing yourself.It’s about remembering what was never sinful to begin with.

From Constantine to the Doctrine of Discovery: When Faith Became Permission

Once Christianity aligned with empire, it learned how to justify domination.

By the 15th century, this theology became explicit through the Doctrine of Discovery, which declared that:

* non-Christian lands were “empty”

* Indigenous peoples were less than human

* conquest was divinely sanctioned

This was Christianity as worldview.Christianity as weapon.Christianity as permission.

The cross no longer signaled suffering under empire.It marched with empire.

Somatic pause:Feel your feet on the ground.Let gravity remind you that you are here, now—not back there.

Decolonization Is Grief Work

Liberation is not just reclaiming.It is mourning.

Decolonization asks us to grieve:

* what was stolen in the name of God

* what was never passed down because it was burned or banned

* what we had to become to survive

This grief is layered:

* personal

* generational

* collective

For many white-bodied people, this includes grieving:

* severed European indigenous roots

* Christianization as cultural erasure

* belonging purchased at the cost of memory

Assimilation was not free.Safety came with a price.

Somatic pause:If grief rises, let it.You do not need to explain it away.

Reframe:Grief is not a sign that something is wrong.It is evidence that something mattered.

Grief is not the opposite of liberation.It is the doorway out of empire theology.

From Doctrine to Manifest Destiny to Project 2025

The theological logic did not end with colonization.

It evolved.

Manifest Destiny baptized expansion.Christian nationalism reframed supremacy as morality.And today, we see the echoes clearly in Project 2025 a political theology rooted in:

* Christian dominance

* patriarchal control

* the fear of demographic “replacement”

* end-times urgency

This is eschatology weaponized.Not the end of injustice, but the end of pluralism.

Somatic pause:Notice what happens in your body when power feels justified by God.That sensation is ancient, and learned.

Shadow Work Is Collective Because Colonization Was

Colonization fractured community on purpose.

Christian empire replaced kinship with hierarchy.Individual salvation replaced collective care.

So healing cannot happen privately what was broken systemically.

Shadow work at this scale must be:

* ancestral

* communal

* embodied

This is why self-work alone will never be enough.

Reframe:Decolonization is not about becoming “good.”It is about becoming honest—with history, grief, and complicity.

Somatic pause:Ask yourself gently: Who am I trying to heal alone because community once failed me?

Closing: When One World Ends

Colonial Christianity taught us to fear the end of the world.

But what if what’s ending is not faith… but domination?

Grief exists because love exists.Love for our ancestors.Love for futures we haven’t seen yet.

Liberation does not begin with answers.It begins with acknowledgment.

And healing grows, in community.

Somatic pause:One final breath.Inhale through the nose.Exhale slowly through the mouth.

You are allowed to grieve.You are allowed to remember.You are allowed to imagine something else.

Practice Your Praxis

From Shadow to Embodied Liberation

This work is not meant to stay theoretical.Decolonization lives in the body, the home, and the systems we move through every day.

Practice your praxis slowly. There is no urgency here.

SELF: Tending the Body Where Shadow Lives

Colonial Christianity taught many of us to distrust the body, to prioritize belief over sensation, obedience over intuition.

Reclamation begins here.

Practice

* Sit or lie down comfortably.

* Place one hand on your chest and one on your belly.

* Take three slow breaths, lengthening the exhale.

* Ask quietly: What grief has my body been holding that my faith never made room for?

* Do not rush to answer. Sensation is enough.

Reflection Prompts

* Where do I feel grief, heaviness, or resistance when I think about religion, empire, or belonging?

* What parts of my body learned to brace in the name of being “good” or “saved”?

* What would it feel like to trust my body as a source of wisdom again?

Affirmation

My body remembers what empire tried to erase. I listen without judgment.

HOME: Disrupting Empire in the Everyday

Colonial Christianity didn’t just live in churches, it reorganized households.

It taught:

* hierarchy over mutual care

* silence over truth

* control over relationship

Decolonization at home is about shifting culture, not perfection.

Practice

* Choose one ritual this week that slows the pace of your household:

* shared meals without productivity talk

* lighting a candle for ancestors

* collective rest without explanation

* Name it aloud as an act of resistance.

Reflection Prompts

* Where does empire still shape my home life (urgency, hierarchy, silence)?

* What would collective care look like in my household?

* How can my home become a place where grief is allowed to exist without fixing?

Affirmation

My home does not belong to empire. It belongs to care, truth, and rest.

WORK: Naming and Interrupting Colonial Logics

Empire theology taught us that worth is earned, suffering is redemptive, and urgency is holy.

That logic still shapes workplaces, including justice spaces.

Decolonization at work begins with awareness, not martyrdom.

Practice

* Notice one moment this week where urgency overrides care.

* Pause.

* Ask: Who benefits from this pace? Who is harmed by it?

* If possible, name the tension aloud or choose a slower response.

Reflection Prompts

* Where does my work replicate productivity-as-worth?

* How does Christian moralism show up in expectations of sacrifice or burnout?

* What would it mean to center sustainability instead of saviorism?

Affirmation

My value is not measured by output. Liberation requires sustainability.

Reflection: Holding the Arc

Bethlehem offered a vision of liberation.Empire transformed it into domination.Colonization carried it across land and bodies.And now we are being asked to grieve what was lost and imagine something else.

Closing Prompts

* What version of faith am I mourning as it unravels?

* What new possibilities become visible when I stop rushing to resolve the grief?

* What kind of world am I willing to help build as this one ends?

Somatic Closing Pause

Before you move on:

* Take one slow breath in through the nose.

* Exhale gently through the mouth.

* Place a hand over your heart and whisper: I am allowed to grieve. I am allowed to remember.

Next in the Series:

Colonizing Bodies: How Christianity’s Control Over Gender, Sexuality, and the Body Shaped Systems of Power

Ways to Journey Deeper

Choose the ones your body has capacity for. Each offering is an invitation, not an expectation.

✨ Creating Healthy Boundaries Workbook If you are seeking ways to create boundaries for yourself this will guide you along the way Download here

✨ Book Leah’s Arc of Inner KnowingIf this article stirred something in you, Leah’s three-session journey is a powerful next step.It’s a space to:

* reclaim the parts of yourself empire taught you to silence,

* deepen your alignment,

* and get resourced for the road ahead. A liberatory gift to your inner world.

✨ Friday with Friends on Let’s Have the ConversationIf you want to be held in real-time community as we dismantle empire’s narratives and rebuild liberatory ones, join us live.It’s free, intimate, relational — and it’s where much of this collective healing happens. DesireeBStephens.bio and click Friday with Friends to sign up.

✨ Table Talk Unpacked If you’re navigating gatherings, family patterns, or relational spaces shaped by obligation and inherited scripts, this somatic companion is for you.It supports you in:

* honoring your capacity,

* setting boundaries without guilt,

* grounding your nervous system when empire’s expectations show up at the table.➡️ Open the Table Talk

✨ 31 Days of Shadow Work for Liberation (App)

Step into the Season of Self with 31 guided prompts, somatic practices, and altar invitations for just $11.A sacred container to support your shadow work and liberation journey.➡️ Download the App

✨ Ebook: Dismantling Supremacy Culture (2nd edition)

Understanding and Overcoming Its 15 Pillars — a foundational guide to identify, name, and unlearn the habits of dominance within ourselves and our systems.➡️ Download the Ebook

✨ Support the Work & the Healing Homestead

If liberatory giving resonates with you, this is a place to practice it intentionally.Partner with me and LadySpeech Sankofa in building the Selenite & Sage Healing Homestead — a sacred initiative to purchase land that will serve as a community healing, education, and retreat space.

Your offerings sustain the vision of land stewardship, communal healing, and intergenerational repair.➡️ Support the Healing Homestead

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Support my ongoing journey into becoming a PsychoSomatic Practitioner(began September 15th), or simply offer gratitude for the labor and love that goes into this work. Venmo • Cash app • PayPal: [email protected] WishLists: Desireé, Erin, Kieran, and Morrigan.Every gesture of reciprocity sustains the work of liberation and care.

✨ Explore More Tools and Resources

From e-books to guided meditations, workshops, and more — explore the growing library of liberation tools.➡️ Visit My Resource Hub

In solidarity and liberation,Desireé B. StephensEducator | Counselor | Community BuilderFounder, Make Shi(f)t HappenWriter of Liberation EducationSteward of Selenite & Sage Healing Homestead Co.Where Reflection Meets Transformation

Thank you Susan, Sam Beard, Jennifer Tinker, Deidre Keller, Ariana Skeese, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.

Some conversations don’t follow an outline… they follow truth.

This week’s Friday with Friends episode with Chaneé Jackson Kendall is one of those. No rigid questions. No forced structure. Just two people who trust each other enough — and know the work deeply enough — to let the conversation go exactly where it needed to go.

What unfolded was a living, breathing exploration of intentional relating, community as foundation, and what it actually looks like to decolonize love, spirituality, and family… not as a concept, not as a trend, but as a way of living inside your body and your relationships.

And if you’ve ever felt like the way you love, connect, parent, or build community doesn’t quite fit the scripts you were handed… this conversation is for you.

Intentional Relating Is About Rejecting Scripts

Early in the conversation, Chaneé names something many people feel but don’t yet have language for:

Most of the relationship scripts we’re given were never designed for us to thrive.

They were designed to keep people small, compliant, and contained; particularly Black, queer, disabled, and non-normative folks whose lives have always existed outside the narrow definitions of “acceptable” love, family, and belonging.

Intentional relating asks a different — and far more dangerous (to the system) — question:

If you could design your relationships yourself, what would they actually feel like?- Chaneé Jackson-Kendall (Iya Eguntoyebi) @Chaneespeaks

Not what they should look like.Not what you were taught, they must be.Not what keeps other people comfortable.

But what would feel life-giving, grounded, and true.

That question doesn’t stop at romance. It reaches into friendships. Parenting. Community. Spiritual practice. Chosen family. The way you show up… and the way you’re allowed to be met.

And once you start asking it honestly, the old scripts begin to unravel.

The rest of this conversation goes much deeper — into community accountability, decolonized spirituality, sovereignty, and why centering choice changes everything.

👉 Become a paid subscriber to continue reading to access the full conversation and episode breakdown. $10 a month /$100 a year /$150 as an Equity Partner, and scholarships are always available at: [email protected]

Every season asks something different of us.And winter, Season of Self — this sacred descent inward — asks us to tell the truth about what we’ve been carrying, what we’ve been giving, and what it has been costing us.

Today’s podcast episode walked us straight into that truth: a reckoning with the ways giving has been weaponized under empire, and an invitation to reclaim generosity as something rooted in dignity, not depletion.

Beneath the stories, the laughter, the realness, and the moments where the body remembered before the mind did — a deeper truth emerged:

Most of us were taught to give from fear, guilt, or obligation… not from capacity, alignment, or reciprocity.

And that distortion didn’t come from our cultures.

It came from empire.

The Myth of “Good Giving”

We started where many of our stories begin:Watching the adults who raised us sacrifice themselves in the name of love.Carrying the unspoken expectation that “good people give until they’re empty.”Learning that the cost of belonging is self-abandonment.

But what we explored in the episode — and what expands even more clearly here — is that these beliefs didn’t originate in our families.They were inherited through systems that trained entire communities to confuse depletion with devotion.

Empire taught us:

* Self-denial = holiness

* Exhaustion = virtue

* Martyrdom = love

* Silence = obedience

* “Goodness” = disappearing into other people’s needs

These are the fingerprints of Constantine, not Christ.Of colonial Christianity, not community.Of supremacy culture, not ancestral wisdom.

We have been performing empire’s version of generosity while calling it family, culture, faith, and duty.

Somatic Pause

Unclench your jaw.Let your shoulders drop.Feel your body respond to the idea that giving could center you, too.

✨ If moments like these support your journey, consider becoming a paid subscriber. Your support sustains liberation-centered education and community care.➡️ Upgrade here.

What We Discussed:

Talking Point 1: We Learned Giving Through Survival, Not Choice

Most of us didn’t learn generosity in environments where our needs mattered.We learned giving as a strategy to stay safe, stay included, or stay “good.”

Liberatory Reframe:Giving rooted in survival is not the same as giving rooted in sovereignty.You get to choose now. That is the work empire never wanted us to do.

Reflection Questions:

* Where did I learn that giving is how I prove my worth?

* When does giving feel like pressure rather than desire?

* What part of me still believes rest must be earned?

Talking Point 2: Empire Taught Us That Exhaustion Is Holy

Under Constantine and colonial Christianity, sacrifice became a performance of goodness.Our families inherited that story. We inherited their exhaustion.

Liberatory Reframe:Your capacity is sacred. Your boundaries are sacred. Your replenishment is sacred.Liberatory giving strengthens the giver — it does not erase them.

Reflection Questions:

* What expectations about giving live in my body but not in my values?

* When I say yes, is it coming from alignment or fear of disappointing someone?

* What becomes possible when I stop treating depletion as devotion?

Talking Point 3: Giving Without Reciprocity Reproduces Empire

Empire turned giving into a vertical transaction:power → downwardobedience → upwardself → last

But our ancestral practices were circular. Mutual. Returning.

Liberatory Reframe:Reciprocity is not a luxury. It’s the structure that keeps community alive.If giving always flows one way, it’s not generosity — it’s extraction.

Reflection Questions:

* Where is reciprocity present in my life?

* Where is it missing?

* What relationships, institutions, or traditions ask for my labor without offering support?

Reclaiming Generosity From the Inside Out:

Liberatory giving begins with the giver, not the gift.

We asked:

* What does my body actually have capacity for?

* Where am I giving from fear instead of fullness?

* What expectations live inside me that I never consented to?

And beneath every one of those questions was a reclamation:

You were never meant to be the offering.Your life is not the altar.Your exhaustion is not required for your belonging.

Empire demands self-abandonment.Liberation demands self-regard.

Somatic Pause

Feel your feet.Feel your breath.Let your body register the possibility of generosity that includes you.

To continue on with this lesson, I invite you to become a paid subscriber of Liberation Education Newsletter for $10 a month/ $100 a year/ $150 as an ewuity partner. If you need a scholarship, please reach out to: [email protected]