Issue II Available for Pre-Order Now
Those of us engaged in movement work have arrived at a distinct moment. We are privileged to access an abundance of language, history, tools, and theory around changemaking. Despite this availability, we still find ourselves in the early stages of implementing our many skills and tools, with varying degrees of success. We know what we don’t want and can imagine what it is we do want. But along the way, we discover the distance we must travel within ourselves, between each other, and within our movement communities before we can arrive at these places in praxis.
As Soil Generation (SG), a collective of Black and Brown women farmers and organizers, we’ve gathered critical resources that have helped guide our organization. At SG, we work through the inevitable messiness of shaping the future. Our collective actively engages in intentional training, knowledge seeking, and experiential catharsis through literature, film, research, bodywork, spiritual alignment, and introspection. As a result of these efforts, we have begun to restore our wholeness by recovering our individuality. We challenge the urgency in how we work, interrogate our patterns of perpetual overgiving, and address conflict with centered accountability.
This work ushered us into the creation of our forthcoming publication, Soul ReIntegration: An Artistic Self-Exploration and Healing Journey, a curriculum guidebook designed to help others process their personal experiences, grief, and loss to reframe gratitude, and to ignite imagination for our futures. We hold immense gratitude for the teachers, leaders, and writers who have created resources that have influenced us. In developing Soul ReIntegration, we curated a list of resources for those in movement communities navigating organizational and personal pain, healing, and transformation. Read on for our recommendations of tools—books, works, and experiences—that have guided and grounded us, as we hope they do for you.
Dr. Akasha Gloria Hull
The book Soul Talk affirmed what we felt intuitively, but couldn’t articulate at a time when political work had drained so much from us. Dr. Akasha Gloria Hull investigates a rise in the visibility of Black women’s creativity and spirituality in the 1980s, and how Black women cycle between the political, creative, and spiritual. She interviews complex, prolific and powerful women, including Alice Walker, Toni Cade Bambara, Lucille Clifton, and Sonia Sanchez, inviting them to contemplate these connections.
Dr. Hull gently weaves herself into her study of this phenomenon. Her vulnerability and self-reflection alongside her research, revelations, and poetry embody an authentic collection of work that makes us as readers feel held and seen. She asks the same questions that come to mind for us in our healing journey. She explores how to navigate spirituality in a politicized or criminalized body with grace and spaciousness, creating room for contradictions. She legitimizes creativity and spirituality as inherently political. Soul Talk makes for a soothing and grounding experience, landing us in replenished faith that we are a part of a larger movement. Dr. Hull gives us permission to exist expansively without guilt, reassured that our efforts are not in vain.
Maryam Hasnaa
Energetic Boundaries is a virtual workshop within Maryam Hasnaa’s New Earth Mystery School portal that can be purchased on demand. Hasnaa is an initiated priestess, energy worker, medicine woman, and flower practitioner who offers psychic tools, training, and templates for spiritual development, energetic hygiene, and living in reciprocity with Earth and all of its beings.
Hasnaa teaches us how to recover our individuality and rebuild the bridge to our own emotional and energetic landscape after habitual community enmeshment and people pleasing. She discusses how enmeshment is not empathic ability, and how internalizing or anticipating how others feel is a protective mechanism. She drives home accountability for one’s own feelings and actions, asking us to unpack how these tendencies contribute to controlling behaviors that disregard others’ energetic boundaries.
Her framework affirms our understanding of masculine and feminine energetic imbalances: how the feminine tendency to crave connection can tilt toward enmeshment, while the masculine drive for autonomy can tip into urgency and control. She shares that to restore a feminine energy balance, we must slow down, reflect, and surrender the things we could never control. A restoration of masculine energy requires us to value boundaries, conceptions of the self, and to reinstate self-control of our inner world.
Poor boundaries put us at risk of being absorbed and dissolved into the goo of the universe, causing us to lose the tether to our unique gifts and purpose. Movement for the sake of movement does not equate to moving in the right direction. Hasnaa guides us to reground in our personal energetic body by slowing down and learning to listen more closely to the suppressed knowledge stored in our flesh and our higher selves, and to surrender to the reality that we cannot control others.
Health Justice Commons
This virtual six-week political education series unpacks the Medical Industrial Complex (MIC), revealing how deeply embedded ableism, medical racism, and environmental racism are in its foundation. The curriculum explores the compounding impacts of Big Pharma, corporate polluters, eugenics, genocide, and how the MIC benefits from and perpetuates the climate crisis.
The organization Health Justice Commons (HJC) defines health as all of the mechanisms that affirm and support life, allowing all to live in harmony and dignity with ourselves, one another, and the planet. Everyone is impacted by health and disability justice because we occupy a body and will experience our abilities changing, due to aging, exposure to disabling pollutants, accidents, or tragedies. If we practice centering the most impacted people in our radical liberatory politics, then we must include the voices and experiences of those who live with disability and chronic illness. The HJC grounded our collective’s understanding of climate justice with disability and health justice at the center, and the covert implications of the MIC’s role in creating and maintaining systems of ecological and human oppression, disablement, and disposal.
Throughout the series, the HJC presented analyses in a digestible way, and the potentially triggering history was handled with care. SG deeply resonates with the thoughtful manner of HJC’s facilitation. The HJC embodied their values by taking the time to hear from each participant. The workshop leaders accounted for all accessibility needs, held participants responsible for meeting one another’s needs, and prioritized language justice. HJC’s efforts required time, slowing down, and mindfulness that challenged our sense of urgency. They created an opportunity for us to witness and participate in moving at the pace of community and a true commitment to inclusive care.
We were also met with a fundamental challenge to our sense of self-worth being attached to our ability. When we invest our sense of self-worth in our capability to serve, we are complicit in ableism because we assign value to productivity and by extension, ability. For people who cannot contribute in that way, what do such assumptions say about how we perceive their value? We were confronted with internalized capitalistic and ableist habits that drove our self-judgment and implicated us in the judgment of others. Our ability varies and is temporal, but our value is not. No one’s value is contingent on what can be extracted from them.
We believe that food, land, and environmental justice are incomplete without a disability and health justice analysis, and recommend this series to our movement relatives.
Generative Somatics
Conflict as Generative is a six-week training that guides us through somatic practices, theory, and self-work. Our original understanding of somatics expanded into a political theory and lifestyle around embodying transformative change individually and collectively.
We engaged in deep self-reflection around our conditioned tendencies and automatic responses under pressure, distinguishing them from our safety shaping—how our nervous system and body seek safety, dignity, and belonging under oppression. We learned that habitual responses of fight, flight, freeze, or dissociate are ways our body’s intelligence protects us in conflict. Through our somatic practices, we uncovered underlying messages we’ve internalized throughout our lives. We learned to acknowledge and validate ourselves to move toward a centered accountability.
We at SG accept the lifelong practice of holding complexity and contradiction, and remain accountable to our commitments. We also maintain an understanding of what is not our responsibility, while staying in tune with ourselves and each other. During the training, we reconnected to an embodied sense of resilience. We recognized the life-giving reservoirs of our hope and imagination, and these practices support us in our quest to reestablish safety and connection to self and others. Most importantly, the course helped us practice centered completion—to work through internal resistance to saying goodbye to our past selves, work that is complete, roles that we’ve outgrown, and to accept change as a natural cycle.
Dr. Gabor Maté
Dr. Gabor Maté draws on his medical research to connect perpetual emotional self-neglect and chronic illness. He is a physician versed in the lifelong impacts of mental and emotional trauma on physical health conditions such as autoimmune disease, cancer, addiction, and other chronic or terminal illnesses.
Dr. Maté builds upon attachment theory to articulate how the body suffers when one subjects oneself to a lifetime of martyrdom and overgiving. Silencing our intuition and sacrificing our health, boundaries, and comfort does not eliminate our need for them. In fact, we leave our bodies with no choice but to demand change through debilitating conditions that force us to stop pouring into others. Dr. Maté reiterates that being too nice can quite literally cost you your life, and learning to be okay with being disliked and disappointing others can save it.
It is refreshing to hear a medical professional lecture on health with a holistic perspective that acknowledges the inherent inseparable nature of mind, body, and spirit. While Dr. Maté’s perspective is considered controversial by some, potentially placing responsibility on the individual for their illness, he says we are not to blame for the instincts and coping mechanisms we adopt, nor our illnesses. He expands the medical dimension to what Hasnaa elucidates in her Energetic Boundaries workshop—an urgent call to restore our connection to ourselves, and to what exactly is at stake.
Toni Cade Bambara
The literary masterpiece The Salt Eaters by Toni Cade Bambara, had such an impact on Dr. Hull that she dedicated Soul Talk to Bambara. Bambara wrote The Salt Eaters from a spiritual dimension outside of her everyday rational self. The story is nonlinear, with multiple perspectives from members of a fictional town in Georgia who witness a life-changing event. The interconnection between perspectives, interjections of thermodynamics, and spiritual technology flesh out an expansive, spirit-awakening experience for the reader.
Bambara explained to Dr. Hull in Soul Talk that it was her own sense of misalignment that prompted the channeling of this story and its characters. The Salt Eaters centers around a communal healing for Velma Henry, an overworked, Black woman organizer. Velma continually chooses work and community responsibilities over the increasingly loud demands of her spiritual, physical, and emotional self. Velma, like so many of us, was moving without clarity, without regard for her needs. She hurts herself and others by neglecting her personal relationships. In her story arc, she must move through a spiritual portal to confront and accept herself to get through her crisis and advance in her life with resilience.
We often remind ourselves of the epigraph Bambara chose for The Salt Eaters, by the healer Minnie Ransom: “Are you sure, sweetheart, that you want to be well?...I like to caution folks, that’s all. A lot of weight when you’re well.” The healing we must do to become whole is neither fluffy nor light; rather a continual confrontation with who we are. It involves sharpening our tools to reconnect with our strengths, values, and personal missions beyond our movement roles. This journey requires understanding that universal time has a say in the trials and challenges that we face throughout our lives. Healing is hard, but worthy and necessary work. Sometimes, we are called to submit to the lessons that Spirit has in store.
