I greet you in the ceremony of my heart. My imperfect ancestors open their arms for you. If your intentions are pure, here in this place you will be fed.
Sacred Word is an ongoing journal gathering in which I provide guidance on your freedom work, writing, creative life, and sacred healing. I do medicine work with you.
I also share writings and book previews, audio and video gifts, product discounts, and respond to your questions.
I hold the heart of this Sacred Word space for those subject to the very real, daily, lifelong, double oppression of gender and race. Also imperfectly known as women of color. All souls are Loved and welcome here.
I am Indigenous. I work through Indigenous ways. We gather here in the essence of ancestral, unappropriated tribal spirit. Around the fire even virtually. In song and dance. In true ceremony. To experience the fullness of this, we must be willing to release our colonized, academic, bureaucratic allegiances and learn to feel and be alive again.
In this space, I am no guru. I am here as son, brother, father, uncle, witnessing soul. I am honored to learn, guide, and nurture. I invite, most of all, you who are artists, activists, revolutionaries, and compassionate soul servants. This is not for conquerors. It is for those brave enough to surrender.
I do not call this a “course”. The moment I do, your mind, conditioned since preschool, instantly creates expectations of syllabi, scripts, materials, lectures, passive student roles, hierarchical power dynamics, and a soul-killing linear process focused on memorizing and not on feeding, feeling, or empathically expanding.
I call this a gathering so that we may remember and practice our ancestral ways of healing, learning, teaching, guiding, growing, and communing. Sacred Word is circular. We follow the course of spirit, which Loves to return to its source over and again. Like a water-wheel. Our method is compassionate listening and Loving speech. Our materials are the poetry of vitality and grace. This experience is non-linear. Each gathering is its own organic, living intelligence and harvesting. Whether you have gathered with us before or not, you belong and have medicine to learn and to offer, as long as your spirit is in a good way. Sacred Word is not a series of “classes.” It is a waterfall of gestation and birth.
I am concerned with the experience of girls and women, particularly their safety and freedom.
I am concerned with art. Art is respiration of the soul. As revolution work is more than anything a life-risking, life-saving dare from the soul, art is how a revolution breathes. For me, all forms of art are sacred word.
In our virtual gatherings and here in our Substack, we address these things and more: What it means to be an artist and revolutionary. Fulfilling your life in relation to the double oppression of gender and race. Methods for ending caste systems, repairing their harm, and effecting restitution and reparation. Boundaries and idolization. Gardening your work and relations. Remembrance as a force for healing and change. The power of presence. Temptation and seduction. Predators and prey. Gathering as fortification. Ceremony and ritual. Softness as birthing force. Moon cycles, mischief, and mayhem. Silence, solitude, stillness. Storytelling as sacredness.
I also care that your experience in our gatherings softens you. That you deepen your capacity to breathe, relax, grow calm. Consider Sacred Word a sauna, Jacuzzi, retreat, soul massage. Our time together should increase our wellbeing, not just our knowledge.
This Sacred Word space is where I do much of my medicine work. And where we learn, share, talk story, testify, bear witness, commune, break bread, create, laugh, cry, heal, weave, sing, dance, and most of all remember. Remember who we truly are.
I fiercely protect our Sacred Word culture as we grow it here. A culture that begins and ends with each of us feeling safe to be our intrinsic, passionate, soulful selves.
I hope you freely share with me and with each other here in our Substack. Ask your musings, share your stories, nourish each other. We use our Substack to keep our gatherings alive in-between gathering.
I am honored to kneel beside you in the fertile soil of this mystic gardening.
- Jaiya John
jaiyajohn.com
