Care for Your Sacred Stories

They are the garden of your life

photo by Jaiya John

CARE FOR YOUR SACRED STORIES
*Excerpted from my book, Freedom:
Medicine Words for Your Brave Revolution

Take care of your sacred stories.
They are the garden of your life.

Hope is the light bursting out from the story you tell yourself. Despair is when your story chases all the light away. Mend your story. Stories too can tire and fray. Hope habits are what make hopeful people hopeful. These habits require practice. We have to build our hope muscles for times of heavy lifting. The more oppressed and dehumanized you and yours are, the more hopeful you must become. This is the sacred dance. Weave a hopeful story. Carry your whole life in that basket. Hard times are like a cold night just before a brilliant dawn. Storytell your personal sunrise.

She who stops telling herself nightmares
and starts telling herself fantasies,
shall live in paradise.

Whose story are you telling yourself all day long? Likely one you inherited. Burn your old stories whose voice sounds like trauma. The gloom and doom. The fear and doubt. Start a fresh new you tale that spa-treats your soul. Your life is not about your circumstances. It is about the legend you create in your mind that invades your soul, soaks your heart, and floods out into your life. Harness the power of your storytelling to make your sweet dreams come true. No more nightmares. Only fantasies. You're in paradise now, dear one. Time for a paradise kind of mentality.

Speak your truth. Say what you truly mean. Coded language serves those who destroy. Naked language serves our ultimate healing. In an oppressive society, code language is developed that protects favored people from guilt, shame, and culpability. Break through this insulation by speaking precise truth. Call the diseases by their true names. Name the perpetrators. Describe not only their offense but also their harm. Society will pressure you to water down your language, to make it more palatable for the favored ones. Do not dilute your medicine. Your medicine is Truth.

When you find yourself in the desert dying of thirst, run to water. Do not run away from it. You would think we would go to what is good for us. But when we are used to life and people being hurtful, we can develop an ironic attachment, a trust in hurtfulness. This trust can cause us to run from kindness, goodness, Love, and sincerity. If this is you, it is never too late to repair your compass. Do not run toward what you know even if it includes language and stories that desecrate and dehumanize you. Run toward what cures you. Sacred words and stories. Be a medicine seeker. Be careful not to dwell in cynicism. It is a trash dump that rots your soul. Dwell in Love. It is a far better garden.

Take good care of your words. They will gather your words as kindling and use them to build a fire. They will use that fire to incinerate your revolution. And to justify their supremacy and enslavement of your people. They will say it is your own words that give them the right and prove their point.

Faithfully weed out your oppressor's words and language from your own. Like picking stones from black eyed peas, or invasive plants from your garden. Their language will grow inside your revolution and poison it. Their language will be a Trojan horse inserting their spirit and ideas of you, inside your people, inside your sacred spaces. You will think you are using your own language to move out of slavery, but it will be their desecration language holding you in.

The fear in you is generations old.
Be the generation to set it free.
Be the freedom generation.
Choose new stories.

Language caught in group labels can enslave us to the plantation of group identity. The slavery virus does not care about groups, social boundaries, or borders. It cares about finding hosts, organisms that offer the right inner conditions. Create language that destroys fear.

Are you sure, dear soul, that the story you've been
telling yourself all your life is setting you free?

Life travels in circles. So should our stories. In the cultural heritage of most people worldwide, stories are not told in straight, logical lines. They are told in the same manner as life itself unfolds: unpredictable, folding back on itself, reconnecting in surprising ways. This circularity allows the sacred ingredients of the past and the future to mix with our current reality, blessing us with perspective, wisdom, meaning, and purpose. If your intent is to leach these qualities from souls and society so you may control and exploit people, you force them to tell false stories in flat, linear ways. You create educational systems to uphold and insulate this kind of storytelling. You create media systems for the same. You isolate the entire population in the kind of storytelling that fixates on individual opportunities for personal gain without responsibility to anything or anyone. Then you insert imposter heroes into the center of your story. False heroes in your own image. You include imagined villains around the perimeter of your story. This is how you fortify your supremacy. And if you are a revolutionary, you destroy all of this by helping to revive soulful, circular, ancestral story in the lives and minds of everyone.

Any peoples’ cultural heritage and experienced reality are valid by virtue of those peoples’ existence. A people should not have to adjudicate the truth of their oppression to those who have not lived it. And yet, this is how the dynamic plays out. Stay rooted in what you know is real. Explaining yourself is a good way to get lost in the woods of other people’s denial.

Words like plantation and reservation mean very different things to those who own them and their descendant kind, than they mean to those who suffered and were tortured there, and the ones who come after them. The naming of things matters. The way you name yourself and your people and places matters even more.

If your words are not rich, nourishing soup for someone's soul, it may be best not to speak them. Serve only soul food at the table of your presence in the world. And if you are going to listen to what someone shares from their heart, listen with all of you. Make it a ceremony.

Describe people as people before you indicate their social category. Social category labels dehumanize the labeler and the ones being labeled. First say, There goes a person, a soul, a living thing. Say this first, before you paint the portrait of the category in which you imagine them. This is how you bring life back into a lifeless human kind. Speak first of Life you see in a person. Resurrection tongue.

Do not let others use their oppression language on you. The word minority is a violent tactic. You will never be minor. They will never be major. The only minority are those who cannot coexist in harmony as human beings and living things. Words like underdeveloped, third world, foreign, immigrant, and illegal can be strategic slurs intended to dehumanize and position certain groups within a caste system. Castes are by nature hostile, traumatizing, and dehumanizing. Take great care in what you call those who are unfavored. Especially if you and yours are unfavored. Your conditioning may make your language a cage. They will call your first world the third world when they are the youngest world in relation to the ancestral world of your people. Remember who you are.

When you are oppressed, you find yourself buried under certain soils: Exhaustion. Fear. Doubt. Mutedness. Dire imagination. Incarcerated pain. Dream abandonment. Relational isolation. False names. Spiritual bleaching. Abandonment of permission. Ancestral distancing. Time imprisonment. Songlessness. These are among the heavier soils. To taste sky again, you need a determination to excavate your soul. You need tools for dirt removal, and plentiful water for cleansing. Boundaries to prevent reburial. And you need new names. Oh, how you need new names.

Give yourself beautiful sacred names each day. No need to restrict yourself. There are no rules in this. Claim the ones that make your soul sigh. Each name evokes a unique part of you. Particular notes in your song. Open the windows inside you. Let yourself out. Maybe we on earth aren't lacking self-Love. Maybe we lack sacred names. Self-Love lives in the names we call ourselves, and in the names we allow ourselves to be called. Time for a whole new language. One we can whisper in the hard moments to soften the soil. One we can lullaby ourselves to sleep with at night. Endless names exist whose sound and spirit feel good to your soul, for they are native to your soul. Claim them. Watch your life become a feel good thing.

The story you tell yourself about who you are is woven of a thousand threads of repetition. To heal and be free, unravel each thread patiently. Just as patiently, weave the truth of your beautiful soul. Reweave you. Your idea of you, and therefore your life, is not an unchangeable stone. It is a weaving of rivers. A water that wants you to find the wonder in its waves. You are a creatable thing. Don't be afraid of the notes freedom sings.

Resurrect your ancestors' tongues. They are guiding you in their language. If you are not fluent in moon, moonlight cannot lead you across the meadows of night. Grow fluent in your ancestral voices. They will guide you home to freedom.

Culturally isolated, stigmatized people live in the vortex of conflict between what they are and what society expects them to be. This brings daily peril and bruising, a haunting hailstorm with shelter too rarely found. Keep alive the ancestral, generational chain of custody for your cultural truths. This is the work.

If you want to spark others on their freedom path, encourage their creative self-expression. Creativity is how the spirit reintroduces itself to the conscious mind. It is a way for the spirit to say, Whatever you thought you were was a dream. I am your reality. I am as true and able and worthy as I say I am.

Slaves do not believe they are worthy of happiness. Slave masters do not believe they deserve discomfort. Both statuses depend on false beliefs. Fairytales live in the heart of oppression. Sacred stories are the key to the persistent cage. Gather your storytellers, your stories, and talk story until you feel new life in you. Build your new society around these legends. Devote yourselves to never losing hold of your stories again.

The conflict within our souls regarding oppression is itself a recognition spark. A sign that we, as living things, are obligated to repair what we have wounded. What we have disordered unnaturally. Who will testify? Who will bear witness? You cannot heal a thing without the story of its harm being passed around like honored cups of tea.

Words are living things. They must be fed. Can be medicine if you choose them well. Words are the carriers of your revolution ideas. Invest in them. Bless them with long massages. Warm baths. Help them be at their best. They have so much work to do.

What you tell yourself in the worst of times
becomes your mantra in the best of times.

Reality isn't your biggest threat. Your inner stories about reality are. People say, I have trouble sleeping. What they really mean is, I have trouble storying. Our story creates our condition. The best time to examine, mend, and reweave your stories is all the time. Do it when you are awake, so you dream better in your sleep. Do it when you sleep, so you live better when you are awake. When life grows daunting, sit with your stories and spend special time. If you neglect your stories, they fray and turn against you. If you nurture your stories, they will carry you through the worst and bring you all the way to a paradise called Peace in a land called Freedom. We are not only living through the season of our circumstances. We are journeying through our stories. Our healthy stories are water in the desert. Drink. Hope in the valley. Graze. Mountains in the mist. Climb. Medicine for our memory. Pour. Manna for the masses. Share all the food. Let your people feast.

Jaiya John
Freedom: Medicine Words
for Your Brave Revolution
*Available at booksellers worldwide.

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