Wellness and Freedom

A full chapter excerpt from my book, Freedom: Medicine Words for Your Brave Revolution

photo by Jaiya John

Blessings, Sacred Souls. Today I would like to share with you another full chapter excerpt from my book, Freedom: Medicine Words for Your Brave Revolution. May it nourish you forward on your divine adventure.


WELLNESS AND FREEDOM

This revolutionary life requires daily purification. Purification as each thought and feeling comes through, and each impulse arises. You will be polluted always by a social atmosphere that is allergic to the work you are doing. The way boiling oil reacts to water is the way a sickened world will react to your medicine. Purify your mind, spirit, heart, and body to withstand these violent and pervasive reactions. Notice how polluters are attracted to dumping their pollution in clean rivers. Something about the desecration, the spoiling entices them. People will want to spoil your purity. So they can then humiliate you for not being pure. You don’t have to be pure. You do need to have a purification system. Remain clean enough in spirit and motive to be medicine and not malice in the meadow of this life.

In the morning, we wash our bodies clean. How often do we wash our spirits clean before the day? We feed our bodies daily. How often do we feed our spirit, soul, heart, and mind? In a materialistic culture, we value and care for the material, neglecting the immaterial. But our immeasurable nature is what we need most to preserve. For it is the atmosphere that determines the possibilities for our life.

Viruses incubate, gestate, survive, and breed in unwellness. Other people's anxiety, fear, negativity, trauma, and ill intent accumulate in us like bacteria, eventually overcoming our spirit's immune system. Spiritual hygiene is real. It can keep suffering away. Wash your spirit clean. One of the first things unwellness says is, Change is hopeless. Nothing can be done. Freedom work is wellness work. Reject the toxic idea that you must work yourself to death to achieve freedom. Just the opposite. Work yourself to life. You will have freedom.

The calendar does not determine your growth and healing. Your soul does. When your soul is ready, you will do the sacred work. May you be free, you precious, worthy, living thing. May you be free.

Your soul is a sacred land.
Make sure you treat it that way.

Stay in your ceremonies. Song, dance, joy, rest, release, forgiveness. Nutritional food, feelings, words, prayers, and thoughts. Communal ways. Rich solitude. Personal poetry in your ways of being. Cups of tears spilled in gratitude. Peace attitude. More kindness latitude. This, simply, is how you Love yourself, and bless your people and all living things. Send and receive Love. Receive it as though you are worthy. You are.

You feel sad, so your tears flow. Your flowing tears make you sad. This is how it is with freedom. Feeling Love's radiance in you, freedom flows out of you. The flow of freedom makes you feel Love. Use this sacred circle flowing in your revolution. Show us how it works.

Hold onto your joy. Dearly hold onto your joy. It is a flotation device when the waters get rough. You have every right to seek and savor joy in challenging times. Joy is best practice. Salvation mode. Chosen resistance act. Proclamation of enduring life. If you look closely, you may see reasons for joy where you did not before. Quietude and stillness have a way of shining a light on the littlest of blessings. Which are not little at all.

What is the freest thing you know?
Make that your teacher.

You can lead so many quiet revolutions today. Wear your natural hair. Show your natural face. Dress in your natural clothes. Speak your natural tongue. Pray in your natural ways. Share your natural kindness. Move in your natural rhythms. Rest and create as you are naturally inspired. Your nature holds the key to your freedom. Spring the lock.

When someone is kind to you,
make sure to plant that seed
in the soil of your worthiness.
You deserve it.

We struggle with feeling worthy partly because we forget the countless times we have been treated as worthy. Instead we remember all the times we have been mistreated, devalued, and dehumanized. This is especially true for marginalized peoples. Visit the archives of your worthiness. Bring food and stay awhile.

Bring your soul out to the plains of Sacredness. Kneel and praise earth and sky. Wash your spirit clean in holy water. Share breath with Creation. This pure air is deep ceremony. Drum your ancestors back to you. Sacredness will remind you, you are a sacred thing, too.

If you want to swim, it helps to be in the water. If you want freedom, spend your life in freedom spaces. Invest your soul in people whose soul water carries detectable levels of freedom. Each day, bathe in the sensation of your oneness with all things. This will keep you clean, pure, humble, and open to your noble work for the new day.

Sun doesn’t chase sunlight.
You shouldn’t have to chase peace.

Peace is in you. It is your very nature. When you chase peace out in the world, you abandon the peace you already are. Peace is not an acquisition. It is an excavation. Life’s illusions have buried the peace in you. If your current condition is not peaceful, it doesn’t mean you are not a peaceful person. Let go of that story. Release your false ideas about you and life, and you uncover your native peace. Go into that inner sunlight. Bask in yourself and all your peace.

Do not confuse your earthly condition with your true nature. You always were a beautiful thing. Maybe sky looks at you the way you look at sky. Consider yourself that big and beautiful. Rehabilitate your idea of yourself. This is the first brave movement into freedom. Once you see yourself as a phenomenal thing, you will permit yourself phenomenal things.

She erased all the social conditioning
oppressing her entire life and started over.

Deconditioning your mind from oppression is a long journey. You will need all your patience, all your ceremonies, all of your sacred Loving circle. Learning the organic you begins with unlearning all your invasive ideas of you.

When working to kill a virus, take all precautions to not become re-infected. Freedom work requires your wellness most of all. Your immune system must remain strong, resilient. Achieve this in your own wellness ways. Ceremony, ritual, community, family, nature, breathing, body work, remembering, resting, movement, inner stillness, releasing, purging, nurturing, Loving. Stay in your ways.

When you find yourself isolated among favored ones, with no one to relate to your reality, root yourself in thoughts of your Loved ones and all your relations. Dance, sing, drum if you can. Keep small ceremonies alive in that desolate space.

In the moments you feel peace, study the roots of its arrival. Repeat what brings you peace. Peace isn't random. It is a habit. It whispers something to us about the ways of being free. Strengthen your spirit’s immune system to resist this supremacy contagion. What nourishes your soul? Do that. Do that for a lifetime.

Wellness is the greatest wealth we pass on to our children. The future ones are already alive in us, as a baby is in the womb, communicating in spirit ways how they feel about our choices, about our way of being. Already they are letting us know what kind of world they want us to leave for them. This is why in some moments we feel peace, in other moments we feel conflicted. When we know our way is wrong, it is because the future ones have let us know from their spirit womb in us that our way is wrong. We also feel their delight when our way is life.

Careful. Your way of being is not
necessarily a way of life.
It may be a way of death.

Oppressive societies drown in their dreariness, in a social agreement to grimness. Freedom embraces the value of beauty, is not shamed by the decadence of simple pleasure even in the midst of suffering and struggle. Freedom does not say, My cause is too serious for beauty. Freedom says, Because my cause is vital, let me savor beauty where I find its fortune. Let me taste every delicacy to suffuse my soul for this arduous labor of Love.

Peace isn't to be bought, but soul-sought. It is an artifact of a soul well Loved. A remnant of healing, a pervasive flower risen from the ground of tenderness. If your oppressor lives in the center of your soul, it is time for a purging. A revolution overly waged out in the world will erode without daily inner contemplation, healing, and nurturing of the bonds within your revolutionary circle.

Does this set my soul free?
That is the question.

So many rivers in your life. Take the ones flowing to the ocean that is peace. Wash your spirit clean. Over and over. Choose freedom, a single quest that simplifies your life as all the cages come for you. Stay in your mantra question: Does this set me free? Be brave with the answer. And with your choices after. May you birth peace. And raise it beautifully. Here's to a glorious upbringing. And all your peaceful generations after. You are a worthy ancestor. Your offspring will flood this world forever.

Your pain is meant to be a compassionate catapult to a new reality, not a tar pit trapping you forever. Make sure your pain is working for you. It is your teacher. Your motive. Your movement. Your messenger. Make medicine with your sacred ache.

You may say, First let me get well, then I will be ready to work for freedom. Freedom says, I will get you well. Work to get to me.

Human perception is a cataract lens on the eye of this world. If you want to see clearly, expose your soul to the sunlight of truth. Risk eternal sunburn.

If you prefer giving your wealth to your oppressor, and not to your people, you have been overtaken by the slave virus. The inferiority virus. Consider whom you choose to feed. Cure your giving habits.

Feelings are your soul speaking to you. Don't run. Be a good listener. Make peace. Messages are coming through that want to heal you. Let them guide you to a beautiful life.

We do not have to surrender to the contagion of unkindness. In each moment we choose either freedom or the collective, conforming suffering of our times.

As you feed yourselves along your freedom road, it helps to learn the difference between nutritious freedom food and the slop offered by those who are out catching runaway slaves.

Your soul only wants soul food.
Not junk food.
You have to cook
if you want to burn.

If you want to be a candle of peace, open yourself to the high heat that is Truth. Be willing to be seasoned and baked by your journey, transformed by organic foods ripe with meaning. Make your mystic moments marinade for your manifest dreams. Feed your soul what it hungers for. Give it that and you will be free.

In some moments, freedom comes through union, immersion, or communion. In other moments, it arrives through solitude. Sometimes through both. Pay attention to what your soul craves. What you wanted in the womb is what you will want your whole life. Follow this river to the ocean of your sweet undoing.

In your quietest moments you are likely to be visited by clarity about your way forward in this work. Do not rush your silent visitor. Take the time. In this freedom endeavor, quietude, solitude, and stillness are sacred herbs, can be your special friend.

See beauty often. Everywhere. It keeps your revolution rooted in Love. It refreshes your soul water. Do not shy away from laughter. No sacred scroll has ever said your revolution must be grim.

It is possible to become consumed in being against or anti something, such that this something now controls our existence. We go where it goes, shift when it shifts, are dragged along by its impulses and whims, its tactics and strategies. We become soaked in its spirit, diluted of our essence, exhausted by its manipulations. We live in its shadow, neglecting our light. Its pathos overruns our inspiration, our vision making. Center your life in being for something. This way you control your daily directions, moods, and spirit. You are proactive, not reactive. Have faith in that which you are for. Pour into it. Believe it will do the work for you of acting against that which you are against. Grow an anchor, a compass, a self-determined root. Drink from your source. Stay in your sacred water. It has the power to manifest your freedom dream.

Have you gone wild yet today?
There's still time.
Put some freedom
in your daily stew.

It is important that you repatriate your dreams. Your dreams get lost along the way. They lose their country. Which is your soul. Bring them back. Renew your hope and faith. Dare to believe your Love can make all things new.

Our struggle is not between belonging and loneliness. It is between abandonment and freedom. Do not abandon your own soul. Stay. You will know freedom.

Dr. Jaiya John
Freedom: Medicine Words
for Your Brave Revolution



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