The Power of Communal Care: Building Resilience Through faith
Estimated Reading Time 7 minutes | Song: Faith by Stevie Wonder featuring Ariana Grande
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I won’t pretend to speak for the rest of anyone but as a millennial, I am tired of living in unprecedented times. It could be the Taurus in me or maybe the fact I feel as if I have been caregiving all of my life, but a nap sure would do me some good. How about you?
Believe it or not, I am Black. I am a woman. I am also a small business owner and have been since I turned 18 in some form or fashion. With that said, I have been in the position where I have had to question my values more than I could account for in regards to participating in capitalism. Do I need to have and own a business making billions of dollars? Not really, because that is not what makes me happy or would fulfill my soul and yet, many businesses do have this as a goal. Ey, we listen and we don’t judge.
When I owned and operated my yoga studio, I was the sole owner. I was denied loans and grants because as an owner I appeared too much of a risk, doing it all myself and wearing all of the hats, not to mention the redlining because of how I am racialized in America. I learned a lot about business and a lot about myself. I learned alot about what it was I truly valued and needed to say enough was enough. I personally do not now nor in the foreseeable future need to make millions or even billions of dollars via exploiting others for personal gain. I do desire for all of my and my family's needs to be met with space for our wants or desires to have a chance to come into fruition.
Since Target has decided to roll back it’s DEI initiatives due to pressure from The Heritage Foundation, National Center for Public Policy Research and National Legal and Policy Center, the Black community across the internet has been vocal about boycotting or not boycotting, along with still supporting the Black businesses within places like Target, Walmart and others. I mean after the election, Drinkable Bryan gave us an entire list of folks that supported Project 2025 financially and as the householder, I explained to my husband and children why we would no longer be supporting these stores. Collectively we cannot speak of boycotting without acknowledging the ways boycotts are not accessible to the masses within our community right now, nor are we collectively in a position to buy solely everything Black because we lack ownership in logistics, manufacturing and more. The way forward is through communal and collective care but it is going to require us to build our muscles of resilience, delayed gratification and steadfastness.
Sankofa
In this moment we cannot lose sight of what our ancestors and generations have done before us, with much less than us and without technology. The greatest boycott to impact the U.S. was the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955-1956. When we look back now at what our ancestors were able and willing to accomplish, it can be a reminder to us of how great a people we are, have been and what we can do when we collectively work together and stand in solidarity. We collectively found a way regardless of age to show up and made our organizing efforts intergenerational.
The practice of sankofa is to go back and get it. Go back to our elders, our wisdom keepers and get the knowledge and bring it forward into what is needed today. Go back and get those we have left on the fray within our own communities and find what they can or have to contribute to the movement. In what ways can disabled members of our communities show up without being required to physically walk a protest? How can farmers with access to land create co-housing spaces and meeting spaces like those in the past did?
In a metaphorical sense, this is reengaging our [collective] muscle memory, we have done it before and we can do it again. Now, how do we delay our need for gratification or that dopamine hit for validation. In this video by @Briahash, she breaks down some of the buyer psychology between our relationship to purchases at Target.
Remembering Our Divinity
I have shared before my experience as a student attending a therapeutic training program that was everything BUT therapeutic. During one of the many training session by the owner of the program, he shared that many people do not know or recognize their divinity, to which I asked the question, what happens when I DO know my divinity and yet the world around me does everything within its power to dehumanize and make me appear as less than divine? I asked this question because within the teachings of the philosophy of yoga, specifically the Bhagavad Gita, shares there is an inherent oneness within all of us. If we are able to see the divinity and oneness in every living thing, we are then able to see each others humanity.
Sadly, I think many practitioners or those that practice yoga asana forget or are not actually applying yogic teachings to their lives. How can I see less in any living being, this is to include different forms found in nature as less than divine? Meaning, our value is in the fact we exist, that is all it takes to be divine and as a result, I witness our inherent oneness even when others do not see that for me. Now, I am not sharing that saying to show up in spaces where we are tolerated but definitely showing up in spaces we are welcomed in our wholeness, our divinity.
Finding Our Value Outside of Consumerism
In one of my very first rituals in writing, I noted reasons or ways we are encouraged to spend what we don’t have on items we don’t need merely to continue the supply and demand of the economy. When we equate our value to what we have, what we can do or produce for others, we are actively practicing our own dehumanization. We are cheapening our divinity to something that could be recreated, not what is special. It is not a surprise for those across the African diaspora have the thought that if we either assimilated to what the American standard is or was, or played into respectability politics like dressing in suits or wearing the finest luxury branded items then we would have ‘made’ it or finally been seen as equal or of value. Brands like Cadillac, McCormick and the like have become staples in our communities as a result of this need to feel or prove through consumerism our value. I haven’t even mentioned the ways that we have been filling the human need for excitement and feel good hormone through social media scrolling and making purchases.
The human biological response to feeling good, whether it is helping another, receiving [consented] touch like a hug, we receive a hit of dopamine. Studies have shown, this is similar to the response we feel when we acquire likes on our social media feed or increase our numbers of followers as we find it as validation.
When we are able to actually sit with ourselves to acknowledge the ways we may have grown up or been conditioned to believe in our unworthiness or being less than, we can begin to unravel the ideology that we must be consumers in order to be of value or a commodity to be used or resourced. We could decide we no longer need to participate in consumerism and capitalism to remind us of our value or divinity by keeping up with the Jones. The recent push for boycotting Target has pointed this out. Many believe shopping at Target has meant a status symbol and that they have arrived. What if we remembered our value cannot be found in stores and on shelves but rather in what we are able to do collectively for ourselves and each other? As we begin to separate our value from the purchases we can make, we can create more spaciousness for our delayed gratification and desire for collective liberation.
Steadfast in Faith
In the culture of who we are as a people and who we have always been, we have always been forward thinking. Octavia Butler has demonstrated this in her series of Parable of the Sower and many have recognized the ways in which she foreshadowed exact times like these and how to move forward, why? Insert Afro-Futurism. In Afro-Futurism, we are not only able to imagine the future but envision Black people in the future, making it. Thriving collectively just as our ancestors did. They did not imagine freedom just for their child or themselves in that moment, they envisioned that one day we would all be free. One of the things I value most about my ancestral lineages is the faith they had despite what was before them to believe that things would be different some day, even if they never got to see it.
As I shared in the ritual to writing, The Phases of Yogic Life: Finding Balance and Purpose, we each have a role to play in our collective liberation and it is intergenerational. For each of us to show up it requires us to be in daily ritual so we can show up grounded and whole to contribute to moving us forward. It takes faith to believe in a world we have not seen and liberation we may not have felt yet. And love is what compassion is what will bring us there.
Join me this Friday, February 7th at 6pm at Yoloha Studios for a gentle and compassionate practice of asana. Together we will reflect and explore our ability to practice and experience love and compassion for ourselves, our families, our communities and the collective.