The Land As Healer: Reconnecting gratitude to our roots

Estimated Reading Time 6 minutes | Spoken word: The Revolution Will Not Be Televised by Gil Scott-Heron

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As I sit here writing, I am activated in spirit. My heart and soul is full and I feel invigorated just as my guides told me I would begin this part of the month. Last night, KDot, thee Kung Fu Kenny, Kendrick performed an ancestor rooted and grounded ritual on National television and well, today much like last night those with colonizer roots and energy have yet to decipher it. In fact most of them dislike or hate it, and well The Blacks (the ones with eyes to see and ears to hear) received the message. 

There was so much imagery and (spoiler alert) I will NOT be dissecting it or sharing it here because truthfully it wasn’t intended for everyone and that is a problem that white america has to grapple with, everything does not center them nor is it for them. What I will say is, I believe the ancestors are pleased and he cannot be touched because he is covered. IYKYK KDot’s performance was everything needed in this moment for the culture and specifically, the people in this land that have been oppressed and constantly had every right stripped away and trying to be stripped away (link to removing civil Rights). Kendrick’s performance, along with the NFL and each company's choice of commercials promoting unity and various identities from women to people in larger bodies pushing the obesity epidemic and the way we sexualize women and femmes breast but lack the attention of early breast cancer detection. It was clear from the moment Brad Pitt stepped on screen the NFL was intentional about sending a message. Kendrick standing in the center of the American flag made of Black bodies and saying his lyrics, “Be Humble, Sit Down’’ in front of the orange fanta and all of white america was a message to humble themselves because although you could try to erase or cancel Black History Month, you cannot silence or cancel Black America. We are the very fabric of this nation, built by those stolen,  trafficked and enslaved (our ancestors) and the unceded stolen land from the Indigenous people of Turtle Island. How can we address the ways we rape and pillage each other or ourselves even if we never stop to acknowledge the ways we have exploited the land?

40 Acres & A Mule

Is one of those common saying in Black families within the American culture and has passed from generation to generation, yet many do not know where it originated from. During Kendrick Lamar’s performance he mentioned, ‘40 acres and a mule, this is bigger than music.’ Forty acres was a promised to newly freed enslaved Africans at the end of the Civil War by General William T. Sherman after he met with a group of 20 Black leaders in Savannah, GA led by Garrison Frazier. “The way we can best take care of ourselves is to have land, and turn it and till it by our own labor– and we can soon maintain ourselves and have something to spare. We want to be placed on land until we are able to buy it and make it our own.” Many do not know a mule was not promised but some were given decommissioned mules. 

This request for land points back to the way our people have always been an agrarian people and relied heavily on our relationship with land for our survival. Although the promise to give us land was recanted after Lincoln’s assassination, our people continued to work the land as sharecroppers and many sought to acquire land after America began to express Manifest Destiny and the Homestead Act. 

Homeless or Hungry in Lineage

In 2019, two years after my husband was medically retired from the military, we received news that would could potentially lose our home. I was just finding my stride as a mom and was 4 years into building my yoga business. Since we already owned a home in South Carolina and the other was in Hawaii, we decided to retire to South Carolina. Those few years before COVID happened, I had difficulty finding my stride with so much uncertainty seeming to disrupt our family system. What held me the most was offering my classes and caring for my plants I was growing both inside and out in our garden. Somehow, growing plants was doing something for my spirit that the despair all around me could not ruin. 

After 2020 hit and COVID had folks isolated, I fell into a deep fog of what felt like helplessness. I found joy in my children, my garden and my houseplants. There was just something with having my hands in the dirt, in the soil that was healing for me and I needed it. After the false awakening to racial justice, suddenly my business had all of this new found interest by those that would have never looked my direction or included me before. Other studios, studio owners, teachers and yogis it was like a dog eat dog industry and I fell right into the trap of centering whiteness and calling out the ways white women were harmed in yoga spaces while it redirected the focus from my center, my mission which was to center the Black lived experience. Not only was I redirected to naming all of their harms in their experiences, they continued taking up space, space I created for Black folks to have a person that looked like them and could provide them space to heal. This broke my heart because who was I really able to serve and it was no longer even serving me. I stopped teaching, maybe 8 months later, I closed my studio and knew if I was going to make it through any of this, I needed to leave SC. I needed to breathe. I had a phone call with my Dad and told him, I wasn’t sure where I was going to go, but I had to leave SC unless I was on ancestral land. I wasn’t expecting what came next, but he told me we HAD family land and he’d call my uncle and a cousin to come down from New Jersey to show me where it is at. 

My small family and I made a decision to move to the land of my ancestors, land that has been in our family since 1869. Land that I was told my great great grandfather said would remain in the lineage so none of his offspring would ever go homeless or hungry. Land that my great-great grandmother not only grew on and cultivated but expanded to our 40 acres. 

This land has held me while I made the decision to leave a national organization I loved the mission of, while they were not paying me, knowing my family was depending on my income. The land that held me while I made the decision to officially close the chapter that was Transformation Yoga. The land that has held me while I decided I was ready to be seen, to show up, take up space and be even more of myself. Myself decolonized without the conditioning and constructs this society has sought to place on me and try its darnedest to stifle my and my family’s liberation. 

Gratitude

This winter is getting that much closer to ending and as it draws to an end, the Earth is awakening. She is rebirthing herself and ready to show us all that she has been working on in her slumber. One of the many ways my ancestors have expressed gratitude to the land, for its care and the ways in which she holds us and gives provision, is to have ceremonies and provide offerings to her before planting season begins. 

This year, I am inviting those across the diaspora to join me in providing an offering to the land and the ancestors for gratitude during the Ancestral Grounds Yoga practice on Sunday, March 2, 2025 at 11am. Please bring musical instruments like hand drums, bells, tambourines, shells and calabash. If you do not have any instruments please bring flowers, fruits or herbs for the ancestral altar.