I Couldn’t Find a Spiritual Path That Wasn’t Designed to Kill People Like Me, So I Built My Own 🤷🏿♂️
How I turned survival into sacred practice, and built a spiritual system rooted in liberation, not control.
“If God is not for us, if God is not against white racists, then God is a murderer, and we had better kill God.”
— James H. Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation
The God Who Wasn’t For Me
Unlike many Black Americans, I was never taught to believe in (the Christian) God.
I was raised outside of religion to be spiritually sovereign, as I like to say.
But that didn’t protect me from the world religion helped build.
I still live under systems influenced by Christianity, whiteness, and empire, systems that call themselves “good” while harming. I grew up surrounded by language that sounded moral (well, to some, not me) but was controlling. That’s doublespeak; when words say one thing but are used to mean something else, usually to hide violence or justify domination. Linguistic sleight of hand.
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Doublespeak is when “salvation” means obedience.
When “order” means silence.
When “peace” means submission.
When “love” means erasure.
It was everywhere, in the schools, the workplace, politics, the adoption industry, the government, advertising, and in spiritual spaces that claimed to be inclusive but couldn’t hold my full self.
I never lost my faith (in humanity).
I just refused to let it be colonized.
So I stopped looking for a spiritual path that could hold me.
And I built one that could.
Now this isn’t “all credit to me”, I built on the shoulders of giants and integrated a lot of wisdom from others. They are the musicians, I am merely the conductor.
I created a living spiritual system, part practice, part philosophy, part activism, part spirituality, part way of life.
It came from my need to live in truth, not performance. In freedom, not fear. In coherence, not control.
This is what I walk now.
I call it Embodied Liberation Dharma or ELD.
And this is the story of why I had to make it, who it’s for, how to practice it, what the goal of it is, everything.
What Is Evil? Why ELD Had to Be Born
I didn’t start with a problem. The problem started when I realized the world was never meant to hold someone like me, and let me live a good life.
Black. Queer. Solo poly. Neurodivergent (Autistic and ADHD). Trans-racially adopted. Creative. Spiritual but not religious. Deep-feeling. Sovereign. Not obedient. Not easily controlled. Multiply marginalized, you get it. It is difficult to mold into anything that makes the people in power comfortable.
I began using a simple but radical lens to see more clearly: POSIWID, where the Purpose Of a System Is What It Does.
Everywhere I looked, I saw systems pretending to be noble and spiritual, but their POSIWID told the truth: They were designed to control, shrink, erase, pacify, kill, and extract.
“To accept Christianity, the Black man must deny his history, his power, and his gods.”
— Chancellor Williams, The Destruction of Black Civilization
Systems that used the language of “light” while dimming people.
Systems that said “we’re all one” while flattening real differences.
Systems that sold “healing” but only if you performed your pain correctly.
Systems that told me to be grateful for life while making it unbearable.
Even the ones that claimed to be radical or liberatory still carried the same toxic architecture underneath.
“To be African is to be spiritual. It is to be one with your ancestors, the earth, the stars, and the unseen.”
— Malidoma Somé
The same gatekeeping.
The same spiritual bypassing.
The same obsession with purity, hierarchy, or progress.
And so often, behind all of it, Christianity.
Not just as a religion, but as a cultural software.
As the default spiritual operating system for everything: schools, therapy, media, policy, even “wellness.”
It shows up in the belief that suffering is noble.
In the worship of forgiveness without accountability.
In the idea that “truth” should always be quiet, polite, and disembodied.
I don’t believe in heaven after death.
I believe in heaven while I’m alive.
“The Christian slavemaster made up a ‘new religion’ (Christianity), and put Jesus’ name on it to fool us, telling us we would get our heaven (Freedom) after we die, ‘way up yonder in the sky’… ‘after we die.’ While at the same time our slavemaster himself was getting his heaven on earth, now, in this life. White Man’s Heaven Is Black Man’s Hell.”
— Malcolm X
And that meant I had to stop trying to make peace with systems that were never meant to let me be whole or remotely happy.
The spiritual problem wasn’t that I had “lost my way”.
It was that most spiritual systems were designed to kill something in me to begin with:
My curiosity. My insightfulness. My body’s wisdom. My culture. My rage. My sadness. My ancestral wisdom. My knowing. My identity. My love. My clarity. My critical thinking. My wholeness. My aliveness. My joy.
They wanted me fragmented so I’d be easier to control, manipulate, crush, and kill.
‘“When the missionaries came to Africa, they had the Bible and we had the land. They said, 'Let us pray.' We closed our eyes. When we opened them, we had the Bible and they had the land.”
-Desmond Tutu
I knew I couldn’t just tweak these systems.
I had to stop even slightly trying to fit inside them entirely. I had to distance myself from those committed to this path that I was whole-body viscerally terrified of.
Because I’m not here to be palatable or liked.
I’m here to be whole, happy, and liberated, in this lifetime.
So I stopped asking to be seen, validated, held, and recognized by systems (and the systems are way deeper than just Christianity) that love inching people like me towards death. I started seeing myself and the divinity within me.
I stopped playing “death games”. I started playing “life games”.
“How can he when he does not even speak our tongue? But he says that our customs are bad; and our own brothers who have taken up his religion also say that our customs are bad. How do you think we can fight when our own brothers have turned against us? The white man is very clever. He came quietly and peaceably with his religion. We were amused at his foolishness and allowed him to stay. Now he has won our brothers, and our clan can no longer act like one. He has put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart.”
-Chinua Achebe
I Didn’t Find a Path, I Built One
I wasn’t looking for a savior.
I wasn’t looking for certainty in an uncertain world.
I was looking for something that could hold me as I am, without shrinking, scolding, or spiritualizing my pain.
I needed a spiritual system that could:
- Protect and honor my spiritual sovereignty as divine and important
- Value truth over obedience
- Welcome my complexity without judgment
- Provide structure without control
- Reject doublespeak and linguistic manipulation
- Cultivate embodied discernment, not blind belief
- Make power visible
- Take a holistic approach to spirituality
- Affirm queer and trans ways of being
- Reject charismatic domination
- Integrates trauma-informed healing into the spiritual path
- Supports self-correction and evolution, especially in alignment with science
- Affirms joy, pleasure, and sensuality as sacred
- Protects me from performative spirituality and toxic positivity
- Centers collective liberation, not individual escape
- Decolonize my relationship to time, rest, and productivity
- Provides a living ecosystem, not a fixed creed
- Honors death, grief, and the unknown without fear
- Create sacred boundaries without fear or judgment
- Align with an African worldview and multiple valid ways of knowing
- Teach me how to live, not just how to cope, transcend, bypass, or wait for some future healing.
- and much much more…
And I needed something built for people like me.
What I found instead was:
- Healing spaces that were obsessed with positivity and politeness.
- “Conscious communities” that “didn’t see color”.
- Decolonization spaces that didn’t touch the spirit.
- Spiritual spaces that wouldn’t touch power or whiteness.
- Christians who worshipped power, whiteness, and money, and were well versed in doublespeak to justify their actions to themselves.
I found fragments, teachers, books, quotes, practices, but nothing that pulled it all together into a system that made sense for this body, this brain, this history, this soul, this lifetime.
So I stopped trying to find the perfect fit.
And I realized: maybe the system I needed didn’t exist yet, because I hadn’t made it.
Maybe I wasn’t supposed to follow a path.
Maybe I was supposed to carve one.
“The Bible is the greatest piece of propaganda ever written. It has justified every atrocity committed against our people.”
— George Jackson
Embodied Liberation Dharma is not a religion.
It’s not a brand. Its not a cult.
And it’s definitely not a performance.
ELD is a living spiritual system I created so I could live in full truth without betraying myself. But it can also be custom fit toward others and their unique situations and needs.
It’s made for people who are tired of being erased, gaslit, or pacified in the name of “peace.”
It’s for people who don’t want to escape the world, they want to survive it, heal in it, and help remake it.
It’s a system built for freedom. But not just outer freedom, inner freedom, too.
10 Core Principles of Embodied Liberation Dharma
At its core, ELD is made of 10 unchanging things:
. Liberation (in all senses of the word) is the purpose of all spiritual life.
If a system doesn’t move you toward liberation, internal and external, it is not ELD.
Liberation means freedom from Evil, domination, manipulation, self-erasure, and disembodied performance. Any belief or ritual that justifies oppression, even spiritually, is rejected.This is Liberation from a POSIWID perspective
Truth is sacred, even when it's inconvenient.
ELD is rooted in coherence (and compassion), not comfort.
We don’t lie to ourselves or others to keep the peace.
We don’t soften our language to protect domination.
We name what’s real, even when it’s messy.
Embodiment is non-negotiable.
ELD must be lived in the body: through action, sensation, rhythm, ritual, relationship, and daily life.
Theoretical spirituality, head-based truth, or abstract liberation alone is incomplete.
Healing is physical, nervous system-based, and intimate.
Evil Is Real, and It Must Be Resisted.
ELD accepts Bartlett’s definition of Evil: any force that destroys or enslaves the soul, fragments wholeness, or distorts relational integrity.
ELD is a path of active resistance to Evil, not spiritual bypassing, neutral witnessing, or moral relativism.
Doublespeak Is Rejected.
ELD names and dismantles doublespeak, language used to obscure harm, justify domination, or mask control as care.
ELD speaks truthfully, without euphemism, cultish reframe, or weaponized compassion.
This includes resisting Necrolinguistics (language that deadens) and Necropolitics (systems that determine who is allowed to die).
Ubuntu Is a Guiding Ethic
ELD is not for the self alone, it is for the interbeing.
Ubuntu means: "I am because we are."
Any practice that disconnects you from relational integrity, whether with people, ancestors, ecosystems, or truth, is a betrayal of ELD.
CREDs and Self-Accountability Are Required.
CREDs = Credibility Enhancing Displays: practices must reflect the values they preach. No armchair liberation.
ELD is a self-correcting dharma, capable of adaptive growth, honest feedback, and communal accountability.
Rigidity is not tradition; it is domination. ELD evolves to stay aligned.
Ancestral Wisdom and Epistemic Sovereignty Are Honored.
Practitioners must reject epistemicide, the killing of ways of knowing.
ELD centers Indigenous, Africentric, and embodied knowledge systems.
The Dharma welcomes diverse ancestries but refuses to center whiteness or uphold Western supremacy as universal.
Systemic Analysis Is Required.
ELD sees both the forest and the tree: it attends to personal trauma and structural oppression.
It makes Power visible.
Healing without analysis is self-help. Analysis without healing is burnout. ELD does both.
Spirituality Must Align with Liberation.
Any belief system, ritual, or spiritual practice that upholds or is found to uphold hierarchy, abuse, supremacy, silence, fatalism, Evil, etc is rejected.
ELD only welcomes spiritualities that can evolve, self-correct, and liberate, not those built to dominate.
It keeps me alive.
It helps me notice when I’m compromising parts of myself to survive systems that shouldn’t exist.
It helps me feel without being overwhelmed.
It helps me act without being consumed by urgency.
It helps me rest without guilt.
It helps me love without performing.
It helps me be, without needing to be anything other than free, honest, and whole.
ELD is not about transcending your body, bypassing your trauma, or pretending to be healed. It’s not about looking like you’ve got it all together. It’s not about following anyone else's idea of what sacred looks like.
I didn’t want a spiritual system that only lived in books or retreats. I needed something real, something I could feel in my body and return to on the hard days. Embodied Liberation Dharma lives through the way I move through my day, how I care for myself, and how I relate to the world. It’s not a checklist. It’s a rhythm.
What ELD Looks Like in My Life
ELD for me is comprised and influenced by stuff like this:
Africentric Worldview (This is the foundation, and everything is built on this)
Ancestral Veneration (anyone can practice this btw)
Libations
Offerings
Communication
Food as medicine and eating communally or not alone
Afro-Vegan diet
Herbalism
Hoodoo (African American Closed Practice) (Honestly have been building a relationship with my ancestors this past year so can’t tell you much about this but I plan on diving deeper later on)
Ubuntu (African Philosophy)
Yoruba (African Spirituality)
Ori
Asé
Hinduism
Ayurvedic Medicine
Yogic Ethics
Yoga
Taoism
Tai Chi
The belief in energy, like prana or chi
Engaged Buddhism (It’s not enough to cultivate inner peace, we must also transform the systems and structures that cause suffering.)
Metta
Tonglen
Meditation
8 fold path
Sangha
Buddhist ethics
Black Liberation Theology (God is metaphorically Black and on the side of the oppressed)
Rastafarianism (An Abrahamic religion so more so just inspiration and alignment from Ital living, entheogens, nature immersion, and rejection of Babylon, which is basically another word for Evil)
Healing Practices
IFS
Somatic Yoga
Lefkoe Method
Sedona Method
Nervous system regulation
Wim Hof Breathing
Therapy
Entheogens / Plant Medicine
etc
Creative Expression
Writing stuff like this
Music / Dancing
Movement Practices
Martial Arts
Running
Weightlifting
Yoga
Tai Chi
etc
Activism
Solo poly as a yogic practice and yoga as a solo poly practice
Aligning myself with self-esteem as defined by Dr. David Burns
Self-Reflection, journaling, and iterating on my personal ELD practice
Aligning myself with Steven James Bartlett’s definition of true mental health
I don’t do these things to look spiritual. I do them because they help me stay whole in a world that profits off my fragmentation. This is what helps me return to myself. This is how I live Embodied Liberation Dharma, not as a performance, but as a practice that keeps me free.
Who ELD Is For (and Who It’s Not)
Embodied Liberation Dharma isn’t just for me.
I built it from my life, but it’s not locked to my story.
It’s a framework, not a formula. It’s meant to be adapted, reshaped, and reinterpreted. There’s no one right way to practice it, and there never will be. That’s the point. It doesn’t require belief in any specific god, cosmology, or tradition. What it requires is a commitment to truth, coherence, liberation, and staying in right relationship, with yourself, with your ancestors, with the land, and with the systems we’re trying to survive and transform.
If you’re someone who’s been harmed by religion, disillusioned by spiritual performance, or left out of every path you’ve tried to walk, ELD can offer a way back into yourself without demanding you erase who you are. If you’re tired of bypassing, of false peace, of pretending to be healed just to fit in, there’s room for you here.
ELD can hold people who are spiritual but not religious, people who left religion but still crave depth, people who have been exiled from their traditions, and people who want to decolonize their practice without losing the sacred entirely. It doesn’t matter if you’re Christian, atheist, Buddhist, Muslim, agnostic, or undefined. What matters is your alignment: your hunger for liberation, your willingness to be honest, and your commitment to not reproducing the same harm under a new name.
There are multiple ways to enter ELD. You can bring in your ancestral practices and reshape them. You can weave in parts of traditions that resonate, so long as you do it with integrity, respect, and a clear rejection of domination. You can keep it simple or build it out. You don’t need a guru. You don’t need perfection. You need coherence. You need consent. You need a path that doesn’t ask you to betray your soul.
That’s what ELD offers.
It’s not a container for sameness. It’s a structure for spiritual self-determination.
A way of walking that protects your wholeness and sharpens your discernment.
It meets you where you are, but it doesn’t let you stay asleep.
And if you're walking this path in your own way, you’re not alone.
For me, resistance isn’t just political. It’s spiritual. It’s daily. It’s personal.
It lives in how I speak, how I name things, and how I refuse to lie to myself just to survive.
“Christianity is an arm of empire. It gave divine license to the slave ship, the plantation, the lynching tree, and the police badge.”
— Rev. Osagyefo Sekou
So much of the harm we live under is carried through language. That’s why doublespeak is one of the most dangerous tools of domination. Doublespeak is when language gets twisted to hide harm. It says one thing and means another, usually to make violence seem normal, to make oppression sound like care, or to keep people obedient while thinking they’re free.
You’ve heard it. I was raised around it, even outside of religion.
Words like:
“Salvation,” when they meant obedience.
“Peace,” when they meant silence.
“Healing,” when they meant performative positivity.
“Love,” when they meant erasure.
“Unity,” when they meant don’t make us uncomfortable.
Doublespeak doesn’t just confuse. It breaks trust. It numbs discernment. It rewires us to tolerate harm in beautiful packaging.
This isn’t just an accident. It’s part of what I call Evil, following the paraphrased definition from philosopher Steven Bartlett: Evil = Persistent Harm + Immunity to Correction, amplified by Power.
Evil isn’t some mysterious force, it’s when people, systems, or ideologies become functionally disconnected from the suffering they cause.
It’s when empathy is severed.
When harm is justified because the system says so.
When domination hides behind “duty,” “tradition,” or “faith.”
When people do cruel things and feel nothing, or worse, feel righteous.
Evil shows up in the way institutions operate. It shows up in how people justify abuse with scripture, silence survivors in the name of forgiveness, or demand gratitude from the oppressed. It’s not always loud. Often it’s subtle, smiling, well-intentioned. It uses nice words. That’s why it’s so dangerous.
I see this in “spiritual” spaces that reproduce hierarchy, shame, coercion, and silence, but dress it up as healing. I see it in the adoption system. In nonprofits. In white allyship that centers guilt over accountability. In therapy rooms where power goes unchecked. In liberation spaces that secretly want to be empires.
So part of my practice, part of Embodied Liberation Dharma, is speaking clearly.
No pretending. No fake peace. No euphemisms that let harm go unnamed.
In ELD, truth is sacred.
Coherence is sacred.
Language is sacred.
Because if we don’t speak with clarity, we end up consenting to systems that break our spirits.
I don't use the language of enemies. I don’t call capitalism “freedom.”
I don’t call abuse “growth.” I don’t call suffering “my purpose.”
I don’t call silence “healing.” I don’t call Evil “God.”
Resistance starts with what we agree to say.
And for me, speaking clearly is one of the most important rituals I have, not because it sounds good, but because it keeps me from betraying myself in small, daily ways. That’s the real work.
I didn’t build Embodied Liberation Dharma because it sounded good.
I built it because I needed something I could trust with my life. Something that wouldn’t lie to me, flatten me, or ask me to disappear in order to belong.
So much of what I’ve been offered, whether in therapy, religion, wellness culture, or even “radical” spaces, was still playing the same game: perform your healing, suppress your rage, accept the terms of the system quietly. Smile while suffering. Forgive what hasn’t changed. Meditate your way through systemic harm.
I couldn’t do it anymore.
What I needed was something I could walk with through grief, through rage, through exhaustion, through joy, through numbness, through being human.
ELD is that for me.
It doesn’t ask me to be perfect.
It doesn’t ask me to be pure.
It asks me to be present.
It asks me to be honest.
It gives me a place to return to when the world tries to tear me apart.
This system has held me in the middle of trauma responses. It has held me through spiritual confusion, burnout, isolation, and existential dread. It’s kept me rooted during the worst of capitalism, the loneliness of neurodivergence, the grief of being Black and adopted in a world that still doesn’t know how to hold either well. It gives me rituals that make my days make sense. It gives me clarity when I’m drowning in gaslight and noise. It doesn’t promise comfort, but it does give me coherence.
I trust it because I built it slowly. I tested it. I lived it. I broke it. I rebuilt it. I listened. I rewrote. I re-rooted.
I trust it because it doesn’t demand belief, it invites alignment.
Because it’s never asked me to betray myself for belonging.
Because it lets me be a mystery and still be whole.
I’ve trusted this system with the most tender parts of me, and it has never used them against me.
That’s what makes it mine.
That’s what makes it sacred.
How to Begin: Practices, Not Performances
You don’t need permission.
You don’t need a ritual toolkit, a certificate, or to believe what I believe.
You just need to start with this question:
“What would a spiritual system look like if it were built to protect your wholeness instead of demand your performance?”
That’s the first doorway.
Start small. Start honest. Start real.
Here are a few ways you can begin practicing your own version of ELD:
- Look over the 10 unchanging features of ELD
- Look at what you’re already practicing or feel tied to and assess if its in alignment with liberation (is its POSIWID Evil or not)
- Integrate that or reject that.
- Start experimenting with practices based on what you need in a system but all should ultimately serve personal and collective liberation
- More practically you can do this:
- Clean something with intention. Your room, your altar, your body. Not for purity, for presence. To reclaim your space as sacred.
- Speak clearly. Notice when doublespeak shows up in your language or thinking. When you say “fine” but mean “numb.” When you say “blessed” but mean “performing.” Begin telling the truth in small ways.
- Erase what erases you. That might be a spiritual teacher. A tradition. A practice. A belief. You don’t have to explain why. Just listen to the part of you that knows when something is off.
- Create one rhythm that centers liberation. Maybe a weekly Sabbath, a morning walk, a journaling ritual, a full moon bath, whatever. Keep it simple. Make it yours.
You don’t have to adopt my system. But you can use it as a mirror or a jumping-off point.
Start where you are. With what you have. In the body you’re in.
Because your liberation isn’t waiting at the end of some sacred staircase.
It begins when you stop betraying yourself and start walking in truth.
That’s ELD.
If You’ve Been Building in the Shadows…
If something in you stirred while reading this, follow it.
You don’t need to fully understand ELD to start living in alignment with it. This isn’t a closed system. It’s a living one. And like anything living, it grows through relationship, not replication.
You’re not here to copy my path. You’re here to remember yours.
If you’ve felt erased by religion, this is your permission to un-erase yourself.
If you’ve been numbed by doublespeak, this is your reminder that truth doesn’t have to sound nice to be sacred.
If you’ve been burned by purity culture, spiritual bypassing, or fake inclusion, this is your reminder: it wasn’t your fault. And it doesn’t have to be your future.
If you’ve been quietly building your own system in the shadows, this is your confirmation: you’re not alone.
ELD is here for the ones who are done performing.
For the ones who want liberation in their nervous system, not just on their vision board.
For the ones who want coherence more than certainty.
For the ones who are ready to build something that can’t be colonized.
So if you’re walking your own path, if you’re building your own system, if you’re trying to live into a way of being that doesn’t betray your soul, this is your blessing:
May your practice keep you soft where you need to be soft.
May your truth keep you sharp where you need to be sharp.
May you rest without guilt.
May you rise without shame.
May you stay in right relationship, with your body, your ancestors, your values, and your voice.
And may you never again mistake obedience for peace.
This is the path I walk.
And you are welcome here, so long as you walk in truth, not domination.
We don’t need more followers.
We need more people who dare to live whole.
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