Lesson 1: Healing Race & Renewing Culture

🌕 Teaching 5 – Releasing Whiteness, Healing Race, and Renewing Land-Based Culture

🌿 What Is Whiteness
Whiteness is not a culture.
It is a pattern of disconnection — the place where scarcity and shame intertwine.
Whiteness numbs the body and separates the soul from its natural healing processes.
It teaches people to value comfort over feeling, safety over honesty.
It convinces us that if we have nice shoes, nice homes, nice neighborhoods, and nice smiles, we are whole.
But nice is not love. Nice is suppression.

Whiteness lives as emotional anesthesia — a loss of relationship with land, ancestors, and feeling itself.
It pretends to protect but actually imprisons.
It robs us of culture, steals from our souls, and causes harm.

None of us are inherently bad.
We are participating in a mistake — a long, centuries-old mistake.
White supremacy is not an identity; it is a multigenerational error in consciousness that replaced relationship with hierarchy and fear.

✴️ Facing Mistakes and Maturity
Recently I was talking with my friend Monroe.
When I spoke about middle- and upper-class white people he mentioned that they frequently take the stance of, “What? No — not me! I couldn’t possibly have made a mistake! I’m not causing any harm with my behavior. I’m not a neo-Nazi!”

That reflex — the need to defend innocence — lives in almost every white body.
It shuts the door to growth.
Refusing to acknowledge where we have made mistakes and where we are still causing harm is immature behavior that keeps whiteness frozen in adolescence.

✴️ The Lie of White Supremacy
White supremacy tells us that we don’t need healing — or worse, that we don’t deserve it.
It teaches us to pretend we’re fine, to deny pain, to keep moving, producing, achieving.
It tells us that vulnerability is weakness and that control is safety.
But this is the deepest wound of all: the belief that we are beyond healing.

To reclaim our humanity, we have to refuse that lie.
We need healing — every single one of us — not because we are broken, but because we have been disconnected.
Healing is not indulgence; it is responsibility.
It’s how we end the cycles of harm that whiteness keeps alive.

To release whiteness is to feel again.
To grieve.
To allow the body to shake, sob, and open until separation begins to dissolve.
Releasing whiteness means learning to work in relationship — with the land, with labor, with one another — to give, to serve, to repair.

Any spiritual work that centers only white or middle-class people, or that speaks of “healing” while remaining insulated from those still bearing the cost of that insulation, is spiritual bypassing.
It confuses comfort with healing and turns inward when the medicine is relational.
To release whiteness, spirituality must expand beyond personal peace toward collective restoration.

Here are two 5-min artistic videos FSSL created on whiteness:
Wheel of Capitalism
Spiritual Wellness Industrial Complex

🤝 Healing Race — The Work of Relationship
The truth is that we deeply need each other in order to survive & grow.
There is healing that can only happen in relationship.

No matter how much work we do alone, the repair won’t be complete until we face one another — body to body, heart to heart — and learn to stay present with what has been broken.
That is the crucial work of healing race, which includes healing between white people. I need repair with all the white people who severed me in relationship because of their shame.

Being white or benefiting from white supremacy does not make us bad; it means we’ve inherited a mistake and forgot how to grieve.

🧠 Psychobiological Processing
Healing race requires psychobiological integration — releasing psychological pain and inherited trauma through the body.
Psychobiology is the relationship between psyche and biology, between the stories we carry and the cells that hold them.
The body knows how to heal if we let it.

We can release shame, scarcity, and whiteness through movement, breath, and sound — through the sacred permission to cry, yell, shake, break down again and again until we reach the tender ground of love beneath it all.
Accessing our deep love by allowing ourselves to feel our feelings is liberation.

Healing race also means learning to listen — really listen — to BIPOC voices, leaders, and movements.
Not to resist or defend, but to hear and allow.
Reverend angel Kyodo williams and many others have shown what embodied, relational healing can look like.

⚡ Radical Responsibility and Collective Power
Healing race and renewing culture both call for radical responsibility — each of us owning our part in the collective field of harm and repair.
Responsibility is not blame; it is response-ability: the courage to act with presence and humility.

When we claim radical responsibility, we reclaim our inner power — the life-force that colonial culture numbed in all of us.
This power is not domination; it is current.
It moves through breath, voice, sexuality, and truth-telling, connecting us to cosmic power — the creative intelligence that animates all life.

When we channel this current through our bodies instead of controlling it, it becomes liberation.
Our creativity, bodily power, and leadership turn from tools of hierarchy into sacred energies of restoration.
This is collective power: when inner power meets cosmic power, and we use that energy to repair rather than dominate — co-creating systems that serve life.

Right-sized power is participation, not possession.
Each of us carries a spark of Earth’s creative force, and our task is to use it wisely — to restore balance, share resources, and organize for reciprocity.
When we honor pleasure, creativity, and desire as sacred expressions of Earth herself, we stop exploiting life and start co-creating with it.

From this place of embodied and cosmic power, belonging deepens and the planet responds.
Power becomes prayer.

🌍 Renewing Land-Based Culture
When it comes to renewing land-based culture, I want to be honest: as a white-bodied person, I come from people who lost their cultures.
What most of us call “white culture” today is not culture at all — it’s a system built on taking: from Earth, from other peoples, and from ourselves.

Before we can even speak of renewal, we must release the whiteness within — the scarcity and shame — and learn to heal racialized trauma together.
Only then can we live on the land in a way that honors sharing and reciprocity.

Renewal also means remembering the land herself — and all who live within her body.
We cannot talk about culture without talking about the soil, the animals, the insects, the fungi, the plants, the waters, the mountains, and the clouds.
They are not scenery or resources; they are people — each with their own spirit, intelligence, and relationship to the whole.

Plants are people.
Animals are people.
The rivers are people.
The clouds are people.
The rocks and mountains are people.
The moon, Jupiter, the stars — all people who are alive, conscious, and in relationship with us.

We have caused great harm to our non-human kin through extraction, pollution, and disregard.
We are not in respectful relationship with the animals we eat or the plants we harvest.
Even veganism, when unconscious, can reproduce the same colonial entitlement — consuming without gratitude, forgetting that plants are living beings with their own dignity and will.

Every time we eat — almonds, soy, elk, water, lettuce — we are participating in the life–death–life cycle.
The question is not whether we consume, but how we relate.

Renewing land-based culture means changing our relationship with consumption itself.
It means learning to honor the beings who nourish us, to thank them, to grieve them, to celebrate them, to listen.
It means reentering relationship with all our relatives — human and more-than-human — through reverence and reciprocity.

I have learned from my Indigenous relatives that all beings are people.
Leaves that fall onto the ground and decompose are people.
Worms are people.
Water is a person.
Every wildflower, every crow, every gust of wind deserves to be seen, loved, and appreciated.
It’s how we remember that life and death are not opposites, but lovers in eternal dance.

🌎 Human Supremacy and the Web of Life
What humans have done to the animal realm is hard for me to speak about.
How humans have treated pets, livestock, insects, spiders, and plants — even the smallest beings — reflects our disconnection from the sacred web of life.

To believe that you are above life and death, or that you don’t need to care for the beings you’re in relationship with, is your inherited shame.
It is your unprocessed trauma.
If you believe there’s nothing after death — that consciousness simply ends — that, too, is your shame speaking.

Projecting shame and supremacy forward — whether as white people or any people — keeps souls trapped in suffering.
We are the ones who must make the choice to save ourselves.
No one is going to save our souls for us.
We have to take accountability — together.

🌾 Renewal Through Repair
Renewing land-based culture means releasing whiteness, shame, and scarcity through psychobiological processing, allowing BIPOC to lead, and repairing our relationship with the land and the creatures.

The ancestors are part of the land and are central to its renewal.
Art-making, too, is essential — it reconnects us to creative intelligence and the songs of the Earth and Cosmos.

From this place of healing our shame and scarcity, and asking forgiveness from the land, from this Earth, and from one another, we can begin to imagine new educational systems, new agricultural systems, new legal systems, and new social agreements rooted in care.

🌺 Story: the deity & BB Mystery
While I’ve done shadow work in different ways with different friends, something about my relationship with the deity was profoundly unique.
It exemplifies both healing race work and shadow work — what I call collective shadow work.

We talk about shadow work in the previous teaching, and it’s crucial here too.
Collective shadow work is part of radical responsibility — learning to own our projections, integrate the many aspects of ourselves, and allow them expression, as long as they’re not harmful.

The deity and I lived in the same town.
We are both lower class.
Both queer.
Trans.
Relationship anarchists.
Artists.
Kinky.
And deeply committed to decolonizing ourselves.

Because of these shared intersections, we were able to have one of the most transformative relationships of my adult life.
He helps me see and release the white supremacist within, through inquiry and accountability.
He helped me lay down my old drag persona, make peace with my body, and own my gender and sexuality more fully.
He made me my first flogger — a small act of creative intimacy that carried enormous symbolic power.

We have performed kink together and honored our ancestors en el Día de los Muertos.
Our relationship became a living practice of healing race and shadow simultaneously.
In relationships like this, the healing and the psychobiological processing — even when uncomfortable — become softer, more human, because of the love.
The love holds it all.

When there is love, the work doesn’t feel like punishment.
It feels like transformation.
It doesn’t feel like a big deal to cry for a while, because the crying opens awareness and compassion.

Through this love, I came to understand that shadow work is not separate from race work, gender and sexuality liberation, or from love itself.
They are all part of the same sacred current of becoming.

Te amo como el fuego, hermano.
Como las estrellas preciosas y brillantes.
Como unos animales cute abrazando.
Con cuero, dolor, y placer.
Gracias por todito. ❤️

⚪ A Message to White People
I have really taken one for the team, y’all.
I have chosen to listen — deeply — to many BIPOC teachers, to the land, and to the ancestors, while living in the lower class.
They have been my guides and my mentors in this work.

Because of that guidance, I’ve been able to process immense layers of shame from my psyche through my body, and create a guide for new systems.
I have friends and family members I can’t be in communication with right now because of their white supremacy, white fragility, and shame.

This is really sad to me, but I am saying no to supremacy patterns. It is not good karma to be passing on.
It’s not anyone’s fault; I’m not blaming anyone.
But it is a collective choice to uphold this pattern of avoidance.

This fragility, this refusal to feel, is 100% on us.
It’s something we must take accountability for, because our souls are on the line.

What is happening right now is not only political; it is spiritual.
Supremacy is the main force keeping human souls trapped in shame.
As long as the soul and consciousness are imprisoned in shame, humanity cannot evolve, cannot reach the “heaven” we keep talking about.

Heaven isn’t a place we arrive after death; it’s a way of being we create through accountability, repair, and love.