"Spirituality is the Heartbeat of our Organizing"
At Envisioning Safety on Our Campuses, we believe “we can do well when we are well,” yet the times we find ourselves in pose a direct threat to any kind of wellness, because envisioning the future requires us to lean into practices that fortify us during these times. Spirituality and spiritual wellness equip us with the tools to (re)envision the future, grounding us and honoring it as a living practice of resistance, healing, and connection. Spirituality grounds us in a liberatory lineage and community, and in the wisdom of our ancestors, while guiding us to reimagine safety, wellness, and liberation beyond systems of oppression. It is not separate from our organizing but the heartbeat of our work —a reclamation of ways of knowing and being that colonial systems sought to erase. Through ritual, study, and collective care, we embody freedom in the present while building futures rooted in justice, joy, and transnational solidarity. We have always talked about self-care, and now more than ever, we offer up spirituality as a way to think about fortification. Fortification of the self, community, and the world. Our work, though, is still similar to past iterations and will now have spiritual ideology and practices woven into all offerings. In our practice, we refuse the collapse of spirituality into individualism, and in our methods, we refuse all systems of domination that harm Black peoples. Spirituality is where the past|present|future are one, you return to be in the now, and in the future all at once, to ways of being and knowing that we cannot erase.