I feel quieter.

Not smaller. Definitely not silent. Just… Quieter. I have less to prove, and that’s a very specific kind of freedom. When I was younger, I used to think revolution had to be loud and violent and muchy, all the way in your face, all the time. I don’t believe that anymore. I believe in the micro and the macro, language I got from adrienne maree brown’s emergent strategy, the idea that what happens in the small and particular ripples out into the large and collective. All the Black Girls Are Activists didn’t sell a million copies. It’s in the hands of close to eighty thousand people, and I won’t pretend all eighty thousand have read it. Say ten percent did. That’s eight thousand people living differently because of something I wrote. And if it had been eight hundred, or eighty, or eight, the math wouldn’t change what I know to be true: something happens in the quiet that changes the whole.

So much of what I’m quieter about now is my own body. I’m in pursuit of my body still, but the pursuit doesn’t look like it used to. It’s not a thirst trap, though I do love a good thirst trap. It’s that I hear my body faster now. It tells me this offering, I receive, or this offering, I do not, and I listen. These gray hairs, these skin blemishes, this yearning, I can say all of it out loud, usually to myself or in prayer, without it needing to be loud. Sometimes I don’t even have to say anything. You can just see it in my shoulders. I’ll be in the comments telling people, focus on what I’m saying and not on the fact that my arms are fleek tf (lol), and that in itself is unashamedness. Quieter unashamedness is still unashamedness.

This doesn’t mean I don’t believe in loudness. I wrote a whole chapter on it because I do. But loudness isn’t the only register revolution comes in, and getting quieter over these three years taught me that. I had a conversation this morning about bonnets in public, and here’s my honest position: I don’t have a problem with it. It might not be my personal choice, but everything is ghetto until proven fashionable (Naeresha Willis, 2016). What I’ve stopped doing is making public proclamations about it one way or the other, because I know respectability politics won’t save us, and I know whatever is true about it will only get resolved in intimate community, not in a comment section. That’s a quieter reality than any public stance could ever be.

The deepest part of this, though, is my ancestors.

In pursuit of my ancestors and in pursuit of authority used to be two separate chapters in my mind, and now they’re one conversation. The quieter I got, the more I could actually listen, and the more I listened, the more I heard from my ancestors, from my own spirit. I can present as very Christian to people who’ve known me a long time, and I know it makes my family uncomfortable when I talk publicly about my faith as an initiated priest, using language I got from Chelsea VonChazz around Baptist hoodoo, ancestral technology, ancestral veneration. I can say Jesus is my way to God without believing anymore that Jesus is the only way. There’s nothing wrong with saying any of that out loud. But being in pursuit of my ancestors and my own authority these last three years hasn’t made me louder about defending it. It’s made me quieter, because I don’t need anyone’s affirmation in a way that maybe I used to subconsciously feel like I did. I’ve heard from my ancestors directly. There isn’t going to be a back and forth about it, not because I’m avoiding the conversation, but because I already know, factually, that whatever they said/revealed is true and I just don’t need to ever turn up with ANYBODY about that kind of knowing.

They affirm me. I believe it. That’s settled.

And all of this, the quiet, the body, the ancestors, the bonnets, the loudness I still believe in, it’s really just leading up to us having a deeper conversation about sovereignty. Sovereignty is where we’re headed. That’s what Soft Sacred Sovereign (my substack blog) has always been about.

Tomorrow, July 28th, we’re marking three years of All the Black Girls Are Activists with a live lecture and Q&A. I don’t say this from arrogance, but I know this text matters to the canon, not just because it introduced the fourth wave of womanism, but because it gave us language to finally take a deep inhale and exhale around things we haven’t historically had room to sit with. We’ll keep having these conversations into year four, year five, and we’ll keep learning what this text taught us as we go.

To join the live lecture and Q&A tomorrow, subscribe at any tier; the lowest tier is four dollars. Your subscription supports this work and gets you in the room with us.

See you there! - ebonyjanice

patreon.com/ebonyjanice

I have been (quite literally) living inside that phrase ever since.

When I woke up to document the dream, at first I thought it might have been a quote from her that I was remembering, but I searched, and she never said that in her human, waking body. My honorable ancestor and softness archetype really visited me with this word. Then I wondered, “Maybe she meant prize like heaven.” But I recalled thinking that in the dream, and she repeated it a second time like, “No. I SIT. AND WAIT. FOR PRIZE.”

Here is what I know about prize now. I sit. That is the softness. And I wait. And that waiting is not passive, and it is not waiting from fear, and it is not waiting from scarcity. I wait because I have already planted the seed. I do not have to do anything else. I sit in my soft-seated self, and I wait for the harvest. For the celebration. For the acknowledgment, both from myself and of myself. For the spaciousness to be seen and witnessed and named. For the prize that is already real, already coming, and already mine.

That is sovereignty. And that is why softness and sovereignty have always been holding hands in my work.

Now here’s a soft girl lesson that I don’t know if I have taught well enough yet. So let’s add this to the growing curriculum:

It is not always some serene, candlelit, gold-couch moment. It is hard. It is especially hard for me. I am a Capricorn. I like a strategy. I like to do stuff. I like step one, step two, step three, and I like to see the steps working. And when one of the steps is be still, that is not fun for me. That is not easy for me. Stillness as a strategy almost feels like a trick sometimes. Like, surely there is something I am supposed to be doing right now besides sitting here.

And I see it in the women I coach and support too. They get into the sitting and the stillness, and they start to panic that they are doing it wrong. That they fell off. That they lost it. And I have to remind us, over and over, that we are forever and ever on the journey of becoming. That is the whole thing. You learn the way to go, and then you forget it, and then you remember it, and then you forget it again, and then you start back over. But never from zero. You never start back from zero, because you have time served. You have wisdom that got built in all that forgetting and remembering. And maybe the next time you sit, you last in the stillness a little longer than you did before. And maybe you do not. But either way, you keep returning to the practice of sitting and waiting for prize. The returning is the practice. The returning is the prize too.

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A few weeks ago I was at Black Romance Book Fest, and there was a panel on softness as part of our revolutionary right. KC Mills, Kennedy Ryan, Alexandria House, Christina C. Jones, and Natasha Bishop. They were profound. They had so much to say about what their characters are doing, how these women in their books are reaching for a soft life and surviving and choosing themselves. And I sat there knowing that the foremother of softness was in the room. It me.

So when the Q&A came around, I stood up. I told them who I am.

I introduced the language of softness years ago, and I was the first person to give it a definition that was not about luxury.

Because when I say softness, I have never meant soft like pink. I have always meant soft like sovereign. Toni Morrison, as one of my softness archetypes, a woman who could do hard things from her soft seated self, never gave soft like laying on a lily pad - even though she could do that too. She always served soft like deeply seated and her own.

And I told them why I needed to stand up and say it. Because when we talk about softness, people skim right past the political praxis, the ethic, the liberation that is living underneath it. Black women have not only been told we cannot be soft because we have to be strong. We have also been told we have to be meek. And softness in relationship with sovereignty is what finally lets us say the thing out loud, without managing how it lands for everybody else.

So I asked the whole panel to do something. I asked each of them to take a moment to name what they introduced, the thing people might skim over, and the thing that, because of them, we are even having this conversation. I asked them to pop their shit. And they did it. A few of them had to move through their feelings about it first, because it is rare, it is so rare, that Black women get given the room to say that is mine, I did that, I had it first. That’s me.

That is what sovereignty makes room for. Not just self-ownership. Not just authenticity. Prize. The right to claim your own harvest out loud.

So that is where I am this month. Sitting soft. Waiting for prize. Returning to the practice when I fall off it, which is often. Knowing the seed is already in the ground. Sitting and deep breathing and praying and meditating and gospel song humming and gentle body swaying and all the rituals repeating — waiting and waiting and waiting for prize. A prize that’s already mine. I just gotta sit.

If you are reading this and something in you got quiet and sure, if you know you are ready to stop performing strength and stop performing meekness and actually do the deep excavation of what it means to sit in your sovereign self and wait for what is already yours, come find me at freepeople@thefreepeopleproject.com. The deepest version of this work is what I do in A Return to God — a 12-month priestess portal towards Black women’s sovereignty, in the 2 Day (in-person) one-on-one Dream Retreat, and in one-on-one virtual dream containers, and every one of those always starts with a woman deciding she is ready.

I sit and wait for prize.

EbonyJanice

www.ebonyjanice.com

Not theoretically or even just as an initiated name I wear. I am Osun’s child as a living, embodied fact. I got the (redacted redacted redacted) to prove it. I am Osun’s child, which means my very existence is riverwater and sovereignty, and I am emboldened to move with the kind of power that does not ask permission.

I say this because I have been in grief. Real, legitimate, necessary grief over a very big energy in transition. A major shift that has been painful in ways I am still learning to name, and somewhere in that grief, I think I kind of lost the plot… and maybe a little bit I forgot who I am.

My godmother called me earlier this week. She reflected back something I have been sitting with for weeks now, something I finally said out loud to her: “I do not access my rage in a real way, Iya. And the reason is this. I am afraid that if I do, if I actually feel the fullness of my anger, I will end people’s bloodlines.”

I have destroyed institutions. There is a school that no longer exists. Or if it does, it exists in a form so diminished and so very fundamentally altered that it is not the same entity that harmed me. My rage did that. This is not a poem. And this is not an exaggeration. This is a fact. I told those people, “Until you do right by me…” (word to Celie).

And they still haven’t.

So they’re still fumbling to figure out how to recover.

Saying that to say that I learned, early and thoroughly, to swallow my anger. To keep it small as a way to protect people from the force of what I carry. I learned to hide it in grace and sweetness. To deep exhale it away. I learned to be careful with my words and even more careful with my thoughts, because I understood at some cellular level that I am infinitely powerful. I live with the kind of power that can unmake things.

So I be grace.

And I be sweet.

And I deep exhale.

And I rarely rage.

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And I’m going to be honest about where that came from: Jesus. It’s not really Jesus’ fault… but the brand of Jesus that I was raised on taught me to be gracious and only ever gave me ONE real example of Jesus crashing out and ONE particular reason why it would be ok.

Nobody ever fleshed out the Christ that grieved so hard in the garden before his crucifixion that he started sweating blood. Because it’s one thing to talk about Jesus praying so hard he started bleeding, and a whole other thing to understand that Jesus was GRIEVING! This was something beyond the spiritual. Jesus was feeling his mother freaking feelings so hard that he started to sweat blood.

I have been this anxious. This hurt. This confused. This consumed.

But I only had reach for a deep exhale.

I never had reach for a scream & yell.

So I sat with this. I sat with the revelation that I have been operating from my grief. And my grief has had me begging God when the reality is, I am God. I am Osun’s child. I am the river. I am also the mountain. I am seated & I am flowing. I am both.

And somewhere in the last few months, in the thick of feeling my feelings, I forgot that. I spent days operating from a place of smallness, asking for what was already mine, pitying myself like my life had fallen to pieces when my life had not fallen to pieces. I am in transition, yes. I am in the middle of major shifts, yes. But transition is not destruction. Transition is the river finding a new course while remaining the river.

So, I took a picture of myself a few days ago. The one where I am remembering who I am. And I wrote: Sometimes grief can have you reverting back to begging god instead of being god.

Because here is the thing. I am EbonyJanice. I am the granddaughter of *Hoodoo Baptist* women (whether the most immediate ones called themselves that or not). I am in the lineage of Voodoo women and priestesses with technologies unnamed. I am an initiated priestess of Ifa, Obatala, Osun, and Egungun. Nothing about that reads: beg.

I can have whatever I want.

I am the river and the mountain, and all of my ancestors held inside one woman.

The grief is real. The transition is real. The rage that I have learned to manage is also real, and worthy of more honest attention than I have been giving it. But none of that erases what I am. None of that makes me less than what I have always been.

If you are reading this and you are also in a season of forgetting, if grief has had you begging when you are meant to be being, let this be your reminder. Whatever you have been initiated into, whatever lineage you carry, whatever name your people called God before colonization renamed everything: you are still that. The transition has not unmade you. The closure has not unmade you. The grief has not unmade you.

You are still the river. You are still the mountain. You are still seated. All.

And you are allowed to remember.

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If something in this called to you — if you are in your own season of remembering, transition, or return — I hold a small container called A Return to God for women who are ready to be witnessed in the deeper work. It includes the year-long Priestess Portal and a two-day Dream Retreat held at my home. Both are intimate, both are intentional, and both begin with a conversation. If you feel a pull, write to me at freepeople@thefreepeopleproject.com and we’ll see what wants to happen. xoxo

*Hoodoo Baptist* is language that I got from Chelsea VonChaz. I was on her podcast several months ago talking about “Black Girlhood As Sacred Text.” You can listen HERE.

Not in a ritual or in the midst of something deep and holy. Not preparing to receive a word. Just praying the way I pray when I’m not performing prayer for anybody, when it’s just me and God and the water and the quiet. And spirit started moving through me the way it does, words coming that I was not choosing, and I heard myself say:

Trust me as I trust you.

And I stopped.

Not because I said anything wrong. But because it felt so exactly right that I understood immediately what I had just agreed to.

Uh-oh. And also (heavy sigh).

The Prayer You Don’t Know You’re Praying

There is a prayer I grew up with. A lot of us did. It went like this:

God, anything in me not like you, take it out right now.

We meant it from a very humble place. It was a surrender. “I want to please you, so anything in me that is not like you, remove it.”

Literal LOL!

And then a friendship ended. Or a job disappeared. Or a door closed so hard you could feel the air move. And we called it chaos. We called it a spiritual attack. We called it the enemy. We did not call it what it was.

An answer.

God was being extremely literal. You said: "ANYTHING” not like you. And God said: “SAY LESS.” And then God began the work of removing anything in your life that did not have the frequency of the divine. You just didn’t have the theological framework to read the loss as the answer. Nobody taught you that prayer is demolition, reconstruction - spiritual architecture. That what you say to God becomes the structure you live inside.

Words to God are not casual. They are covenantal. They build worlds.

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What I Actually Said

So when I heard myself say, "Trust me as I trust you,” I understood. I had not made a request. I had not offered a sweet sentiment. I had declared an updated terms of engagement. And honestly… mother freaking YIKES!

Here is what the covenant means, broken all the way down:

If God releases to me what I trust God for, then what I have is exactly connected to my level of trust. Not God’s willingness. Not divine timing in some mysterious external sense. My trust. Which means every lack in my life is legible. It can be read. It is the precise measure of where my trust has not yet landed.

What you trust God for, you receive. What you do not trust God for, has not yet released to you. Not because God is withholding it. But because your trust and your capacity to receive are mutually inseparable.

That is a hard word. I know. Stay with me.

Do I Know I Am God?

Here is where it gets wild. Because the covenant only works if we are honest about the nature of the relationship.

If God is not an entity outside you, separate from you, somewhere above you waiting to be persuaded, then “trust me as I trust you” is not a conversation between two beings. It is a conversation happening inside one. It is God in you asking you in God: do you know what/who/how you are?

The question I return to again and again is this: Do I know I am God? Not as arrogance. Not as a replacement for spiritual practice or surrender. As a reckoning. As the most honest theological question I know how to ask. If the kingdom of God is within me (it’s in the book - you gotta read your book), and I AM the manifestation of God’s word. And God is God’s word. Then I am one portion of God’s promise to itself b/c God’s word can’t return void to God (unless God stopped believing God was God).

Ewwwww. This is wrecking me and will likely be a video too at some point because a preacher gotta preach in multiple fonts sometimes for it to really land — but again, stay with me.

So… if I do not trust myself, there is no other God coming to move on my behalf. There is no external divine waiting to override my self-doubt. The God that is in me, as me, through me, cannot manifest what I have not yet trusted me for. My distrust of myself is not humility. It is the ceiling. It is the thing I keep praying my way up against and calling the result “chaos.”

Trust me, as I trust you, is sacredly circular. I am asking God in me to trust God in me. And God in me is asking God in me to trust God in me. LOL! I am saying: release to me what I trust me for. I Am is saying release to God what I Am is trusting God (in me) for.

The Covenant You Are Already In

Here is what I want you to sit with.

You are already in a covenant. Whether you have named it or not. Whether you prayed it deliberately or prayed it because someone told you it was the right thing to say. Your life right now is largely the evidence of what you have trusted. The love you have. The work you get to do. The things still withheld. Not by God. By you. By the places your trust has not yet arrived.

This is not condemnation. I am not telling you that you have failed. I am telling you that your life is legible. That the lack has a name. That the name is not unworthiness and it is not divine timing and it is not the enemy.

The name is: I have not trusted myself here yet.

And the covenant says: when you do, it moves.

I was in the bathtub. Spirit was moving. And I heard something that stopped me cold, not because it was frightening, but because it was so precise it felt like a key turning in a lock I had been standing in front of for years.

Trust me. As I trust you.

I am still figuring out what I am brave enough to trust myself with.

But I said it. And I meant it. And now I have to live inside it.

Honestly. Today might be a 2 Nap day because McScuse me? Le sigh.

Selah.

-ebonyjanice

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EbonyJanice is a womanist theologian, initiated priestess, and the author of All the Black Girls Are Activists. She is currently completing her PhD in Women's Spirituality and editing her second book, Real Soft Girl Shit. You can contact her to learn more about the “A Return To God” mentoring container at freepeople@thefreepeopleproject.com.

I’ve been sobbing all morning. Not sad crying. Brave crying. The kind that comes when you finally look at the version of yourself you were most afraid to become and realize - she’s the one who saved you.

Two years ago, I let a tradition that was not mine by upbringing but was mine by blood lay hands on me. And the Orisha who came first - with crystal clarity, in my very first Dafá (divination) reading - was Ọbàtálá. The father of all Orisha. The one who shapes humans from clay. The cool head. The white cloth.

And I understand now why it had to be Ọbàtálá first. Because for a girl who had this intimate, lifelong, undeniable relationship with Jesus Christ - Ọbàtálá didn’t feel like a departure. Ọbàtálá felt like a deepening. Such a familiar spirit. Such a gentle hand. Like God saying, I’m not asking you to leave Me. I’m asking you to find Me where I’ve always been.

That’s the part that makes me cry.

Not because it was easy. Because it was terrifying. Because I remember believing - knowing, in my bones - that coming out of the spiritual closet would cost me everything. That the people who gave birth to me might stop loving me. That my community, the Black church world that raised me and formed my tongue and gave me my first theology, would reject me entirely. For not being a Christian. Imagine. Imagine the people who made you deciding you are no longer theirs because you returned to a path that was yours before it was taken from you.

I came out anyway.

And while I didn’t lose everything I thought I would, some of what I thought would happen was true.

But I am still here. Still loved. Still EbonyJanice. More EbonyJanice, actually, than I have ever been.

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I always tell people that part of the reason I came to Ifá is because I understand it as my path - as the next step in the next phase of my journey to sovereignty. To becoming the actual, full, unedited EbonyJanice. And that journey required something the tradition I was raised in could not give me: a decolonized space. Decolonized language. Decolonized spiritual technologies. Tools and cosmologies and ways of knowing God that are ancestral. That are Black. That didn’t need me to flatten myself to fit inside them.

Ifá gave me that.

Ọbàtálá gave me that.

And two years later, standing in my shrine room, I can say something I couldn’t say before: I know what it means to return to God. Not the God I was handed. The God I am.

That phrase — a return to God — has been sitting on my tongue for a while now. It’s the thing underneath everything I teach, everything I write, everything I offer. It’s the question I’ve been asking myself since before my initiation and the question my initiations have been answering: God knows God is God. I know God is God. Do I know I’m God? And if I do, what am I willing to build from that knowing?

I’ve spent 25 years creating programming devoted to wholeness, to sovereignty, to personal development. But the deepest work I do - the most sacred, the most intimate, the most transformative - I’ve been doing quietly. In private rooms. In my shrine. In containers of two and three women at a time who are ready to stop performing their spirituality and start becoming it.

I’m not ready to say everything about what this is becoming. But I will say this: I am opening something. Something I’ve carried for a long time, something born in that same shrine room where Ọbàtálá first claimed me. It is for women - particularly Black women - who know there is something godlike, something profound, something sovereign inside them that they haven’t been able to fully access because every spiritual system they’ve been given was designed to separate them from it.

If something in you is stirring while you read this, hold it gently. A time is coming soon for us to witness each other in this knowing together.

Happy Odun Ọbàtálá to me. Two years in white. Two years of returning.

I’m still becoming.

Eepa Orisha! Eepa Baba!

🤍

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EbonyJanice is a womanist theologian, initiated priestess, and the author of All the Black Girls Are Activists. She is currently completing her PhD in Women's Spirituality and editing her second book, Real Soft Girl Shit. You can contact her to learn more about the “A Return To God” mentoring container at freepeople@thefreepeopleproject.com.

I said it the way you talk to people you’re intimate with. Casual. Honest. No formality. Just me and my ancestors and the divinities I am in relationship with, and spoke the truth: I need some money. A little bit I was joking but I’m actually also never joking about money.

Before I could finish the thought, my Apple Watch buzzed. A deposit notification. $450 into my account. A payment I was expecting from someone repaying a loan arrived two days late, and they'd added $50 without my asking.

Surplus. Unprompted. Instant.

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And you know what I almost did? I almost let that moment pass. Almost dismissed it because the money came through a channel I recognized. Almost judged the amount because when I said “I need some money,” what I meant was something much larger. Almost failed to notice that I spoke… and the material world rearranged itself in the same breath.

That’s the thing about spiritual authority. It’s not always dramatic. Sometimes it’s so quiet, so woven into the fabric of your day, that you miss it entirely. You speak, and things move, and you don’t even stop to say thank you because you’ve been trained to believe that power looks like something other than what just happened.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately - what it means to return to yourself. Not the version of yourself that the world built. Not the one that learned to submit to an external authority in order to access the divine. Not the one who was taught that God is somewhere out there, above you, separate from you, and your only job is to be small enough to be acceptable.

I mean the version of you that speaks and things move.

The version that knows something (has always known something) about who she really is. Something godlike. Something profound. Something that got buried under religion and respectability and the particular way Black women are taught that power is dangerous, that authority is masculine, that the safest thing to do with your fire is to hand it to someone else for safekeeping.

I was raised in that theology. I was a Jesus fanatic. I loved the church with my whole heart. And then something in me cracked open… not all at once, but slowly, over years… and I realized that the God I’d been looking for outside of myself had been living inside me the whole time. That realization didn’t make me less devoted. It made me more. But it changed everything about how I practice, how I pray, how I move, and who I trust with my becoming.

I’ve spent 25 years creating programs and spaces for Black women’s wholeness. I’ve written books about it. I’m completing a PhD around it. I’ve been initiated into multiple priestesshoods that anchor everything I do. And through all of that, there has been one offering that I’ve carried in my chest but never fully named in public.

Until now.

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I am opening a deeply intimate mentoring space for women - particularly Black women who know that something sacred lives inside them and are ready to stop circling it and start inhabiting it. This is not a course. There are no modules. There are no PDFs. This is a long-term, one-on-one container - a priestess walking with you through the kind of initiation that reorganizes your entire life. Your relationship to God, to yourself, to your power, to your money, to your body, to your lineage, to everything.

Three women a year. That’s it. Because it’s such a big work, I know that’s what I can hold space for as I hold space for this transformation in the works.

I know what this kind of transformation costs because I’ve invested in it myself - twice, at the highest level - and it changed my life both times. It still is. As I write.

I’ve built the curriculum. Discerned the necessary tools. I have my altar, my practice, my initiations, my life, and the knowledge that this morning, in my shrine room, I said, “I need some money,” and got money before I finished the sentence. That’s the kind of knowing I want to walk other women into.

If something in you is stirring right now - not performing interest, not “maybe someday,” but genuinely stirring - I want to hear from you. To have a conversation. Email me directly: [freepeople@thefreepeopleproject.com]. Tell me what’s alive in you right now. That’s enough to start.

This is me, stepping out of the shrine room and into the open. Saying it out loud for the first time. Letting the right people hear it.

More is coming. But this is the beginning. We are returning to God.

Ase & Amen.

EbonyJanice is a womanist theologian, author of All the Black Girls Are Activists, and PhD student in Women’s Spirituality. She is an initiated priestess, a mentor, and a free woman on a love journey. She writes, teaches, and prays from wherever she is — currently North Carolina, soon New Orleans, Dakar, Paris, The Moon. You can find her at ebonyjanice.com or reach her directly at [freepeople@thefreepeopleproject.com].

Lately, I’ve been practicing a question:
“And what’s better than this?”
And then asking again: And what’s better than this?
And again, until I can’t go any higher.

That repetition - that insistence - is how I expand my highest imagination. It’s how I stretch possibility until the impossible becomes familiar.

Because that’s what freedom actually feels like. Not a destination, but an ongoing question of what more could be possible if we stopped centering oppression and started centering imagination.

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It hit me recently - everything I had built up to this point, every project, every platform, every expression of my work - was born from resistance.

From Fannie Lou Hamer’s declaration that she was “sick and tired of being sick and tired.”
From that deep ancestral exhaustion that says, if I don’t do it, it won’t get done.

So much of what Black women have had to create - our institutions, our movements, our families, our self-care rituals, even our joy - has been forged in the fires of necessity.

We built worlds because we were refused entry into existing ones.
We made magic because survival demanded it.
We kept going because we didn’t have the luxury of stopping.

But what happens when the reason we build shifts from resistance to reverie?
Who might we become if the foundation of our creativity wasn’t exhaustion, but ecstasy?
What would we make if our guiding question was not “How do I fix this?” but “What do I want to feel?”

That’s the real work of dreaming ourselves free. It’s the radical permission to create not because we’re tired of what is, but because we desire what could be.

I don’t believe in 5-year plans. Not because planning isn’t useful, but because if I can see the version of me that exists five years from now… I can start embodying her now.

If I can visualize the house, the money, the joy, the partnership, the platform, the health, the creative expansion… I don’t have to wait five years to live in that timeline. I can start walking like her. Talking like her. Creating from her vision.

That’s what I mean when I say I quantum leap.

There was a time I was meditating and my grandmother appeared to me. I was weeks away from starting my master’s program and didn’t yet have the credentials to teach at the level I wanted.

But she said to me so clearly:

“If you say you’re a teacher, teach.
If you say you’re a writer, write.”

And so I did. I started teaching whoever would listen… even if it was just one person. I started writing like my name already belonged on the syllabus.

Six months later, I was teaching a graduate course on “The Black Girl Magic In Beyoncé’s Lemonade: An Intro to the African Spirit Religions in The Visual Album” — a class I technically “wasn’t qualified” to teach. But I had already decided I was a teacher. My belief bent the timeline.

That’s what happens when we stop waiting for permission to live in the future we’re already dreaming.

Dreaming Ourselves Free: A Fourth Wave Womanist Tool For Cocreating Free & Sovereign Worlds

For Black women, dreaming is not frivolous… it’s resistance.
It’s how we rewrite the script when the world tells us we don’t belong in our own stories.

When we dream, we remember our divine authorship.
We remember that our imagination is the original technology.

This is what my 6 week Masterclass Intensive, Dream Yourself Free, is all about.

Over 6 weeks, I walk Black women through the technologies of:

• Dream recall: because your subconscious is already speaking your freedom language.

• Ancestral dreaming: because your lineage knows the way.

• Somatic imagination: because your body is an oracle.

• Softness as strategy: because rest, pleasure, and ease are data points.

• Vision mapping” because dreaming without structure is just wishful thinking.

• Sovereign embodiment: because we become what we practice.

We don’t dream as escape.
We dream as reclamation.
We dream as resistance.
We dream as revolution.

—

Applications for Dream Yourself Free Cohort 8 are now open.

If you’re ready to stop creating from exhaustion and start creating from imagination,
if you’re ready to expand your highest vision until it overflows,
if you’re ready to live as the future self who is already free —
this is your invitation.

Apply for Dream Yourself Free – Cohort 8

Be Soft, Be Sacred. Be Sovereign.
EbonyJanice

Thanks for reading! Feel free to share this post with folk who would benefit from thinking about Dreaming and for anyone you think would benefit from Dream Yourself Free.

*Title is a Solange lyric from the song “Dreams.”

I’ve been thinking deeply about what it means to move through the world as a woman so in love with herself that it startles people. To be so tender with myself, so lavish in my care, so publicly unbothered by anyone who can’t meet me in my softness — it unnerves some folks. And yet, I remain seated in the truth that this care is not a consolation prize for being single. It is my birthright.

Because here’s the thing: I’m not interested in pretending that being single is some kind of purgatory on the way to love. I am already in love. This body? Loved. This altar? Loved. This Parisian satin dress I bought just to wear while sipping tea and listening to Solange on a Tuesday? Loved. I do not care how many men’s opinions I make irrelevant when I light a candle for myself and ask aloud, “How do you want to be loved today, baby?” That moment — that ritual — is the love story.

And I know what you’re thinking — because the world won’t let us forget it: “You have to love yourself first before anyone else can love you.” But I reject that as both myth and weapon. Most of us are already walking around with so much self-love we could bottle and sell it. What we need isn’t more unsolicited advice. What we need is more witnessing. More space to say, “I’m loving my life and still dreaming of someone who can hold it with me,” without it turning into a sermon about wholeness. Beloved, I am whole and I am open.

So, when I talk about being soft, sacred, and sovereign, I’m not talking about aesthetics — I’m talking about practices. About building shrines in your home and also in your schedule. About buying the perfume you want to be kissed in. About tending to your skin like a priestess would tend to an anointed relic. I’m talking about understanding your body as holy ground, your boundaries as scripture, and your laughter as prophetic revelation.

And still, we cannot ignore the ache. This is not a bypass. There are days when longing curls around me like a question: Why not yet? Where is he? When will I be met like this — in softness, in fire, in fullness? Is he even possible? Is there anyone capable of fully holding how absolutely humongous a love with me really requires? On those days, I don’t scold myself into self-love. I hold myself — speak kindly, take naps, write prayers in lipstick on the mirror. I call on community, I call on Orisha, I call on my own breath. Because I know this kind of softness doesn’t make me fragile. It makes me ready.

And if there is a communal response to this kind of sacred, sovereign womanhood — let it not be more discipline or more labor. Let it be reverence. Let it be sweetness. Let it be friends who remind you that you are already chosen. Let it be lovers who don’t compete with your altar but pray beside it. Let it be a world that no longer treats singlehood as absence, but as presence. A luminous, delicious presence that deserves to be honored and held.

So yes — I am in a committed relationship with myself. We travel together. We weep together. We have inside jokes. We are building a life. And any love that wants to join us? He better come correct. He better come soft, sacred, and sovereign. And we don’t mind if he comes… soon.

Recently, I had a situation with someone who assumed they had authority over me. They wanted to dictate my boundaries. But here’s the truth: I’m 42 years old. I don’t have a boss. I am a free woman. And beyond all of that, I am sovereign. So whatever they think they can withhold from me, I don’t need it. I do not need to perform compliance to be worthy. I don’t need permission to be who I am.

Audre Lorde teaches us that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” I hear in that a call to stop waiting for permission slips from systems that were never built for us. Sovereignty means I will not barter my freedom for access to someone else’s house. Sovereignty means I build my own.

Sovereignty means that I will never perform false humility in hopes of acceptance.

This is vital because there will always be people who believe they hold something over your head. They will think they can “little sis” you. They will position themselves as the gatekeepers of your dreams. But sovereignty breaks that spell. You are not my mother. You are not my boss. You are not my God. You are not the one who authorizes me. bell hooks once wrote, “To be truly visionary, we have to root our imagination in our concrete reality while simultaneously imagining possibilities beyond that reality.” That’s what sovereignty does - it roots me in my lived reality while freeing me from the imagination of my oppressor.

June Jordan reminds us, “We are the ones we have been waiting for.” This line is not just poetry - it’s strategy. Sovereignty means you stop waiting for someone else to open a door for you. You stop begging for a seat at a table where you were never meant to eat. You recognize that your very being is the table, the chair, the feast.

And because sovereignty is sacred, it gives me freedom in situations where others would feel trapped. I can leave any room that does not honor me and still be whole. I lose nothing because I was not depending on anyone else’s authority to begin with. That is liberation in its truest form.

Your sovereignty is not a future goal - it is a present truth. The work is to remember it. The work is to live into it daily. When you stop allowing others to “little sister” you, you reclaim the fullness of your being. You stop waiting. You stand firm. You are soft. You are sacred. You are sovereign. Ase ooooooo!

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Welcome to my “soft, sacred, & sovereign” Substack
August 7th, 2025 | Paris, France

Every August, I come to Paris to fall deeper in love with myself. It’s become a sacred ritual - a soft season where I let the city slow me down, charm me, and seduce me back into my favorite version of myself. Paris EbonyJanice is a woman I adore: she takes long walks in dramatic flowing dresses, reads in cafés until dusk, and romanticizes every sip of coffee like it’s sacred. While this city might not offer the abundance of Black-women-obsessed men required for me to live here full-time, what it does give me is space. Space to soften, space to listen to my own longings, space to write and remember.

This is the heartbeat of “soft, sacred, & sovereign,” not just aesthetics or ease, but the radical reclamation of tenderness as power. My softness is not a lack of strength. It is a form of resistance. A refusal to be hardened by a world that demands my rage before it has earned my trust. A reclamation of my body, my time, my dreams, and my joy. This Substack will be a living altar to that truth. A soft landing place for essays, rituals, reflections, and real-life activations that will lead us into our sovereign selves… dripping in honey, drenched in power, and resting in our divine authority.

This is also a place for you to deepen your own softness work with a forefather of “softness” as a movement. I know I know. These things get “viral” and lose their origin - but in my book “Real Soft Girl Shit: A Womanist Reclamation Of Radical Vulnerability” (Row House, 2026), I’ll set the scene in a bit more detail to how I introduced the very specific language of “softness” as a tool for liberation that Black women are worthy of (as well as give you more elders and thinkers to cite when you’re thinking about softness, because there are many doing credible embodiment work that’s rooted in an actual regulating nervous system and not just a moment, a catchphrase, or an aesthetic).

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As part of my ongoing rituals towards staying deeply seated in my softness this season, I’ve been reading - deeply and intentionally. My July reading list was filled with Black romance (per youj). And I’m here to promote Black Romance to all the girls looking for a nervous system regulating tool that doesn’t cost them a Delta One flight to Paris or an expensive extended stay at a wellness spa.

Black women writers creating portals where we are loved, chosen, and deeply desired is a radical worship that has consistently saved my life. These aren’t just “cute stories,” despite the fact that there will be a happily ever after - these are sacred texts. They are spells. They are practice. They are how I remember the necessity of my dreaming and imagination. Using them as tools to consider what’s possible beyond the grief and injustice of this world. In these stories, our softness is never weaponized. Our vulnerability is never punished. Our pleasure is not an afterthought. These books are altars I return to daily when the headlines try to make me forget who I am and what I deserve.

One of my favorite reads from this past month, Are You Going to Love Me? by Aubree Penn, gave me a kind of softness that didn’t have to be earned through trauma. It just was. Two people choosing each other - tenderly, vulnerably, imperfectly - and learning to trust that maybe love doesn’t always have to hurt first. It reminded me that even in a world full of hard edges, I am allowed to want ease. I am allowed to want joy. I am allowed to want love that feels like warm honey, not barbed wire.

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So welcome. Whether you’re here to dream yourself free with me, to be witnessed in your worthiness through these words, to be held as someone holy and divine, or to find language for your own soft-sacred unraveling, this is your space too. Subscribe, share, and come back often. I’ll be here, reflecting from Paris patios, NYC rooftops and Carolina porches, teaching softness like it’s a survival skill… because for us, it is.