My daughter doesn’t usually come to watch my boxers compete. A few months ago she showed up anyway, mostly to spend the afternoon with my wife and I, and to practice taking pictures. She brought her camera and found a seat near us, and I didn’t think much of it beyond being glad she was there. I had a young woman fighting that day. Eventually, I warmed her up running through the same sequence I’ve run a thousand times, watching her hands and her breathing and the small signs that tell me whether someone is ready. At some point I noticed my daughter watching, camera up, and she looked impressed. I registered it for a second and then went back to the work in front of me. I didn’t think about her again until the bout was over.

Both of my boxers won that day. The young woman’s win put the whole place on the edge of their seat yelling. Afterward, once the excitement settled and a lot of the seats had emptied because other teams were packing up to leave, I found my way over and sat down next to my daughter to watch what was left of the boxing card. She told me she had been thinking about a line from Moneyball while watching me warmup the young woman, the one about how you can’t help being romantic about baseball, except she was applying it to boxing instead and talking about how amazing the whole experience was to watch. She told me it was inspiring to watch my fighter warm up, and was quite impressed with how good she clearly was, along with how much work it must have taken to get to that level even though my daughter barely knew her. She talked about how good it felt watching my young man win right after her. With a trembling voice, and a tear or two, she told me she was so proud of me and that watching me work with these young people made her wish she had spent more time with me when she was younger.

She is often emotional, so her eyes had already been watering before telling me this. I could tell she meant every word. I think she told me, without planning to, most of what I had wanted to hear from her for years. I felt the tears before I could stop them. I turned sideways in my chair so I wasn’t facing her anymore, and I leaned over onto her shoulder and cried while she cried too, her arm around me. I don’t know if I had ever felt that close to her before that moment. I don’t remember the last time I felt that much joy and love. It was like she had somehow found the words I had been waiting for without knowing I had been waiting a long time. She saw the investment I had put into these young people, the long hours, the specific kind of work it takes to build a bond that gets someone through a fight like that. And underneath it, I think she saw something I had never said out loud to her. That I wished I had been able to make that same kind of investment in her and her sister when they were young. She found a part of my heart that day that I don’t usually show anyone, and she found it without me pointing her toward it.

I’ve spent a long time assuming that words of affirmation might be my love language. I understand now why I made that mistake. Though it can arrive from elsewhere, attunement often arrives through words, since words are often how another person tells you what they’ve noticed. But the words were never the thing itself. The thing itself was that she had been watching closely enough, for long enough, to notice what I actually do and who I actually am underneath what I show people. The words were just how she delivered what she saw. That distinction matters to me because I think a lot of people confuse being complimented with being known. Someone can say something kind about you and still not be tracking you at all. They can praise a project you finished without knowing what it cost you to finish it, or admire your patience without knowing what you’re actually practicing patience against. Words of affirmation can be generous and still be generic. Attunement is different. It requires someone to hold you in their attention long enough to notice the specific, shifting shape of what you’re carrying, and then to respond to that instead of to the version of you that’s easiest to see.

I think this is part of why I sometimes feel lonely even in a community full of people who seemingly like me. I lost a friend attuned to me in February. He saw parts of me that most people in this town never bothered to look for, and he told me so without being asked. His death didn’t just take a friendship. It took one of the few working witnesses to the parts of my life that go unnoticed. That kind of loss teaches you what attunement actually costs to lose, which is different from what it costs to never have had it at all. People can be warm without being attuned. I don’t think most of it is unwillingness. I think really seeing another person requires a kind of vulnerability that most of us are not trained for, on either end. It asks the person doing the seeing to sit with someone else’s inner world instead of their own for a while, and it asks the person being seen to let that happen instead of managing how they’re perceived. Most of us learn early to do the second thing, manage the perception, because it feels safer than being actually known and possibly found wanting.

There is a version of me that shows up at the gym every day and does the work quietly. Some of that work gets noticed by people in the community who aren’t advertising that they’ve noticed it, and I’ve come to understand that as its own form of attunement, someone paying enough attention to my life to see the parts I don’t talk about. But most days it goes unnoticed, and that’s fine, because I don’t do it to be seen. What my daughter gave me that afternoon wasn’t praise. It was the experience of being known by someone who had taken the time to actually look. I don’t know when I’ll feel that again. I know it isn’t something I can arrange or ask for directly. I only know that when it happens, it undoes something in you that words alone were never going to reach.

In every generation of resistance, there has been a subtle expectation to suffer for the cause. The revolutionary becomes heroic by disappearing into the struggle working, protesting, organizing, and burning out until the body itself becomes evidence of commitment. I’ve seen this myth of exhaustion play out not only in social movements but in academic, community, and even spiritual spaces. The message is consistent. If you are not tired, you are not doing enough. This mindset, while born of urgency, is often a continuation of colonial logic. Empire measures worth through productivity. It thrives on bodies that do not rest. Activism, when unexamined, can reproduce the same dynamics it seeks to dismantle. The idea that constant motion equals moral value comes from the same worldview that once treated land as resource and people as labor. To heal activism, we must first question the economics of urgency.

Audre Lorde’s reminder that “self-care is an act of political warfare” still feels radical because rest remains taboo in activist circles. The colonized mind fears pause, mistaking stillness for apathy. Yet history shows that every sustainable movement whether abolition, civil rights, Indigenous resurgence, contained rhythms of retreat and reflection. Resistance without restoration becomes replication. In contemporary activism, social media amplifies this pressure. Outrage becomes currency, and speed becomes virtue. Many activists confess feeling guilty when they unplug or celebrate small joys. They fear being seen as disengaged. But this guilt reveals the shadow of empire. We have internalized the demand to produce even our pain for public consumption. True decolonization begins when we reclaim the right to be whole, not merely useful.

Bayo Akomolafe often says, “The times are urgent; let us slow down.” It is one of the most paradoxical truths of liberation work. Urgency without reflection accelerates collapse. Slowing down does not mean disengaging, it means aligning. It allows us to discern whether our actions emerge from fear or from love. When we rest, we return to relationship with our bodies, with each other, and with the earth. Rest is not a retreat from activism, it is its foundation.

The Colonial Body in Motion

Colonialism was not just a political system, it was a way of choreographing human movement. It trained bodies to march, labor, obey, and perform. Even today, activism often reproduces this choreography. Protest lines mirror military formations. Rallies mimic sermons. Speeches become performances of moral authority. These forms have power, but they can also center domination with voices that overpower rather than invite. Angela Davis reminds us that liberation is a collective process of becoming. It is not a single act of conquest. Yet the colonial mindset persists in the desire to win, to convert, and to dominate the conversation. In activist spaces, we sometimes inherit this competitive energy of who works hardest, who knows more theory, or who carries more pain. The struggle becomes a hierarchy of suffering, and care gets lost in comparison.

Adrienne maree brown challenges this paradigm through what she calls “emergent strategy,” the art of aligning small, intentional actions with the patterns of the natural world. She writes, “What we practice at the small scale sets the patterns for the whole system.” When activists practice burnout, urgency, and guilt at the personal level, movements reproduce those dynamics collectively. When they practice empathy, pacing, and collaboration, liberation begins to look different. It looks more like a forest than a battlefield. Sociologically, this transformation can be understood through symbolic interactionism. Activism is about meaning making in interaction and not just about institutions. When an organizer chooses to listen rather than lecture, they redefine what power looks like. When a leader acknowledges exhaustion, they normalize humanity. These micro acts shift the collective narrative from domination to mutuality.

The colonial body in motion seeks validation through visibility. The decolonized body moves from intention. One strives for recognition, the other for relationship. This distinction matters because activism is not only about changing policy, but also about transforming the culture that made injustice possible. To embody justice, our movements must reflect the peace they proclaim. This requires a radical honesty about our motivations. Many of us enter activism seeking belonging, purpose, or redemption. These are human needs, but if unacknowledged, they can distort the work. The need to be right can overshadow the need to be kind. The desire to be seen can eclipse the goal of transformation. Decolonizing activism involves continuous self-inquiry. Am I acting from love or from the residue of domination? From empathy or ego? From healing or performance?

As Paulo Freire might say, activism without reflection becomes activism against people, not with them. Reflection transforms action into praxis. It turns the march inward as well as outward.

Learning as Liberation

Education is one of the most powerful and one of the most misunderstood forces on earth. For centuries it has been sold as a ladder of progress, yet the ladder often leads back to the same gatekeepers. The problem is not learning itself but the way empire built schools to reproduce obedience rather than imagination. A truly liberating education does the opposite. It restores our capacity to wonder, question, and connect. It makes us more human. I have watched it happen. Sometimes I am privileged enough to witness the moment a student suddenly “gets it.” When their eyes shift, their posture softens, and they realize they are not being indoctrinated but invited into awareness. They begin to see that learning is not a script to memorize but a mirror to examine the world and themselves. In those moments, you can almost feel a collective exhale in the room. Something invisible unshackles. Education is more about awakening than performance. Paulo Freire called this the movement from banking education, where knowledge is deposited into passive students, to problem-posing education, where learners and teachers become cocreators of meaning. “To study,” Freire wrote, “is not to consume ideas, but to create and recreate them.” When students discover that, they begin to heal from years of intellectual domestication. The stress that comes from constant evaluation, in the form of grades, rubrics, and credentials, finally loosens. What takes its place is curiosity, and with it, joy.

The Architecture of Empire in Schooling

Colonial education systems were never designed for that joy. Missionary schools, industrial academies, and European universities all shared a goal to civilize, convert, and classify. They taught colonized peoples to distrust their languages, doubt their intelligence, and defer to authority. Even now, the architecture of empire lingers in standardized tests, Eurocentric curricula, and the myth that knowledge is objective only when detached from culture. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o called language the “collective memory bank of a people.” When colonizers imposed their own tongues, they changed vocabulary and rewired imagination. Generations of students learned to think in someone else’s rhythm. Decolonizing education begins by reversing that amnesia starting with letting people name the world in their own voice. But language is only the beginning. The entire grammar of modern schooling is steeped in hierarchy. Rows of desks facing a single authority. Bells that segment time into units of obedience. Grading systems that reduce growth to data points. The implicit lesson is submission through an internalization of control. Ivan Illich saw this clearly in Deschooling Society. The school, he argued, conditions citizens to depend on institutions rather than one another. “School,” he wrote, “is the advertising agency which makes you believe you need the society as it is.” That conditioning has consequences beyond the classroom. It shapes how we work, vote, and even love. A person trained to compete for approval struggles to collaborate for justice. A child rewarded for silence learns to distrust their voice. When society praises compliance as maturity, the result is emotional exhaustion resulting in an epidemic of anxiety that hides beneath achievement. Happiness becomes deferred until the next credential, the next promotion, the next applause. The capitalist classroom produces a capitalist worker who is disciplined, disconnected, and perpetually striving. In such a world, wellness feels subversive. To rest, question, or feel deeply all become small rebellions.

Unlearning and Reimagining Education

There’s a particular joy in unlearning. There is the moment when a belief planted by empire finally loses its power. It’s the joy of discovering that intelligence was never the same as conformity. When students realize they can question authority without losing themselves, education becomes a spiritual act. I think often about the emotional toll of traditional education. There is the anxiety, the self-doubt, and the constant measuring. Bourdieu described schooling as a mechanism that reproduces inequality through “cultural capital.” Those who already possess the codes of power like language, manner, and access succeed effortlessly, while others internalize failure as personal flaw. The result is shame disguised as meritocracy. Decolonizing education means refusing that shame. It means redefining success, so it is not seen as competition but as contribution. It asks teachers to move from grading to guiding and from lecturing to listening. The goal is to eliminate uniformity in favor of understanding. Ivan Illich imagined a world where learning would be freed from institutional control as part of a “convivial” society where education happens through networks of mutual interest. Today, that vision feels both radical and necessary. Community-based learning circles, apprenticeships, and intergenerational mentorships offer glimpses of it. They show that education thrives when it’s rooted in relationship and not bureaucracy.

We can see hints of this in places where art, activism, and study converge in gatherings like community storytelling nights where elders teach history, youth programs that blend gardening with environmental science, peer led mental health groups in schools. Each of these is an ecosystem of learning that centers wellness as much as knowledge. Education should prepare people not just to make a living but to make a life. That means teaching empathy alongside literacy and reflection alongside reasoning. It means to stop treating the classroom as a factory and to consider it a place where knowledge circulates freely and where every question is a doorway to connection. A truly decolonized classroom feels alive. You can sense it in the energy between people or the way ideas spark laughter or silence. The teacher no longer stands at the center, the circle does. Authority becomes relational. In that space, even disagreement becomes sacred, because it signals engagement. Happiness enters the room as a byproduct of honesty. In such learning, the body is not an inconvenience. It is an instrument. Movement, breath, and storytelling are part of cognition. The arts return to their rightful place as co-teachers of empathy. Meditation before class, community walks, journaling, or dialogue circles are not distractions but tools of integration. They remind learners that the mind and spirit were never meant to be schooled apart.

Education, when liberated, resembles play more than procedure. Children understand this intuitively. They learn by touching, exploring, and experimenting. Yet adulthood trains that curiosity out of us. A decolonized pedagogy must restore play as a legitimate way of knowing. Play reintroduces spontaneity, which empire fears because it cannot be managed. But without it, happiness dies. To teach for liberation is to teach for aliveness. It’s to understand that knowledge, like love, grows only when shared without domination. The teacher becomes less a gatekeeper and more a gardener, tending conditions for growth. The soil is dialogue, the sunlight is trust, the water is curiosity. What blooms is consciousness. When I think back to students who found their voices after years of silence, I realize how profound those transformations are. A person who feels seen learns differently. They stop seeking approval and start seeking truth. They learn to not only listen to information but to one another’s humanity. That listening is the root of both wisdom and wellness. Decolonizing education is not simply a matter of curriculum reform. It is a moral revolution. It asks, what kind of people do we hope to become through learning? What kinds of worlds do we create by the way we teach? In the end, happiness in education is not necessarily comfortable but it is coherent. It’s the peace that comes when learning and living align and when what we know serves who we are and who we hope others can be. Education, at its best, is never a pathway out of the world but a way back into it, awake and ready to participate.

Rebuilding Circles of Care

Most of the repair I’ve witnessed doesn’t look like programs, it looks like tables. Ours is nicked and sturdy. People have cried on it, laughed over it, fallen asleep next to it after telling a hard story. We’ve served meals to students, sparring partners, neighbors, and sometimes strangers who became neither. Food is a teacher. It equalizes status, sets tempo, and invites listening. A good meal says, without fanfare, Stay as long as you need. The table asks for nothing except presence, which is the rarest gift in a rushed world. I’ve watched shoulders unclench after the second helping. I’ve watched eyes lift. I’ve watched a room remember it has a heartbeat. The gym is another table, louder and made of movement. Its ritual is simple. Show up, work, breathe, cheer. A bell marks time. The heavy bag drums out private anger until it becomes a beat the whole room can sway with. The mitts talk back. Here. Again. Yes. Wins are plural here. When one of our guys has his hand raised in another city, phones in Anderson light up with texts and videos and too many exclamation points. The joy is distributed. When somebody loses, the group closes around them like a muscle around a bone that is firm and protective. No one says, “You are still ours,” but the room says it anyway.

Sociologists call places like this “third spaces.” They are neither home nor work, where identity grows through participation. I think of them as modern commons. They cut against the privatized logics that say every service must be billed, every hour optimized. In a third space, a person can practice being a person in public, safely, imperfectly, with witnesses. A shy teenager cracks a joke and waits to see if it lands. A woman who learned to make herself small now teaches footwork and claims the center of the room. A young man in early sobriety holds his hands steady on the speed bag long enough to believe he can hold them steady somewhere else. Across traditions, there are names for this feeling. Ubuntu, I am because we are. Buen Vivir, good living measured not by accumulation but by harmony. Victor Turner called it communitas, the surge of unity during rituals when status dissolves and a group becomes more than its parts. I’ve felt communitas in a circle-up before a tough workout, in a room singing the same chorus, in a funeral basement where plates and stories move hand to hand until grief stops feeling like drowning and starts feeling like being carried. Communitas is medicinal joy. It doesn’t erase pain. It makes it livable.

There’s a sound I love in the gym of a dozen or so voices counting together. It’s simple and it always works. A dozen human beings align breath and voice for a minute, and the minute is kinder than the one before it. That’s the kind of wellness I trust, the kind built out of small repeatable acts that cost nothing and change everything with time. Laughter after the bell. A towel tossed. A “you got this” from a kid who believed they didn’t. Empire cannot monetize that, and so it underestimates it.

Happiness as Collective Liberation

If I draw the future I want for my neighborhood, it looks like a building with four rooms and a garden. In the first room, long tables and bright lamps with homework spread out, mentors leaning in, a whiteboard crowded with ideas, and a schedule that leaves space for taking a breath. In the second, a kitchen warm with cumin and onions, volunteers plating food like offerings, a sink full of dishes someone is happy to wash because the conversation is too good to leave. In the third, the gym with music low enough for voices to rise over it, coaches calling out names, a wall of Polaroids where everyone gets to be remembered. In the fourth, quiet. It would have couches, books, counselors who know how to sit in silence and how to ask the question that lets a person exhale. Outside, raised beds with tomatoes and basil, peppers and greens. Kids bragging about the cucumber they grew. A small stage painted by local artists and the history of the block in color and names. Friday nights are for a movie or a fight card on TV, elders narrating their memories, young ones learning to ask good questions. Saturday mornings are for repair. Maybe a fence fixed, a porch cleared, a corner cleaned. Community projects aren’t chores, they are choreography. These are ways bodies learn again that they move best together.

This is not utopia. It’s infrastructure for care. It collapses the false divisions between therapy and tutoring, athletics and art, or nourishment and education. It says healing is never one domain work. It also says dignity is a design principle. Every room communicates you matter here without a single sign on a wall. When people belong without having to audition, their nervous systems read the room as safe. Safe bodies learn. Safe bodies love. Safe bodies take risks for the common good. I’ve seen the beginnings of this future already in a teen who stayed after class to wipe down bags without being asked. I’ve seen it in a parent who showed up with a car trunk full of bottled water and snacks on a ninety-degree day. I’ve seen a college student who brought a friend to dinner and the friend became family. These are the tiny hinges on which large doors turn. They turn against empire’s direction. They open toward a happiness that isn’t scarce because it isn’t owned.

Collective joy is not an accessory to struggle. It is how struggle endures. People sang in the worst conditions. They weren’t naïve. They did it because the song braided breath together long enough to see morning. Desmond Tutu wrote that without forgiveness there is no future, I’d add that without shared joy there is no stamina. Joy rehearses the world we are trying to build. It is not delusion. It is practice. So much of modern wellness asks, How can I feel better? Collective wellness asks, How can we live better? The first question can become a loop of self-optimization. The second becomes a door to politics, policy, and practice. It is mutual aid, street-level kindness, neighborhood governance, and the long hard work of making systems answer to care. James Baldwin said that love reveals what must change in both the lover and the beloved. When that revelation reaches institutions, it looks like budgets and parks that heal instead of harm. It also looks like a kid at a kitchen table doing algebra with someone who refuses to give up on them.

Belonging does not remove grief from a community but it does make it survivable. Belonging also never erases violence, but it builds more places for its aftermath to soften. Belonging does not need to pretend empire is not real. However, I believe that together we can build rhythms that empire cannot read. My joy depends on yours. My healing is a thread that is stronger when woven with yours. If that sounds like faith, it is. Not naïveté but practice. The daily discipline of forming a we in a world that sells me. I think of the funeral basement sometimes when the gym is loud with talking and clowning after a sparring round. The same current runs through both rooms. We were holding a life we had lost. Here we are holding lives we intend to keep. The grammar is the same. There are plates and stories passed. There are towels and jokes passed. In both places, people refuse to let one another be alone. Happiness is not a possession in rooms like these. It is a medium we are soaking in, because we made it so.

The church was full. The collective sound of grief has its own frequency. It is low and steady, like wind moving through tall grass just before the rain. I took a seat in the back, ready to leave quietly after the service, and then heads turned. That’s the coach. His mother reached me before I could stand, and the hug she gave me felt like permission and blessing at once. She introduced me to aunts, uncles, cousins. She repeated the stories he’d told them about the gym. She told me how he was learning to breathe through rounds, how he’d started to dream about a fight card with his name on it, how he was eating better because “Coach said.” Afterward, we went downstairs for a shared meal, and someone put a plate in front of me the way families do when words are not enough. We traded memories about his stubbornness, his jokes, and the way he’d pretend he wasn’t tired when everyone could see he was. In the space between sorrow and laughter, something quieter settled. I belonged.

Belonging isn’t self-declared. It’s conferred. It’s the moment a community says, You are part of our story whether you meant to be or not. Durkheim called this social solidarity. This is the unseen glue that binds a people. I felt it in the hymn that everyone knew by heart, in the murmured assent when an elder spoke, and in the way hands reached for one another across folding tables. Ritual gathers the broken pieces into a shape strong enough to carry pain together. The sorrow didn’t shrink, the circle holding it got bigger.

I’ve learned to notice belonging in smaller ways too. There is the nod from a stranger on my street who knows what I’m trying to do with the gym, the wave from a parent whose child started making eye contact again, the way a local business owner says, “See you, Coach,” and it lands like a blessing. These micro-gestures create social capital. There is trust that lives in the air between us. They don’t fix policy or erase poverty. But they are how people survive long enough to fight for those things. Recognition itself, I’ve come to believe, is a form of medicine.

She said it very plainly, as though she had rehearsed it alone for a long time. I’m just kind of floating and doing whatever. This implied to me she currently had no direction or purpose. Her past, she told me eventually, felt like something she always carried with her. It didn’t seem like she had ordinary memories but more like a verdict. She couldn’t seem to locate the distance between who she had been and who she was standing in front of me right now. I didn’t argue with her. I’ve been that person. I know what it is to sit inside your own history like it’s a sentence rather than a story. There are choices I’ve made and harm inflicted on me that I would not wish to be defined by. There are the moments where the worst version of me showed up fully and left a mark. I don’t dress those moments up. I carry them honestly. But I’ve also had to learn slowly, and not without struggle, that those moments are not the final word on who I am. The quote above stopped me the first time I encountered it, because it names something theologically serious dressed in plain language. The hope it carries is structural. It insists that judgment without context is not justice, it’s just punishment by another name. And it extends that insistence to everyone, or to no one. That symmetry matters. It is not a private exemption. It’s a posture toward all human beings. There’s a tradition in Christian thought rooted in grace, that holds that no person is reducible to their worst moment. That the divine gaze does not freeze us in our failure. That what is being restored in us is not what we performed at our best, but what we were always meant to be before the weight of the world got to us. This isn’t a theology of cheap forgiveness. It’s a theology of costly return, particularly the kind that asks something real of us on the other side of being met with grace.

Here is what I’ve come to believe just as deeply. Grace is not only something God extends toward us. It’s something we extend toward each other. We become the second chance. When I look at the young woman floating without purpose and I refuse to read her past as her destiny, I am doing something that is both human and sacred. I am saying: this is not all you are. And I mean it. This isn’t because I’m naive about what people do to one another but because I know the pain and anger in me too. I have seen what shame and exhaustion and bad circumstances can make a person become. That knowledge doesn’t excuse anything. However, it does make judgment harder and compassion easier. What breaks my heart, over and over, is how many people walk through my door who have been beaten down so thoroughly by systems, family, or their own choices compounded by circumstances they didn’t choose. They’ve often accepted the verdict others handed them. They wear their shame like a uniform. They can’t imagine being seen any other way. And what they need, before anything else, isn’t instruction or correction. They need someone to stand in front of them and refuse to see them that way. I think that’s what it means to practice returning. Not just returning to ourselves, but returning to each other. Refusing the easy economy of judgment. Holding space for the person someone is becoming, especially when they can’t hold that space for themselves yet. I told her that in that moment I was not interested in who she had been. I was interested in who she was choosing to be in this room, on this day, by showing up. That’s not nothing. That is, in fact, everything. The second chance is sacred ground. Treat it that way in yourself, and in everyone you are brave enough to love.

The Practice of Returning is an ongoing series on contemplative life, spiritual recovery, and the long work of coming back to yourself and each other. I haven’t decided what to do with these particular reflections as of yet. I know it is different than what you may be used to from me so I am glad you’ve read this. Thank you.

What strikes me most about mindfulness is how easily it travels across cultures while still remaining particular. The Vipassana my friend taught in India, the Examen prayer from Christian mystics, and the breathing awareness found in Indigenous traditions all share the same heartbeat. Awareness, gratitude, presence. It’s proof that mindfulness doesn’t belong to one people or place. It’s a human inheritance. And yet, how we hold that inheritance matters. When we uproot mindfulness from its cultural and spiritual soil, it loses potency. Without its moral roots of compassion, humility, and community, it becomes just another tool of self-improvement. There is sometimes a misconception that meditation is escape. The reality is that it is engagement. It teaches attention, and attention is the beginning of love. When I practice awareness, I notice the smallest things like the color of light through a window, or the subtle rise and fall of my own chest. These details tether me to life. They remind me that mindfulness is not about closing the eyes to the world but opening them more fully. To live mindfully is to walk slower, listen deeper, and meet each moment as if it were sacred. Because it is.

Meditation has also become part of that rhythm for me. Ten minutes each day, mid-afternoon, when the world hums with distraction, I sit in stillness and watch my breath. Usually, I succeed but sometimes my thoughts chatter endlessly. Even in those restless moments, I feel something shifting. Meditation, like fasting, is a return to simplicity. It’s a decolonial act in a culture addicted to stimulation. Silence is unsettling for systems that thrive on noise. Stillness interrupts the machinery of production. To meditate is to remember the body’s original language. Presence. The ancestors knew this long before neuroscience confirmed its benefits. What strikes me most is how universal these practices are. Every culture I’ve studied holds some form of mindful stillness, some ritual of purification, and some conversation between body and spirit. Healing, when stripped of branding, looks remarkably similar across continents. It’s not owned by anyone, it’s remembered. Reclaiming traditional healing isn’t for nostalgic purposes. It’s for survival. It’s the art of remembering how to live well without waiting for permission.

This is an excerpt from an early draft of my upcoming fall book release. Alone in a Crowd: Empire, Exhaustion, and the Path Back to Each Other

The harshest language in the gospels is never directed at the people the religious establishment had already condemned. It is directed at the establishment itself and at those leaders who used sin management as a tool of social control, who kept careful account of who was acceptable and who was not, and called that faithfulness. Jesus reserved his sharpest words for the people most confident they were doing God’s work by maintaining the boundaries. And somewhere in two thousand years of organizing, the church became the institution he was critiquing. I am not interested in a simple anti-church argument. That is too easy and not entirely honest. What I am interested in is the gap between the teaching and the institution, and what it costs people who fall into that gap. The summary Jesus gives in Matthew 22 is not complicated. Love God. Love your neighbor. He calls these the two commandments on which everything else depends. Not a list of managed behaviors. Not a hierarchy of acceptable people. Two relational imperatives that point outward, not inward. Everything else in Christian tradition is commentary on those two lines, and commentary has a way of becoming more important than the text it was meant to serve.

Paul is where it gets complicated, and where the most damage has been done. The selective use of Pauline texts to subordinate women and exclude others from full participation requires ignoring the same Paul who wrote in Galatians that in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, neither male nor female. The interpretive choices reveal an agenda. When a church reaches for the texts that limit women’s leadership while setting aside the texts that flatten every human hierarchy, it is not doing theology. It is doing politics and calling it scripture. The political capture of American Christianity in recent decades has not helped. When faith becomes a cultural identity marker rather than a set of demands on how one lives, it loses its capacity to challenge anything. A Christianity that blesses power rather than interrogating it, that wraps itself in flags and electoral alignments, has not simply made a political choice. It has made a theological one. It has decided that belonging to a tribe matters more than following a teacher who had very little patience for tribalism. The Jesus of the gospels was not a nationalist. He was not interested in restoring a nation’s former greatness. He was interested in the person in front of him who had been discarded by every system that was supposed to care for them. I say this as someone who works in decolonial frameworks, which means I cannot pretend Christianity has a clean history. The cross arrived in this hemisphere on the same ships as the conquistadors. The faith was used to justify what was done to Indigenous people, to enslaved people, to anyone whose humanity was inconvenient to the colonial project. I carry that history. I do not get to set it aside because I miss something.

What I miss is simpler than an institution. I miss the relational core of the teaching. I miss the idea that love is not a feeling but a practice, that it has weight and cost and direction. I miss the possibility that there is something larger than my own effort holding the world together. I miss, if I am honest, the person of Jesus. Not the doctrine constructed around him, not the institutional power exercised in his name, but the figure in the gospels who kept moving toward people everyone else had decided to move away from. I do not know yet what it looks like to move back toward that. I know it will not look like returning to the churches I left. It may not look like church at all, at least not in any form I currently recognize. But I think the first honest step is admitting that the longing is real, that it has not gone away in ten years of absence, and that longing for something true is not the same as being naive about the institutions that claim to hold it. The message was always simpler than what we made it. Love your neighbor. Not manage your neighbor. Not rank your neighbor. Not decide which neighbors qualify. Just love them. Everything else is commentary.

May 2011

This is one of my journal entries from the trip to India I took. It is not inspiring. It is not a testimony to what an amazing trip it was. It is simply something that has been on my heart. I haven’t talked about it, because it has been difficult to express, but I feel the need to share it with you.

Matthew 25:45 ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.’

As we were making our way down Sutter St., I was somewhat thinking about the many times I walked down this area. There were many volunteers that stayed in hostels nearby. This was a very congested place that people set up street markets in which they sold many things. You could buy shirts, pants, jewelry, camcorders, DVD’s, or even suitcases. Just about everything that you could think of was being sold within these 4 blocks or so. There were also a few spots to eat American like food, as well as a few spots to use the Internet or ATM. I guess you could say this was a safe place, as far as safe places go for volunteers in Kolkata. This was the only spot we really were, where you see Americans or Europeans on a regular basis. If you walked into the right air-conditioned restaurant at the right time, it almost felt like you could be in the U.S. somewhere.

A little way down the street there was a sidewalk almost completely occupied with people’s belongings that lived there. I had previously met a few people that lived in this area. I had even shared food with a few of them on more than one occasion. As you near the corner of the street, you see the crowded sidewalks where many street vendors are trying their best to get you to look their way and buy something from them. It is a very overstimulating experience as you navigate through shoulder to shoulder crowds of endless people.

Though this was towards the end of the trip there was still a bit of shopping that a few people from our group wanted to do so I thought It would be fun to tag along and walk with them as they searched for souvenirs or gifts to take back. As we turned off Sutter St. and onto Chowringee to shop, a corner, which was normally relatively empty, had a few people standing around. Behind them laid a woman on the sidewalk. She was crying uncontrollably and appeared to be injured. She was obviously from the streets, as she did not appear to be very clean. While rounding the corner, I got a better glimpse of her. She was not wearing any pants. She did not have so much as a piece of cloth to cover her lower body. Among the crowds, nobody seemed to care. After all, there was suffering all around us. I quickly looked away and pretended not to notice. We came here with a shopping agenda, and I wanted to look around. After only getting about 10 or 15 steps away, I noticed a table in which a street vendor was selling what looked like sheets for around 50 rupees. This is the equivalence of about $1.25 in U.S. currency. I thought to myself, how nice it would be if someone were to purchase one to cover the girl with. This could be an opportunity to ask her if she was ok, or to ask her if she needed at least a drink or anything.

As people closed in around us to try to sell us things, I quickly thought again about our shopping agenda. We searched and searched some more for discount items and souvenirs. After more than an hour we came back the same way we came. We were satisfied with our purchases and wanted to get back to the familiar sites of Sutter St., get a bite to eat and head back to the hotel. As we approached the corner, I noticed the woman was still lying there. Now it appeared as if she was sleeping. She still was not covered from the waist down and appeared to be lying right where she had been relieving herself, to put it mildly. People who lived on the streets sat nearby, as though they might be with her. I looked away and thought of what I would order when we were sitting somewhere air-conditioned. I thought of grilled cheese and a cold liter of water. After all, it was over 100 degrees just a little bit earlier when we started out. I thought of laying down in the comfort of my bed later and maybe finishing my book.

In other words, I did nothing.

The image of her suffering eventually made its way back into my mind. I know absolutely nothing about the woman I had seen, but there are a few things I may know that I believe are fairly safe assumptions.

One is that her lying there half naked on the street was probably not as bad as what led up to that point. I think about what she did the hour before she was there, the day before, and the week before. It appears she had hit bottom, but the reality was that what happened to her leading up to that point was probably worse.

The other thing I know is that somebody loved her at one time. Someone cared for her. Someone fed her as a child and taught her to be a person. Someone looked into her face, as I do my daughters, and thought the world of her. There were also people that she cared about at one time, maybe there still is. She is definitely somebody’s child, and possibly somebody’s sister, or friend.

Mother Teresa once said, “It’s easy to feed people, but to console or to remove the bitterness, anger, and loneliness that comes from being spiritually, emotionally, or physically deprived, is a whole different kind of ministry that we must learn.” It is said that being unwanted, unloved, and neglected is a far worse kind of poverty than the deprivation of material things. I don’t pretend to understand that I know what that is like, and I’ve never really cared until now. My shame and my regret have woken me up as I have dreamt about the woman lying in the street that day. I have felt her eyes and heard her cry even as I write this.

Do I deserve God’s mercy and grace? I find it difficult to believe so.

When I began to eat more whole foods, more plants, and fewer things from boxes, I noticed how quickly my energy and focus returned. The body knows when it’s being respected. There is a clarity that comes from nourishment that’s alive, grown, and tended rather than manufactured. Our modern food systems often resemble our histories of colonization. They are often mass-produced, profit-driven, as well as divorced from land and season. To eat well is not simply to feed oneself, it’s to participate in an ecological relationship. It’s to remember that the soil, like the self, needs diversity to thrive.

Colonization taught us to view the body mechanistically like something to control, optimize, and exploit for labor. Western medicine, for all its miracles, has inherited that mechanistic gaze. It separates organs from emotions, mind from matter, and healing from environment. Yet Indigenous, Eastern, and ancestral systems have long known that wellness is relational. A stomach ache might also be a story about grief. Fatigue might speak the language of emotional depletion. To decolonize physical health is to reunite the parts empire has divided. It is to understand that a strong body without a rested spirit is still unwell.

Sometimes, after a workout or a long walk, I think of how much my body has carried. At times it has held stress, hope, joy, hunger, as well as generational memory. The body keeps its own archive of survival. It doesn’t need perfection, it needs attention. Decolonizing physical health, for me, begins with listening to that archive and learning its dialect of fatigue and renewal. The body does not lie. It tells us what our lives have cost and what they could yet become if we listened more kindly.

I find hope in the small movements reclaiming this truth. People gathering for full moon ceremonies in city parks, communities planting gardens where parking lots once stood, youth meditating before protests, elders teaching songs to children who thought spirituality was outdated. These are quiet revolutions. They remind me that wholeness is not a retreat from the world but a return to participation. As the Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh wrote, “The miracle is not to walk on water, but to walk on the Earth.” Every mindful step becomes a declaration that we belong. Happiness, in this light, is not pleasure or success, it is harmony. It is knowing one’s place in the pattern of things. When I reflect on moments of genuine joy, they always involve connection like the laughter of friends, the smell of pine after rain, or the feeling of being useful in someone else’s healing. None of these require perfection but they do require presence. Perhaps the work of spiritual wellness is not to escape suffering but to widen our capacity to hold it alongside beauty. As Rumi said, “The wound is the place where the light enters you.” Healing does not erase the wound, it turns it into a window.

There is a passage in Siddhartha where he listens to the river and hears every voice at once. There is the laughter, the weeping, the thunder of life. Then he realizes they form a single sound. “Om.” I think about that from time to time. I want to hear the world like that. I want to sense the unity beneath the noise and live decolonized. Empire thrives on fragmentation. Spirit thrives on wholeness. The task of our time is not to escape the world but to remember our belonging within it. When I stand again at sunrise, I sometimes whisper a simple prayer. Let me be porous to wonder. Let me meet this day with softness, not certainty. Let my happiness be humble enough to share. In that moment, nothing feels missing. I remember that peace is not a possession but a participation. The mind grows quiet, the body settles, and for a breath or two I understand. Spiritual wellness is the steady practice of remembering that we were never separate from the sacred.

A brand new day outside of Westside Boxing, Anderson, Indiana.

Presence also means embodiment. Western religion often separates spirit from body, as if holiness requires disowning the flesh. But embodiment is sacred practice. When I breathe consciously, when I stretch or walk slowly, I feel prayer happening through muscle and bone. The Stoics taught that virtue is aligning the inner and outer life. Buddhist teachers call it mindfulness in motion. Whatever the term, it is the same act of returning. The spirit, when grounded in the body, becomes uncolonizable. In this culture of constant stimulation, attention itself has become revolutionary. The world demands reaction, but healing asks for response. I try to remember that each moment of stillness repairs something empire has broken. When I sit quietly, I am refusing to be a product. When I look someone in the eyes without distraction, I am rebuilding trust. When I choose a slow walk over another hour online, I am reclaiming my time as sacred. These small refusals are forms of prayer.

Presence is also collective. We heal one another through attention. When someone speaks their pain and is met with silence instead of judgment, a kind of grace enters the room. In traditional healing circles, listening is medicine. I have witnessed moments where a single deep breath shared among strangers changed the temperature of the space. No diagnosis required, no transaction, only presence. Spiritual wellness grows in these quiet solidarities. These are spaces where no one needs to perform being healed to be loved. Happiness, too, changes shape when seen through presence. It stops being an emotion we chase and becomes an orientation toward life. It lives in gratitude, in laughter that rises unplanned, in the acceptance of impermanence. The Taoists call this harmony; Buddhists call it equanimity. Whatever the name, it’s the feeling of being at home in the world even as the world keeps changing. I don’t believe happiness is the goal of life. I think it’s the byproduct of alignment and the residue of living truthfully.

I’ve thought carefully about how to write about the people in my life who support him. I don’t want to perform outrage at them. I have been tired of arguments since before Biden was elected so you haven’t seen one from me in more than 6 years. To be clear, I don’t want to write something designed to win an argument. I think mostly because what I feel isn’t anger, it feels closer to grief. There is a particular kind of sadness that comes from watching someone you care about decide that a thing doesn’t matter. It’s not the grief of policy disagreement. People I respect hold policy positions I believe are wrong, and I have learned how to live inside that tension without it breaking the relationship. This is something else. I think what I’m grieving is the distance. Like there has been this slow realization that the moral threshold I believed we shared has shifted or perhaps was never shared at all. I thought we agreed that there were certain lines which, once crossed, disqualified a person from our trust and our allegiance. Or that a man who publicly celebrates the death of his enemies had stepped beyond the bounds of what we could excuse. Watching people I care about step over that line, or redraw it entirely, has felt like like a loss. I don’t know how to close a distance like this. I’m not sure it can be closed through persuasion, because persuasion assumes we are standing on the same ground. Some distances don’t appear all at once. They always seem to open slowly in ways you don’t notice until one ordinary Saturday morning you read four words and suddenly understand just how far apart you actually are. Before the finger points back at me, just know that I can’t fathom the celebration of anyone’s death and I haven’t done it. Even though I attribute my feeling on this matter to a humanistic philosophy, I had this realization about 15 years ago, during my Christian phase, when one of our military units killed Bin Laden. I was glad for people who felt closure and suffered losses because of 9/11 but violence begetting violence also didn’t feel Christian, and at the time, it felt like that his death might just lead to more of the same. I think I probably even quoted Proverbs about not rejoicing when your enemy falls or something like that. I am not sharing that to claim moral purity. Only to say that this isn’t a new line I’m drawing to make a political point. It’s a line I have been trying to live by for a long time. That’s why this moment feels more like some kind of mourning, rather than a political argument. All that to say I don’t know how to feel about the fact I think what I’m currently mourning are the assumptions I once believed we shared about what kind of people we were trying to be.

I remember sitting once in a crowded cathedral, surrounded by opulence. There were gilded altars, marble saints, and a sermon about prosperity. It struck me that if Jesus returned to that space, he might not recognize himself there. I thought of the poor outside the door, of the unpaid workers who built the building, of how easily religion becomes architecture instead of action. In contrast, I think of the times I have seen real faith like volunteers bathing the sick in Kolkata, Indigenous elders praying over rivers threatened by pipelines, friends sharing food they could barely afford. Those moments carried more divinity than any sermon. They reminded me that the spirit does not need spectacle, it needs sincerity. Colonialism not only stole lands, it redefined time. It divided the sacred from the secular, the Sabbath from the workday, and the human from the divine. Decolonizing spirituality means dissolving those false boundaries. It means recognizing that tending a garden, cooking a meal, or writing a letter can be as holy as kneeling in prayer. The line between worship and work disappears when both are done with love. Liberation theology once said that the only authentic prayer is action that restores justice. Perhaps happiness also depends on that restoration. Perhaps it depends on a world where joy is not private property but shared inheritance.

Faith must also reclaim mystery. Empire fears ambiguity because ambiguity cannot be monetized. But mystery is the lifeblood of the sacred. When we allow ourselves to sit in wonder without rushing to explain, we rediscover reverence. I have come to believe that faith’s truest measure is not certainty but curiosity, as well as the courage to stand before the unknown and say yes.

He wasn’t a childhood friend, and he wasn’t family, but he was one of the rare people in this town who knew how to see me. He always recognized things in me that most people overlook or catch only in glimpses. That changes the shape of grief. Losing someone like that is losing a witness to the best parts of yourself. I met him at a small watering hole in Anderson, Indiana. The sort of place where the beer is cold, the lighting is uneven, and the conversations are rarely anything more than surface level. I’m used to that. But he sat there arguing about Latin America with me as if it mattered, as if he had been waiting for someone to unpack the world with. When he found out I had traveled through some of the places he cared about, he bought beers just to keep the conversation from ending. A Facebook request came later that night. From there, we talked about fitness, nutrition, desire for sobriety, national parks, hiking trails, mountains we wanted to climb. Basically, all the kind of goals men set when they want their bodies and minds to stay honest.

I didn’t know how starved I was for that kind of engagement until he offered it without condition. It had been a long time since someone in this city showed that much genuine interest in my life. When you are a Latino sociologist in a small Midwestern city, you learn to live inside the quiet math of being slightly out of place. People don’t always know what to do with you. They see the boxing gym before they see the intellectual work. They see the physical presence before they see the community builder. He never struggled with any of that. He saw the whole thing and met me right there. When he learned about my boxing gym and what we are building, he supported it with a rare pride I barely ever get from people. He brought his son to class, asked what we needed, offered to fix things around the gym. He spoke about the place to others as though he wanted people to know his kid was training somewhere that mattered. Being around him made me carry myself a little straighter. I trusted that he was not performing anything. He respected what I do, and it showed in everything he said and didn’t say.

When someone like that dies, the grief touches places other losses don’t reach. It pulls up everything you have ever felt about belonging, visibility, and what it means to be known. Anderson is a city where I love the work but often feel the deeper parts of who I am passing unacknowledged. He caught them easily and it surprised me every time. Over the last four months, I watched him face cancer with a rare combination of courage, humor, faith, and honesty. His posts were a whole story on their own. Some were gritty. Some sounded like they had been written from the edge of pain that most people never find language for. He joked through the fear, praised his wife’s strength, made fun of himself, and held onto God with both hands. There were days he could barely breathe, and somehow, he still found a way to encourage people to get their bloodwork done and take their health seriously. He told the truth about the ugly parts. He broke tension with humor and kept showing up in spirit even as his body was failing him.

There was something in the way he moved toward his own mortality that stayed with me. He knew what was coming. He felt the fear, the grief, and the exhaustion. Still he understood what was worth holding on to. He valued time, his wife, and the people who showed up without being asked. He valued the parts of life that don’t require explanation. He wasn’t pretending to be unbreakable. He was choosing to live with intention until he couldn’t anymore. Losing him pulls me toward my own life with urgency I can’t afford to ignore. It makes me want to set more goals, stay consistent, keep my health honest, show up more fully for the people I love, and stop pretending there is always more time. Our final conversation was by phone a few weeks ago. He thought he had time. Maybe even a year or year and a half. He was preparing to move back here and we talked of the possibility of hitting some trails and what he wanted for his wife and son when he was gone. He mentioned that I don’t give myself enough credit, and that I’m doing an amazing job with my community work. He told me how awesome my family is and what a great job I’ve done navigating my girls into adulthood. I didn’t understand then that it would be the last encouragement I would ever receive from him. I keep returning to that. How people like him leave you with something to carry long after they’re gone.

He will be remembered by different people in different ways. Some will hold him close for years. Some will let the currents of living carry them forward, and the memory will fade. That is how communities work. They tend to remember unevenly. But I know this. He had real friendships. They were the kind built on something more than convenience. People knew his humor, his grit, his faith, and his heart. And even if no one else understands what he meant to me, I understand it. That’s enough. If there is a way to honor him through the work I do, it will be by holding the question he kept implying. Who are you becoming while you still have time? Ironic that my boxing coach growing up, who died of colon cancer, would raise the same question constantly. Every class at the gym, every student I stand in front of, every essay I write carries a chance to bring that question into the world with more care. His belief in me doesn’t disappear with him. It becomes part of the way I move. It becomes the voice that tells me to stay steady, stay healthy, stay curious, stay involved. It becomes the reminder that we all need people who see us clearly and that when we find them, those connections are worth treating as sacred.

So if there is anything I want a reader to carry away from this, it is this, Pay attention to the people who see you. They are few. They are gifts. They hold the parts of us that don’t always have a place to land. Tell them what they mean while you still have the chance.

And when grief finally sits down beside you, ask yourself: Whose voice will you carry forward, and how will it change the way you live?

I read an excellent book about a road trip that resulted in life changes back in 2008 right before I made the decision to move to Anderson, Indiana where I began to know a new place while also engaging in many multicultural experiences through travel. I share this wonderful essay from the beginning of the book with young adults from time to time. Even happy to read it to them from time to time and then discuss. In some ways I probably owe Donald Miller a big thanks for setting things in motion for me. This is from the Introduction of his book called Through Painted Desserts. If you read this short essay, I’d appreciate any thoughts you have about it or resonate with. My state of mind and the timing of me revisiting this essay really has me thinking about what could be next for me.

IT IS FALL HERE NOW, MY FAVORITE OF THE FOUR seasons. We get all four here, and they come at us under the doors, in through the windows. One morning you wake and need blankets; you take the fan out of the window to see clouds that mist out by midmorning, only to reveal a naked blue coolness like God yawning.

September is perfect Oregon. The blocks line up like postcards and the rosebuds bloom into themselves like children at bedtime. And in Portland we are proud of our roses; year after year, we are proud of them. When they are done, we sit in the parks and read stories into the air, whispering the gardens to sleep.

I come here, to Palio Coffee, for the big windows. If I sit outside, the sun gets on my computer screen, so I come inside, to this same table, and sit alongside the giant panes of glass. And it is like a movie out there, like a big screen of green, and today there is a man in shepherd’s clothes, a hippie,

all dirty, with a downed bike in the circle lawn across the street. He is eating bread from the bakery and drinking from a metal camp cup. He is tapping the cup against his leg, sitting like a monk, all striped in fabric. I wonder if he is happy,

his blanket strapped to the rack on his bike, his no home, his no job. I wonder if he has left it all because he hated it or because it hated him. It is true some do not do well with conventional life. They think outside things and can’t make sense of following a line. They see no walls, only doors from open

space to open space, and from open space, supposedly, to the mind of God, or at least this is what we hope for them, and what they hope for themselves.

I remember the sweet sensation of leaving, years ago, some ten now, leaving Texas for who knows where. I could not have known about this beautiful place, the Oregon I have come to love, this city of great people, this smell of coffee and these evergreens reaching up into a mist of sky, these sunsets spilling over the west hills to slide a red glow down the streets of my town.

And I could not have known then that if I had been born here, I would have left here, gone someplace south to deal with horses, to get on some open land where you can see tomorrow’s storm brewing over a high desert. I could not have known then that everybody, every person, has to leave,

has to change like seasons; they have to or they die. The seasons remind me that I must keep changing, and I want to change because it is God’s way. All my life I have been changing. I changed from a baby to a child, from soft toys to play daggers. I changed into a teenager to drive a car, into a worker to spend some money. I will change into a husband to love a woman, into a father to love a child, change houses so we are near water, and again so we are near mountains,

and again so we are near friends, keep changing with my wife, getting our love so it dies and gets born again and again, like a garden, fed by four seasons, a cycle of change.

Everybody has to change, or they expire. Everybody has to leave, everybody has to leave their home and come back so they can love it again for all new reasons.

I want to keep my soul fertile for the changes, so things keep getting born in me, so things keep dying when it is time for things to die. I want to keep walking away from the person I was a moment ago, because a mind was made to figure things out, not to read the same page recurrently.

Only the good stories have the characters different at the end than they were at the beginning. And the closest thing I can liken life to is a book, the way it stretches out on paper,

page after page, as if to trick the mind into thinking it isn’t all happening at once.

Time has pressed you and me into a book, too, this tiny chapter we share together, this vapor of a scene, pulling our seconds into minutes and minutes into hours. Everything we were is no more, and what we will become, will become what was. This is from where story stems, the stuff of its construction lying at our feet like cut strips of philosophy. I sometimes look into the endless heavens, the cosmos of which we can’t find the edge, and ask God what it means. Did You really do all of this to dazzle us? Do You really keep it shifting, rolling round the pinions to stave off boredom? God forbid Your glory would be our distraction. And God forbid we would ignore Your glory.

HERE IS SOMETHING I FOUND TO BE TRUE: YOU DON’T start processing death until you turn thirty. I live in visions, for instance, and they are cast out some fifty years, and just now,

just last year I realized my visions were cast too far, they were out beyond my life span. It frightened me to think of it, that I passed up an early marriage or children to write these silly books, that I bought the lie that the academic life had to be separate from relational experience, as though God only wanted us to learn cognitive ideas, as if the heart of a man were only created to resonate with movies. No, life cannot be understood flat on a page. It has to be lived; a person has to get out of his head, has to fall in love, has to memorize poems,

has to jump off bridges into rivers, has to stand in an empty desert and whisper sonnets under his breath:

I’ll tell you how the sun rose

A ribbon at a time…

It’s a living book, this life; it folds out in a million settings,

cast with a billion beautiful characters, and it is almost over for you. It doesn’t matter how old you are; it is coming to a close quickly, and soon the credits will roll and all your friends will fold out of your funeral and drive back to their homes in cold and still and silence. And they will make a fire and pour some wine and think about how you once were … and feel a kind of sickness at the idea you never again will be.

So soon you will be in that part of the book where you are holding the bulk of the pages in your left hand, and only a thin wisp of the story in your right. You will know by the page count, not by the narrative, that the Author is wrapping things up. You begin to mourn its ending, and want to pace yourself slowly toward its closure, knowing the last lines will speak of something beautiful, of the end of something long and earned,

and you hope the thing closes out like last breaths, like whispers about how much and who the characters have come to love, and how authentic the sentiments feel when they have earned a hundred pages of qualification.

And so my prayer is that your story will have involved some leaving and some coming home, some summer and some winter,

some roses blooming out like children in a play. My hope is your story will be about changing, about getting something beautiful born inside of you, about learning to love a woman or a man, about learning to love a child, about moving yourself around water, around mountains, around friends, about learning to love others more than we love ourselves, about learning oneness as a way of understanding God. We get one story, you and I, and one story alone. God has established the elements, the setting and the climax and the resolution. It would be a crime not to venture out, wouldn’t it?

It might be time for you to go. It might be time to change,

to shine out.

I want to repeat one word for you:

Leave.

Roll the word around on your tongue for a bit. It is a beautiful word, isn’t it? So strong and forceful, the way you have always wanted to be. And you will not be alone. You have never been alone. Don’t worry. Everything will still be here when you get back. It is you who will have changed.

There was a time I believed that mental health meant getting fixed. It was a belief inherited from a culture obsessed with productivity. Every symptom was a disruption to be managed, and every sadness was an obstacle to be removed. Eventually every rest became a threat to output. I learned to interpret my own exhaustion as weakness, my anxiety as failure, and my depression as laziness. Healing, in this world, had nothing to do with wholeness, it was only about restoration to function. The more I have unlearned this colonial logic, the more I’ve begun to understand that what we call “mental health” has long been shaped by the same forces that measure worth by utility. It is not only our minds that have been colonized, but our understanding of what it means to feel, suffer, or heal.

I think of the first time I sought therapy. I sat across from a white clinician in an office decorated with posters that read “Progress is possible.” She asked me about my goals, and I didn’t know how to answer. I didn’t want progress. I wanted peace. I didn’t want to become more productive. I wanted to stop performing. Yet even in therapy, the conversation kept circling back to adjustment. I was to be learning to cope with a system that was harming me rather than questioning it. I left that room with the uneasy sense that my pain was being repackaged into resilience. It seemed that my survival was being measured by how quietly I endured. I would later come to understand this as a form of psychological colonization. It was nothing more than a subtle rewriting of my inner world to fit the outer demands of empire.

The more I read thinkers like Frantz Fanon, the more I began to see the parallels between his descriptions of colonial trauma and the modern epidemic of mental illness. Fanon wrote that colonization is not just the occupation of land but the occupation of consciousness. It teaches the oppressed to doubt their worth and internalize inferiority, while seeing themselves through the eyes of those who dominate them. This psychic violence continues long after the physical chains are gone. In our context, the empire has changed shape. It speaks the language of consumer choice and self-improvement, but the effect is similar. We are trained to doubt our inner knowing, to compare, to compete, and to distrust stillness. The modern self-help industry, for all its intentions, often reproduces the same logic. It tells us that happiness is a project, that self-worth is an achievement, and that our suffering can be optimized away. We are not taught to sit with pain as information, or to view distress as a signal of imbalance in the collective body. We are told to medicate our discontent so the machine can keep running.

Reclaiming Context and Community

I am not against therapy or medicine. I have seen both save lives. But I am against the way empire turns everything, even our care, into a commodity. When healing becomes an industry, it begins to reflect the hierarchies of the world it claims to treat. Those with money get access to choice and continuity. Those without are left with waiting lists, overworked counselors, and clinics that treat symptoms but not systems. The language of diagnosis can itself become another colonizer’s tongue. This language categorizes behaviors through frameworks built on Western epistemologies. When a young Black man is called “defiant” rather than “depressed,” when an Indigenous woman’s grief is labeled “borderline” rather than historical trauma, when a refugee’s flashbacks are reduced to “disorder” rather than testimony, we see how clinical categories can erase context. To decolonize the mind is to recontextualize suffering and understand that it is not personal failure. It is an intelligent response to oppression.

I’ve seen this most clearly through the young men I coach at the boxing gym. Many come in carrying unspoken rage, grief, or confusion that no one has ever asked about. They have been told to “man up,” and to fight rather than feel. They’ve been asked to perform toughness as a form of safety. When they finally start talking, after the sweat, after the gloves come off, the stories pour out. These are stories of neglect, racism, hunger, incarceration, and often loss. The first punch that lands clean is rarely against another opponent. It’s against silence. I’ve learned that healing can begin in motion, in sweat, in rhythm. The gym becomes a kind of counter-therapy, a community that listens through presence rather than paperwork. I think of one kid who said after sparring, “This is the first place I feel like I’m not crazy.” He wasn’t crazy. He was human in a world that punishes vulnerability.

Mental health within colonized contexts has always been political. There is the plantation, the reservation, the prison, the factory. These have all been institutions of both control and despair. When we trace the lineage of psychiatry, we find it entangled with colonial administration. Early “asylums” in colonized nations functioned less as places of healing and more as instruments of social control, pathologizing Indigenous spirituality and labeling political dissent as illness. The field has evolved, yes, but its architecture remains haunted by those origins. Even today, wellness spaces often center whiteness through imagery, through access, and through norms of expression. When I walk into a yoga studio or meditation retreat, I feel the dissonance between the practices’ ancestral roots and the commodified versions being sold. Colonialism does not only steal land, it steals practices of restoration and sells them back to us at a markup.

The decolonized approach to mental health asks us to remember what our ancestors already knew. The mind cannot be separated from the body, the land, or the collective. Healing happens in relationship. It happens in ritual, in art, in storytelling, in touch. It happens when we belong again. The Western model often isolates healing within the individual. The decolonial model restores it to the community. It does not ask, “What is wrong with you?” It asks, “What has happened to us?” In that question, there is solidarity instead of shame. There is an acknowledgment that the self is plural, and that we are all interdependent expressions of the same field of being.

I used to believe trauma was something that happened and ended. Like a sharp event that could be named, dated, and filed away. But the more I listened to my own body, to my students, and to the people I coach, the more I realized that trauma doesn’t end, it tends to reverberate. It’s stored in language, in posture, in the ways we protect or avoid intimacy. It hides in habits that once kept us safe but now keep us stuck. It lingers in silence. For those of us shaped by histories of colonization, displacement, or violence, trauma is personal and generational. It’s an inheritance passed down in fears and beliefs about what it means to survive. The first time I read Resmaa Menakem’s My Grandmother’s Hands, I felt a recognition that was almost physical. He wrote that trauma lives in the body, not only in the mind, and that healing must begin there too. I thought about my own body. Years of tension in my shoulders, the way I hold my breath when someone raises their voice, the impulse to withdraw when conflict arises. These are not random habits, they are adaptations. My nervous system learned early to scan for danger, to anticipate rejection, and to seek control. And while those responses once helped me survive, they also keep me from fully living. Trauma teaches the body to mistake familiarity for safety, even when familiarity hurts. Decolonizing the mind, then, begins with re-educating the body. A reminder is often needed that safety is possible without control and love is not always a threat. I have come to see that healing from trauma isn’t a return to who we were before, because colonization ensures there is no “before” untouched by violence. Healing is a remembering of what we have always been underneath the fear and what our ancestors knew before empire taught them to forget. In Indigenous and ancestral worldviews, trauma was never an individual wound, it was a tear in the fabric of community. Healing required ceremony, storytelling, rhythm, and collective presence. Empire replaced those with institutions with hospitals, prisons, churches, and schools that treat pain as pathology rather than wisdom. When a people’s way of healing is criminalized or pathologized, the trauma deepens. The cure becomes part of the disease.

I saw this dynamic play out in the communities where I’ve worked. A young man once told me, “I don’t talk about my past because I don’t want to seem weak.” He said it like a confession, but it was a lesson he had inherited. His father didn’t talk either. Neither did his grandfather. Generations of men silenced by a system that rewarded stoicism and punished emotion. When I asked him what he did when he felt overwhelmed, he said, “I go fight or I drink.” Both are ways to escape the body, to silence its messages. The colonial project has always depended on that disconnection. It is always training us to distrust what we feel. Because if you can’t feel your own pain, you also can’t feel the pain of others. That’s how domination sustains itself through numbness. My own healing didn’t start in a therapist’s office but in a boxing gym. The sound of gloves hitting the heavy bag, the rhythm of breath, the ritual of wrapping hands. It all became a kind of ceremony. Sweat replaced words I didn’t yet have. Over time, I learned that healing doesn’t always look peaceful. Sometimes it looks like shouting in a parking lot, like shaking uncontrollably during meditation, like crying at the sight of something beautiful because beauty reminds you of what you lost. Trauma is the body’s story of too much, too fast, too soon, and healing asks us to move at the pace of trust. To slow down. To breathe. To let the nervous system relearn safety through repetition and care. I have learned that the body does not forget, but it can forgive. For many of us, trauma and colonization are intertwined so tightly that it’s hard to tell where one ends and the other begins. The violence of empire was both physical and epistemic. It fractured the ways we know, love, and make meaning. It taught us to see ourselves through the eyes of the colonizer who sees us as fragmented, defective, and in need of saving. This psychological colonization is what Fanon described as “epidermalization,” the internalization of inferiority, the haunting sense that our skin, language, or customs make us less. That haunting is its own trauma, one that seeps into parenting, relationships, day to day interactions, and our concepts of self. It tells us to hide our accents, to temper our joy, to question our worth. Sometimes it may seem that healing from this kind of trauma is about integration into the dominant culture. It is really about remembering that we were never broken to begin with.

I used to think healing meant closure, like a wound that scars over and disappears. But now I see it more like tending a garden after years of neglect. You can’t rush the soil. You have to remove debris, nourish it, and wait for new growth to emerge in its own time. Sometimes weeds come back, and sometimes they stay. The goal is never perfection, it’s renewal. When I started seeing my healing process through this ecological lens, I stopped blaming myself for setbacks. The body, like the Earth, has seasons. There are winters of rest, summers of expression, autumns of letting go. Colonization forced us into endless summer with constant production and constant striving. Decolonization allows for rest, for death and rebirth, and for cycles of becoming. Still, trauma has a way of sneaking back through the side door. Even after years of reflection and therapy, there are moments when a tone of voice or a memory triggers a flood of adrenaline. The old stories rush in. You’re not safe. You’re not enough. I’ve learned that the goal is not to eliminate these reactions but to meet them with curiosity. My trauma responses are not enemies. They are younger versions of me trying to help. When I speak to them gently, sometimes literally, out loud, they calm down. This is what I mean by a decolonial mind. It is a mind that does not exile its wounded parts but welcomes them home. There’s a story from many Indigenous traditions that says trauma enters when a part of the soul flees the body during a moment of terror. Healing is the process of calling that part back. I think of that often when I see someone laugh for the first time after months of despair, or when I notice joy returning to my own face after grief. This is what reclamation looks like. It is fragments returning and spirit reinhabiting flesh. Colonization scattered our souls across continents and generations. Healing gathers them back. Every act of tenderness, every circle of listening, every breath of forgiveness is a summoning of those lost pieces.

One of the hardest truths I’ve had to accept is that healing doesn’t always make us more comfortable. It often makes us more aware. When you stop numbing, you start feeling everything. The joy, yes, but also the sorrow of a world still structured by trauma. Sometimes I feel the weight of collective pain pressing on my chest. I see the violence against women, the erasure of Indigenous languages, the loneliness of digital culture. It’s tempting to withdraw again and to seek anesthesia through distraction or busyness. But healing is never insulation. It’s integration. It’s learning to stay open without being consumed. I believe it’s also carrying empathy without drowning in it. This, I think, is what the decolonial mind trains itself to do. It holds the world’s suffering with dignity and responds with care instead of despair. When I teach sociology, I often see students recognize for the first time that what they’ve carried personally has structural roots. A young woman once wrote that she thought her anxiety came from “being bad at life,” until she learned about systemic inequality, intergenerational poverty, and gendered expectations. She said, “It’s not all my fault.” That realization alone is healing. It transforms shame into understanding. Empire thrives on isolation. It wants us to think our pain is private and not political. But when we connect our wounds to the world that shaped them, we begin to find solidarity. Solidarity is medicine. I also think about the role of forgiveness in this process. I don’t really mean the kind preached from pulpits to pacify the oppressed, but the radical kind that frees us from the cycle of vengeance. Forgiveness, as I’ve come to understand it, is not about excusing harm. It’s about refusing to let harm define the boundaries of our imagination. To forgive is to release ourselves from the colonizer’s logic of punishment and retribution. It’s to create room for new stories to take root. Some of my deepest healing moments have come from deciding that how I was wronged no longer had permission to dictate how I live.

There are times, though, when I resist the very idea of healing. When I see injustice continuing, when I feel exhausted by the slow pace of change, when I watch entire communities retraumatized by systems that never seem to end. In those moments, I remind myself that resistance and healing are not separate, they are parallel currents of the same river. To rest, to grieve, to nurture, to imagine. These are all are forms of resistance. The empire wants us traumatized because trauma keeps people predictable. Healing, then, becomes a revolutionary act. It reclaims the capacity to feel joy even in the ruins. In recent years, I’ve learned that trauma work is not only about release but also about re-rooting. When I walk barefoot in my garden, I feel something ancient stirring. There is an awareness that my nervous system is older than modernity and that the soil itself is an ancestor. The Earth has witnessed more trauma than any of us, yet it continues to regenerate. Maybe that’s the final lesson. Healing is not about erasing scars but about becoming fertile again. The wound becomes the place where the light enters, as Rumi said, but it also becomes the place where life returns. Trauma, healing, and decolonization are not three separate stories. They are one long narrative of return. Return to the body. Return to the land. Return to community. Return to self. It’s not a clean process. It is messy, circular, and full of setbacks. Still, every time I witness someone reclaiming their voice, their laughter, or their capacity to love, I know the work is working. We are all remembering together. Healing does not happen in isolation. It happens in circles, in sweat, in soil, in song, in the brave act of showing up again and again for a life that once seemed impossible. That, to me, is liberation. It is the slow, sacred undoing of everything that told us we could not heal.

For a long time, I thought of sobriety as subtraction. It was like the loss of something I once used to ease the edges of living. I imagined it as absence, a dry space where pleasure used to be. What I didn’t expect was how much it would give back. Eventually came a clarity, honesty, and a strange kind of strength that only grows when illusions collapse. Rohr was right. Transformation doesn’t always arrive with fireworks. Sometimes it begins when the scaffolding of denial gives way.

When I quit drinking, I didn’t feel heroic. I felt stripped. I had to sit with the noise I had been muting along with the hum of anxiety, the ache of old regrets, and the fatigue of pretending everything was fine. Sobriety felt like standing in a room where every sound echoed. But in that silence, I began to hear things I’d been missing. Things like birds in the morning, my granddaughter’s laughter, and the steady rhythm of my own heartbeat after a long run. Clarity became its own kind of intoxication, though one that asked me to stay awake.

Sobriety, for me, isn’t an escape from something, it’s a return to something older. It’s a remembering. Indigenous writers like Harold Johnson call this the Red Road, a path that leads back to balance after generations of forgetting. In Firewater, he writes that alcohol didn’t only wound Indigenous communities by numbing pain, it replaced ceremony, language, and relationship. I see echoes of that in my own family history, and in how colonial patterns of silence and survival seep into modern lives. Addiction becomes a shadow form of belonging when community is broken.

Every empire depends on sedation. Rome had its circuses. The modern world has its screens and substances. The colonial project was never only about land. It was about attention, about what people were taught to worship and what they were taught to forget. Sobriety, in that sense, is not only personal recovery but an act of decolonization. It’s choosing to wake up from the trance of consumption and remember that peace is not pleasure so much as it is participation.

When something old falls apart, as Rohr says, the new self doesn’t arrive fully formed. It arrives as space. Space for grief, space for patience, space for the truth to grow roots. In those early months, I learned that sobriety has little to do with perfection and everything to do with curiosity. It asks, what if I no longer needed to numb what hurts? What if discomfort is not punishment but instruction? Michael Easter calls this the “comfort crisis,” the cultural allergy to struggle that weakens us. Sobriety has been my cure for that allergy. It reintroduced me to challenge, to sweat, and to the humility of being fully human again.