Two years before the pandemic, I started a divorce and moved back to Mississippi. I didn’t know it yet, but that was the first step toward a spiritual awakening on a Jamaican hillside that would rewire me from the cell up.
I want to tell you the truth about how I got here, because the version people usually hear is too clean.
It didn’t start with a lightning bolt. It started with paperwork.
The undoing
About two years before the pandemic, I filed for divorce and moved back to Mississippi. On paper, I had done everything right. Degrees. A job. A marriage. The whole architecture of a life that was supposed to prove something — that I’d made it, that I was fine, that the plan had worked. And still, something in me would not sit down. It never had. I just hadn’t had the stillness to notice until the marriage ended and the noise of “doing everything right” finally quieted enough for me to hear it.
So I did the only honest thing left to do. I stopped performing a life and started excavating one.
I began re-learning my own body. Re-meeting myself as a woman, not as a role. And underneath all of it, I started asking a question I’d never had language for growing up in rural Mississippi, moving in and out of scattered church pews without ever quite landing: how did our ancestors actually connect to the divine, before anyone else got their hands on it?
Traditional religion had never fully held me. Not because I didn’t believe in God — I always did — but because what I’d inherited felt like it was missing pieces, or worse, that some of the pieces had been swapped out on purpose. I started to understand that I was carrying more than my own life. I was carrying generations of unprocessed weight — trauma and survival mechanisms passed down not as stories but as inheritance, written into the body, maybe even into the DNA itself. My people, as far back as I could trace, likely never had the chance to heal any of it, or to reclaim their own sovereignty from what was done to them in this country. Nobody had gone back for it.
So I decided I would.
Venerating my ancestors meant venerating myself. Asking for their liberation was, without my even realizing it, how I began liberating me.
The altar
Like a lot of people starting this path, I began with an altar. It moved around with me — different rooms, different arrangements — but it always held the same four things: earth, wind, fire, water. The elements that hold up everything alive and that most of us go our whole lives never actually building a relationship with.
Every time I stood in front of it, I was doing something simple and enormous at once: offering my ancestors love, gratitude, forgiveness. Asking them to be released from the density of what they carried, so they could turn around and guide me through what I was carrying now. I didn’t know the word for it then, but I was learning to alchemize — to take dense, stuck energy and transmute it into something I could actually move through. Every act of honoring them was clearing a pathway in me. I was becoming receptive to my own guidance for the first time in my life.
The choosing
Then 2020 happened, and like a lot of people, something in me cracked open further. I was in Mississippi, teaching English online, watching the whole world stop. And in the middle of all that stillness, a desire rose up in me that would not be reasoned with: leave.
Not leave for anywhere. I had one requirement, and it was non-negotiable: a predominantly Black country. I wanted to exist somewhere I didn’t have to explain myself. Somewhere blackness wasn’t a variable to manage. I looked at what I had, what was possible, and I chose Jamaica.
The moment the borders reopened after lockdown, I got on a plane.
I want to be clear about something: I didn’t arrive enlightened. I arrived open. And almost immediately, something in my spiritual energy began to climb.
The year of putting it together
It took about a year of living there before I understood what had actually happened. I’d heard of astrocartography — the idea that certain places on the earth pull you toward them for reasons your logical mind can’t always name, but that are essential to the life you’re actually here to live. A year into my time in Jamaica, I started connecting my own dots. This hadn’t been a whim. I had been called here. I didn’t know yet where the calling led. I just knew I had to trust it enough to keep walking.
My spiritual experiences kept intensifying. I started describing myself, half-joking, as having “free-range energy” — less and less tethered to the 3D, physical version of existing that most of us are trained to call reality. As that spiritual muscle got stronger, the guidance I was receiving got clearer. Something was building toward a threshold. I just didn’t know the date yet.
April 9th
On April 9th, 2024 — the day after a lunar eclipse — I was in Spanish Town, Jamaica, when a dormant, ancient energy that had been sleeping in my body my entire life woke up all at once.
I don’t have a clean way to describe it that captures the size of it, but I’ll try. I felt like I had been born again. Not metaphorically — physically, cellularly. It was as if the historic DNA inside me had been dormant my entire life and, in that moment, switched on. My whole energetic framework didn’t just shift; it was rebuilt, cell by cell, down to what felt like my original divine blueprint, and then reassembled from there. I was experiencing reality on a completely different frequency than I had ever known.
I had touched pieces of this before — moments of release, moments of feeling lighter, more elevated. This was not that. This was new. I felt like I was experiencing the world for the first time in my life, and it cost me everything I had — I was completely wiped out for three days afterward. But underneath the exhaustion was something I can only describe as free. Expansive. What some traditions would call touching a light body.
It felt as if every cell in my body had been stripped down to its original divine blueprint and reconstructed anew.
What it taught me
In the aftermath, I started to understand something that has shaped everything I teach now: spiritual knowledge isn’t just theory. It has a scientific foundation, whether or not the systems around us ever taught us to see it. That awakening stripped away my physical limitations just long enough to show me what it feels like to tether your energy directly to God — something that’s almost impossible to do while you’re operating from fear, worry, and lack, or while you’ve been trained your whole life to go looking for God somewhere outside yourself.
Here’s what I now know in my body, not just my mind: we already carry the frequency of God. The work is syncing our own energy until we’re aligned with it. That alignment is the doorway — to what some would call heaven, to the ability to actually manifest what you desire in the physical world, not as a wish, but as a match.
And it was venerating my ancestors that walked me to that frequency in the first place. The old knowledge systems always understood something we were taught to forget: that God isn’t a figure to petition from a distance. God is an energy that runs through you. You are the altar. Your body is the channel. That’s why going back for ancestral wisdom matters so much — they already knew the way. They were always trying to tell us.
Where this leaves you
I’m not telling you this so you’ll believe you need a hillside in Jamaica and a lunar eclipse to be whole. I’m telling you because I think the disconnection so many of us feel — the sense that something isn’t aligning no matter how many boxes we check — is not a flaw. It’s a signal. It was for me.
Pre-colonial, pre-patriarchal understanding holds pieces of our collective liberation that we are only now, collectively, circling back for. Whichever path you walk toward the divine — your ancestors, a tradition you already hold, or something you haven’t found language for yet — I believe it can lead you home, if you let it be more than theory. The science was always underneath the spirit. Somebody just told us to stop looking.
I hope my story, this specific and strange and true, gives you permission to trust whatever is stirring in you right now, even if you can’t explain it yet. Mine didn’t make sense for a long time either. I just kept walking toward it.
If any of this resonates, What It Means to Decolonize the Divine is where I lay out the fuller teaching behind what happened to me in Jamaica. And if you’re ready to go deeper in your own life — one-on-one, with someone who has lived this — The Return Journey is where we’d begin.