What does it mean to be Indigenous?
To have once been Indigenous?
To belong to the colonizer class?
To reach back now, in this ancestral season, and try to remember what was taken — and what still lives in your bones?
This month, across traditions, the veil thins.
Samhain. Hoodoo Heritage Month. Día de los Muertos, ancestral veneration rites from the continent, and so many more.
We slow down.
We listen.
We feel the presence of those who came before us — not as ghosts haunting the past, but as breath still shaping the present.
What It Means to Be Indigenous
To be Indigenous is to belong to the original people of a place — those who hold a relationship with the land that predates empire, colonization, or borders.
It is not merely an identity; it is a relationship — a sacred contract between people, spirit, and earth.
It means living in reciprocity, not domination.
It means holding memory, language, and ceremony that tie you to a place long before any government declared ownership of it.
It means knowing that land is not property; it is kin.
Globally, Indigenous peoples make up just 6% of the world’s population, yet they safeguard over 80% of the planet’s remaining biodiversity.
That is not a coincidence; it’s a covenant.
They have carried the weight of survival through attempted erasure: genocide, boarding schools, stolen children, and stolen tongues.
And still, they remain — keepers of balance in a world that has forgotten how to listen.
What It Means to Have Once Been Indigenous
Some of us carry a quieter ache — a severed lineage.
Once, our ancestors lived in communion with land and spirit. They were colonized, converted, and assimilated. They survived by becoming something they were never meant to be.
To have once been Indigenous is to carry ancestral amnesia — the loss of language, ceremony, and belonging that colonization demanded as payment for survival.
Our bodies remember what history erased.
Our dreams hum with echoes of names we no longer know how to pronounce.
This isn’t about guilt; it’s about honesty.
Assimilation was not liberation; it was survival through erasure.
To reconnect with that truth is to begin healing the fracture; to grieve what was taken and to honor what endures.
What It Means to Belong to the Colonizer Class
For some, ancestry shifts over generations: from oppressed to oppressor, from stolen to inheritor.
To now belong to the colonizer class is to live with the benefits of a system built on someone else’s erasure.
It is to carry privilege shaped by harm you didn’t personally cause, but that your lineage continues to profit from.
This isn’t about shame; it’s about stewardship.
Because knowing you live within the colonizer’s comfort means recognizing that comfort as unearned, and choosing to use it for repair.
Belonging to the colonizer class means you have access to power, and therefore, a responsibility to disrupt the systems that sustain it.
Your task is not to disown your lineage, but to reclaim your humanity — to reject the supremacy it promised you and return to the relational ways your ancestors once lived before empire taught them to forget.
Reconnecting with Respect During the Season of Descent
This is the season to remember.
Across cultures, this is the month when we honor the dead — not with fear, but with gratitude.
We cook their favorite meals.
We speak their names aloud.
We build altars not for aesthetics, but for relationship.
To reconnect with respect means coming to your ancestors humbly, not demanding, but listening.
Ask yourself:
What did they endure so I could exist?
Where did they forget themselves in the process of survival?
How can I repair that forgetting through how I live, breathe, and love today?
This is not performative spirituality.
It’s not “ancestor worship.”
It’s the work of returning to the bones — remembering that you are the continuation of everything that survived inside them.
Reconnection begins with reverence.
You don’t need to know all the names. You just need to be willing to listen to the whispers that move through you.
🩶 The Descent as Devotion
The descent is not punishment — it’s pilgrimage.
You are being invited back into your own roots.
Breathe slowly.
Feel where the story of separation still lives in your chest.
Every exhale is an act of release; every inhale, a reclamation.
Your body is the altar.
Your breath is the offering.
Let the remembering happen here.
(Paid subscribers receive this week’s guided somatic meditation companion in the bonus recording — a grounding practice for your own descent.)
Making Space for Grief
A Sacred, Somatic Practice in Twelve Principles
Grief is not a problem to fix; it is a teacher to sit beside. In this Season of Descent, we honor grief as sacred… tender, intelligent, and worthy of room. The body is our altar; somatic practice is how we make that room with care.
A note on pacing: move slowly. Take breaks. Drink water. You decide what is shared and what stays private. Your consent and choice lead everything below.
1) Safety & Consent
Principle: Nothing opens without permission.
Practice: Whisper, “Body, do I have your yes to feel a little more?” If not, choose rest. That is sacred.
2) Orientation to Now
Principle: Presence makes feeling survivable.
Practice (30s): Name 3 things you see, 2 you hear, 1 you feel on your skin. You are here.
3) Ground & Weight
Principle: Weight belongs to the earth, not just the shoulders.
Practice (60s): Feel feet, seat, back. Let 10% of your weight drop into what holds you.
4) Breath as Bridge
Principle: Breath widens the room around big feelings.
Practice (1–2 min): Inhale 3, hold 1, exhale 4. On the exhale, whisper, “I release a little.”
5) Sensation Before Story
Principle: The body speaks in sensations first.
Practice (60s): Name qualities: warm/cool, tight/loose, heavy/fluttering. No analysis, just noticing.
6) Pendulation
Principle: Move between comfort and pain to build capacity.
Practice (2 min): Touch a neutral/pleasant place (hand on heart), then a tender place (throat, belly). Back and forth, slowly.
7) Titration
Principle: Small doses prevent overwhelm.
Practice: Set a timer for 90 seconds of feeling, then 90 seconds of rest (look at sky, sip water). Repeat once if there’s capacity.
8) Containment & Boundary
Principle: Edges help feelings have shape.
Practice (30s): Wrap arms across your torso or hold a cushion. Tell your body, “This is enough for today.”
9) Movement & Sound
Principle: What the body feels, it can move; what it moves, it can release.
Practice (2 min): Gentle rocking; low hum on the exhale. If tears come, let them be prayer.
10) Co-Regulation
Principle: We borrow steadiness from kin—human, land, or ancestor.
Practice (1 min): Lean your back to a wall or a tree; imagine an ancestor’s palm between your shoulders saying, “I’ve got you.”
11) Meaning-Making & Ritual
Principle: Ritual turns pain into relation.
Practice: Place a small offering (water, flower, salt) on your altar: “For what was lost, for what remains, for what will be made whole.”
12) Completion & Integration
Principle: Close the practice so the nervous system knows we’re done for now.
Practice (60s): Press palms together; bow your head: “Enough for today.” Rinse hands in water. Eat something grounding.
🕯️ A 5-Minute Grief Ritual (Use Anytime)
Orient (30s): Name 3 things you see.
Ground (60s): Feel feet/seat; exhale longer than you inhale.
Name (60s): Whisper what you’re grieving in one sentence.
Move/Sound (90s): Rock or sway; hum softly.
Offer (30s): Place water or a tear on the altar: “For them, for me.”
Close (30s): Hands to heart: “I am safe enough to stop.” Eat a bite of something real.
After-care: drink water, put your bare feet to ground if possible, and do one ordinary task (fold a cloth, wash a cup) to signal completion.
Why this matters: Grief clears the channel between you and your people. Making somatic room for it is not indulgence—it is lineage repair. When you befriend your grief, you stop outsourcing it as harm.
Ancestral Accountability
Some of your ancestors did harm.
Some resisted it.
Some were both.
Healing is not pretending they were all righteous; it’s telling the truth about what they did and choosing differently now.
When you honor your ancestors, don’t romanticize them, reckon with them.
Ancestral accountability is the bridge between reverence and repair.
Healing the lineage means releasing your inheritance of silence.
Grounding in Reciprocity
As you honor your ancestors, also honor the Indigenous stewards of the land you live on now.
Learn their names. Support their sovereignty.
Acknowledge that you are a guest on their land.
Ancestral veneration without land acknowledgment is incomplete.
Healing without accountability is avoidance.
The veil thins not just between life and death — but between denial and truth.
Between comfort and consequence.
Between who we were taught to be and who we were before empire told us we had to forget.
Cultural Stewardship
Honor is not imitation.
If you do not come from a lineage of altar work or Hoodoo practice, begin with listening.
Support Black and Indigenous teachers. Cite your sources. Offer reciprocity through financial support and solidarity.
Remembrance without reciprocity is consumption.
True reverence restores relationship.
Ancestral Future Vision
You are someone’s ancestor in training.
The choices you make now are writing their inheritance.
How do you want them to remember you…
as the one who kept silence,
or the one who broke it with love?
LIBERATE Framework™ | A Taste of the Work
Each Monday’s free reflection is a doorway.
What follows is a glimpse of the deeper journey explored weekly in the paid Liberation Education community.
31% OFF all annual memberships this month
in honor of Hoodoo Heritage Month and the Season of Descent.
Learn: Whose land are you on? What stories were erased to make room for yours?
Integrate: Where do you feel your ancestors in your body?
Build: Create an altar or ritual that honors both your lineage and the land’s stewards.
Empower: Speak their stories aloud as acts of remembrance.
Reclaim: Cook their foods. Sing their songs. Name their names.
Act: Support Indigenous and Black-led land return or cultural preservation efforts.
Transform: Turn guilt into responsibility.
Envision: A world where remembering is communal, not solitary.
Practice Your Praxis | Self, Home, and Work
SELF:
What part of me still carries my ancestors’ silence?
How can I honor their resilience without reenacting their pain?
HOME:
What rituals of remembrance can I bring into my household this month — even simple ones like lighting a candle, cooking a family recipe, or teaching a story?
WORK:
What would it look like to practice ancestral accountability in professional or communal spaces — in how I use power, voice, and access?
Tracing the Threads | A Lineage Reflection Map
Take a few moments to map what you know.
Whose names do I carry?
Whose stories were silenced?
What songs, foods, or languages live in my memory?
What am I ready to reclaim — and what must I release?
Keep Journeying Deeper
If this piece resonates with you — don’t stop here.
Join the Season of Descent paid tier for lessons, somatic practices, playlists, and communal reflection spaces.
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Share the Ceremony
If this reflection moved you, share it with three people who are also remembering.
Forward it, post it, or tag @desireebstephens with the hashtag #ReturningToTheBones so our collective descent becomes a visible act of communal healing.
A Closing Integration Practice
When you finish reading, place your hand on your heart.
Whisper softly: I remember.
Take three deep breaths.
On the third, speak aloud one way you will honor your lineage this week.
That is the beginning of decolonization — remembrance turned into movement.
Ways to Journey Deeper
Awareness is only the first threshold; practice is where liberation begins to take root.
On October 14th at 9:30 AM EST, Myself and
are offering
Radical Self-Love Meditations for White-Bodied People Leaving White Supremacy. This is the second cohort and goes on for 4 weeks. It is a live (Zoom), intimate class designed to help you meet the truths that rise in your body with compassion, not collapse.
This isn’t a performance of allyship.
It’s a practice of reckoning, release, and repair.
A space to learn how to hold discomfort without defensiveness,
and to begin transforming guilt into grounded accountability.
There are only 20 seats available to keep the circle intimate.
For every 5 seats purchased, an equity seat is opened for someone who might not otherwise have access, because liberation must always include redistribution.
Reserve your place here:
👉 Join the Class
Additional Resources
✨ Download the App — 31 Days of Shadow Work for Liberation
Step into the Season of Descent with 31 guided prompts, somatic practices, and altar invitations for just $11. A sacred container to support your shadow work and liberation journey: Download here
✨ Download the Ebook-Dismantling Supremacy Culture: Understanding and Overcoming Its 15 Pillars Download here
✨ Join the Liberation Education Academy focus group — where you will get the opportunity to see what is happening in 2026 and co-create: Join here
✨ Offer direct support
buy me a coffee
support my journey into becoming a PsychoSomatic Practitioner (began Sept 15th)
or simply give an offering of gratitude: Give thanks here
✨ Explore more tools and resources — desireebstephens.bio
May this descent be honest.
May the ancestors find you listening.
May you shed what whiteness taught you to protect,
and rise, not as innocent, but as whole.
In solidarity and liberation,
Desireé B. Stephens, CPS-P
Educator | Counselor | Community Builder
Founder, Make Shi(f)t Happen
New Agreements, New Systems, Deeper Connections
Writer of Liberation Education
Where Reflection Meets Transformation