Episode 01: Surrender to Truth
“For some time now, I have seen that we cannot fully create effective movements for social change if individuals struggling for that change are not also self-actualized or working towards that end. When wounded individuals come together in groups to make change our collective struggle is often undermined by all that has not been dealt with emotionally. Those of us committed to feminist movement, to black liberation struggle, need to work at self-actualization.”
There is no freedom without healing and truth.
In our first episode of the season, we explore this season’s theme of surrender by learning how to surrender to the truth. We start by offering a spiritual-political definition of Black feminist surrender, a move of power that necessitates that we choose what we surrender to. Then we use the wisdom of bell hooks, from her book sisters of the yam: black women and self-recovery, to unpack what we must surrender to—the truth. Brendane shares the truth of what brought her to this podcast. In the last segment, she discusses Megan thee Stallion’s Cobra and Hiss as examples of Black feminist surrender and empowered vulnerability.
Listen to the episode here. Scroll down for the transcript.
Read
sisters of the yam: black women and self-recovery, bell hooks
Surrendering to Our Spiritual Assignment, Ayana Zaire Cotton
grief: a pathway to peace, Brendane A. Tynes
The Power of Surrender, Judith Orloff
Parable of the Sower, Octavia Butler
Listen
Cobra, Megan thee Stallion
Hiss, Megan thee Stallion
J Christ, Lil Nas X
Get Up 10, Cardi B
I Surrender All, CeCe Winans
Reflect
How will you testify to your truth and to the truth?
When we surrender to the truth, that it is our fear of death, our fear of loneliness, our fear of ostracization, our fear of alienation, our fear of poverty, our fear of all of these things that drive us to create this distorted view of reality, what do we let go of?
When we surrender to the truth that we are hurtling towards a fascist end to the world-that-is where our water, our air, our food, the very dirt from which our food grows from right and the earth are being poisoned, what possibilities for revolution are opened?
Acknowledgments: We would like to thank Mayyadda, The People’s Psalmist, for allowing us to use her song On My Way for our title theme. Check out her newest album, Try&Remember.
We would also like to thank Ayana Zaire Cotton for the gift that is Seeda School. It is this Black feminist dream space where I got the nudge to follow through on my own spiritual assignment.
Transcript
[Content Warning 00:35] For my listeners who may be impacted by hearing about interpersonal violence, this episode does contain references. So please listen with care. In the show notes we'll have timestamps [26:16- 32:25] in case you choose to skip that portion.
[Welcome] Hello, and welcome to black. loved. free., a spiritual-political podcast dedicated to Black spirituality, healing, and Black liberation. I am your host Brendane, a reluctant anthropologist, a storyteller, a writer, a student of Black and African indigenous spirituality. And for the Astro girlies, who want to know, I'm a tropical Gemini and a sidereal Taurus. And I'm also an energy healer. So some of you may know me from my previous podcast, Zora’s Daughters, which I co-hosted with a colleague. On there, I showed up very squarely in my educator and Black feminist anthropologist bag. And while I am still very much that girl, black. loved. free. is a different space, one that is attuned to my interests outside of the academy. And so, I invite you to join me in each episode of this podcast where we'll talk about a theme or a topic that relates to our liberation and healing. And we'll start by clearing the air or defining the episodes topic, then we'll bring in some testimony, collective wisdom from Black feminist and womanist texts, ancestral stories, and even interviews. And finally, we'll end with the segment living in alignment where I might pull some cards and give a reading for listener, or receive some guidance on how to apply what we've discussed to our lives and to our political movements. At times, I will be joined by some fantastic guests this season. So please stay tuned and subscribe so you know what's up.
[Intro to the podcast season 02:40] In this episode--our very first-- I will introduce the theme for this season, which is Surrender, by talking about surrendering to the truth. Now, both “surrender” and “truth” are very loaded terms these days. So you might be like, Girl, I thought we was talking about liberation here like why the hell are we starting with surrender, especially as we see the entrenchment of fascism around the world. We'll get into exactly what I mean by surrender later. And we'll have to save truth for a different episode. We'll also explore some spiritual and political practices of surrendering to truth. And by the end of this episode, you will be equipped with some questions for compassionate reflection, and hopefully feel empowered to surrender to the truth in your own life. So to do this, we'll sit with some of the wisdom and bell hooks’s Sisters of the Yam, Black Women and Self-Recovery and will also sit with the truth that there is no liberation without spirit, and without to telling. Before we get started, I wanted to take a moment to thank everyone who has donated to the podcast so far, producing a podcast isn't cheap. And since this is a personal passion project of mine, I am funding this with my own postdoc check. So, I'm incredibly grateful to those who have given and those who will give to help subsidize this. And if you'd like to donate to the podcast, please visit the link on our website at blacklovedandfreepodcast.com.
Believe it or not, I have been sitting with the seeds of this podcast since 2021. Shortly after the death of my father, and the end of a toxic relationship, I found myself yearning for a deeper connection with my ancestors in order to help me heal my pain. And while meditating, the idea of the podcast came to me. I wanted to provide space to practice liberation, to recognize that freedom is my divine right--and our divine right--in the wake of the shifts I saw and felt in the world. So, if you've been not listening, not looking, not seeing what's going on, let me tell you, a reckoning is coming. And the powers that distorted the earth and her peoples are now facing their inevitable end, meaning that domination, fear, scarcity, and unholy violence will no longer rule the world. And I looked up and looked around at my own experiences as a Black cisgender, queer, neuroexpansive, and dynamically disabled woman, and I noticed that these forces weren't just outside, right, Black communities or outside of Black liberation spaces, but were very much present in the spaces that we were using to “build” our new world. So much so that transformation, liberation, or abolition meant replacing white oppressors with Black ones. It meant more of the same old, same old, more of the status quo. And so, I wanted to create a space for myself and for others to release our devotion to the status quo. It is this devotion that enables capitalism, white supremacy, homophobia, transphobia, and ableism. And our commitment, whether spoken or unspoken, to returning back to normal is partly what hinders us from getting free. This podcast is a creative commitment to Black liberation and healing, to Black feminist abolitionist practice that requires us to accept the truth, that things will never be what they were. But let me not get too ahead of myself, this intro was already longer than it needs to be.
[Clearing the Air 6:42] And so I'm gonna go ahead and do what I said I was gonna do, and provide you all with the definition of surrender. So as a quick aside, I believe in providing people with definitions of things so that we're, when we're talking about something, we can at least start on the same page. And so this segment of the podcast is called clearing the air.
So, I invite you to take a deep breath with me. Imagine we are clearing space in our spiritbodymind to receive the gift of clarity, and providing you with a clear definition of what the fuck I'm talking about. By providing you a clear definition of what the fuck I’m talking about, I'm allowing you to decide if you agree with me or not. I'm inviting you to join me in principled world building through clear definition. We're cleansing the space to welcome in this gift for with clarity of when, where and how we enter. And we can build community. And so if you're talking to or listening to a spiritual (or really any other kind of leader) who refuses to clearly define the words that they're using, or to clearly define when, where, or how they enter, you might be joining a cult, not a community.
But anyway, what is “surrender”? If you look it up in the Merriam Webster Dictionary, you'll see a few definitions to yield to power, control, a possession of another upon compulsion or demand; to give up completely or agree to forego especially in favor of another; to give oneself up into the power of another especially as a prisoner; to give oneself over to something such as an influence. And so we might call this dictionary definition, literally, the white man's definition of surrender, because of its stake in individual power. These definitions make surrender akin to defeat. And this is largely because whiteness and white supremacy frames power as domination, control, and ownership. So to surrender under this paradigm is like death, and not the good kind of death, right? To surrender under this mode of thinking means to be chained to an undesirable outcome. Essentially, you become a prisoner or a slave to something or to someone else. So, for some, surrender might conjure up visions of a white flag waving over a battlefield held by a sad, withdrawn soldier. And for others who grew up in the Black church like me, surrender might conjure up memories of the hymn.
09:35 [Brendane sings “I Surrender All”]
I will say that that kind of surrender is similar to the white flag defeat kind of surrender. But I'll get to that in another show. So you can hold on to this definition if you want to. But this is not the kind of surrender we're talking about here. I actually came up with a theme for this season in today's episode while I was in Baldwin and Co. bookstore and coffee shop in New Orleans. I went there with one of my best friends to see Juvenile in concert with Mannie Fresh and the Big Six band I believe. So, we went to New Orleans to shake our asses and bring the new year and with all the style. And that day, we went to the bookstore to get some work done. And because bookstores are one of my favorite places in the world, I walked around to see what I could spin my little check on. And I happened upon this book, The Power of Surrender by Dr. Judith Orloff, who is a psychiatrist and professor, I picked it up, I saw she was white, and I put that shit right back down. Just being real. But I walked through the book selection again. And the book called out to me again. So, I picked it up, and I started reading it. And I won't lie and say that the book doesn't read like a white woman wrote it. But her definition of surrender—borne from years of life experience trying to be someone she is not and her Eastern spirituality practice—compelled me to buy the book. And I guess we can say I surrendered to the impulse to buy it. And I'm glad I did. So, Orloff defines surrender as the grace of letting go at the right moment, the ability to accept what is to exhale and to flow downstream with the cycles of life instead of battling them, obsessively attaching to people and outcomes and anxiously brooding. She named surrender as an intuitive way of living, a way of gaining mastery of your own life by letting go. She notes that it is letting go that empowers one to get through difficult times and to celebrate joy. For both of these require surrender. So, in order to surrender, one must be deeply self-compassionate, willing to deal with fear and willing to release their fear of death. Releasing the fear of death is essential for surrender. For the fear of death is a central principle of white supremacy and capitalism. And I won't go too deep into it here. I think I'll save that for our Afropessimism series, [laughs] but Orloff notes that acknowledging and embracing death is how we give ourselves permission to live in the moment.
So, I ask you to consider how your own life would open up if and when you recognize that death is not the end, as white supremacist capitalism needs us to believe, right, but the surrender of this life to the next? It is white supremacist capitalism spread to the corners of the earth through settler colonialism that teaches us to fear death. But our ancestral traditions did not regard death as something to fear and to avoid. But that was seen as a transition to a new life. So Orloff goes on to say that there are four kinds of surrender, intellectual, emotional, physical, and sensual and spiritual. And all of these forms of surrender are necessary for us to live fulfilling, principled lives with integrity. Surrendering, in all the ways might allow us to harmonize with nature, with ourselves, and with each other. If we're not actively choosing what we're surrendering to, we're actually giving over to the status quo. Right? We are actually surrendering to whatever the fuck is going around us. So, if we're not actively choosing to surrender to the truth, we are aligning ourselves with a distorted view the world.
So, to prepare for this episode, I asked a few of y'all on Instagram to define surrender. And I got some really interesting responses. One person said surrender is, you know, “I want to give myself permission to surrender to my needs and continue flourishing.” Another said, “throwing up your hands, not in defeat, but in soft resignation that what will be will be.” And another response indicated a really important I think, warning about surrender right, and that there needs to be a bed or base to it. Otherwise call to surrender are probably violent. And I think this is very true. If we think about all of the responses, right, they all indicate that surrender is actually a move of power. Right a choice. You're giving yourself permission to attune to your needs, so that you can continue to flourish. So, surrendering to the truth that you need things. Rather than surrendering to the status quo of capitalism that says that all you need is money and power, throwing up your hands, freeing yourself from continuously tinkering and working with beings and not in defeat, because you're not defeated by giving over your power in this situation, in this case, but just allowing what will be to be. This bed and base to surrender points to the fact that you must actively choose which you surrender to.
So, if you're like, “Okay, girl, no, this is cute. But where else can I go to understand surrender in a grounded way in a Black feminist, abolitionist, political way?” And one text I would say to study for surrender is Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler. The protagonist is a 15-year-old Black girl named Lauren Olamina, and she exemplifies what it means to surrender in a spiritual-political way. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the text, I suggest that you run and pick it up today or listen to the audiobook through your local library or if you have an audiobook app. In short, in this future, which looks a lot like a not-too-far-away present for us, Lauren has the extreme capacity to empathize with others’ emotions. She feels pain, joy, death, orgasm, and other feelings, sometimes just by looking at others. And in her world, which I must stress again, looks a lot like our world, this capacity is a disability, as it hinders some from being able to live in the midst of violence and renders them enslavable. She tries to warn the other members of her community about what she knows is coming. She has surrendered to the truth that one day the gates in her community will come down, and the relative safety that she and others experienced will end, so she prepares by reading survival texts, learning how to shoot and how to fight. And she also begins writing her own spiritual texts to see the community in this text she calls Earthseed. So, I won't share much more of the book. But, I will say that Lauren Olamina demonstrates a type of Black feminist surrender that prepares her for the present and the future. And her surrender enables her to lead others and to create a new world, even in Apocalypse.
So as we approach [an] end of the world—that is because the world has ended many times, right— surrendering to truth will be essential to liberation and to the creation of new worlds. And so,
[Testimony 18:22] I'll explain more as we move into our testimony section. Now, if you don't know who bell hooks is, you better get on Google and not ChatGPT—or whatever AI people are using as search engines these days—and find out about her, okay! bell hooks is an ancestor who was a Black feminist writer, professor and changemaker from a small town in Kentucky. She's written a lot of books that speak truth to power. And I see her life as an exemplar of a Black feminist surrendered life. I first encountered her work in college while I was writing my senior honors thesis. And my introduction to her brilliance came through reading The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love. And that work helped me develop compassion for the men who abused me. And I think that kind of compassion is actually essential for abolitionist and transformative justice work, but I'll talk about that another time. Today, I'm sharing some insights from her self-help book for Black women entitled Sisters of the Yam, Black Women and Self-Recovery, that I hope will ground our journey into surrender this season.
In this work, bell hooks reminds us that we must resist a white supremacist capitalist patriarchy by decolonizing our minds. And she defines decolonization as “breaking with the ways our reality is defined and shaped by the dominant culture and asserting our understanding of that reality of our own experience.” And growing up in a segregated community in Kentucky, she needed to assert her the reality of her own experience, right? And that happened in a very deeply spiritual way. And she noticed that “In the traditional world of Black Folk experience there was and remains in some places, and certainly, in many hearts, a profound and shaken belief in the spiritual power of Black people, to transform our world and move with integrity and oneness, despite oppressive social realities.” So there's truth of spirituality being central to living through life and through being attuned to our transformation is something that she noticed from the time of being a young girl. And so because she lived among white people, and in an anti-Black society, as she grew up and went to college and moved on to her career, she noticed that this life really actually fundamentally prevented and impeded Black people from life-affirming views and practices. And so, in order to come back to ourselves and to transform the world around us, we must confess the truth of our lives and begin the process of self-recovery.
So no amount of participation in this death-dealing structure that she describes will ultimately allow us to heal ourselves. It actually requires a denial of ourselves, our pain, and our truth. So she says, beautifully, “For some time now, I've seen that we cannot fully create effective movements for social change, if individuals struggling for that change are not also self-actualized or working towards that end, when wounded individuals come together in groups to make change. Our collective struggle is often undermined by all that has not been dealt with emotionally. Those of us committed to the feminist movement, to Black liberation struggle, need to work at self-actualization.” She then points us to Toni Cade Bambara’s words, where she says “revolution begins in the self and with the self.” hooks also channels Audre Lorde’s admonition that healing ourselves should be at the center of our lives. And if it isn't, right, what kind of world are we truly being into being? How is that world any different if we still are dealing with the same pains and hurts?
And so, hooks reminds us that, “Black female self-recovery, like all Black self-recovery, is an expression of a liberatory political practice. Living as we do in a white supremacist, capitalist patriarchal context that can best exploit us when we lack a firm grounding and self and identity, which is the knowledge of who you are and where we have come from, choosing wellness is an act of political resistance. Before many of us can effectively sustain engagement in organized resistance struggle, in Black liberation movement, we need to undergo a process of self-recovery that can heal individual wounds that may prevent us from functioning fully.” So, how does this process of self-recovery come? Right? Well, for hooks, it is staked explicitly in the truth. So, in order for us to recover ourselves, right, we have to be able to see the world for what it is, and see our own experiences for what they are. So she says, “to be open and honest in a culture of domination, a culture that relies on lying, is a courageous gesture. Within white supremacist, capitalist patriarchal culture, Black people are not supposed to be well. This culture makes wellness a white luxury. So, to choose against that culture, o choose wellness, we must be dedicated to truth.” She names this dedication to truth, “collective unmasking,” and she notes the collective unmasking is an important act of resistance. She says, “If it remains a mark of our oppression, that as Black people we cannot be dedicated to the truth in our lives without putting ourselves at risk. Then it is a mark of our resistance, our commitment to liberation, when we claim the right to speak the truth of our reality anyway.”
So, if we as Black women dare to look at our lives, ourselves, and our experiences, and then, without shame, courageously name what we see, we will bring about our freedom. We must talk about our struggles, our pain, and our suffering. This is what enables us to seek healing. At the end of the chapter, hooks kinda leaves us with a quote from a student that says that “Healing occurs through testimony, through gathering together everything available to you and reconciling.”
Mayyadda [interlude]
You won’t see me break/cause I know what made me, yeah/stay out of my lane/hear me when I say, I’m not here to save you/ not here to save you
[Brendane’s Testimony 25:25] So to model this truth telling, this testimony, and this vulnerability for myself, I'll share mine. I will share my testimony, my gathering of everything available to me, to reconcile myself to myself, and I share with you, not for you, and I don't actually need your validation or affirmation of my experiences. This is for me, in an attempt to recover myself. And as a dear friend reminded me, this space of healing is primarily my own. And it has to be.
[Testimony – Content warning: rape, interpersonal violence, abuse 26:16]
These past seven months, I have faced moment after moment that's required me to surrender to the truth. So I will say, I'm not ashamed of who I am, of where I come from, and where I stand today, and the pain that I've experienced. And what I've accepted about myself, no one can use against me. I grew up as the oldest of my mother's three children in Columbia, South Carolina. My mother had me young, at the age of 20. She never told me clearly the circumstances of my conception. But I've gathered over the years that she might not have fully consented to having sex with my father. My mother, like many of the women in my family--my grandmother, my great grandmother, and even many of my ancestors--dealt with undiagnosed mental health issues brought on by decades of rape, incest, and poverty. I had hoped that I would somehow escape this generational curse, but I did not.
My family and I grew up unhoused often having to leave our city-subsidized housing when the rent would go unpaid or when the house would be too hoarded. We'd stay in a place for maybe a year or two then have to go back to Grandma's house and then back to subsidized housing again. And as I grew older, I was tasked with the responsibility to help my mother raise my siblings. I'll never forget the day some of my family members sat me down and told me that I’d have to help my mother because she wasn't always “there” if you catch my drift. I was about five then. It didn't help that I began reading at two. So, my ability to interpret information faster than my peers made me appear by all accounts to be hyper-capable of helping her raise my siblings. So, every dollar that I earned from doing chores with my grandma or just doing other things, or that was gifted to me, went back into my household. There were many days and nights where I cooked food for my siblings, and there would be nothing left for me to eat. But that was okay because taking care of them was my duty as an adultified poor Black girl child.
So, the charge to help my mother without protest, and the shame instilled in me from living in poverty, shaped me to be an anxious, quiet girl who had a slightly wilder side around my friends. [laughs] And I did not know that it was my duty to protect myself from harm because no one protected me. My validation came from helping others at my own expense, from excelling in my schoolwork, from proving to others that I too was worthy of love and attention. I had no real example of self-love. I only really saw self-sacrifice and martyrdom or extreme self-centeredness. My mother ended up joining a cult like Black nondenominational church when I was 12. And the pastor and members of that church heard from God that I was a demon. Quite literally said that they had visions of me fucking people as a teenager, and that, you know, I was a Jezebel. I was cursed. And this led to me being ostracized and alienated I was taught not to smile or laugh around boys, because I would seduce them and take them away from God. People would tell their kids not to talk to me. Men followed me to the bathroom and or would just say really odd things to me. And I was shamed about everything: my body, my hair, my clothing. There was nothing that I could do to be good enough for God's love. So I spent a lot of my time repenting for my sins and feeling deeply unworthy. And in high school, I even had a teacher who would ask me to take out the trash. And he said, it was preparing me for my future career. And at the time, you know, I'm 17, I willingly submitted to the joke, and swore that I would prove him wrong one day, but there wasn't much in my life to affirm that I wasn't trash. Thankfully, I had some good people in my life, some good friends and adults and mentors who saw my worth, but I had learned to value the opinions of those who truly did not matter more, and to see myself as a reflection of what they thought of me.
So I knew myself as sinful and unworthy. And I could only bring about relationships that really reflected that. Outside of, of course, my close friends who truly, truly showed me love and care. I had lovers who only truly had the capacity to reaffirm the untruths that I was unworthy. I stayed with them for years, because I never could even imagine being loved better [or] differently. And I was told that that was impossible because of who I was. So, I stayed even when they raped, or demeaned, or financially and psychologically abused me.
[End of Content Warning 32:25] I escaped these horrifying moments through my academic work. So I have plenty of accolades. And you can look at my CV and never really know that I had these experiences. Somehow, I found the strength to continue doing as well as possible in school, moving from high school, to college, to graduate school, and still find the time and the capacity to do work in the community. I thought that activism and academics would be a salve for the deep wounds of my heart and spirit. And I thought that giving away all I had to my family, or to whomever demanded it, would make me truly be a good person, and prove to those who projected onto me that I wasn't that I was. I believed that sacrificing for my students would make me feel whole. And I encountered a string of narcissistic comrades, colleagues and professors whose imprints in my life made me feel as if self-protection and community protection were impossible. I would turn and tell folks that “Hey! This person is hurting me. This experience is hurting me” and be told to hold that or be told that maybe I deserved it. Or maybe I should be quieter.
For many, graduate school is a time of, you know, the depths, as far as financial support, but [for me] graduate school was really the first time in my life that I was financially stable. But pursuing my degree in higher education came at the cost of my mental, emotional, and at times my physical safety. And when I would express this to others, I was told to hold on to my pain. I was told quite literally to develop a tougher skin in the face of racialized and gendered violence because that is what I would experience in the academy. There was no way to change it, and I was told to save my truth telling for my second book, right, not to tell the truth at meetings, or not to tell the truth in emails, just gather all of the violent things that have happened to me and then, you know, 15 years down the road, be able to talk about it. And, you know, academia professionalizes us to respond to violence with silence. And I'll say right here right now, right, that practice is life-ending for Black women, as we have seen. So, we're told to swallow our truths and surrender to the status quo, which is to literally kill us, right? And poisoning ourselves [by holding the truth inside]. And one example of this is quite literally, like I had high blood pressure towards the end of… getting my dissertation. My blood pressure was high. And it wasn't high enough for me to be put on medication, but the doctor said that she would continue to kind of monitor it. And literally once I finished my program, once I defended my dissertation, my blood pressure went back to normal levels. So imagine, right years and years and years of swallowing, pain, of swallowing truth, of not speaking truth to power, literally cause my heart to be more…. What the fuck? You know?
But to continue and say that all of this conditioning, all of this disciplining, right, that was sold to me as a way to be successful. Eventually, I no longer needed prodding to sacrifice myself at the altar of daughter, at the altar of scholar, at the altar of knowledge, I became a willing tribute, feeling like if I had the capacity to endure some kind of pain or mistreatment, that it was okay, as long as no one else had to. It took me years of therapy to change my thinking. And yet, it wasn't until last summer that I began to see how deeply my own embodied unworthiness had made me a stranger to myself.
My Saturn Return came out swinging, destroying some of the relationships that I had held near to my heart. And this period of time in my life, has revealed all the ways my silence about my pain would not free me, but give those who harmed me the ability to continue to harm me and others. My silence, the binding of my tongue, gave them power. My fear of being alone and rejected or being seen as mean, pretentious, rude, a liar, etc. (all things that people have said to me over the course of my life) led me to romantic relationships and friendships where I essentially over-functioned in order to try to prove that I was none of these things. I had internalized the projections of selfish, self-centered, manipulative, fraudulent and insecure people. So much so that I thought that I was a bad person because I did not make myself available to them. And that often happened at my own expense. Of course, it is not noble to abandon yourself, right? I had to come to realize that no good person would ask me to do that. And to choose myself would be to choose freedom.
So these days, I am quite literally fighting for my life. And I'm not saying that as a euphemism. I'm not saying that as an exaggeration. Every day is a fucking fight. I am rediscovering who I am, what I love and who I love. I'm recovering that little girl who delighted in herself and her abilities before the world showed her that that delight was shameful. I'm recovering that a teenager who saw the truth of herself as intellectual, as intelligent. Despite what she was told, I'm recovering that college-aged woman who spoke truth to power and moved with love and care. And I am now, right, that 30-year-old Black queer woman who alchemizes my pain into strength to live and to thrive another day. I know because I have lived that this world must change. And that change won't come with my silence. It will only come when I surrender to the truth. And the truth is, I've been quiet too long. Been professional too long. Been nice too long. Been protecting nigg*s, nigg*ritos, and niggxs too long. And I've been playing by the rules meant to kill me for entirely too long. So, I say no more. I choose to live. And I choose to do so boldly and without apology. I surrender to the truth that I too, am worthy of protection.
[Living in Alignment 40:20] If you've made it this far, first of all, thank you. This last segment is called Living in Alignment. And in future episodes, I'll do a short reading for listeners, so if you want me to do an anonymous reading for you on the podcast, write us an email at blacklovedandfreepodcast@gmail.com.
Second of all, listen to Cobra and Hiss by Megan thee Stallion. These songs and her album actually provide a beautiful example of what it means to surrender to the truth. Megan thee Stallion is in real time showing us what it is like to live a feminist and surrendered life. A diviner and storyteller that I really admire because 1) she's from the South like me and 2) her words always hit honey, Jeida K Storey (and I'll link her in the show notes) described Hiss as “a model of vulnerability.” This song shows us the power of transformation when we embrace the things that are meant to shame us. And so, what we see in Cobra is Megan thee Stallion unveiling quite literally, right, she's unmasking herself, and saying, “You bitches was gone let me die. Gone let me die behind some man. And now I see that I can testify to the power of my own life. And here in this moment, I'm sharing with you, right that I'm depressed. That I almost took my own life of a what you motherfuckas had to say about me.” So we see that vulnerability. It's kinda embraced there and empowered. And then we get to Hiss, which I don't know much about snakes because they scare me, but snakes hiss right before they strike. So, this ain't even you know, this is Megan's top top, which we know it’s not because she's a genius, right? This is just a warning. So, what's coming after that? I wonder. But Hiss is, is really that kind of move that empowerment, that self-recovery and self-reclamation in her song and in her music. She said, I'm tired of dealing with my enemies on their own terms. So here I am, telling you that I recognize that you only have power when you speak my name. Here I am recognizing that I must be powerful because you bitches keep chopping my name in your mouth, right? And so, she demonstrates this empowered vulnerability through her music, where she shows us the power of surrendering to the truth that she's the baddest bitch whose name is a spell. Megan said, “Yeah, every time you speak my name, I make money.” Honey, that's a spell. That is surrendering to the truth, of recognizing her own power as a Black woman.
And so, perhaps this truth here will if we sit this, sit with this and integrate this right? That if folks are talking about us negatively, there must be some power in our name. Right? And well, I'll say this, if you're living in integrity, if you are someone who's living in integrity, and you are not crafting a self-centered, arrogant vision of yourself and harming other people while you try to build yourself, then yeah, the negativity they're always calling on your name, the mistreatment, right, is is an indication of your power. And an attempt to take that power from you. And so, what we see is Megan, reclaiming their power, saying, “Hey, my name is powerful, I make you people relevant.” And if that weren't the case, right, then why would others be jealous and attack her? Right? Why else would others try to lay claim to her body and her mind if she weren't powerful? But what she also demonstrates through this transformation is that she has surrendered to the truth that she is worth fighting for and protecting at all costs, regardless of whether a nigga is around. And that in and of itself, disrupts with the world-that-is teaches Black women. So I offer this: Cobra and Hiss are a salve for us. Right? A point to a direction in which we can think about the world and say, “Wow, there is power in reclaiming our truth, and integrating the things that are meant to shame us” and say, “No, the thing that you tried to make a bad point about me, I love about myself. I know about myself. I have forgiven myself for, and that in and of itself is beautiful.
Megan also teaches us through this, surrendering to the truth, that despite what we face, right, we can still succeed. She says this, you know, this is one of my favorite lines where she says “Do Megan bad/I'm still good.” And you know, sometimes I'll put my name in there and say, you know, “do Brendane bad, I'm still good.” And that's the truth of the matter. Earlier, I definitely spoke about some of the pains and the challenges that I've had in my life. But, baby, if you look at my CV, you can see what I've accomplished, despite the violence and the abuse that I've endured, literally from the time I exited the womb.
For myself, I say this, I can only imagine what would have been possible, if I did not encounter those who did not have the tools and the capacity to love themselves in my journey. Who knows who I could have been or what I could have become. But even with the bad that I've endured in my life, I'm still doing damn good. I'm doing great. I'm doing amazing. And that that is the truth, and the testament of my own power. And so, as I continue to fight for my life these days, I listen to the song at least twice a day to help me gather the strength to fight. Like those millions of views. I'm accounting for at least half of them. I'm absolutely sure.
[music interlude]
So, I meditated on the topic of this episode, and I pulled some tarot cards for us and gathered some collective ancestral wisdom. My ancestors actually said this to me, and I will share this with you because I think it's a really provocative question. So once we know the truth, right, and we're surrendering to this truth, that truth, Audre Lorde teaches us compels us to speak and compels us to move into action.
So, I ask you, now that you know what you know, what will you say? What will you do? How will you testify to your truth and to the truth? When we surrender to the truth that we are hurtling towards a fascist end to the world-that-is where our water, our air, our food, the very dirt from which our food grows from right and the earth are being poisoned, what possibilities for revolution are opened? When we surrender to the truth that COVID-19 is still here with us, still infecting us, still killing members of our communities, that killing people around the world, what possibilities for disability justice open for us? What ways of community building actually open for us when we recognize that survival of the fittest and eugenicist thinking is not going to get us to the liberation that we want and need? When we surrender to the truth that things will never be what they were and that that in and of itself is for the best because who wants to go back to white supremacist capitalist, anti-black, ablest sexist, patriarchal, you know, ways of living, right, what will we do to ensure that the life we bring about is filled with love, joy, care and compassion?
When we surrender to the truth, that no form of ableist, white supremacist, anti-black cisheteropatriarchy will [save] us, no matter who's making the money, no matter how they make it, right? What steps will we take to get free?
And when we surrender to the truth that no form of justice that involves a criminal punishment system will provide safe communities, what ways will we embrace creating those communities on our own?
We are watching in real time the shift of facts and truth to serve white supremacist colonialism. And there are so many ways that we have to ignore the truth to live an acceptable life. We're literally seeing the transformation of language and fact that has always already been there--If we think about what language and fact have done for Black people, African people, indigenous people over time, right? There's always been a distortion if fact and truth around our life and experience. And so what we see in fascism is the kind of nationwide, the international, the transnational transformation of language and truth about other groups of people. In particular, what we're watching unfold in Palestine and what's hidden from us that's unfolding in other places around the world. So, when we surrender to the truth, that ignoring these distortions of reality, by sticking to the status quo, right? When we surrender to the truth, that that is unacceptable, that that is no way to do life differently, or to change the world differently, that is how we transform.
When we surrender to the truth that it is our fear of death, our fear of loneliness, our fear of ostracization, our fear of alienation, our fear of poverty, our fear of all of these things that drive us to create this distorted view of reality, what do we let go of? There are so many ways that we have to distort reality in order to “survive” through this shit, right. And one of those primary distortions, kinda stemming from this Abrahamic belief that we as men are meant to rule the earth and have dominion over the earth, rather than live with the Earth and the other beings and non-beings here, right? We actually bind ourselves through this kind of acceptance, of surrender to this form of survival, to beliefs and systems that literally kill the earth that we live with. And each have like we're killing ourselves and each other here.
So, all that to say, I will end with a set of questions for you, my dear listener, as we close out. And I hope that these questions help you to surrender to your truth because again… yes, we're here to change the world. But we're also here to heal ourselves. It must start within.
So I ask you, what do you need to release to be free? What truths do you need to surrender to about yourself? About those around you? About your life? So that you can move to action and speak honestly and heal? What pain are you holding that you've ignored? How do you keep it contained? And what is that containment costing you? What things whether they be old lovers, old and new hurts, friends, money, old habits, etc. do you cling to desperately? That you must release because the truth is that they no longer serve you? And what communities are you calling to hold you and your secrets and your fears and your concerns safe right now? How are you tending to your own self-recovery and allowing that community to attend to you? If it feels good in this moment to affirm yourself, please do so. Here is an affirmation that I find useful that I channeled through my reading: I surrender to the truth that I am whole and loved. I surrender to the truth that my healing heals the world.
[Outro 55:12] Well, that's all I have for y'all today. Thank you for taking the time to listen. I hope this episode gives you permission to unravel and to surrender to your own truth. I want to express my deepest gratitude to my elevated ancestors, and spirit guides and to the Most High God for giving me the inspiration and the fortitude to do this work. I do not take it lightly. I also want to thank and Andrew Viñales, black. loved. free.’s audio editor for all of his work. If y'all didn't know, Andrew is a gift and is a gifted audio editor. I also want to thank bell hooks, Megan thee Stallion, and Jeida K. Storey for your wisdom, I honor you.
And if you want to keep up with future episodes, follow us on Instagram @/blacklovedandfree. You can also visit our website blacklovedandfreepodcast.com. And be sure to give us five stars and a review wherever you listen to podcasts because that helps us reach other listeners. If you would like to give us feedback or to submit a question for a reading on the podcast, send us an email at blacklovedandfreepodcast@gmail.com. And please provide some context for what's going on in this email. Don't just send an email saying “give me a reading.” [laughs] And if you would like to donate to the podcast, you can visit the link on our website.
Okay, so this is getting like a church benediction. So, let me get out of here. I'm gonna let y'all go, as us Black folks say, with this: May you find a sacred, soft place to care for yourselves and for each other. May you radiate in the truth that you are the one who saves you. May you find the strength to be Black, loved, and free. Till next time.
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