In this episode, you’ll consider your soul – your inner voice, your core – and how you define that for yourself. Nicole describes how the institutional categories of the academy displaced her own sense of self and how she found her way back to her core essence. Nicole’s playlist: “Gut Feeling” by Ella Mai ft. H.E.R. (2018)
Download the workbook to follow along: https://www.bbqplus.org/rage-to-heal. You can also use a pen and paper or your computer to complete the exercises in the series.
CREDITS:
Written, created and hosted by Dr. Nicole Truesdell with the support of the Pedagogy Lab at the Center for Black, Brown, and Queer Studies (BBQ+).
Produced by Ronald Young Jr. of ohitsBigRon studios.
Music by The Mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder.
[0:01: Relaxing synthesizer music plays]
[00:15] Nicole: Hello everyone, and welcome back to “Rage to Heal: Finding Our Humanity Through Our Emotions.”
This limited series is produced in partnership with the support of the Pedagogy Lab at the Center for Black, Brown, and Queer Studies.
[00:29] My name is Dr. Nicole Truesdell, and I am a trained anthropologist focused on the project of liberatory humanity through what I call a Black decolonial lens.
[0:41] Now before we go any further, this is Episode 5 of this series, and in order for you to get the most out of all of these talks, you’ll be best served going in order. So if you haven’t yet, go ahead and start with Episode 1 and meet me back here when you’re done.
For those staying, welcome back! Again, this is Episode 5, The Soul.
[Relaxing synthesizer music continues and then fades out]
[1:20] Please grab whatever you’re using to take notes. Hopefully you still have it close by – if not, go ahead and pause this episode and grab it. And as always, go at your own pace and take whatever time you need to record your thoughts. You can pause me at any time, I’ll be here.
[Relaxing synthesizer music starts playing]
[1:38]
Today, we’re going to start with some word association. I will give you a word and you write down the first three things that come to mind.
OK, the first word is… water. [Nicole repeats “water.”]
2. Fire. [Nicole repeats]
3. Earth. [Nicole repeats]
4. Air. [Nicole repeats]
5. Soul. [Nicole repeats]
[2:39] OK, so those five words again are water, fire, earth, air, and soul.
[2:59] And I’ll give you a second to catch up with writing your associated words.
[Relaxing synthesizer music plays more loudly and then stops]
[3:18] The soul is an interesting concept. Many would tie it to religious or spiritual philosophies, seeing it as a spirit that is within you and connects you to a higher power, creator, entity.
Others shy away from the concept because of its religious connotations and the volatile history of many religious traditions.
[3:41] Yet I want to leave that to the side for a moment and have you think about your soul as your inner voice, your core, the foundation of what makes you tick. What singer Ella Mai says is that “gut feeling” you may or may not run with, depending on how much you really trust yourself.
[4:03] Some call this intuition, what you just know ‘cause you know. Others say it’s your higher self that sits at your crown, that aura you have around you that can glow or dim depending on how connected one is.
[4:18] For me, the soul is what connects you to yourself and other living beings around you. It is that inner force of energy that is primal in nature, drawing from your lineage – it is ancient.
[4:34] It is the culmination of your experiences and those of your ancestors, all stored away inside of you ready to be discovered and uncovered as we grow and accumulate experiences, knowledge that hopefully turns to wisdom, and years on this earth.
[4:54] Even if you don’t believe in a higher being outside of you, you still need to believe in yourself. And so for me the soul is our roots, our foundations of getting to know and understand who that self is, who that core essence is.
[5:19] And just like any other subject, we have to take the time and study the self. Get to know the self in all its intricacies, contradictions, growths, and regresses. Get to fully see yourself in all aspects and lights – that deep self-study.
[Relaxing synthesizer music starts playing]
[5:56] This is what soul work is – what I also call the “rootwork of self” – as you get to truly know yourself at your core over time and space. This means you have to let the mind go, let it take a back seat for the first time in many years for many of you, as you go internal – into the inner working of what makes you tick.
Because it ain’t the mind – it’s the soul.
[6:38] Why is this so important?
You have to know who you are in order to truly embody a true human practice. In order to figure out who you truly are, you have to be able to assess which voices in you are actually yours, and not the opinions and views of others disguised as your own.
[7:03] Then you got to root them out, lovingly, and with compassion, for those pieces were a part of you and helped shape you. Once you let them go, you can now fill this new space with those elements that truly comprise the being that is you. Fair warning: once you go down this path there really is no turning back. This knowing has a responsibility attached to it – ‘cause once you know better, you got to do better.
[7:45] Think about it: how many times in your educational journey have you taken a class or been asked to really get to know you? To sit and take the time, like any other subject, to delve deep into your core via question-making, theorizing, lived experiences that serve as lessons, and contemplation? This is not a passive exercise, but rather an active undertaking that requires a lifetime of work. But it is work that will keep you clear and on your own individual path as you mature into yourself.
[8:32] This might seem “easy” or some hippy dippy type shit, but really it can be hard to know the self when the world around you is constantly telling you how to define Self via the categories society has pre-determined and defined. And these categories can be – and many times are – confining, limiting, bounded with little room for expansion depending upon said category.
[9:01] The focus on representation of identity at the expense of deep structural change over the past few decades has sped up this external defining of self.
[9:14] What do I mean by that? Now we must “see” ourselves everywhere and being seen means many of us are in the positions or locations we are because we “fit” at least one category of institutional or corporate interest: Person of color. First-generation. Low-income. Queer. Or a combination of one or more. I remember when I first came to college in the Fall of 1999 and I understood myself to be a lot of things, but first-generation/low-income was not one of them as a defining marker of who I was. Now, I knew I was the first to go to college, and I always knew we ain’t have no money, but those were sets of circumstances I grew up in that impacted and influenced how I saw and moved through the world. I did not see them as ways or terms to define who I was as a person.
[10:13] Yet over time within the walls of the academy, these categories, and others, infiltrated my sense of self and took precedence in how I came to understand myself – and they are inherently deficit-based, in the construction and usage within these spaces.
[10:35] I am not saying these categories are “good” or “bad” – don’t think of this in a binary. Rather, I am questioning their validity, since the definitions of these categories were made outside of me, influenced by the foundations of larger US society.
[10:54] And those foundations are raggedy – rooted in the colonial projects of setterlism, whiteness, patriarchy, capitalism, homogeneity, anti-blackness, and anti-indigeneity all wrapped up together and packaged as the “norm,” the status quo of society. Those things we should be striving to achieve as that defines so-called success.
[11:23] And if my being, my full sense of self is already antagonistic to those external foundations, to this status quo, then why in the hell would I define my personhood by that?
[11:40] As Malcolm X said, who taught you how to hate yourself?
I add on, why are we afraid to truly love ourselves?
[11:51] I came to finally realize that if my full humanity is denied within the confines of the normative, then the normative is the problem – not me. And if the university was a space that helped perpetuate and reify the norm, then the university, too, was the problem and not me.
[12:13] See, the norm limits the full range and scope and beauty of humanity, and I take and claim with every breath in my body my full humanity and my peace. So I see the norm is the problem, for it has a human problem, it has a life problem, in that the norm is inhumane and anti-life.
[12:39] This is where the soul and that soulwork comes in as a way to find direction, a way forward, out of the confines of the suffocating status quo because that status quo, the norm, is where chaos lies and multiples. And it is in chaos that many of us live, believing and being told that is where we should be striving for and reproducing via our living and being.
And I am telling you – it’s a damn lie.
[Music of gentle chimes starts playing and then fades to background]
[13:24] Let’s take a moment to check in with your body. How do you feel now after listening to this episode? Write that feeling down.
[13:38] What is a song that embodies that feeling? Write that down too.
[13:46] And if you’ve been recording along from Episode 1, your playlist should now have six songs on it.
[13:54] This concludes Episode 5 on the soul. In Episode 6, we’ll examine how chaos can take residence in our minds.
‘Til next time.
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[14:13] Rage to Heal was written, created and hosted by me, Dr. Nicole Truesdell, with the support of the Pedagogy Lab at the Center for Black, Brown, and Queer Studies. It was produced by Ronald Young, Jr. of ohitsBigRon studios. Music by The Mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder.
[Music of gentle chimes fades back out]