15:34:43 Hi, friends. How are you doing?
15:34:47 It's the 31st of July, and… Uh, there's some beautiful astrology happening today.
15:34:56 Sun and Mercury meeting up, a cazimi. Mercury is retrograde, the Sun is in Leo, which is my rising sign.
15:35:08 And… that's also… all this action is happening right on my 
15:35:14 ascendant… I wanted to come to you
15:35:18 to talk about something that… has been… so revolutionary for me in the last…
15:35:29 2 plus years… And… has allowed me to understand something that I have known my whole life.
15:35:40 And it's about spiritual sovereignty, spiritual authority. Spiritual freedom.
15:35:50 And when I say spiritual. I mean… however you connect to the notion of spirit.
15:36:09 I want to start by…
15:36:15 Offering some gratitude to myself.
15:36:21 For having navigated a lifetime
15:36:28 of spiritual Traps.
15:36:33 And to have chosen the path of sovereignty for myself, and for everybody.
15:36:45 When it comes to… your sense of how you connect.
15:36:51 To yourself. And… the larger world and communities, and the unseen and the unknown.
15:37:10 When I was growing up. I had, 
15:37:18 Opportunity / misfortune, however you want to look at it.
15:37:25 to be part of many spiritual groups and cults.
15:37:32 I was raised in a very religious context, and I've talked about my
15:37:39 caste privilege before, um, and I don't relate to Brahmanism as a spiritual path
15:37:48 For myself. Through the process of existing in a home,
15:37:58 that was very connected to… ritual practices, um, in the… Tamil and Hindu traditions, however Sanskritized it might have been,
15:38:12 I'm also having to recognize the gifts of
15:38:19 being tied to these traditions, such as Astrology, and the planets who are an inherent part of Tamil worship.
15:38:34 And the gifts that those brought in. I want to recognize that not everybody
15:38:46 in the Indian subcontinent and the diaspora,
15:38:52 due to caste, and religion, and all sorts of gatekeeping
15:39:01 that lives within these, oppressive constructs ---
15:39:08 Have resulted in spiritual dispossession, spiritual disempowerment, and disconnection and gatekeeping for lots and lots of communities.
15:39:31 That said… I'm gonna come here into this from my own experience
15:39:41 of both learning and unlearning through these, through these traditions and cults and whatnot.
15:40:00 A story that's coming up for me is how… When I was a kid, I was really drawn to learning about the esoteric, the religions, like, any information that I could get my hands on.
15:40:19 I can remember reading books about this Siddhars who are Indigenous spiritual practitioners that predate and exist outside the context of our Aryanized,
15:40:37 Kind of, like, Vedic constructs of spirituality that India is so known for right now.
15:40:47 But the Siddhars, the Siddhars, they
15:40:56 have a very… animistic practice
15:41:05 The Siddhar that I have met. In their temple, did not have the same kind of gendered rules about who worships.
15:41:18 Siddha medicines have been so powerful in my journey of supporting my body through
15:41:27 Pain, and…
15:41:32 Sinus issues, and whatnot?
15:41:37 And also… I am remembering how I would learn
15:41:42 about the chakras, learn about whatever, like, I would pour through the Tamil paambu panchangam / Almanac
15:41:51 whenever I could. And I learned through osmosis from my grandmother, I learned
15:42:03 through books, learned through whatever I could get my hands on.
15:42:09 And at the time, I perceived myself as really boring for how much I went into these things.
15:42:21 What I learned over my experiences of growing up in cult contexts is, just
15:42:36 How much I am willing to challenge my own knowing and my own connection
15:42:49 To my spirit.
15:42:59 And get lost and subsumed
15:43:05 in others' influences and energies.
15:43:12 Most recently, I was married to a man until just before the pandemic,
15:43:24 and he was an atheist.
15:43:32 Also, he was brought up in the same cultural context that I was in. In fact, he was
15:43:40 the grandson of a priest. And… due to his own personal journey
15:43:52 chose the path of atheism. But in that process, he…
15:44:02 believed that… being spiritual
15:44:08 was just a cop-out.
15:44:14 It was a cop-out for not choosing to be atheist. Not choosing religion,
15:44:21 and choosing this unknown middle.
15:44:28 Once again, I allowed that to, hit me deep,
15:44:33 to take over my underlying notion that I was a spiritual person,
15:44:44 even though I didn't believe in religion and religious rules as much.
15:44:56 I allowed myself to… just let go of this identity of being spiritual. I allowed myself to believe that there wasn't,
15:45:09 anything unknown, anything that I could be interested in that had anything to do with the things that I was raised in, the things that
15:45:18 I had harbored an actual interest in. That I was able to just kind of cast in this past light of…
15:45:35 It's just what I had to do, because there wasn't, there wasn't anything else
15:45:43 that was available to me.
15:45:51 In the last few years, learning about Spiritual sovereignty,
15:45:59 through the work of Cyrée Jarelle Johnson, who's a rootworker and an herbalist
15:46:07 and a tarot teacher / practitioner.
15:46:13 Through the work of Ari Felix, the Dream Mami. Through many, many folks I have come in contact with.
15:46:21 And even the orientation that I came into my own creativity, my leadership, it all had to do with reclaiming agency, reclaiming individuality
15:46:40 in how you connect to spirit.
15:46:51 And individuality is not individualism.
15:47:01 When I allowed myself to claim my sovereignty as a spiritual being,
15:47:08 I learned
15:47:13 the voracious interests I had in astrology, in tarot, in magical traditions,
15:47:24 In herbal traditions. That were introduced to me through ancestral ways.
15:47:33 As well as constantly come in contact with me in learning about
15:47:40 native plants and Indigenous ways in Turtle Island.
15:47:47 I felt into how much shame I was holding
15:47:56 about even engaging in these practices. And I was able to release my own self-judgment,
15:48:05 and when I released my own self-judgment, what I perceived as others' judgment disappeared, too.
15:48:11 Because I was projecting that onto them.
15:48:18 Over time… I was able to reclaim these practices through liberatory lenses, through
15:48:28 an anarchistic lens through…
15:48:41 The belief
15:48:47 that my communication with spirit
15:48:59 and the pathways that were being offered to me, that I was being drawn into ---
15:49:10 had a purpose.
15:49:15 They were innate to me. And I could continue to hear the call.
15:49:23 And I could continue to make choices. And continue
15:49:31 to bring that same sense of non dogmatic, self-oriented spiritual authority and agency
15:49:43 to whatever I was studying. Even if it was presented to me in dogmatic ways.
15:49:57 I'm so grateful for this path I have been on. And for the magic and the witchiness that is unfolding in myself.
15:50:11 I'm so grateful for the teachers. And… For adriennemareebrown's Witch School, which was such a huge influence
15:50:27 in bringing me into loving and embracing these parts of myself.
15:50:45 So, that's really what I wanted to talk about today. I hope you have a good day, and I'll talk to you soon.