let's stop crying over spilled milk...

Whether you want to believe it or not, there is always a new perspective to every circumstance. And there's a process we experience to gain these new perspectives. Excuse me, while I explore mine...

Since the book was published, I’ve stopped sharing my spiritual growth and experiences. Maybe it was after reading how everyone’s not on a self-discovery journey and they are annoyed with the discussions. I was triggered when I saw that people don’t understand the power of the mind and how changing how you view a situation can make the situation easier or harder.

Excerpt From: UN-TRAP DA HOOD

“These things come up as triggers, think of triggers as mirrors that highlight what something or someone is reflecting to us. When we experience this opportunity it is for us to focus on the trigger itself. Does it serve us any good right now or is this something we have conditioned ourselves to believe over the years?”

I share this excerpt from my book because I had to remind myself that the trigger was attempting to show me something if I sat still with it. My trigger to their disbelief in the power of self-discovery revealed my doubts about whether changing my mindset would really bring in a new reality. This secret doubt goes back to when I got my Reiki I practitioner certification, by the time I got my Reiki Master’s certification I was convinced that all 200+ individuals who received a reiki service from me were liars. How did they feel relief in their chest and shoulders after I pulled that energetic cord from their heart chakra? Logically, I couldn’t explain why their breathing would change as I used techniques to loosen up the stagnant energy within their aura. Even as I practiced this ancient technique on myself I couldn’t grasp how I could feel something moving throughout my body with each tug on cords running from my chakras like an electrical box. Even the visual of seeing things that are not present to the human eye, how can I see this? ‘What kind of curse did I put on myself?’ I wondered.

visuals of what I am about to describe about my holistic practices

I’ve never been fully accepted into the spiritual community because of my beliefs and outlook on life. My techniques and practices have always been noticeably different than how it’s taught. In my Reiki-II training class, in a group session, I remember the looks on everyone’s face after it was my turn to clear and open the throat chakra of the group. Our instructor gave each of us a chakra to work on and when it was my turn everyone was coughing uncontrollably while gagging as I pulled and tugged on the energetic cord that had us all feeling unworthy to speak up and share our truth. The cord was intertwined with the solar plexus as I went back and forth between the throat and stomach to loosen and remove the cord until it finally snapped providing immediate relief. Everyone looked at me as if I was not human, like I was an angel in human form and that same look happens after every reiki session I’ve done since. If you are familiar with reiki then you understand there are procedures and steps you must follow along with symbols that must be used to complete the service, but I don’t use any of that. My practice is more of shamanic work than traditional reiki and for long-distance services, I use reiki more as a tool to send shamanic healing to the person I am working with.

Focusing again on that trigger I can’t help but accept I still have doubts while on my self-discovery journey. I mean honestly, how can my thoughts change my reality, especially when it’s been nine months of living without a place to call my own home? Time and time again being let down by my hopes and dreams of having keys to our new home shot down like cupid with his arrows of love, only I don’t feel the love from the Universe.

I learned it’s my control. It’s my impatience. It is my lack of self-worth and my own insecurities manifesting in plain sight. It’s constantly encouraged to be mindful of your thoughts because whatever you put your energy into will manifest. We are all sitting in a manifestation that we once created, right now. I feared in California I would struggle to find housing, and because I put all my energy into worrying and crying about my difficulties securing a home, look what’s manifested in real-time. However, if I shift my energy to being grateful for how my experience has been there are the qualities of home that I do have that I can be thankful for. Such as being comfortable in a house (whether it is mine or not) - I am not homeless on the streets. My family is safe we are sheltered (but not in a shelter), we have clothes (may not be many or fashionable but we have it), and we can enjoy a warm meal together for every meal. The people we share this house with (my father-in-law) don’t appreciate their home in the way we do, since coming into this environment we have cultivated the feelings of home.

We turned this man’s house into a home if you will.

See, the self-discovery journey or self-help community isn’t about changing your mindset and magically you become a millionaire no. If that were the case everyone would be delusional and see results. The reason for the journey of rediscovering parts of ourselves is to become confident, fearless, empowered, honest, authentic, have boundaries, and most importantly experience fulfillment in life.

If you are religious, the purpose is to be a good human to make it into heaven. This idea is that fulfillment of life happens in the afterlife. But why would this higher power that loves us so much want us to struggle here on Earth just to experience fulfillment after death? The logic behind that just never sat right with me.

I want to experience fulfillment in my life on Earth, creating a Heaven on Earth for myself and my family. I don’t want my flowers after death, I want them while I am alive because I love flowers. I don’t want to live my life and feel regretful in my last days, and my loved ones live on suffering because I didn’t end my days in fulfillment but in a state of regret. My daughter deserves to see her mama change the trajectory of her life and grow up with a clear understanding of life. There is no comparison to the upbringing of my life and my daughter’s because I chose to provide my daughter with a fair chance. I stopped waiting for our bank account to reach a certain number for us to start living life. I stopped telling her my dreams and when she asked why I didn’t do it I replied that I had responsibilities, and instead, I pursued them. My daughter fuels my inspiration for a better life because I need her to experience life in a way I didn’t.

Through rediscovering parts of myself, I can connect with her from a playlike energy rather than an authoritative one. She understands through my experiences that if you put your mind to it, you can achieve it. I want to leave my daughter with the understanding that her dreams in life are reachable, and it doesn’t need to be hard for her to reach them. My life was hard in my twenties going into my thirties but this was because I was conditioned in my upbringing that life is hard and I would have to work hard to accomplish things. But when I worked hard and did everything that the handbook said it did not produce the results promised.

Excerpt From: UN-TRAP DA HOOD

“Many of us went to college like the handbook said, but the good-paying secure job didn’t come like it was advertised. The white picket fence with the happy family sounded nice, but for many of us that was not a lifestyle we saw often in our culture. None of the American dream if we are being honest.”

I am learning through my experiences that the material things we were conditioned to believe were the pillars of success are actually just tools and resources. These tools and resources are meant to help us experience life rather than be the determining factor for a good or bad life.

Money is not the end goal in life, because money is not generational wealth. Looking at the definition of generational wealth, you will find it’s a gift of financial security through bonds, stocks, real estate, and/or family businesses. When you are ‘manifesting’ money to pay your bills or to have financial freedom most people are upset when they don’t see the mysterious deposit of life-changing money in their accounts within a few minutes or hours. That’s not how it works, and that’s my problem with the ‘new age spirituality’ too. My experience with manifesting financial freedom started with an idea to write my book.

Here is the tea, the idea didn’t come with a topic for the book, a cover design nothing. There was a burning desire within me to write, and as I leaned into that desire the words flowed like water. I was put on a path that allowed me to travel and have experiences that I could share in the book.

We moved onto a farm in Tennessee on October 9, 2023. On October 11, 2023, my wife received her first Veteran compensation deposit with back pay when we had only $9 left from our travel from North Carolina! A freaking miracle! Our three months on the farm taught us about our perspective of money and how invaluable it is when you are rooted in the core fundamentals of life. On the farm we lived in one of my fantasies, waking up every morning to make a lavender and vanilla latte to take with me to the greenhouse to water my seeds planted and feed the goats and chickens. Outside under the sun spending my days planning food crops for the upcoming seasons while harvesting food for our co-op shares and community feeding centers. However, inside I explored my creativity through farm-to-table meals, cultivating family recipes that would become household staples. Leaving the farm hurt me and I cried the whole 6 hours back to my mom’s as we prepared to transition into our next ‘home’. But when I look back I am proud of myself for standing on business and boundaries not allowing a white man and woman to disrespect myself or my family.

We had a three-month-long beach ‘vacation’ which allowed us to establish what our family’s core fundamentals of life are rooted in. Driving to the beach I cried the entire 4 hours in disbelief that my mother (I am her only child) truly hated me. She didn’t say those words exactly, but her coldness and attitude towards me pushed me over the ledge. There we were two days before Christmas unloading the car to make an Airbnb winter special our home for the next 30 days. Everything I knew crumbled under me at this Airbnb forcing me to build myself up. My emotions ranged from moments of happiness and bliss to moments of defeat and pure fear. As we bounced from one Airbnb to the next, I started to leave pieces of me to pack lighter. This process broke me, but there was an inner knowing that everything I left behind would come back to me better than how I left it. Every part of me that could not exist in my new reality was released into the ocean waters during those three months I spent at the beach. I remember every release I experienced at the beach too but this one stands out the most when I think about financial freedom. We were at Blue Waters Resort and our checkout was the next day with probably $100 left. I had been trying to hold my shit together the whole day, doing my makeup, dancing, and playing music all day. That morning I believe I had just wrapped up part one of my book and made breakfast for my family when they woke up, so I was intentionally trying to make the best of the day. But as the sun began to set and the day started to turn from day to night I just couldn’t hold it in anymore. I looked up at my then-girlfriend with those sad puppy eyes and she knew, the waterworks were about to flood this room. Without even getting my sentence fully out I let out the ugliest cry with the snot bubbles, gasping for my breath between each boo-hoo. I had no idea what was about to happen, I prepared for us to live out of the car until our next deposit guilting myself for having too much faith that my taxes would hit before the expected date. See I booked each stay off faith that by our checkout we would have direct for what’s next and resources to make it happen. And for those three months, my faith and inner knowing had not been wrong once, I mean I could have gambled and hit big with this kind of faith and inner knowing I mastered. As I was preparing for the worst and planning how to make living out of the car as comfortable for us as possible, I went to check my account to know what number I needed to keep in mind and there was my account with a comma in it. Imagine over $3000 sitting in your account, with no notification, no email, nothing just a mysterious deposit before the expected date. I was floored, embarrassed that I really showed my ass about some money as if the Universe had not pulled through for me each time. At that point, we knew we had to make the move to California because the way life was rearranging things for us proved we were on the right path. That night we looked for flights out west unsure of where we would go and then the path lit up for us. Go to Las Vegas and get married before you go ‘home’ because we had been trying to elope during those three months at the beach but it wasn’t working out. The flight to Vegas for our family with a checked bag was $300 almost ensuring this was the right move. And the day before our flight my wife’s Veteran deposit hit her account as a reward for us taking another leap of faith.

Excerpt From: UN-TRAP DA HOOD

“This was something I did not understand until I started my physical quest out west. My reality has always reflected struggle, and I spent intentional time by the ocean releasing my mindset of struggle. I was tired, I felt defeated in my life and I knew there was more for me. Although my dream was to always live in California, my reality showed no way out to ever achieve that dream. Financially I could not afford to even get to the West Coast, mentally I feared not being capable of making a life for myself on the West Coast.”

During our first three months in California, we learned how to implement our core fundamentals of life. I am not going to lie, since getting out West shit has been mentally exhausting. My fearful manifestations became my reality these past three months. I refuse to serve a 30-day sentence this June in my mental prison I am getting my shit together. I witnessed my shifts on and off with my practices in out-of-body experiences since being in California. And each time I completely gave up, something unexpected out of the blue would come through for us giving us a rope of faith and hope to grab hold of. When I don’t start my day with the sun touching my skin, I can expect emotions to bubble up like boiling water on the stove until I go outside. Or if I don’t accept hugs and affection from my daughter and wife throughout the day I can expect to feel isolated and alone. I’m realizing how much I don’t like to be touched when I am emotionally disassociating from my environment. If I don’t wake up before my family and have my morning coffee with the sun rising as I write, I can expect to be annoyed and frustrated but not know what’s wrong because I didn’t take the time to navigate my emotions alone. I’m learning more about myself as I experience what others would determine as a struggle but I am accepting to be a fearful manifestation. In my piece, Relinquish Control, I explored the thought that control is an illusion and I’d rather be delusional. This is what it looks like to shift your mindset by shifting the perspective you have about your circumstances. Let me just say, that writing brings clarity. I have worked on this piece for three days, and each day except today I blew up on my family because I was triggered that I was interpreted and could not finish this piece. My frustration exploded this morning before finally taking up space in this uncomfortable space to make time for me to write, and through this, I have found the clarity I wasn’t getting in meditation, through my walks, or signs and synchronicities. Reading the pieces I wrote from my past now serves as letters of encouragement and reminders of what works to continue to build on that. My inner yearning to find clarity to make sense of my reality also brings me back to my laptop to dump my thoughts into organized expressions of my emotions. My writings become thought dumps for me to channel the exact emotion as a timestamp disguised in words yet felt deep within the soul. It feels good to dump all those emotions out and sit down to organize them accordingly. For me, the process is what brings me peace and contentment in my circumstance, which I would consider healing.

As I enter my next three-month experience I recognize the theme around learning what it feels like to be content. Peace is what we aim for, and in my moments of peace I feel content, and when I realize it I immediately feel the need to find something more productive to do. That’s that hustle culture, with a little sprinkle of black culture for favor. The definition of contentment is a state of happiness and satisfaction, so why are we conditioned to believe it’s a dangerous game to be content in life? The moment I get the keys to our I will feel content, the house will instantly be filled with the aroma of family, love, and joy. Our worries will vanish with one key turn, and our lives will be the green check mark off the bucket list. We will be content as a family. Now knowing what I know about manifesting, this piece is my reminder to shift back into my state of delusion now that I’ve finally given up control. Today I will embody the emotion of feeling content through the clarity and completion of this piece, and carry that energy with me through my days manifesting this same emotion at home.

Now, I’m kind of glad I saw that post and notes thread that day and got triggered, and I’m happy the trigger festered until I finally sat still to explore the emotions. I understand why I was so bothered by the comments, and I better understand my own doubts about my belief system and practices. I encourage you to revisit one of your older posts and share one in the comments that resonates with you in your current circumstances. I’d love to see the comment section filled with new reads for us all to enjoy together, and grow within our communities.

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Note to my readers:

…but I want to thank you too! Thank you for taking the time to read my thoughts that translated into this thought piece. Sharing is not always easy, and for you as a writer yourself, I am sure you can relate to moments like this reading others’ experiences and suddenly feeling that confidence to continue sharing your translations. To feel like you are not alone in your experiences of breaking generational conditions that keep us in comfort zones that set us back rather than propel us forward. That is what community feels like, and I appreciate each like-soul within this community cultivated in my little corner of the internet.

If you would like to read more about my experiences below are some of my writings from the beach and in the beginning months of being out West. It amazes me how my language has continued to shift as I learn more about myself on this journey. I have decided since reaching over 100 subscribers within 30 days of being consistent and committed to my writings that I want this platform to be a free resource to find my thought pieces, and if you want to support my work and experiences you can purchase a copy of my book through my website. Likes, comments, and shares are acts of love for me so feel free to love on me all you want with this piece and any others shared!

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