Liberationist: Breaking Out of the Trauma Cycle Through Spiritual Revolution
When Activism Becomes Another Cog in the Machine of Empire
I am no longer interested in surviving empire louder. I am interested in understanding how empire lodged itself inside the body, the imagination, the nervous system, and the spirit, and how those internalized architectures continue to govern even our most righteous movements. What follows is not a rejection of activism, but an expansion of its horizon. It is an articulation of liberation as a spiritual revolution, one that must be somatic, relational, and cosmological if it is to endure beyond cycles of crisis.
Activism, as it has been historically organized under colonial modernity, is structured by urgency. It emerges in response to catastrophe, mobilizes bodies toward resistance, and often depends on heightened affect, outrage, and moral clarity to sustain momentum. This orientation has been necessary, and it has also been costly. Urgency, when normalized as a permanent condition, trains the nervous system to remain in survival mode. Over time, emergency becomes an identity, burnout becomes a badge of honor, and suffering is mistaken for devotion. The movement survives, but the people fracture.
Liberation demands a different temporal logic.
Trauma collapses time. The traumatized body is pulled relentlessly into the present moment of threat, shaped by unresolved past harm and unable to imagine a future that is not simply a repetition of endurance. Many activist cultures unconsciously reproduce this temporal collapse. Cycles of outrage rise and fall. Mobilizations surge and dissipate. Each crisis is framed as unprecedented, even when it is part of a long and well-documented lineage of violence. This pattern is not merely political. It is physiological and spiritual.
As Resmaa Menakem has articulated, trauma is not only an event but a pattern held in the body, transmitted across generations, and reinforced by social structures that reward hypervigilance and control rather than repair and regulation [1]. When movements do not attend to this somatic dimension, they risk reproducing domination internally, even as they resist it externally.
This is where spiritual revolution becomes necessary.
By spiritual revolution, I do not mean transcendence, bypassing, or retreat from material struggle. I mean the refusal of colonized cosmologies that sever spirit from politics, healing from justice, and rest from resistance. Colonization did not only dispossess land and labor. It reorganized meaning itself. It taught us that worth is proven through sacrifice, that time belongs to productivity, and that the sacred is private, apolitical, or decorative. These beliefs continue to shape how movements organize, who is celebrated, and who is discarded.
Liberation requires the unlearning of these cosmologies and the remembering of older ones.
As Paulo Freire wrote, “The oppressor consciousness tends to transform everything surrounding it into an object of its domination” [2]. This includes people, land, and even movements for liberation. Without spiritual and somatic reorientation, resistance itself can become extractive, consuming bodies and relationships in the name of a future it cannot actually sustain.
A liberationist framework asks different questions. Not only what are we fighting against, but what ways of being must be composted, and what ways of being must be remembered. Not only how do we win, but what kinds of nervous systems, relational capacities, and spiritual technologies are required to live in the world we claim to be building.
This shift is deeply queer.
Queerness, as a lived epistemology, already disrupts linear time, normative attachment, and inherited scripts of value. To be queer in a colonial world is to navigate dissonance between imposed structures and embodied truth. It is to learn, often painfully, that survival requires creativity, attunement, and the capacity to reimagine kinship and meaning beyond sanctioned forms. This is not incidental to liberation work. It is foundational.
As Octavia Butler reminds us, “All that you touch you change. All that you change changes you” [3]. Liberation is not an external project enacted upon the world without consequence to the self. It is a reciprocal process that demands accountability to how power moves through us, not just against us.
Spiritual revolution, then, is the work of restoring coherence between body, spirit, and struggle. It is the reclamation of ritual as a collective technology for grief, accountability, and regeneration. It is the recognition that healing is not a detour from justice, but a structural condition for movements that do not collapse into the very logics they oppose.
Robin Wall Kimmerer writes that “restoration is about renewing a relationship” [4]. Applied to liberation, this means renewing our relationship to time, to each other, and to the unseen lineages that precede and follow us. It means valuing repair alongside rupture, listening alongside mobilization, and slowness alongside urgency.
I am beginning to name this not only as theory, but as calling.
In this lifetime, and apparently many before it, I have been trained to hold thresholds, to translate between worlds, to speak from the liminal space where somatics, spirit, and politics converge. For a long time, I resisted naming this as spiritual work, wary of how spirituality has been commodified, weaponized, or emptied of its liberatory edge. But refusing the role does not dissolve it. It only leaves the work unnamed and therefore unaccountable.
To step into liberation as spiritual revolution is to accept responsibility for coherence. It is to insist that our movements must be capable of sustaining life, not just opposing death. It is to build practices that can hold rage without being ruled by it, grief without turning it into spectacle, and hope without severing it from discipline.
Liberation begins when resistance stops feeding solely on adrenaline and starts rooting itself in capacity, integrity, and long memory. When survival is no longer mistaken for freedom. When we finally ask not how long we can endure, but how deeply we can live together beyond the conditions that traumatized us in the first place.
References
Menakem, R. My Grandmother’s Hands. Central Recovery Press, 2017.
Freire, P. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Continuum, 1970.
Butler, O. Parable of the Sower. Four Walls Eight Windows, 1993.
Kimmerer, R. W. Braiding Sweetgrass. Milkweed Editions, 2013.
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