Revolutionary Spirituality: History, Neuroscience & a Call to Sacred Resistance
Cultivating decolonized, science‑grounded spirituality for liberation
I. Spirituality as Accountability
Spirituality can be perceived as the living weave of meanings, practices, and relationships that asks these questions:
What are we part of that is larger than ourselves?
What makes a life (and a world) feel worthy of our care?
How do we relate to one another, to our own bodies, to land, to time, and to the unseen?
But most importantly, how can we hold ourselves accountable as individuals, in our relationships and as a larger collective as a species without recapitulating universalism?
Spirituality is not limited to religion or belief in a deity. It shows up in how we mourn and celebrate, whose lives we treat as sacred, what we are willing to risk for each other, and how we make sense of suffering and joy. It lives in ceremony and in mutual aid, in liturgy and in street chants, in the way our nervous systems learn to recognize belonging, or mistake domination for love.
It is also the terrain of existential healing: the slow work of tending to questions like “Why am I here?”, “How do I live with the reality of death and loss?”, and “What does it mean to live a good life in a collapsing, unjust world?” Existential healing is not about fixing feelings; it is about metabolizing grief, absurdity, and uncertainty in ways that deepen our sense of meaning and connection instead of shutting us down.
Although, the deepest question that many avoid is that of, “who or what am I accountable to?”
When spirituality is colonized, these questions are often answered with obedience, guilt, denial and pacification: your purpose is to submit, your suffering is a test, your doubt is a problem and you goal is unrestricted autonomy. When spirituality is decolonized, existential healing becomes a collective practice of remembering that our lives matter beyond our productivity, our trauma, or our usefulness to empire, while simultaneously serving as a means of self and collective accountability,
A spirituality of liberation, then, is a way of answering all of these questions that:
Names oppression as a violation of what is most sacred.
Treats resistance, repair, and existential healing as sacred responsibilities.
Reorganizes bodies, relationships, and institutions around dignity, interdependence, and collective freedom.
While questioning the culture and institutions we hold ourselves and others accountable when harm is done.
This is the kind of spirituality I’m tracing across history, into Minneapolis today, and into the science of how our brains and bodies can help—or hinder—our struggles for liberation.
II. Lessons From Past Revolutions: When Spirit Turns People into Protagonists
Revolutionary movements have long relied on spiritual frames to name oppression as evil and resistance as obligation, not merely as strategy but as moral necessity. In the American colonies, Protestant revivals and the Great Awakening preached equality before God and individual moral agency; this theology helped ordinary colonists imagine themselves as subjects capable of resisting monarchy, not merely enduring it. Spiritual conviction loosened the psychological grip of divine kingship and replaced obedience with conscience, transforming rebellion from treason into duty.
In the U.S. Civil Rights Movement, Black church communities supplied more than infrastructure; they generated a cosmology in which segregation was sin, liberation was sacred work, and nonviolent direct action was a form of disciplined spiritual practice. Pulpits became organizing hubs, hymns became technologies of nervous-system regulation, and marches, arrests, and jailings were ritualized as collective sacraments. The movement did not simply demand legal change; it trained people to see themselves as bearers of moral authority in a universe that had told them they were disposable.
Across Latin America, liberation theology extended this pattern by re-reading Christianity from the underside of history. God was understood as siding with the poor, “sin” as structural injustice, and salvation as liberation from imperial and capitalist domination. Base communities mixed scripture study with land occupations, labor organizing, and women’s collectives, collapsing the divide between spiritual formation and political education. Faith became a training ground for analysis, courage, and shared risk, rather than a retreat from material struggle.
Alongside,and long before, these movements, Indigenous spiritual traditions across the globe have sustained resistance not by framing revolution as rupture, but by insisting on continuity. For many Indigenous nations, spirit was never separate from governance, land stewardship, kinship, or law. Colonization was not only theft of territory but an assault on cosmology itself: an attempt to sever people from the relational worlds that made resistance intelligible and survivable. Ceremony, song, language, and land-based practice functioned as living archives of political memory, preserving ways of knowing that empire sought to erase.
From the Ghost Dance to contemporary Land Back movements, Indigenous spiritual resurgence has repeatedly transformed communities from managed populations into historical agents. These movements did not require people to “become political” in the modern sense; they reminded people that they already were. The restoration of ceremony was simultaneously the restoration of jurisdiction, responsibility, and collective orientation toward the future. Resistance emerged not as protest alone, but as refusal to abandon relational obligations to ancestors, descendants, and land.
Crucially, Indigenous movements complicate Western revolutionary narratives by refusing the fantasy of total rupture or final victory. Where many modern revolutions imagine a singular overthrow followed by a new order, Indigenous spiritual resistance often operates through persistence, renewal, and cyclical return. Survival itself becomes insurgent. Continuity becomes defiance. The insistence on remaining in right relation, to land, to community, to the more-than-human world, reframes revolution as an ongoing practice rather than a climactic event.
Though wildly different in doctrine, these spiritualities of liberation share a recognizable pattern. They reorganize people’s sense of who they are, what they are permitted to desire, and what they owe one another. They teach that the poor, the colonized, the enslaved, the displaced are not objects of history but protagonists within it. Courage, solidarity, and sacrifice are treated not as exceptional heroism, but as ordinary responses to a moral and cosmic disorder that should never have been normalized.
What is emerging now inherits this lineage while facing a distinct condition. The task is no longer only to oppose external domination, but to dismantle the internalized architectures of empire that live in perception, attachment, desire, and imagination. Earlier movements trained people to resist unjust systems; the present moment demands the additional work of undoing the ways those systems trained us to mistake survival strategies for identity.
To see both the continuity and the shift, it helps to lay these histories alongside what is now taking shape, a spiritual-political orientation less concerned with seizing power than with rebuilding the human capacity to hold power without reproducing the same violences in new forms.
Spiritual lineages of resistance and where we are now
Revolutionary movements have long relied on spiritual frames to name oppression as evil and resistance as obligation, not merely as strategy but as moral necessity. In the American colonies, Protestant revivals and the Great Awakening preached equality before God and individual moral agency; this theology helped ordinary colonists imagine themselves as subjects capable of resisting monarchy, not merely enduring it. Spiritual conviction loosened the psychological grip of divine kingship and replaced obedience with conscience, transforming rebellion from treason into duty.
In the U.S. Civil Rights Movement, Black church communities supplied more than infrastructure; they generated a cosmology in which segregation was sin, liberation was sacred work, and nonviolent direct action was a form of disciplined spiritual practice. Pulpits became organizing hubs, hymns became technologies of nervous-system regulation, and marches, arrests, and jailings were ritualized as collective sacraments. The movement did not simply demand legal change; it trained people to see themselves as bearers of moral authority in a universe that had told them they were disposable.
Across Latin America, liberation theology extended this pattern by re-reading Christianity from the underside of history. God was understood as siding with the poor, “sin” as structural injustice, and salvation as liberation from imperial and capitalist domination. Base communities mixed scripture study with land occupations, labor organizing, and women’s collectives, collapsing the divide between spiritual formation and political education. Faith became a training ground for analysis, courage, and shared risk, rather than a retreat from material struggle.
Alongside,and long before, these movements, Indigenous spiritual traditions across the globe have sustained resistance not by framing revolution as rupture, but by insisting on continuity. For many Indigenous nations, spirit was never separate from governance, land stewardship, kinship, or law. Colonization was not only theft of territory but an assault on cosmology itself: an attempt to sever people from the relational worlds that made resistance intelligible and survivable. Ceremony, song, language, and land-based practice functioned as living archives of political memory, preserving ways of knowing that empire sought to erase.
From the Ghost Dance to contemporary Land Back movements, Indigenous spiritual resurgence has repeatedly transformed communities from managed populations into historical agents. These movements did not require people to “become political” in the modern sense; they reminded people that they already were. The restoration of ceremony was simultaneously the restoration of jurisdiction, responsibility, and collective orientation toward the future. Resistance emerged not as protest alone, but as refusal to abandon relational obligations to ancestors, descendants, and land.
Crucially, Indigenous movements complicate Western revolutionary narratives by refusing the fantasy of total rupture or final victory. Where many modern revolutions imagine a singular overthrow followed by a new order, Indigenous spiritual resistance often operates through persistence, renewal, and cyclical return. Survival itself becomes insurgent. Continuity becomes defiance. The insistence on remaining in right relation, to land, to community, to the more-than-human world, reframes revolution as an ongoing practice rather than a climactic event.
Though wildly different in doctrine, these spiritualities of liberation share a recognizable pattern. They reorganize people’s sense of who they are, what they are permitted to desire, and what they owe one another. They teach that the poor, the colonized, the enslaved, the displaced are not objects of history but protagonists within it. Courage, solidarity, and sacrifice are treated not as exceptional heroism, but as ordinary responses to a moral and cosmic disorder that should never have been normalized.
What is emerging now inherits this lineage while facing a distinct condition. The task is no longer only to oppose external domination, but to dismantle the internalized architectures of empire that live in perception, attachment, desire, and imagination. Earlier movements trained people to resist unjust systems; the present moment demands the additional work of undoing the ways those systems trained us to mistake survival strategies for identity.
To see both the continuity and the shift, it helps to lay these histories alongside what is now taking shape, a spiritual-political orientation less concerned with seizing power than with rebuilding the human capacity to hold power without reproducing the same violences in new forms.
III. Minneapolis as a New Epicenter of Sacred Resistance
Today, Minneapolis sits squarely in that lineage, not as an anomaly, but as a convergence point where older spiritual grammars of resistance are being reactivated under late-imperial conditions. After the 2020 uprisings following the murder of George Floyd, the city became global shorthand for a crisis of policing, racial capitalism, and the spectacle of white supremacist state violence rendered undeniable. Minneapolis was read as rupture, as explosion, as collapse. But rupture was only the surface phenomenon. What followed was not silence, but composting.
By 2026, the city again erupts, this time not only around police violence, but around the expanding architecture of the border-police state itself. An ICE crackdown, the killing of Renée Good by an ICE agent, and a statewide “Day of Truth & Freedom” general strike catalyze a moment in which the violence of immigration enforcement is no longer treated as a specialized issue affecting only migrants, but as a central organizing logic of contemporary governance. The subsequent murder of ICU RN Alex Pretti, a white body of resistance, further fractures the illusion that compliance or proximity to whiteness offers protection. What becomes visible is a shared exposure to a regime that treats life as administrable, removable, and disposable.
In subzero temperatures, unions, faith leaders, small businesses, and community organizations shut down normal life. This is not protest as spectacle, but refusal as collective practice. The strike does not simply demand reform; it interrupts the metabolic rhythms of the city to say, we will not accept a society organized around cages, deportation flights, and racialized disappearance as business as usual. In this sense, the strike functions as both economic disruption and moral declaration, a communal fast from complicity.
One of the most arresting images from this moment is clergy kneeling at Minneapolis–St. Paul airport, singing, praying, and physically blocking deportation flights. Roughly one hundred clergy from multiple traditions are zip-tied and arrested for trespass and failure to comply after deliberately moving beyond the limits of their permit and interrupting airport operations. Their statements are neither symbolic nor apologetic. They name ICE’s regime as immoral, invoke religious duty, and call airlines to refuse complicity in transporting human beings into exile. Here, faith is not deployed as a language of comfort, but as a mechanism of confrontation.
This is one of many forms of spirituality of liberation in the flesh. The airport, one of the most securitized, surveilled, and regulated spaces of contemporary life, becomes a temporary sanctuary and altar. Prayer becomes a tactic that disrupts logistics. Song becomes a means of holding collective fear and resolve. Arrest becomes a public liturgy exposing the contradiction between state power and moral authority. The image of clergy being loaded into police vans crystallizes a truth long obscured by white Christian nationalism. The state does not want religion in the sense of moral constraint or prophetic witness. It wants religion that will sanctify its violence, stabilize its hierarchies, and provide aesthetic cover for its brutality.
In this clash, a different Christianity, and beyond that, a broader spirituality of liberation, steps forward. It refuses the privatization of faith and the reduction of spirituality to personal meaning-making. It understands sacred obligation as relational and public, bound to the protection of life rather than allegiance to law. This spirituality no longer confines itself to pulpits or temples. It takes its place alongside migrant families, Indigenous land and water protectors, queer and trans youth, healthcare workers, and multiracial coalitions of labor. It does not claim innocence. It claims responsibility.
Minneapolis, in this moment, becomes more than a site of resistance. It becomes a laboratory. A place where spiritual lineages, Black freedom faith, Indigenous resurgence, abolitionist ethics, labor solidarity, migrant justice, and anarchist tactics are forced into proximity and compelled to translate across difference. The city reveals what happens when spiritual conviction is no longer content to name injustice, but organizes itself as infrastructure capable of sustaining risk, grief, and long-term struggle.
What emerges is not a singular movement, but a rehearsal for what sacred resistance looks like under conditions of advanced surveillance, militarized borders, and collapsing legitimacy. Minneapolis teaches that spirituality does not disappear in moments of crisis. It mutates. When stripped of respectability and proximity to power, it remembers its older function, to make ordinary people capable of extraordinary refusal, and to turn sites of control into spaces of moral exposure.
IV. The Decline of Institutional Religion & the Rise of the Decolonized Spirit
All of this unfolds while institutional religion is losing its grip. In the United States, especially among younger and marginalized communities, attendance and affiliation with mainstream churches are declining. Many may associate “church” with racism, queerphobia, patriarchy, and theologies that justified everything from chattel slavery to Indigenous genocide.
Yet the hunger for meaning, transcendence, and connection hasn’t vanished—if anything, it has intensified. People are leaving empire‑shaped religion and rediscovering Spirit. Returning to the definition above, spirituality is about what we hold sacred, how we live in light of that and hold ourselves accountable to that sacredness. Decolonizing spirituality means saying this out loud: colonization did not just take land; it outlawed ceremonies, demonized African and Indigenous cosmologies, pathologized queer and non‑monogamous kinship, and tried to replace relational worldviews with a God who sanctions punishment, hierarchy and extraction while demanding repressive obedience and pacification of the human spirit of resistance.
In response, Indigenous and other decolonial thinkers such as Michael Yellow Bird have articulated frameworks such asof neurodecolonization, where mindfulness, ceremony, and traditional contemplative practices are used explicitly to heal colonial trauma in the body/neurocolonization and restore right relationship with land, community, and self. In movement spaces, we see land‑based rituals at protest sites, vigils that speak of the dead as ancestors and comrades, not mere victims, and healing circles led by queer, trans, Black, Brown, and Indigenous practitioners who treat nervous‑system care as not only central, but as a vital and key part to political and existential liberation.
This is already a new kind of spirituality of liberation: one that trusts the wisdom of bodies and ecosystems, that honors ancestors without romanticizing them, and that understands that empire must be hospiced from both laws and from our conditioned sense of what love, purpose, and safety feel like.
This emerging spirituality also fundamentally alters how power is understood. Rather than locating power solely in institutions, offices, or charismatic figures, it understands power as something cultivated through relational capacity. The ability to stay present under pressure, to metabolize fear without displacing it onto others, to remain accountable without collapse or defensiveness, becomes a spiritual discipline with direct political consequences. In this frame, regulation is not self-soothing for its own sake, it is the groundwork that allows people to act without reproducing domination in moments of crisis.
As a result, leadership itself is being reimagined. Authority is no longer assumed to flow from moral certainty, ideological purity, or rhetorical dominance. Instead, it emerges from demonstrated integrity, from the capacity to hold complexity without fragmenting, and from a willingness to be shaped by collective feedback rather than insulated from it. Eldership is not declared. It is recognized through consistency, restraint, and care for the long arc of the community. This challenges both traditional religious hierarchies and familiar activist dynamics that reward urgency over sustainability.
This decolonized spirit also disrupts the modern separation between inner work and collective struggle. Healing is no longer treated as a private project to be completed before political engagement, nor is activism framed as something that justifies perpetual self-abandonment. The two are understood as mutually conditioning. Trauma that goes unaddressed reshapes movements in its image. Likewise, movements that demand constant sacrifice without repair eventually cannibalize their own people. Spiritual practice, in this context, becomes a means of aligning internal rhythms with collective aims, so that resistance can be sustained without becoming indistinguishable from the violence it opposes.
Importantly, this spirituality is not utopian. It does not presume harmony, nor does it imagine that conflict can be transcended through right intention alone. Instead, it treats conflict as inevitable and potentially instructive, provided there are containers capable of holding it without escalation or erasure. Grief, rage, jealousy, and fear are not pathologized or spiritualized away. They are recognized as signals, often carrying information about breached boundaries, unmet needs, or historical wounds that require attention rather than suppression.
What distinguishes this moment is that these insights are no longer confined to therapeutic or spiritual subcultures. They are increasingly being integrated into organizing spaces, labor struggles, abolitionist movements, and Indigenous-led land defense. Practices once dismissed as “soft” are now understood as strategic, because they determine whether people can stay in relationship long enough to build anything that lasts. The spiritual is not elevated above the material. It is embedded within it, shaping how decisions are made, how harm is addressed, and how people are welcomed back into community after rupture.
In this way, decolonized spirit functions less as belief and more as orientation. It asks not only what we oppose, but what we are practicing together in the meantime. It measures success not only by policy wins or visibility, but by whether people are becoming more capable of care, coordination, and courage over time. It insists that the means and the ends cannot be separated, because the future we are building is already rehearsed in the present, through the quality of attention we give to one another and the worlds we choose to make sacred.
V. Manifestation Under Empire: When “Mindset” becomes self‑blame
Meanwhile, in the wellness and self‑help worlds, “manifestation” has become a dominant spiritual story. We are told: focus your thoughts, visualize what you want, and the universe will respond. Neuroscience buzzwords, such as “rewire your brain,” and “activate neuroplasticity”,are sprinkled in to validate this claim.
There is something real underneath the hype.
Neuroscience does show that attention and emotion shape the brain. Networks like the default mode network (which supports our sense of self and our internal stories), the salience network (which decides what is important), and executive networks (which plan and act) reorganize in response to repeated, emotionally charged focus. The experiences we rehearse--whether that’s fear, shame, or possibility—literally become easier to access.
But under empire, manifestation is easily colonized. Manifestation under this cosmology becomes an extension of the recapitalation of capitalism, meaning “manifesting” is really extracting from energetic forces in order to chase after the hoarding of resources and wealth. In addition, when outcomes are framed almost entirely as a function of “mindset,” ongoing experiences of poverty, racism, deportation, disability, and marginalization get recoded as evidence of faulty thinking or low vibration, instead of evidence of systemic harm. Ultimately, without a political analysis of power and oppression, “manifesting” becomes a tool of supremacy and hierachy, manipulating the energies of this world to be twisted to fulfill unrestricted autonomy and significant resource depletion.
The same nervous systems that have been trained by white supremacy, cisheteropatriarchy, and racial capitalism to prioritize danger and scarcity are then asked to solve their suffering by thinking different thoughts while being gaslit of their suffering and trauma by all those still holding the virus of neurocolonization in their somatic systems, while nothing around them changes simultaneously. “Manifestation” becomes another name for self‑blame, and another way existential pain is privatized instead of politicized.
The energy of liberation cannot afford this. The energetic intentions of liberation has to be honest about both the science and the power relations: yes, attention, emotion, and imagination change brains; no, they do not abolish ICE, prisons, or pipelines by themselves. Instead of promising that thought alone can bypass material conditions, a decolonized, science‑grounded spirituality asks: how do we use what we know about brains and bodies to build movements that are more resilient, more unified, and more capable of sustained struggle and existential honesty.
V. Science Is the Spiritual Is the Political Is the Personal
The separation of science, spirituality, politics, and personal life is not natural. It is an artifact of modernity, produced through colonial epistemologies that required fragmentation in order to govern. By dividing the world into discrete domains, fact versus meaning, body versus soul, private versus public, empire made its violence harder to see and easier to justify. What appears neutral or objective in one domain could be insulated from ethical accountability in another. This partitioning was not merely intellectual. It was infrastructural, shaping institutions, disciplines, and even the architecture of daily life.
Science, under this arrangement, was stripped of its relational and moral dimensions and recast as a tool for control, measurement, and extraction. Knowledge became something produced about the world rather than with it. Bodies were reduced to data points. Land was transformed into resource. Nervous systems were treated as machines rather than living record keepers of history and adaptation. Yet beneath this abstraction, science has always been studying the same terrain spirituality has named for millennia, how life organizes itself, how systems regulate under stress, how relationship determines survival.
What contemporary neuroscience, epigenetics, and ecology increasingly demonstrate is that there is no clean boundary between inner experience and external condition. Chronic stress alters gene expression. Social threat reshapes perception. Dispossession reorganizes attention, memory, and trust across generations. These are not metaphors. They are measurable processes. The body remembers what law and language attempt to erase. In this sense, trauma is not only psychological. It is political history carried in tissue, posture, and reflex.
This is where science converges with spirituality, not as belief, but as practice. When Indigenous and decolonial frameworks speak of ceremony as restoring balance, or of land as teacher, they are not rejecting science. They are refusing a version of it that amputated itself from responsibility. Regulation, attunement, rhythm, and reciprocity are not mystical abstractions. They are observable dynamics within living systems. Spiritual practice, at its most grounded, is applied systems theory, focused on sustaining coherence in the face of entropy.
The political implications are unavoidable. If bodies are shaped by structures, then policy is never neutral. Borders, prisons, policing, debt, and labor regimes are not external to the psyche. They write themselves directly into nervous systems, producing fear, hypervigilance, collapse, or numbness. Conversely, collective practices that cultivate safety, agency, and mutual recognition generate measurable shifts in capacity, cognition, and coordination. Politics is not only about power over institutions. It is about the conditions under which human beings can think, feel, and act together without disintegrating.
This collapses the false distinction between personal healing and collective struggle. What is often dismissed as “personal work” is, in fact, the frontline of political possibility. A person unable to regulate under threat is easier to govern through fear. A movement unable to metabolize conflict will reproduce hierarchy, scapegoating, and burnout. Attention, presence, and relational skill are not soft capacities. They are strategic resources, determining whether resistance fragments or coheres under pressure.
At the same time, this framework refuses the neoliberal inversion that turns healing into an individual responsibility divorced from material conditions. Nervous systems do not heal in isolation. They heal in context. No amount of mindfulness can compensate for structural violence, precarity, or dispossession. Science makes this plain. Regulation depends on environment. Capacity depends on safety. Meaning depends on belonging. The personal is political not as a slogan, but as a biological and social fact.
What emerges from this convergence is a unified orientation. Science studies the patterns. Spirituality cultivates relationship to those patterns. Politics determines which patterns are enforced and which are not allowed to be flourish. The personal is where all of this becomes lived, moment by moment, breath by breath. None of these domains can be separated without distortion. When they are reintegrated, liberation stops being an abstract future and becomes a present-tense practice, enacted in how people organize care, risk, truth, and responsibility together.
VI. Neuroscience of Liberation: Attention, Attachment, and the Nervous System of Empire
Here, neuroscience becomes a map of how spirituality, whether empire-shaped or liberatory, gets under the skin. Three dynamics are especially important, attention, value-tagging, and attachment. Together, they describe how worlds are not only imagined or enforced, but embodied, stabilized, and reproduced across generations.
Attention is the basic currency of neuroplasticity. What we repeatedly attend to, we wire for. Under empire, attention is relentlessly captured by crisis, scarcity, and threat. News cycles, debt, policing, borders, surveillance, and climate catastrophe keep the nervous system oriented toward danger. The salience network continuously flags these stimuli as urgent, narrowing perception and constricting possibility. This is not accidental. A population whose attention is monopolized by survival cannot easily imagine alternatives, coordinate long-term action, or rest into relational trust.
A spirituality of liberation grounded in neuroscience does not ask people to deny danger or disengage from reality. It asks something more precise and more difficult. It asks for the intentional cultivation of attentional counterweights. Attention to pleasure, beauty, humor, rest, erotic aliveness, and collective joy is not indulgent. It is corrective. These experiences widen perceptual bandwidth and reintroduce flexibility into systems trained for collapse. When nervous systems are given repeated evidence that safety and connection are possible, even briefly, they regain the capacity to choose rather than simply react.
Value-tagging determines what the brain treats as worth organizing life around. Through the salience network, experiences are paired with emotional intensity and encoded as meaningful or disposable. Under conditions of colonial terror, slavery, land theft, genocide, displacement, and medical neglect, vigilance and distrust were not moral failures. They were intelligent adaptations. They kept people alive. But adaptations optimized for survival under domination can become constraints when conditions shift. If liberation is consistently paired with exhaustion, isolation, or punishment, the nervous system will quietly deprioritize it, regardless of ideological commitment.
This is why movements that rely solely on critique and sacrifice often stall. Without experiences that pair justice with pleasure, solidarity with relief, and meaning with felt aliveness, liberation remains abstract. A science-grounded spirituality of liberation uses ritual, song, movement, story, and shared rhythm to create emotionally salient experiences of freedom. These practices do not distract from struggle. They encode liberation as valuable, desirable, and livable at the level where decisions are actually made, below conscious reasoning.
Attachment organizes how safety and love are patterned over time. It is the nervous system’s relational memory. Under neurocolonization, attachment becomes distorted in predictable ways. Love is associated with possession, abandonment, or volatility. Safety becomes linked to proximity to power, respectability, or assimilation. Worthiness becomes conditional. Bodies learn to brace, to chase approval, or to settle for harm because it is familiar. These patterns are not individual pathologies. They are the relational aftermath of living inside systems that weaponize scarcity and separation.
Empire survives not only through force, but through the attachment patterns it normalizes. When people believe that safety can only be achieved through exclusion, domination, or being chosen by the right authority, they will reproduce those logics even while opposing them politically. A decolonized spirituality of liberation names this clearly. Empire lives in our attachment strategies. Liberation therefore requires rewiring not only beliefs, but what the body associates with home, belonging, and relief.
This rewiring cannot happen through insight alone. Attachment is reshaped through repeated experiences of attuned presence, repair after rupture, and collective reliability over time. Movements that ignore this reality often recreate the very dynamics they oppose, cycling through charisma, betrayal, burnout, and fragmentation. Movements that attend to it begin to generate a different quality of endurance. Freedom starts to feel safer than control. Mutuality starts to feel more regulating than hierarchy.
Taken together, attention, value-tagging, and attachment reveal why spirituality is never neutral. It always trains the nervous system toward some version of reality. Empire trains for compliance, vigilance, and isolation. A spirituality of liberation trains for presence, connection, and shared risk. Neuroscience does not reduce liberation to biology. It clarifies the terrain on which liberation must operate if it is to last.
In this light, liberation is not only a political horizon. It is a nervous-system competency, cultivated collectively, over time. The question is no longer whether movements have the right analysis, but whether they are building bodies capable of inhabiting the world they claim to be fighting for.
VII. Intra-Secure and Communal Secure Attachment: Unity as a Neural and Spiritual Practice
Here is where spirituality, neuroscience, and politics fully converge. Intra-secure attachment is not a therapeutic add-on to political life. It is the neurological and spiritual capacity that determines whether a person can remain ethically oriented under pressure. Cultivating a consistent, compassionate relationship with one’s own inner parts strengthens neural circuits responsible for self-awareness, emotional modulation, and meaning-making, while increasing their coordination with limbic systems that govern fear and threat detection. Spiritually, this practice teaches people to remain in relationship with their grief, rage, longing, and doubt, rather than dissociating from them or projecting them outward as moral certainty.
When some degree of intra-secure attachment is present, people are less likely to consent to abusive dynamics in the name of urgency, loyalty, or righteousness. They become more capable of distinguishing between discipline and domination, between accountability and humiliation, between sacrifice that is chosen and sacrifice that is coerced. Their nervous systems are still shaped by violence and injustice, but they have a more reliable internal reference point, a home base from which they can act without abandoning themselves. This is not spiritual bypass or self-help. It is spiritual training for long-haul resistance and long-haul existential healing.
Communal-secure attachment extends this capacity beyond the individual and embeds it in collective life. It names the relational field created when people repeatedly experience care, truth-telling, and repair in shared spaces over time. Neurologically, this kind of attachment distributes regulation across bodies, reducing individual overload and increasing collective resilience. Spiritually, it reframes belonging as something generated through mutual responsibility rather than conferred through status, charisma, or ideological conformity.
The practices that cultivate communal-secure attachment are often deceptively simple and routinely undervalued. Sitting in a circle after an action and telling the truth about what happened and how it felt. Eating together and making sure everyone has enough. Attending to conflict early, before resentment calcifies into ideology. Engaging in mycelial economics that privilege circulation over accumulation. Tending land, water, and nonhuman kin as participants rather than backdrops. Breathing together before collective action so bodies enter risk with some degree of coherence. These are not sentimental gestures. They are how nervous systems learn that safety and power can coexist without coercion.
This matters because movements inevitably generate stress, disagreement, and rupture. Without communal-secure attachment, that stress is often discharged through blame, splitting, or quiet disappearance. People leave not because they do not care, but because their bodies associate the movement with threat rather than belonging. When communal-secure attachment is present, rupture does not automatically mean collapse. There are pathways for repair. Grief can be held without being weaponized. Disagreement can occur without triggering existential abandonment. Unity becomes something practiced, not assumed.
Movements that intentionally cultivate communal-secure attachment are, quite literally, building different nervous systems. They are cultivating populations capable of tolerating difference without fragmentation, capable of sustaining commitment without demanding sameness, capable of facing repression without turning inward and cannibalizing one another. These capacities are not abstract virtues. They are embodied skills that determine whether collective struggle can outlast moments of intensity and move into phases of construction.
Neuroscience helps clarify how this is possible, how repeated experiences of attunement and repair reshape perception, trust, and coordination over time. Spirituality provides the rituals, symbols, and shared meanings that make people willing to submit to these disciplines of care, especially when fear and fatigue would make withdrawal easier. Together, they offer a different vision of unity, not as uniformity or enforced coherence, but as a practiced capacity to remain in relationship while moving through uncertainty.
In this frame, unity is not the absence of conflict. It is the presence of enough attachment, internally and collectively, that conflict does not become annihilating. Liberation then becomes not only a political demand, but a lived experiment in whether humans can learn to belong to one another without domination, even as the systems that taught us otherwise begin to unravel.
VIII. A Socioecological Spirituality of Liberation for this Moment
Seen through a socioecological lens, a decolonized, science‑grounded spirituality of liberation operates on every level:
Individual: inviting neurodecolonizing practices—somatics, prayer, meditation, ceremony—that help people unlearn internalized shame and obedience, process existential pain, and cultivate enough regulation to show up.
Interpersonal: challenging mononormativity and amatonormativity, opening space for queer, poly, and village‑like constellations of care instead of isolating nuclear units, and reshaping what love and commitment feel like in the body.
Organizational: pushing movements, congregations, and NGOs to replace burnout and martyrdom with cultures of rest, accessibility, and trauma‑informed structure, so people can stay and keep asking hard questions together.
Community: treating protests, strikes, encampments, and assemblies as ceremonies of resistance—spaces where people rehearse different ways of making decisions, sharing resources, and honoring both grief and joy.
Policy/systems: sustaining a moral imagination that can hold abolition, land‑back, and reparations not as abstract ideals but as sacred obligations, anchored in a felt sense of interdependence and existential responsibility.
This is what it means to speak of spiritualities of liberation in the plural: Ceremony, diasporic ancestral practices and secular somatics, abolitionist chaplaincy and queer ritual all contributing to a shared project of retraining our collective nervous system away from empire and toward aliveness.
IX. A Call to Sacred Resistance
The present moment is asking us to decide how are we going to incorporate and co-weave Spirit and what kind of spirituality we will bring into our resistance work. Empire‑shaped spirituality tells us to be obedient, grateful, and quiet, to see cages and deportations and pipelines as unfortunate but necessary, and to numb not our existential pain but our entire existence with certainty or denial. Hyper‑individual manifestation spirituality tells us that if we think correctly, we can escape so we can be “higher vibration”—even if everyone around us cannot, leaving reality behind.
A decolonized, science‑grounded spirituality of liberation offers another path. It insists that we remember we are bodies and relationships, not just ideas; that we are inheritors of revolutionary spiritual lineages; that our brains and hearts are soft enough to change; and that none of us get liberate without the other and one another. It invites us to treat the picket line, the blockade, the budget meeting, the therapy session, and the healing circle as sites of sacred experimentation in remembering how to be human together.
This is a call to sacred resistance: to bring our prayers and our research, our ancestors and our attachment into the same room; to let them teach us how to confront empire without reproducing it inside ourselves. If spiritualities of liberation once helped people stand up to kings, slaveholders, and dictators, they can help us now, if we are willing to let them be decolonized, embodied, existentially honest, and scientifically curious enough to match the complexity of the world we’re trying to change.
Such an incedible breakdown of how the mind processes a colonized world and WHY spiritual practices have been long-suppressed by these systems. Thank you for your beautiful work. Intersection at its finest.
Damn this hits hard and resonates so much - will be writing my own reflection prompted by this, thank you for doing the work and finding the words <3
Would definitely recommend looking into First Nations Australian cultures too! As the oldest continuous civilisation on earth.... I'd like to also hope that the 'severing' hasn't progressed 'as much', compared to many other Indigenous communities globally, the depth and continuity of that knowledge is relatively less interrupted. Not to downplay the horrific and ongoing colonisation, but it was still recent in context.