Hey y’all.

I’ve never done anything like this before. Never really dedicated myself to anything with intention like this. I want to share what I have written in my dedication so that it’s out there. I will be speaking it out loud every day, lighting a candle each day for my cause, and giving myself the gift of challenge, of testing my endurance, of casting a spell with my word. Since it’s July 4th and only some people celebrate this Independence Day, cause guess what, not everyone is free, this is a good day to begin this dedication, for the reasons I will lay out below. Im doing yoga. Could have been anything, really, but I’m choosing this.

Dedication
In these 30 days of yoga, I envision completion and lasting effects and resolve to continue.

I dedicate my time, space and commitment to my breath, my body and my inner most calling. I focus inward.

I am manifesting, through this dedication, a deep, core sense of sovereignty, self-love and authenticity of action, integrity and intention. I wish this for all beings.

For far too long, I have based my sense of well-being on others and laid my own responsibility for that silently to the wayside.

My sense of self-worth is not dependent on others’ validation. Today I call in self-validation. I call in the active four agreements (Don Miguel Ruiz). I call in the active softening of my heart (Pema Chödron), so that I might operate out of a divine sense of self, my own truth, and my commitments to both self-love in action and community-love in action.

I want to foster systems of mutual care – that must start with me. My radical freedom from the binds of patriarchy, colonialism, hypocritical Christian dogma, capitalism and the historic and current bloodshed in bondage perpetuated by my ancestors stops with me. Right here, right now.

I call in the goddess, my spirit guides, allies and ancestors, who in their passing released their ties to slavery, violence and hatred, for these are of human creation and choice.  I call in the sacred source Spirit to hold me in this dedication.

Of late, my head has been throbbing. I feel grateful for the privilege of time and resources during this pandemic, yet I have felt sad and abandoned, worried and lethargic, ill, unhealthy, unmotivated, depressed and overwhelmed. I have felt anger that Frederick Douglass’ words of disdain for the great American contradiction is still, now, just as applicable as it was when he wrote it in the 1850s. Worse yet, I feel moral indignation for my Black and Brown family who have been made to suffer this intolerable legacy for generations. I feel simultaneous shame and insane frustration with the White supremacist structures set about and still in practice today. I feel guilt for my own White privilege, yet an honor to denounce it as I act as an agent of change in this country. As a teacher, this dedication looks like carving time, sitting down, and showing up for my students in a timely fashion and providing these truths as best I can and, with grave seriousness, present this information in an inclusive way that brings together community and genuine understanding of equality and equity. I dedicate myself to dismantling racism and bigotry within myself by all means necessary. I vow to show up as a neighbor in my community to advocate for equality and reparations to end oppression and violence of all kinds.

I dedicate all this: my physical and mental health, my arts, honoring spirit and confronting bad habits with a forgiving, compassionate lens. I promise to lovingly and deeply know myself, care for myself and love myself – acts of solemn rebellion – so that all this, in service to the highest good, will be done. So it be my will, in service to the Sacred, blessed be. I love and trust You, I love and trust me.