hello from the void
my first post in a long time
Hello beloved friends!
I missed you!! my drafts folder is overflowing with insights to share with you all.
Are you familiar with the term death cycle?
We often percieve death as a final phase, but when we look to nature we see that plants often go through a season of death before re-emerging in the spring.
I came to understand death and its role in entrepreneurship in 2018 while I was temporarily enrolled in a buisness incubator called turtle tank.
I remember how radical it was for me to hear a set of behaviors I felt shame around ( sleepiness, fatigue, disengagement with my work, lack of interest, etc) be understood as an essential phase of growth and maturity.
According to turtle tank, we all go through death cycles, especially before big growth spurts, and it is crucial to honor them. With genuine rest, we often emerge from seasons of rest more resourced and skilled.
Help me put these resources to good use!
Are you or your organization looking for someone to hold thoughtful healing spaces? Someone to lead a somatic grounding practice as a workshop or opening to a meeting?
Are you interested in hearing someone speak about their journey to authenticity and finding inner peace?
What about a workshop on releasing toxic stress, de-escalation, or navigating conflict in multi-racial spaces?
Do you have a way to honor transgender day of remembrance?
Have a unique idea in mind and just need the right facilitator?
Let’s dream together !!! You can email me at opulenceabundanceconsulting@gmail.com, or sign up for a time slot on my calendar.
I spent the first half of my summer working in new ways
My consulting work has placed me in courageous and experimental spaces, at least according to me. I know that many of my clients, at the start of our work, felt that they were failing in heartbreaking and unbearable ways.
I find that one of the first things I do with clients is to work through the emotions present (very often shame, anxiety, guilt, and fear) so that we an view the situation they are navigating with clarity.
As much as we may try, we can’t ignore our feelings forever. Counterintuitively, it is actually a move towards sustainable productivity to take time to talk about feelings and work through conflict, especially in work settings.
It is not comfortable or easy work and outcomes are not guaranteed, but I am always amazed by what is possible with consistent honesty, care, and communication.
After months of meeting over zoom, summer brought me the oppurtunity to meet people in person, facilitate retreats, and bring projects to a close.
Here are some reflections from organizations that I worked with (alongside some very brilliant co-consultants):
For me your presence as a whole has been extremely helpful in these unstable times for my organization. Your outside presence and guidance has helped us unearth so many important contradictions and urge the org as whole to choose a path for reconciliation. It was also great to simply get to know the two of you a bit in the time we have all spent together!
—Strategic Planning Participant
Opulence and Cesia provided so many tools, from a wide variety of grounding techniques, to social work analyses, to breaking down types of harm, to multiple forms of interactive facilitation, and so much more. They also helped remind us about and tap into the tools and networks of support that we already have. Opulence and Cesia helped us care for the hurt feelings of our inner child as well as nurture our inner child’s joy with dancing, music, uncrustables, and many other silly bonding moments!I definitely recommend working with Opulence and Cesia, either individually or as a team, as our time together flowed so easily between profound and heavy conversations and outbursts of laughter and easeful connection.
— Transformative Facilitation client
I spent the second half of the summer integrating feedback through rest and partying
After engaging in transformative and liberatory work it is so so so important to collect feedback.
Sometimes feedback is traumatic.
feedback can burn. Humility can burn. I put this thought in the big font, because I think in this world where transformative justice is a buzz word, we have a deluded expectation that giving and recieving feedback should be easy, and sometimes it is.
But sometimes, feedback is extremely difficult to recieve, and hearing how others percieve us can cause extreme emotional distress.
In the feedback I collected, I gained so much valuable information about how to be a better community member, mentor, and all around person, however it was painful.
As an independent consultant I am responsible for my own paycheck, and the pressure stress can easily take over my life. The feedback I recieved revealed to me the boundaries I was missing with capitalism.
Despite my intense anxiety over money, my recognition of the importance of the feedback I recieved pushed me to pause the newsletter and other work related activities. It felt irresponsible to write newsletters after I had recieved and was still int the process of recieving feedback about harmful behaviors I was exhibiting.
I can’t wait to tell you more about the feedback and the partying ; )
coming soon to a newsletter near you!!!
If you are wondering how I paid my bills while taking time to process my emotions, it was truly by the grace of god and the grace of my community.
Even though I ceased posting on social media and sending out a newsletter and taking sales calls, I stayed employed through word of mouth and community referrals.
A huge special thank you to anyone who has ever shared my name, suggested me for a project, or thought of me for a training.
As an intersex neurodivergent person of color, I really struggle in traditional work environments. My consulting gives me a way to share my needed gifts with the world and thrive financially.
I truly believe in the power of my work, and I witness the impact in real time. This impact is only possible because of the support you all provide me.
Thank you for giving me hope and creating a pathway for me to succeed in this violent world!!
Also a very juicy thank you to anyone who has ever donated to my work!!
Especially those of you who have been sending me mutual aid funds these past couple of months when I haven’t been updating!!
Finally, a very profound thank you to all my past, present, and future clients reading this. Thank you for your trust, time, and financial support and the willingness to enter the fire of transformation with me.
I’m obsessed with my community
How did I get so lucky to attract such an expansive, brilliant, creative, attractive, kind, big hearted group of people to me?? If you are reading this, I include you in this description.
Last year during this time I held a group container called “New Cycles” where we built authentic relationship to each other and with ourselves as we explored ways to release patterns of self sabotage and embrace liberation.
This precious container was a space of growth and vision, and I am so grateful to everyone who showed up to play and grow!!
I’m excited to share that I will be sharing more information soon about a future container! Keep an eye out for the application link!
Friendship is my core strategy for navigating these apocolyptic times
Oh friends, how do I talk about the violence we are witnessing? The dehumanizing violence and torture that people all over the world are experiencing?
In Lebanon and Palestine, the Israeli military (supported monetarily and with weapons by the United States) are literally *vaporizing* people’s bodies. They are systemically bombing hospitals and medical personel. They are creating conditions of hell on earth.
Earlier this year I read “The girl with the white flag" in preparation for my trip to Okinawa. The book is written by an Okinawan women who survived the US bombing of Okinawa. My heart breaks as I reflect upon the horrors she shared and I think about people in Palestine and Lebanon enduring those same horrors.
I am writing this after watching hours of Hurricane Milton related tik toks. it’s giving me de ja vu, because just a week ago I was laid up in my atlanta apartment until 3am watching Hurricane Helene tik toks.
And even though I was in LA, the moment I learned about the chemical fire I was texting everyone I knew about the right type of mask and the healing power of Marshmallow root.
When I see footage of Western NC (click here for mutual aid info), I cannot help but think of Palestine.
When I read that the dam that failed in Asheville has been a known risk for over 20 years, I can’t help but think of Flint.
Our oppression is connected
it’s important for us to remember, to not turn on each other in these conditions of manufactured scarcity, and to resist competition.
We have to actively turn towards each other.
In the past week I have returned frequently to a memory of a talk I was able to go to in 2019. Organizers who survived hurricanes Maria and Irma in Puerto Rico shared about the 14 mutual aid centers that emerged following the hurricane.
The culture of white supremacy talks about survival as a singular activity. There are bomb shelters and go kits that hold just enough for one person.
I once listened to an NPR radio story about a couple that had multiple survival shelters and survival supplies stashed in the mountains of mexico. They had shelters they had created together, and ones they had created individually incase they had a fight.
It depresses me to think of these two people each with 5-7 emergency shelters when there are hundreds of people who are missing this knowledge and support. I remember in 2016 my friend Zumi told me that they were working on a “People’s survival kit” in case of a large scale emergency. I don’t remember much else, but the idea has stuck with me.
How can we acknowledge and respond to these natural disasters in a way that doesn’t happen at the expense of the collective?
mutual aid is powerful
Mutual aid is real and can save lives.
Honestly, mutual aid is what motivates me to resist impulse spending and to build the skills to have a budget. We owe it to the rest of the world, especially if you live on Turtle Island.
Here is a list of mutual aid resources and places to donate to in Western North Carolina
Here is a place to donate for e-sims in Palestine
Here is a fundraiser for families in Lebanon
If you have additional mutual aid resources, put them in the comments!!
THANK U FOR READING I LOVE YOU BE SAFE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Love all this and the pics, I read it in shifts🐘💜