The Black Revolution Today is an “Inner” Journey

www.paulasmith-imago.com

“Dr. King once said, we must have a quantitative shift in our circumstances and a qualitative shift in our souls.”

Let me begin by saying that I am not trying to change anyone. I am singing my song, basking in my passion, doing my work and putting knowledge and experience out there for Black folks considering a new way to live. It is not my job to share what I think others want to hear, but to share my “experience strength and hope.” I write as a professionally trained psychotherapist with nearly 2 decades of experience working with couples, individuals, families, groups, organizations and businesses; a spiritually conscious Black woman in recovery, a Lesbian; Ivy-League educated,Activated Citizen and a fully alive Human being. I believe we, Black folks, cannot build a revolution in society on anxiety and limiting beliefs. Our work today is about conditioning our minds.

Thirty-two years ago I hit bottom. My choice to get sober was my first true act of defiance, of protest against living numb — against deciding to live in the status-quo. But then I had to learn how to manage my mind. In 12-step program, we say, “The problem of the alcoholic centers in the mind.” But in order to quit drinking — in order to heal my mind, I had to get my spiritual house in order. Getting sober is not about avoiding bars, RSVP-ing “no” to weddings, holiday parties or substituting with other substances. Getting sober is about conditioning yourself to go anywhere where alcohol is served with peace and ease. In order to do that, I did not work on getting sober, I had to learn how to condition myself for a life of recovery and sobriety.

In order to obtain a sober life, one has to work on their spiritual condition, and I have been working on my spiritual condition for 31 years. This means, I face myself over and over again, looking at the truth of my self-centered actions. Making amends to those I have harmed; and in doing this work, I am building a relationship with a Power greater than myself and I would argue becoming — someone with greater power and greater personal agency. I understand spirituality as having a discipline in moral psychology, a discipline that is essential to making space for Divinely inspired thoughts, guidance and wisdom to come in.

For me, the daily spiritual practice is how Black Revolution begins. This is what disrupts the status-quo. During my graduate studies at Harvard Divinity School, I learned of many religious and spiritual leaders who disrupted the status-quo with their spiritual powers as a way to combat the forces of racism and copulated daily smear campaigns to discredit African Americans. Today, we still see acts of trivializing, devaluing, undermining and marginalizing Black people. Just turn on the t.v.

Still, the power of liberation is within us, not within the Established Institutions. A book a “Course in Miracles” refers to “our internal teacher.” Our “internal teacher” is that which gives us unexpected insight, direction and wisdom. I think it’s time for African Americans to step it up with our spiritual practices as a way of disrupting the status quo and a protest against the insensitive cultural messages that represent who we are not.

Racism is real and the problem is both external and internal. However, to heal the internal effects of racism requires conditioning our minds; choosing the type of life we want to live — here and now. It requires a focus on our strengths, appreciating and accepting each other’s differences and finding the proper support to help actualize our deepest human potential. It requires conditioning ourselves to seek answers from within and following up on those discoveries with choices and actions that lead to desirable, meaningful and growth-filled outcomes.

It is quite clear we have spent too much time in the past believing it was necessary to mobilize entire armies against the devastating effects of racism, and not enough time considering how one person can help another person to heal from those effects. A chain, after all, is only as strong as its individual links, and it seems to me now that the way to help strengthen the African American community as a whole is to improve the quality of relationships — romantic and otherwise — with folks we meet everyday. This requires tearing down all the walls and cages we’ve built around hearts and taking a long, hard look inside. What I have personally discovered, much to my surprise, is that the view inside of my Blackness is unique, magnificent and amazing.

Racism Past, Racism Present

Often times, African Americans hit a wall in committed relationships and marriage. Black sexuality and power are bound to collide with the immovable force that has profoundly altered the trajectory of Black experience. Institutional Slavery and Jim Crow carry with them a troublesome and violent history causing African-Americans to become detached from their innate capabilities, spirituality, sexuality and unfortunately — each other.

In addition to the cold dehumanization and hatred toward African Americans after the Civil War, there were no Mental health services, no Family therapy and no Home-based therapy for African Americans to address these deep emotional and psychological wounded caused by slavery. And then came the benign systemic neglect of African Americans — endemic poverty, subpar economics, mass incarceration, social and political stress on already weak families, premarital sex, low self-esteem, insecurity toward the institution of marriage, abuse, fear and a concentration on race — all this magnified these conditions.

The Black Church and Mental Health Neglect

African Americans have always utilized the Black church as a resource to lessen the impact of the adversities they have experienced. Drawing from personal experience in the Black church, there is no apparent public or private dialogue between pastors and their congregants about mental health. What may be alluded to as meeting the mental health needs is often done through preaching or teaching about “the mind is a battle ground” and “renewing the mind.” I believe the pastor or religious leader is genuinely concerned about the congregant’s mental health but s/he is often untrained and tend to dismiss that discourse altogether.

Mental health problems in the Church are over-spiritualized or the perception is that the treatment is in the soul or it is a spiritual problem that prayer or scripture reading can be a catalyst for change. The traditional mindset of the Black church is if one is suffering from a mental disorder they must cope with it and “be strong.” The inherent message in much of the indirect commentary on mental health is that therapy is for the weak, the self-indulgent, and, most notably, the privileged and white folks.

Untreated mental health issues such as abuse, addiction, depression, anxiety, protracted intergenerational trauma, etc., creates a psychological malignancy and that malignancy can spread very quickly and affect the individual’s well-being on a variety of levels and impact everyone in his or her wake. So ignorance, short-sightedness, misinformation and blatant neglect about mental health problems has been a cancer spreading in the consciousness of the body politic of the African American community. As such, the resistance to mental health treatment within the Black community is the antithesis of everything that Civil Rights stands for.

“If your heart and your honest body can be controlled by the [church], or controlled by community taboo, are you not then, and in that case, no more than a slave ruled by [that] outside force.” June Jordan

Blackness: An “Inner Journey”

As African Americans we face a difficult task to feel at home in our own skin. We have social and relational pressures that constantly challenge our ideas of comfort and acceptability. We have a overwhelming history of what it has meant to be Black. Consequently if we are not conscientious and conscious, our bodies can feel like jailhouses of shame and ostracism, rather than temples of warmth and compassion. The Black revolution today must be an inner journey. A selective, deliberate focus on those positive things that are right in the world and in our relationships, that sense of wonder and magic that is inherent in small children. We are challenged to point our focus toward the future as we bravely embrace the contradictions, the baffling complexity, and buckle up for the roller coaster rides that have left us whip-lashed, aching and bruised in our relationships. “Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos to order, confusion to clarity.”

Healing Blackness With New, Enlightened Consciousness

We are living in the 21st century. It is my belief that I have a moral responsibility to help African Americans heal and transform the malignant emotional and psychological scars of racism and untreated, protracted trauma. This type of healing requires more than external, allopathic measures. It requires an integrative, holistic, strength-based, relational methodology or paradigm to help with the purification and transformation of memory, allowing African Americans to see themselves as whole human beings; worthy, intact and with an innate capacity for healing and transformation. Rather than, living mesmerized by fears, outside things, bling and other shiny objects, preoccupied by external effects like — the Devil. This externally fixation on the Devil is not a balanced one because it shifts the attention away from our inner agency, personal responsibility and personal accountability. We — Black folks must become conscious. The laws of consciousness are not a matter of opinion. What I have found on my spiritual journey is that th way consciousness operates is unalterable truth.

There are laws of internal and external phenomena. There are laws of consciousness and one of the laws of consciousness is — cause and effect. Cause and effect is an unalterable law. It is important to understand that nature organizes us and nature heals us. Healing is mirrored through the consciousness. The healing that takes place, takes place through consciousness; through the recognition that when our thoughts are in error or we are mistaken in our thinking — we have the capacity to re-think. In other words, our minds are not static our minds are not made of cement. We are capable of Atoning and Repenting. When we Atone and Repent for our errors in thinking this is the equivalent of a Cosmic reset or reset in consciousness.

Ameliorating Black Suffering on the Level of Cause and Effect

Racism is real. The impact and repercussions of living in a racist society are frightening and African Americans are easily lured into fear. So the spiritual journey; the enlightened journey of consciousness is the unlearning and the questioning of these fears and accepting love into your heart.

Cause and effect — or Karma says, “That whatever we think is going to take form on some level. And whatever we think and do will have a consequence.” So the way to affect the consequences is to rethink the thought that produced the consequence. If we only try to change things on the level of affect, we are just trying to manipulate or dealing with things on the outside. As such, when we do not deal with things from the level of cause and effect we just have an effect. That said, ameliorating Black suffering only at the level of effect is heal on the outside. Atonement operates on more than the level of effect. Atonement goes way deeper than that; we must recognize and understand the error of our thoughts. Similar to the 12-steps of recovery — Atonement is the admission of errors, the act of making amends; acknowledging and understanding where we were wrong and taking the right action to make it right again. Atoning, confessing and amending is a Cosmic reset button and it is deeply emotionally, spiritually and psychologically reparative.

Becoming Whole — Again!

I remember when I was studying Religion, Psychology and Race at Harvard Divinity School a professor of New Testament asked us to ask ourselves three questions.

1. How does what you are doing work?
2. Who does it work for?
3. What are the effects?

Inertia is the tendency of the something to move into whatever direction it has been moving until there is a pattern in eruption that disrupts the status quo. In order to disrupt the pattern of malignant scarring that African Americans have suffered due to racism, Black folks need to as themselves those three questions.

Why?

Because the power of liberation is within, the revolution is within —not within established institutions. We have an inner voice — an eternal teacher where we can get unsuspected direction, wisdom and valuable insight. We need to learn how to trust ourselves. One of the ways I’ve learned to trust my inner teacher is:

1. Pray
2. Meditating for a least a minute helps to gain insight
3. Meditate before the day begins
4. Meditate in the morning and at night
5. Ask in your prayer, what would You have me to do? To say? And to whom? Wait for guidance.

The revolution goes even deeper. We also need to take our spiritual practices deeper by taking these metaphysical steps:

1. Expose your character defects/sins (We are as sick as our secrets)
2. Expose your judgements, unforgiveness, self-pity and dishonesty, and allow these to be transformed in the light of forgiveness.
3. Turn your mind/thoughts completely over to the light.

“Dr. King once said, [African Americans] have been freed to … [do what]?”

No one — not your Mama, your Daddy, your girl, your Preacher or your baby Mama/Daddy can do this for you. You must train your own mind out of the status quo and disrupt any and all thinking patterns that create unfavorable affects in your life. We are not victims. But if you remain unconscious, (i.e., trying to manipulate external effects, people, places and things) you will continue to (re)wound and (re)victimize yourself and repeat the same sins and errors in thinking against yourself and others.

Consciousness is not a matter of opinion. Assess the damage in your life for yourself —and recognize the damage you do to yourself and others that come out of a errors of judgment, unforgiveness, hurt, and pain. Condition yourself to have the fortitude to sit and face the truth about yourself. We all have blindspots and we need to learn what they are by becoming conscious of them. Without the data that comes from looking within and working through our thinking errors, our spiritual lives start to feel superficial, like there is nothing to hold us together.

Therapy will not overtly cure racism. Embracing mental health issues and a spiritual practices like 12-step recovery, meditation, prayer, yoga, healthy nutrition, and Reiki, hypnosis, will not make the pain of centuries of oppression go away. But it can, and it does, create more and more spaces to be whole, complex, multifacted, multilayered, magnificent human-being. Every time the Black community dismisses, demeans, or disregards the role of mental health, therapy and other holistic practices, we contribute to the very construct we want to end. Every time we dismiss someone’s marital issues, depression or anxiety as unimportant in the face of police brutality we steal an opportunity to reclaim our own humanity.

But the real strength is in recognizing that you deserve every opportunity to create happiness and health in your life. The real positive message is that you are fully human and there is a place you can go that allows you to express all of who you are without judgment. The Black revolution is not in hiding our struggles, but in owning them and having the courage to openly seek the tools and resources available to help us heal. Everyone can benefit from therapy…even us Black folks.

Paula M. Smith, Advanced Imago Clinician, Certified Imago Therapist, Workshop Presenter, Marriage and Family Therapist, Marital scholar, Spiritual Director, former Adjunct professor at Harvard Divinity School, and published author.

Contact info: paulasmith@post.harvard.edu

Website: www.paulasmith-imago.com

References

Alcoholics Anonymous Big Book. (1939). (2nd ed.) New York, N.Y.

Boyd-Franklin, N. (2003). Black families in therapy: Understanding the African American experience. (2nd ed.). New York: Guilford Press.

Cook, D. A. (1993). Research in African American churches: A mental health counseling imperative. Journal of Mental Health Counseling, 15, 320–333.

Hendrix, H. (2018). Getting the Love You Want. New York: Henry Holt.

Hooks, B. (2001). Salvation: Black people and love. New York: HarperCollins.

Jordan, June. (2007). Directed by Desire: The collected poems of June Jordan. Port Townsend, Washington. Copper Canyon Press.

Richardson, B. (1989). Attitudes of black clergy toward mental health professionals: Implications for pastoral care. The Journal of Pastoral Care, XLIII, 33–39.

Williamson, Marianne. (1993). A Return to Love. Reflections on the Principles of a Course in Miracles. New York, NY: Harper Collins.