Let Your Light Shine Read online

  Yoga involves practicing being aware of your thoughts and intentions and letting that awareness shape more kind and loving thoughts. Yoga helps children build self-awareness and self-regulation at the same that it promotes a communal feeling of connection and a model of what relationships can be. Of course, HLF had to be flexible and translate alien yoga-related Sanskrit words and phrases into words that the kids could relate to: kaki breath became taco breath, and sitali breath became burrito breath. You’ve gotta speak the language of the folks you work with.

  As you read this marvelous book and absorb its lessons, you’ll travel the country, meeting up with folks who are finding their own way to foster the “involutionary” spirit in their own homes and communities. It shares the strategies that have given thousands of kids that edge that allows them to survive and succeed: be it love, support, self-confidence, or simply a friendly ear at a moment when no one else is listening. More importantly, this book shows you how this love, support, and empathy needs to be consistent and reliable, thereby finally adding a degree of stability to these young people’s lives. Too many underprivileged and traumatized people have been let down innumerable times before. It’s better to consistently show up once a month than renege on a weekly commitment.

  This book shares the details of their breakthrough program for fortifying the spirit, finding peace, and fueling the righteous anger that will be required to break through to the next level of physical and spiritual emancipation. It will explain the importance of working with people who look like them as well as the importance of consistency and commitment. This program has given thousands of kids who grew up under the most adverse of circumstances skills and tools to deal with their anger, trauma, and lack of focus. In addition, it’s given kids the chance to learn self-regulation and tools to get back to center.

  The foundations of the Holistic Life Foundation are critical: you cannot do this work by yourself. It is essential to have a strong support system to help you to see, tolerate, and accept your limitations; healthy, loving acceptance and non-attachment are essential for your own sanity and well-being.

  Bessel A. van der Kolk, MD

  President, Trauma Research Foundation

  Dr. Van der Kolk is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma.

  INTRODUCTION

  I’m Not a Teacher, I’m a Reminder

  It’s spring 2022, and the world is on fire, in more ways than one. In DC, the first woman vice president is in the White House. In the streets, communities are still grappling with the effects of COVID-19. Two years on from the protests of 2020 we are still saying their names—change seems so possible—and yet daily, more young Black and Brown people join the ranks of the shot-down, murdered, and ended people.

  So, we have hope, but forgive us for being skeptical.

  Justice in this country is like the foxtrot, or some other old-time dance. We take one step forward, two steps back. Voters in Florida overwhelmingly passed a resolution giving former felons their votes back. The Republican governor tacked on the requirement that those former inmates have to pay all court fees, going back as far as the ’60s or ’70s. Dig deeper, and you’ll find it is impossible to track down, let alone pay, how much is owed. What seems like an easy win for justice turns into a twenty-first-century poll tax.

  If you were paying attention to this story, you might have been surprised by just how smoothly the bureaucratic machine moved to neutralize what seemed to be a minor civil rights milestone. But this is America, and this is how it’s always been. Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation: his successor, Andrew Johnson, reinstated many of the Confederate leaders who assumed they were going to the gallows. Congress proposed the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments: the Southern states delayed ratifying them, or found ways around them. Black Americans boarded trains for the North during the Great Migration: White police officers tore up their tickets and arrested them for vagrancy. “Vagrants” were released to White plantation owners, who paid their fines and took their repayment in months or years of field labor. Black women in the South were arrested if they refused employment—at minimal wages—in White homes, leaving their own daughters and sons uncared for while they raised their employers’ children instead. In 1964, the Twenty-fourth Amendment banned the use of poll taxes to deny voters their ballot: much good it did the 100,000 Floridians petitioning for their right to a vote five decades later. In Andy’s parents’ home of Puerto Rico, the American government conducted numerous illegal, deadly, and secret medical experiments, infecting islanders with cancerous cells and sterilizing women. They also dropped bombs on the island of Vieques for fifty-five years, leading to multigenerational PTSD, and cancer rates 27 percent higher than off the island.[1]

  We’re not cynical. We’ve got hope. We see it every day with the kids we work with. We see the power of active, engaged love, rather than fear. Our love stays strong, but let’s just say that our hope is tempered by an awareness of history. Atman and Ali’s father, Smit, and our godfather, Uncle Will—our spiritual mentor—were both members of the Black Panthers. Uncle Will used to tell us: “I’m not a teacher, I’m a reminder. I’m just reminding you guys of what you forgot. The stuff you don’t even realize you used to know. I haven’t taught you a damn thing. I am just a conduit of energy and information.”

  Uncle Will was talking about our spiritual path, and we’ll get to that in a moment. But this sentiment—“I’m a reminder”—sits with us today. We all know this stuff. Us, living in Baltimore, working with the most vulnerable, underserved, ignored kids in America. You, wherever you are now, reading this book and dipping into a world outside of your own. Politicians, policy makers, teachers, parents, kids. Even if we don’t all know all the details, we feel the facts of American history in our bones and see them reflected back to us, in the societies we live in. So what now?

  Just like Uncle Will, we see ourselves as reminders rather than teachers. Sometimes, when one of our brand-new students slips right into an effortless pranayama practice, or a deep meditation, we’ll look at each other and say, “This isn’t her first time!” But whether you believe in past lives or not, there’s truth to the idea that we all carry a kind of knowledge of our past, encoded in our genes.[*] When we fight to survive, our body suppresses genes that aren’t related to survival, and doubles down on expressing genes that help keep us alive just one more day. These adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) rewire brains: Years later, when the trauma is supposedly over, our genes are still operating as if we are in a daily fight to live. Our kids can inherit this genetic predisposition, and even though they haven’t personally experienced that old trauma that shaped their parents, grandparents, or great-great-great-grandparents, they feel, think, and act as if they have, even before they experience trauma themselves. Kids who don’t exhibit signs of this multigenerational, genetic trauma may still experience ACEs that can derail their emotional, mental, and behavioral development.

  The children of the Holocaust or the Cambodian genocide survivors, for instance, understand this. So do Black Americans, who are dealing with the double whammy of systemic racism and the denial of this systemic racism by White people (even well-meaning White people). You can’t talk this shit out. And for most Black Americans, trying to talk this shit out can be actively toxic to our emotional, mental, physical, and spiritual well-being. Over the course of this book we will share our story, and how we began to heal our own wounds and the wounds of the people around us.

  This book is based on our program, designed to help underserved youth and communities all over the planet. We started with our home first. And because Baltimore is so segregated, “home” was originally the Black youth who lived in West Baltimore. Eventually it spread to Baltimore as a whole. This program is universal, however, and applicable for anyone feeling the intense strain of life today. It allows for deep healing on a s
omatic level—and who doesn’t need that these days?

  This program eventually became known as the Holistic Life Foundation (HLF), and it reaches thousands of the most vulnerable kids in Baltimore, and America as a whole, every year. Our program is designed to work with young children, tweens, teens, and young adults, teaching them mindfulness practices that serve as a circuit breaker and reset from the stress and trauma of their lives. As they learn, they also become teachers, sharing their knowledge with their family members and eventually teaching other kids under our supervision. Our goal is to give them the tools to survive and thrive in situations of intense stress and trauma, and to teach them other healthful habits—eating veggies, exercising, talking shit out—that will help them create a joyful life, full of possibility, and on their own terms.

  Most of us think it takes a revolution to spur big change, but revolution is often a violent and painful process. Instead, we prefer to follow the peaceful path of evolution, but not in the way Darwin defined it. Instead of changing the body, we’re looking at something deeper: the inner change that allows us to not just survive but thrive in the face of challenges. We call our philosophy and program Involution. Involution was another Smit and Uncle Will–ism. Uncle Will defined it as: “To change the outside world you have to go within and change yourself first.” The way he saw it, our real gurus were inside of us. The real learning is in going deeper and deeper into yourself and, if you’re very lucky, breaking through to experience the expansive, unending, infinite self within each of us. This is a profound concept for someone who’s lived within the spiritual community or explored different practices over the years. Now imagine being eight or nine years old, from the worst part of Baltimore, and your life is on the edge of falling apart. It’s not surprising we get some blank looks on the first day of class.

  We see involution in people like Freddie Gray, a kid who could have been straight out of one of our programs. We see it in Elijah McClain, the self-taught violinist who played to shelter cats to calm them down. Or in Sandra Bland, driving cross-country solo to hit that next rung on the career ladder. We see it in Stephon Clark, holding an iPhone in his grandma’s backyard. We see involution in the mega celebrities like Beyoncé, shining a light on HBCUs at Coachella. We see involution in urban gardeners like Ron Finley in Los Angeles, turning food deserts into blossoming oases of free food for local communities. In this book, we’ll travel the country, meeting up with folks who are finding their own way to foster the involutionary spirit in their own homes and communities. Even more importantly, we’ll stay close to home, digging deep on twenty years of intensive work in our community, to share the strategies that have given thousands of kids that edge that allows them to survive and succeed—be it love, support, self-confidence, or simply a friendly ear in a moment when no one else is listening. Crucially, we’ll ensure this love, support, and empathy are consistent and reliable, adding stability to young people’s lives.

  The problem is so clear to us: young Black people living their lives seem suspect, dangerous, or in some way “disordered” to Karens dialing 911 or police at the other end of a gun or Taser. There are plenty of books out there breaking down racism in all its forms, uncovering how it persists today, and guiding White people to be better allies. There aren’t that many books about healing the spiritual burden that comes with racism, for all people—Black, Brown, and White. In the next pages, we’ll share our breakthrough program for fortifying the spirit, finding peace, and fueling the righteous anger that will be required to break through to the next level of physical and spiritual emancipation.

  How Do You Achieve Inner Peace When Your Outer Life Is Chaotic?

  So, let’s clear up one thing before we go any further. Who are we? There’s three of us. Ali and Atman are brothers who grew up on North and Pulaski in West Baltimore, the corner that Time magazine photographed as the worst drug corner in America. Nonetheless, they were lucky to have hippie parents who fed them hearty vegan food and meditated with them every day. It’s not every Black kid who attends weekly meditation meetings on the serene grounds of the Divine Life Church of Absolute Oneness (part of the Self-Realization Fellowship organization founded in 1920 by Paramahansa Yogananda to teach scientific methods of meditation and principles of spiritual living). Atman and Ali feel blessed to have had the opportunity; at the same time, they attended the Quaker Friends School of Baltimore. All throughout school, they went to “meeting for worship.” If the spirit moved you, you got up and shared and then sat back down and reflected on it. If the spirit moved you again, you could speak again. If nothing happened, it was just a time for silence and stillness to see what was coming up inside. Silence was valued there. Before the students did pretty much anything—a class, an assembly, a visiting speaker, a game—there was a moment of silence. It influences their work to this day.

  And Andres? Well, Andy likes to say that Atman and Ali meditated him into existence, right when we needed that third element to our triad (always the strongest and most stable structure, FYI). That’s pretty self-effacing of Andy, and not true at all.

  If Ali and Atman got their spiritual kick-start from their Quaker school, and their dad and uncle’s yogic beliefs, then Andy got his from his mom and aunts’ access to dream worlds, and their spiritual history of growing up in Puerto Rico. Andres’s ancestors came from a tradition of Caribbean spirituality called espiritismo. Like his ancestors, Andres feels the good and bad spirits that surround us and shape our lives, tweaking our luck and shaping our destinies in ways we can’t always see, understand, or predict. If Andy tells you he dreamed that you need to stay off the roads tomorrow, well, you better stay off the roads tomorrow. Now, most of us aren’t tapped into this kind of deep spirituality. But let’s translate it to the secular world: Who among us doesn’t feel that unseen good and bad actors, or some kind of invisible, all-powerful force, are steering our lives? And who would say no to a system that allows us to regain some control over this sense of exterior forces shaping our world?

  Andy may not be blood, but he is family. And this philosophy is a big part of who we are. We are not bound by blood ties. We see everyone as family and look beyond the physical to see that spiritual connection that unites all of us. So, throughout this book you are going to hear references to our dad, Smit; our Uncle Will; our family; our home. Understand that Andy is family. Smit may not be his dad, but he was always a father figure to Andy. Ditto Uncle Will. Andy may not have grown up in the hood, but he’s been here long enough for it to become home, and to become a place he is deeply and passionately committed to.

  We’re lucky that we have each other, and our parents, and Uncle Will. Their influence built us up to be strong, empathetic men, with the ability to navigate a uniquely difficult and often dangerous world. Their lessons made us resilient to the stress around us. And that stress is everywhere, because, let’s get real: This country was built on trauma.

  The people who suffer most from this trauma are the ones descended from slaves, Indigenous peoples, and all folks deemed “lesser” by the powers that be.[2] When you’re living in a traumatized body, you are in a constant state of fight or flight. There’s no time to draw breath, to relax, to heal. All you have is that moment you’re living in, and the choices you have to make in that second—choices that can in the worst-case scenario define the rest of your life. Our work is based on the idea of giving these traumatized people—kids mostly, but young adults too—the spaciousness they need within to just breathe. If we can help these kids to make their bodies safe spaces, then that can be the first step in releasing trauma, or learning to take that extra second. To be responsive, rather than reactive. To envision a bigger, more expansive world, one that welcomes and supports them, rather than rejecting and hurting them.

  And it’s not just the oppressed who are traumatized. Everyone out there resisting change, retreating in fear to some old vision of “how things used to be,” well, they’re traumatized too. It’s
a different kind of trauma, because it’s the trauma that comes from knowing you benefited from the evil actions of your ancestors. It’s the trauma that comes from holding on tightly to the past, because you can’t face the accountability of the present. It’s the trauma of finding any way—no matter how convoluted—to justify unjustifiable belief systems. They’re the people waving guns at peaceful protestors or pouring water on a child’s chalk drawings celebrating the Black Lives Matter movement, all the while spreading rumors and innuendo about people doing the actual hard work of social justice. We meet these people in some of our private and corporate work. Even though they are often initially resistant to us and our ideas, we are usually able to break through with them. How? By modeling involution to them: in the ability to listen, to hold space, and reminding them of their true selves, unburdened by social media stupidity, and giving them the tools to help themselves on their own involutionary path.

  Now think of centuries of transgenerational trauma, passed down from parent to child, written in our genes, and felt so deeply that it feels like part of you. Think of the Black child, living with the weight of ancient pain, constricted in her soul and her body. And her White counterpart, rigid and unblinking in his belief that his parents’ beliefs have to be right, because how will he define himself if they are wrong? There’s a reason that trying to talk this shit out can only go so far. If we want to heal the psychic wounds of our country, if we want to fortify the oppressed, and forgive the oppressors, we need to go deeper than platitudes, slogans, and good intentions.

  How to Use This Book

  Involution might sound like a lot of work. Well, yes. In one sense it is work. Involution means you are willing to let go of some pretty deep stuff. It means surrendering a broken part of yourself that nonetheless feels safe and familiar. This can be scary stuff for a little kid, so mostly we don’t use this kind of language for them—and if you’re guiding a child through involution, you won’t either. But at the same time, involution is effortless. Think of it like waking up after a lifetime of physical pain, to find that your head no longer hurts, or your leg no longer limps. Suddenly you can think clearly and walk easily.