Spirituality Without Politics is Escapism. Politics Without Spirituality is Brutality.~Andrew Harvey

When I came out of the closet at nineteen and left the passionate Christianity of my adolescence, I had to channel my fire somewhere. My early queer days were spent in activist education. My roommates and new friends introduced me to Angela Davis, Audre Lorde, bell hooks, Take Back the Night rallies, queer liberation, and the mind-blowing politics of reproductive choice and anti-racism.

In the following years I attended the March for Women’s Lives in DC, protested George W. Bush and his ongoing wars, and lied down in the middle of intersections in “die-ins” to call attention to Black men and women killed by the police. I was arrested for “Obstructing Trafficways” in an anarchist BlackBloc, and helped tear down Confederate monuments in the former capital of the Confederacy.

With a stellium in Libra, I am obsessed with justice.

Likewise, my Scorpio stellium makes me obsessed with the Unseen, with spiritual realms. I have traversed the depths of my own psyche, studied energy healing, shadow work, and alchemy, and learned somatic trauma healing and energetic body work. I have delved into sacred divination and sat in silence for 10 days at a Vipassana meditation retreat.

I have had a foot in both worlds for decades, and I have seen the glorious gifts and limiting shadows of each.

***Before I begin, I need to make clear: Of course there are spiritual communities that commit to service and activism, and activist communities that do not trip into these pitfalls and imbalances, but I have been around both long enough that I have seen patterns emerge that fascinate and trouble me. Further, the endless nuances of all of this do not escape me. This is complex work and deserves more than a 1500 word essay. Read and follow people like Sonya Renee Taylor, Resmaa Menakem, Adrienne Maree Brown, and Rob Breszny and more for more discussion on these topics.***

The Shadow Side

Often in spiritual circles we crave transcendence, freedom, and personal enlightenment so much that we forget the world around us is burning. Too often, “love and light” and “it’s all unfolding as it should” become excuses to avoid accountability for the way unexamined shadows of embedded white supremacy, exploitative capitalism, internalized misogyny, colonizer mindsets, etc… inform the way all things are “unfolding” in a micro and macro sense.

In many of these spiritual circles we know the Truth that we are creators of our own realities, and believe in radical personal responsibility. While these truths are powerful and transformative, they can sometimes feed a callousness toward the suffering of others and a self-righteousness that does not acknowledge systems of power and privilege that we collectively create and keep in place.

I have experienced people in spiritual communities acting nonchalant and dismissive when I or another have expressed pain about others’ suffering or passionately condemned violence enacted on people. They roll their eyes as if the whole drama of the world was beneath them and they believe they have arrived at a higher level of enlightenment because they are unfazed.

Though we have collectively moved more into doing our own personal shadow work in this last decade, many of us have yet to truly face the way the collective shadows of racism, misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia live in us. Unexamined, we perpetuate these frequencies and collectively continue to create a world in which these imbalances exist.

We speak of creating the “New Earth,” but how can it be new when we carry so much of these unacknowledged systems within us? We speak of LOVE so frequently, but do we really know what it means to put Love into action?

Activist communities, on the other hand, have our own form of spiritual bypassing: Instead of avoiding the world, we often avoid ourselves. We place our focus outwardly and doomscroll until we are paralyzed with the trauma of the world, until our bodies are rigid and exhausted with it all.

We believe that it is our burden and responsibility to save the entire world—to hold in and on our bodies the brutally heavy weight of all injustice and suffering that exists everywhere. We become debilitated and frozen under the heaviness and this can lead to deep depression and hopelessness. I know this heavy state intimately.

In our more active states we energize and legitimize the System by resisting it so strongly. We bang our heads against the same walls over and over again trying to make the government care about us when the fact is that the government was built upon systemic injustice to begin with. It is working exactly the way it was intended to work.

We give so much power to systems of inequality that we make ourselves and others powerless victims with no sovereignty. We often excuse those of us who are systemically marginalized from any personal responsibility in creating the lives that we want for ourselves and our communities.

Most heartbreakingly, in our intensity we also enact violence against our own communities. We wear ACAB patches and declare ourselves abolitionists but we perpetuate carceral attitudes. We act like cops to each other. We walk around each other so afraid to say the wrong thing that we end up in performative and inauthentic relationships. We say we want to create intentional communities and mutual aid, but we have so much undealt-with trauma that we project our wounds onto each other constantly and our communities fall apart.

Why We Need Sovereignty and Collective Liberation

Collective liberation cannot exist without personal sovereignty.

If we don’t unearth and heal our trauma, we will build movements out of our wounds instead of our wisdom. And, if we don’t encourage ourselves and each other to embody our power, to step into our Divinity, to take responsibility for our lives and the world we want to create, we will remain victims of the very systems we seek to dismantle.

Similarly, we cannot embody the freedom, love, and unity of the New Earth until we truly see the suffering of those around us—until we dismantle the remnants of the old oppressive architecture that we uphold.

What if we all doubled down on healing our trauma—not as a navel-gazing spiral, but as the start to World making? What if we committed to uprooting the colonial mindsets and shadow violence of the outer world inside of us?

What if we acknowledged the world as it is, and still chose—deliberately and creatively— to build something new?

When I heal my codependence and savior complex, service is no longer martyrdom or self-erasure. Service becomes devotion to the aspects of G-d that I want to evolve in my(god)self and the world: Love, Joy, Peace, Patience, Kindness, Goodness, Faithfulness, Gentleness, Compassion.

Service and activism done as a world-creating action, done from sovereignty, means my liberation is bound up with yours, though not dependent upon yours. It is the meeting place of empowered beings, not a hierarchy of helpers and helped.

As indigenous Australian activist and artist Lilla Watson famously said, “If you have come here to help me you are wasting your time, but if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”

“True spirituality, what Andrew Harvey calls “Sacred Activism,” recognizes that the mystic and the revolutionary are two faces of the same fervent love. When we understand that all beings are interconnected, then the suffering of others becomes our own suffering. Compassion isn’t a sentimental feeling but a robust force for transformation.Andrew Harvey: “Spirituality without politics is escapism. Politics without spirituality is brutality. The marriage of the two gives birth to the holy force.” (Rob Breszny, “The Holy Force”)

This is where activism is spiritual, and where spirituality calls for activism. Both spirituality and activism charge us to embody the truth that we are all sacred and not one of us is disposable. Both call on us—creators, visionaries, lovers of the unseen—to imagine and build new worlds, not just critique and resist old ones. Both spirituality and activism require the willingness to keep loving this world and each other even through broken hearts.

The New World becomes possible only when we accept that we are POWERFUL creators—Spirit in motion, imagination incarnate. We can make oppressive systems obsolete, not by begging them to treat us better, but by awakening the parts of ourselves capable of designing something entirely different.

So this is the task for world changers, for spiritual seekers:

To heal deeply.

To imagine wildly.

To LOVE FIERCELY in action.

To create consciously

To embody the liberation we long for—so fully that the old world cannot survive in our presence.

Thank you for reading and witnessing this unfolding with me.

If this exploration of sovereignty, healing, and sacred activism resonates with you, I invite you to subscribe. This space is where I’ll continue weaving together mysticism, embodiment, trauma healing, and visionary world-building.

I also coach people who are ready to step out of old trauma loops and into genuine power: queer visionaries, healers, creatives, activists, and anyone who knows they’re meant for a freer self and more beautiful world.

I’ll be sharing practices and guidance here drawn from that work: nervous system healing, somatic liberation, embodied sovereignty, values-driven living, and the art of creating a life that honors your soul.

If you’re ready to step more fully into your own divinity, your purpose, and your freedom, I would be honored to walk beside you. Email me at iamlivingtemple@gmail.com

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