Making Home a Healing Place

As I saw my family pushed to the brink of marrow-deep emotional exhaustion like so many other Black families, I realized that I was going to have to be more intentional in making sure we practiced daily and regular acts of self-care together.

For many sisters in my circle, that means leaning into the power of prayer and the peace of meditation even more heavily. Making dedicated spaces for stillness and quietude to bring our families into can be even more powerful.

Prayer closets, prayer and meditation rooms, and other calming spaces can be literal escapes from the world outside, from our phones and social media feeds—and most importantly from negative vibes and forces that may have seeped into the hearts and spirits of our families.

Think about creating physical spaces dedicated to quiet, reflection, breathing deeply, letting go and pouring into one another spiritually. These can be repurposed spaces in our homes, with added soft lighting or candles, pillows, blankets, prayer or vision boards, journals to hold prayers or meditations, flowers and soft, spirit-healing music.

My family calls our guest bedroom “The Serenity Room” because of the tranquil golden light that paints the walls in the evening. Every day we go in, sit on the floor and watch the sun slide down into the purple gloaming of the coming night. We clear our minds, play soft music and let go of the heaviness of the day, feeling safe and more connected to one another.

With everything we’re up against that makes us feel anxious, sad, angry, off-centre and decentred, actively practicing self-love is more important than ever.

It’s hard to be okay when we’re not safe in certain spaces. It’s draining to deal with double-consciousness, the mind-work of having to scrutinize ourselves the way others do just so we can be safe. It’s heartbreaking to explain to our children, whose natural beauty we glorify, that we can be expelled from school or fired from work just for wearing our natural hair.

There are reasons we say, “Black is beautiful.”

It’s up to us to keep saying what is true in a world that too often doesn’t see the truth about us.

So, we’re loving and honouring our Blackness, our history, our culture and each other even more and rejecting the negative messaging that devalues our humanness.

We know our value. We know our measure. We know our meaning. But that knowledge is constantly threatened unless we shore it up and rebuild it in each other. We are the ones to see, believe and protect the beauty, vibrancy, power, and positivity of us.

That’s why I believe active and intentional affirmation is an important part of self-love.

In my family, we still need that kind of soul-replenishing affirmation—despite the fact that we show and tell one another “I love you” all. The. Time.

So I focus on crafting some self-loving and caring words to fill ourselves up.

I start with affirmations about who we are as Black people. With all the misunderstanding about us hanging in the air we breathe, I want to remind my family of some true and soul-sustaining things.

It’s important that we raise praise for hair, praise for our array of skin shades, praise for our rhythm, style and ways. Praise for our creativity and dreams. Praise for how we are—from skin to soul.

I share affirmations like these about us as a people:

Our Black shines beautiful.
Resilience is in our DNA.
We drive, survive, thrive and win.
We’re dope in every dimension.
Proudly poppin’ melanin!
We’re always pulling for each other.
We are always rising.

Maybe they’re affirmations to hang up, to share aloud as mantras, to write on table napkins at breakfast or dinner together or to slip into lunch boxes and briefcases as family heads out for the day.

I write affirmations to support us as a family:

• Our family is soul-blessing love.
• In this house we are Soul.Full and Hope.Full.
• Our family stands. Stands up. Stands strong.
• We’re going to be all right because we got us.
• Our family is unshakable faith and unbreakable love.

And I write affirmations to each of my loved ones that focus on them as unique and important people so that they could feel seen, understood and lifted up in just the way they need to be:

• Love you for your shine, your smart, your brave.
• You bless any room you’re in.
• I see you being brave.
• I love who you are and how you are.
• You matter to me and to this world.
• You touch lives and move hearts, and that matters.
• You can still make all your dreams come through.
• The world might not be ready for you. But you’re more than ready for the world.

Our little ones especially deserve to be protected with the force field of self-love, confidence and pride:

Perfectly loved,
Perfectly sized,
Perfectly made
Perfectly prized,
Perfectly bold,
Perfectly true,
Perfectly Black,
Beautifully you.

I wrote this especially for our little bitties for Mahogany’s Uplifted and Empowered Collection, cards by Black writers to support us through these times.

From the loosest curls
to the tightest ‘fro,
Black kids make
the whole world glow!

In my home we read hopeful and empowering things.

The novels of literary greats like Toni Morrison, the folklore of Zora Neale Hurston, the poetry of griots like Lucille Clifton, and the thought-provoking and justice-seeking works of Ibram Kendi and Tarana Burke sit on our shelves. And Black artists like Faith Ringgold, Romare Bearden and Radcliffe Bailey hang on our walls, reflecting their artistic interpretation of Black experience, testifying to the beauty of our survival and the spirit-renewing richness of our culture.

We listen to music together. We put the earbuds away and put our playlists together to share music, from the spirituals of the Fisk Jubilee Singers to the gospel of Mahalia Jackson, from the blues of B.B. King to the jazz of Miles Davis, from the soul music of James Brown to the hip-hop of Kendrick Lamar and the R&B of H.E.R.

And we dance and dance and dance.

Because when we’re vibing with the music and moving, liberation starts to happen. To rephrase the funk philosopher George Clinton, “Free your body and your mind will follow.”

We love sharing dances across generations of our family. Younger ones try to show the elders how to make new moves while the elders show the younger why “old school” will always be cool.

Another very soul-protecting thing I do is cook the food my foremothers made and pass down their stories to my family. I might pull out the big pot to make Grandma Josie’s collards and share how my six-foot-tall, take-no-mess Grandma liked her greens “pretty.”

Or I might put on my cast-iron skillet to fry my mama Sadie’s hot water cornbread and share how she is my first sacred memory.

Or my daughter and I might bake Great-Aunt Virgie’s tea cakes or Aunt Mildred’s oatmeal cookies, talking about how each woman was love and warmth walking on legs, and laughing about how using that much butter is illegal these days.

And we play together. For us it’s word and board games. But other families game together—play Spades, Tunk or Dominoes, or even grab the jump rope for some Double Dutch.

What matters is the cultural immersion, wrapping ourselves in what our people created.

I make sure my family is connected to our community’s tradition of resilience: our practice of getting back up when we’re knocked down.

Not the movie version of Black resilience where we’re always unbelievably and unrelentingly strong or martyrs who sacrifice and suffer endlessly through physical and emotional pain without consequence or human costs to ourselves.

I mean the resilience of real human beings who feel the pain of injustice deeply, collapse from anger, sadness, bewilderment and exhaustion, but are then picked up and held in the many loving arms of family and community—comforted, reassured, prayed over and lifted up before we move forward again.

That heritage of caring for one another has brought us to here and will always move us into the future.