To Heal A People: A Book of Transformative Self and Communal Healing

By Soul Ashemu

"Therefore, when we talk about the need to center our collective healing and mental, physical and spiritual restoration, this is not simply about some arcane exercise  aimed at assuaging our bruised and battered egos. No. Nor are we talking

• Language: English
• Publisher: Righteous Rage Institute for Healing and Social Justice
• Release date: Feb 1, 2023
• ISBN: 9798218113353

Soul Ashemu

Hasira Soul Ashemu is the Founder and Chief Visionary Officer for Righteous Rage Institute for Healing and Social Justice and creator of the 'I Create My Life' Wellness and Healing Network. Hasira has traveled the world spending a decade in Africa raising his family in Ghana and connecting deeply with Afro-Indigenous wisdom, practices, and spirituality. He is on a mission To Heal a People, and is a prolific writer, speaker, coach, facilitator, media and communications professional and now, author, with the release of his two long and widely anticipated books.Born and raised in Northeast Denver, CO, Hasira is an East Angel High School graduate and attended Howard University "The Mecca ''. Hasira is a living legacy from a bloodline of Community Organizers; historically leading movements to now mentoring and coaching an intergeneration of leaders using a theory of change that transformational social change begins with individual transformation of mind, body, and spirit.Hasira has been using his talents, experience and skills to create and support initiatives that build new systems for health, education, and wealth grounded in equity and Afro-Indigenous cultural wealth. This focus is based on an understanding that many of the systems we have today are being rendered obsolete in an increasingly diverse society seeking true freedom and liberation, and those systems and institutions that will thrive are those that are able to pivot towards cultural consciousness and true equity.Hasira organizes healing and learning journeys, and offers consulting and coaching sessions at the individual, community, national and international levels for both nonprofit, corporate, governmental sectors, public school districts, public health agencies, and higher learning institutions across the US and five African nations. Hasira works beyond borders, as a frequent international traveler, teaching the success sciences behind manifesting and living life through a Mind, Body Soul experience. Fueled by a plant-based diet, he enjoys running, biking, boxing, yoga, deep meditation and grounding in nature, preferably near any river.

Book preview

To Heal A People

To Heal A People

To Heal A People

A Book of Transformative Self and Communal Healing

Hasira Soul Ashemu

publisher logo

Righteous Rage Institute for Healing and Social Justice

Volume I

By Hasira Soul Ashemu

To Heal a People: Volume 1

Copyright © 2023 by Hasira Soul Ashemu

Published by RRI Publishing

Printed in the United States of America

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or by any information storage retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Hardcover ISBN:979-8-218-10546-4

Cover inspiration by Hasira Soul Ashemu

Cover design by Kreda McCullough and Stephanie Ngan

Chapter 6 on Shadow Work & Part 2 Module for Healing co-written by Allison Brown

Incantation

Speak Truth to the People

BY MARI EVANS

Speak the truth to the people

Talk sense to the people

Free them with honesty

Free the people with Love and Courage for their Being

Spare them the fantasy

Fantasy enslaves

An enslaved person is enslaved

Can be enslaved by unwisdom

Speak the truth to the people

It is not necessary to green the heart

Only to free the mind

To identify the enemy is to free the mind

A free mind has no need to scream

A free mind is ready for other things

To BUILD…

Speak the truth to the people

To identify the enemy is to free the mind

Free the mind of the people

Speak to the mind of the people

Speak Truth

Invocation

Ashe! Ashe! Ashe-o!!!

Mother-Father-Divine Creator

First and foremost, we give thanks for the divine energy. You are the energy that sustains, nurtures, guides, protects, frees, and gives us wisdom and power. You are the energy that gives us beauty and intelligence and connects us to all.

We ask that you bless us with this endeavor. May the words be imbibed with your wisdom and power. May the words be imbibed with your universal intelligence and grace. May these words be used to heal and unite.

We ask these things as co-Creator and deem them perfect in the universal eye. And so it is!

Ashe!

Dedications

This book is first and foremost dedicated to my Grandmother for loving me enough to educate me early and often, for fostering and nurturing my genius, and for instilling within me an unapologetic and undying love for my people.

-My MOM, for always being my biggest supporter and staunchest defender. I am so blessed to have a mother who nurtures my talent, and always speaks greatness into my spirit. I dedicate every single word I will ever write to you.

-My Pops Rest in Power- this is your dream finally fulfilled. We did it. Love you!

-My Uncle Clarke, Rest in Power!

-My Aunt Chris and my Aunt Sandra.

-My brother and best friend Sheps Kasa Heru (Kahlil). You’ve always held me down from day one, had my back, and stood steadily by my side. Love you, bro.

-My beautiful children- Maaja, Aingkhu, Saari, Chayse, Makiya, Deron, John, Zani, and Elliet. The tribe is here.

-Balashange A. - thank you for giving me the most precious gifts a man could ever receive; our children, and wishing you true love and healing.

-My Jakalu (Soul sibling) - Amenra Menab (Richard G.) for the many journeys we’ve taken together and apart that have enriched the Ashemu. Love you brotha.

-Queen D- for catching me when I fell, for tolerating and then dressing up my ready-roads, for keeping the light on for me when I was away, for turning our house into a home, for serving as my most solid foundation and soulmate in the truest sense of the word, for this lifetime and beyond. I love you eternally.

-Cazz B. You have my deepest eternal gratitude for being the single most divine driving force behind pushing me to get this book done and believing in me when at times, I didn’t believe in myself. You are loved and appreciated more than you’ll ever comprehend.

-Sasa A. for serving as my sacred muse and bringing the divine gifts of joy, laughter, love of nature, youthful exuberance, and sacred play back into my life and showing me and the world what grace, resilience, and recovery look like. Catch me outside!

-Allison B. Our goal should be to get all the music out of us before we die. In my pursuit of getting all of the music out of me, you have been a primary conductor and arranger of my songs, and every human being should be so blessed to have someone with your dedication, brilliance, and love in their life. I’m blessed.

Asante Sana’s (Thank you)

Please permit me space to thank all the people in my life who have contributed to Hasira and gotten me to this point where I can relay the learnings from my journey.

This list is in no particular order:

Shekem Ur Shekem Ra Un Nefer Amen. The Washington D.C hesp of Ausar Auset with special thanks to Ur Aua Hehi Metu and the Queen Mother’s EnenTchass Ra, Shemsu Maat, Muima Maat, and Sanetchem Nertay Also, Ntcher Seshuet, Shekem Mehab Neter and Shekem Hames Meten, Rakhem Seku and Hakashe Mut, Melina A. (for rebirthing my revolution-9/18), Paul Hamilton, Rafiki (brotha from another mother), Opalanga P., Jitu B. and J4J Family for you unceasing brotherhood and guidance, Shall Pass, Kundaja K. for a lifetime of brotherhood, Dhoruba Bin Wahad for the countless hours of political education you gave me in your home in Ghana, Imakhus, Rabbi Kohain, Brotha Jeff F., Mic T, Kamau (K-Tone), Frank D.( for the gentle and not so gentle pushes), Benny S., Kareem A., Baba T., Abeni B., Trenia C., Ashem Sada, Amenra Menab, Diedre J., Cliff & Vicky, Tyisha S., Jice J., Kalelia V., Olisa Yaa, My Godmother Hassoni R (for ALWAYS being there)., Pumpkin, Sugg, Suggie 2, Askia T., Tunda A., Nimani B., My Aunt Chris, Cousins Tony (RIP), Nate and Junebug (Greg), Makisha B., Ms. Rhone, the best teacher I ever had, Brotha Talib, aka The Oracle, my sister Belinda, Morgynne the healer, Corey, Euda the healer, Kareem the Shogun, my big because Alton D., Maurice, Effley and Cheri Brooks. My nephew Javon Bridges (Yvie Oddly), my niece ZZ, my brother Tejon W., Mz. Paula Popoff for telling me to go wide; Amma Twum-Baah for her editing work; XITO’s staff, The RRI Staff, and partners; Stephanie N., Tenecia W., Monique B., Candice B. Theo W., Sharron D. Rachael, Ruth B. Solicia L. (ahò love), Papa B (Unc), Shaq G., Rito, Robert, Troy and Jamila, Terez and Tylisa J. and so many others I have not named.

Gratitude to the Ancestors

I am grateful and humbled by the wisdom of my Ancestors. Without their sacrifices, I wouldn’t know how to proceed. I have wisdom precisely because of them. Being bonded in Body through the Maafa while keeping the knowledge of how to remain free in Mind and Soul is by no means a meager endeavor! Even through immense sacrifice and struggle, they’ve kept this knowledge alive. I am here today because of it.

That is why I honor my Ancestors in my daily life and travels. I cannot thank them enough! It is our job to bring their wise knowledge to the next generation. We must pass the knowledge on now while we still can. We are, after all, the New Ancestors.

Guiding Lights

There have been many Guiding Lights for me on this journey! The Abolitionist Harriet Tubman and the many unknown men and women of the Underground Railroad have been my primary guiding souls throughout my community organizing journey.

Born into enslavement as Araminta Ross in 1822, Harriet was traumatized by repeated beatings and whippings as a child. She suffered a traumatic brain injury early in her childhood when an irate overseer threw a heavy metal weight that hit her directly in the head. Her brain injury caused dizziness, pain, and spells throughout the rest of her life, including visions and vivid dreams, which she described as premonitions. Despite her injuries, Harriet created a life that included alchemizing what many would call a (dis)ability into a superpower. She used these gifts to escape enslavement and free hundreds of people.

In 1849, Harriet escaped to Philadelphia and freedom and later returned to the slave holding south to rescue her family. After freeing them, she returned to the belly of the beast; this time focused on guiding more and more people out of enslavement.

Traveling by night on the Underground Railroad, in extreme secrecy, against impossible odds, Harriet never lost a passenger. After the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, Harriet guided enslaved people far, far North, out of the United States, and into Canada, all while putting her life and freedom on the line.

Sojourner Truth, like Harriet, left physical, mental, and spiritual bondage behind. Sojourner said, I didn’t run out of slavery. I walked out of slavery. Indicating once again that when we as individuals or as a people are truly ready to be truly free, nothing and no one can stop us, and we won’t have to chase it or run for it; we will walk into our freedom with the divine energy of the Creator guiding and imbibing every step. This, again, is evidence of the understanding of the African axiom that says, if there is no enemy within, then the enemy without can do us no harm.

Equally as important to remember outside of the individual accomplishments of Ms. Tubman and Ms. Truth is the oft-forgotten reality that the Underground Railroad was the most successful human rights campaign ever created in the history of the United States. Ever. This implores those of us from a community organizing background to understand and appreciate the deep and guiding wisdom of the formula used to establish this underground institution ultimately responsible for freeing over 170,000 Black souls.

The Underground Railroad was successful because it was multi-generational, multi-gendered, and multi-racial. This, to me, is one of the true gems we can mine from the annals of history regarding the efficacy of true liberatory community organizing and institution building. This formula stands alone and unchallenged as the primary foundational building block to liberatory success.

As I write this book, societal ills abound - substance abuse, mental health issues, individual trauma, generational trauma, collective trauma, racism, violence, and so much more. Our systems need healing! Education, criminal justice, employment, and health and wellness, must be healed. Unhealed trauma can be seen everywhere. Our Earth has been ravaged and used; her resources have almost been obliterated. New variations of COVID emerged and wiped out many of our elders, some of our youth, and many of our friends and family. Many have attempted to cope with this trauma through addiction, suicide, homicide, or greed. The Old System is dying. We must heal ourselves and give Birth to a New One!

My Grandma’s Hands

In Ghana, parents still in their youthful, resource-making prime are expected to go out and earn a living for their children, while grandparents are charged with physically raising and caring for their grandchildren. Ghana is where I learned that the style of child-rearing I experienced growing up in the wild western United States, despite its dominant, hyper-rugged, individualistic white culture mindset, is the same type of child-rearing used in Ghanaian culture. In the Ghanaian system, as in the system I grew up in, parents are the providers, and grandparents are the caretakers.

I usually tell people that my grandmother raised me. This is in no way a slight towards my mother who worked her butt off to provide for my brother and I. However, while I lived with my mother, and she did an amazing job, my grandmother was the one who taught my cousin, brother, and me how to read by the time we were each three years old. My grandmother’s house was just three blocks away, on the same street (Vine St.) where my family lived, and her house was where we were fed snacks and cared for every day after school until my mother got home from work. My grandmother also was the one who babysat us the most when my parents needed adult time alone. And it was also at my grandmother's home that we spent the bulk of our summer days after returning from a day at the local YMCA. Whether it was raking leaves, gardening, or shoveling snow, all of these mostly took place at my grandmother’s house while in my grandmother’s care. It was at my grandmother's home that all of our holidays were spent. My grandmother introduced us to the love of musicals, especially Fiddler on the Roof, Oklahoma, and my brother’s all-time favorite, Sound of Music. (Side Note: My brother, who is an avid gym rat with a body that rivals, if not surpasses, The Rock, proudly admitted that he is often caught at the gym, in all of his hulking glory, listening to the Sound of Music while bellowing out the hills are alive with the sound of music...la, la, la, laaaaa. Hilarious.)

My grandmother did a great deal when it came to culturing us. She gave me Malcolm X as my first book to read, so when she told me at the age of 18 that we were going to the movies later that week, we were all intrigued and a bit excited to see what cultural event she had up her sleeves this time.

She wanted us to go see the 1988 release of Mississippi Burning. Mississippi Burning was a movie about a group of civil rights workers who go missing in a small Mississippi town. FBI agents Alan Ward, played by Willem Dafoe and Rupert Anderson, played by Gene Hackman, are sent to investigate, but the local authorities refuse to cooperate. The African American community is afraid to get involved. The two FBI agents clash over strategy, but as the situation becomes more volatile, the indirect approach is abandoned in favor of more aggressive, hardline tactics. It’s still one of my favorite movies today.

It wasn’t until I saw Mississippi Burning that I deeply understood what a lynching looks like. I mean the graphic details of this heinous and atrocious act. By the time I went to see Mississippi Burning with my grandmother, I already had an intellectual understanding of what lynchings were, thanks to the education given to me by my grandmother and father primarily. Even so, my understanding of lynchings was still very limited.

I understood that the period known as Reconstruction was one of the most brutal stretches of organized racial terrorism in American history, with white mobs attacking and lynching Blacks. These unprovoked assaults stretched into the early 1950s. Researchers have documented as many as 6,500 lynchings between 1865 and 1950, including 2,000 attacks during Reconstruction alone. Thousands of other Afro-Indigenous people were also assaulted and raped. In the South, it is estimated that two or three blacks were lynched each week in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In Mississippi alone, 500 blacks were lynched from the 1800s to 1955. Of course, these are just the ones they have recorded, however, it should be safe to assume that thousands if not, hundreds of thousands of these types of heinous acts went unreported.

Even knowing what I knew about lynchings at that young age, the graphic reality had escaped me until I saw Mississippi Burning. There’s a scene in the movie where a Black preacher, and his family, head up the local community church. The local whites see this family as the source of Black resistance to tyranny and, thus, become the targets of terror from the whites in the community. One night, the preacher awakes in the middle of the night to find a fire burning in his barn. He immediately knows that the Klan has set the fire. He runs to his oldest son's room and tells him to get his mother and younger siblings out of the house and to the road further away. The boy immediately searches for his mother, grandmother, and siblings and hastily ushers them out of the house. The preacher then goes outside and attempts to free all his animals from the burning barn since not doing so will surely end in economic calamity for his family and the community. While attempting to free the animals, he is hit over the head while four or five white men attempt to put a noose around his neck, preparing him for hanging.

Now, what I found most striking about this scene, both then and now, is not just the callousness and lack of humanity involved in the hanging process, but the brutal surgical-like efficiency displayed in what otherwise seems like a fairly complicated and violent process. The tying of the noose knot, the pulling up of a human being, the tying of the rope to a tree to keep the tension and support the weight, etc. Why in the hell would someone endeavor to learn such psychopathic skills? This is what I remember thinking.

As I researched the writing of this book, I quickly recognized that there is a shortage of information available regarding eyewitness accounts of what these lynchings entailed. Plenty of information exists on how these acts occurred, when they occurred, where they occurred, and even who they happened to. But the historical accounts are very noticeably silent when it comes to ‘what’ they were in detail.

I was able to find one particular account worth sharing for the sake of posterity. So that we are clear and can unmask this popular and particular form of terror employed against Black people in America as recently as fifty (50) years ago. Claude Neal was the last known spectacle lynching in the United States. This happened in 1934. (Anderson, Carol 2012).

Claude Neal was in jail in Alabama, and the lynch mob was incensed. For some reason, they didn’t want Claude Neal to go through the regular judicial system. Understand that the judicial system in Alabama in 1934 was not a kind and gentle force for Black people; even so, the people of the town needed to and in fact did make a lethal lesson out of Claude.

Conversely, if you search far enough into your Black family bloodlines, several of you will find family member(s) who were victims of lynchings. I have one in my family, my bloodline. I’m separated from the heinous death of this family member by less than 100 years, which is far from being ancient history. Righteous Rage.

So when my grandmother took my brother and me to see Mississippi Burning, she did not tell us what the driving force was behind her taking us to see it. We were simply told that my grandmother had a family member killed in Mississippi years ago. We were spared the gory details and circumstances of his death until 29 years after my grandmother passed.

It was my 80+-year-old aunt who told me about my grandmother’s grandmother, who had come to Omaha, Nebraska, via Mississippi. My grandmother’s grandmother had a sister and a brother. When my great-grandmother was about five years old, her brother, a teenager, had been hanged in Mississippi for no reason other than being Black. My great-grandmother and her sister fled from Mississippi, traveling by foot the 844 miles it took to get to Omaha. In Omaha, they would settle and later become successful restaurateurs.

I was struck by a sense of awe and a familiar burning feeling of righteous rage when I heard this story. Here I was, a community organizer for my entire adolescent and adulthood, advocating for racial and social justice, and in my own family’s bloodline, there was a man who had been a lynching victim; even as I type this, my eyes well up with tears from the pain of knowing the gravity of such a painful personal legacy.

This ultra-violent personal story helped formulate and solidify for me the importance and validity of using the plantation paradigm as a model for breaking the current reality into parts and regressing it back to the same patterns we saw in plantation times. By looking at the similarities between now and then, we can make sense of the pathways for oppression and instead chart a new path that flows to personal and communal healing and freedom.

Why I Wrote This Book

Why are we losing so much human potential, and why are many of the world's issues being compounded even though we have all the necessary human resources to solve them? We are dead smack in the middle of a system and process that is wasting the world's greatest resource, human potential.

I started and stopped this project so many times that I lost count. I wanted to blame the inconsistency on being a full-time father of five and a full-time community organizer and entrepreneur. I wanted to blame it on being the Chief Visionary Officer of the Righteous Rage Institute or on being a full-time husband and partner. The truth is that while I could blame it on various things, none of them would be as accurate as if I owned the fact that I had a deep-seated aversion to digging into some of the places I had to go to write this book.

I haven’t spoken about some of the things discussed in this book in over 15-20 years, especially my experiences in Africa. I cannot speak about some experiences because they involve ceremonial rites and initiations. Some experiences, especially those I experienced in Africa, wouldn’t be believed because they are beyond what most think is possible. But even with all those restrictions, this book is a book of deep sharing, vulnerability, and healing.

This book is written in the spirit of love, as a love letter to my people. And when I say my people, I don’t simply mean Afro-Indigenous people. I mean ALL people who sincerely and authentically value truth, justice, love, and the freedom of humanity. These are the ones I consider MY people.

I deeply thank you for taking your time and energy to explore the pages of this book. I know there are 1 million other things you could be doing with your time. And yet, you chose to spend your time here with me. I am deeply appreciative and grateful. In return, I promise you my sincerity and authenticity. I am not here to waste your time or energy. I am here to support the healing of a people. Although many consider me a radical, this is not how I would necessarily describe myself. It’s much more accurate to consider me a ‘freethinker,’ although, in today’s world, to be a free thinker is to be considered radical. I have no desire to see or participate in the bloodshed or the threats of any group of people or persons. That is not my nature; that is not who I am. I consider myself a warrior, and as such, I am a lover of life, of all life, and I consider all life sacred. I’m clear that I take radical stances and hold radical ideas as my truth; however, these ideas, as radical as they may be, are not violent in nature or intent, regardless of how others, who in their reactionary receiving of my messages, may take them.

I am, first and foremost, a father, companion, partner, lover, son, brother, friend, organizer, traveler, and now a published writer. I love humanity. I love laughter. I love joy. I love to travel. I love freedom. And who drives all of my thinking and actions. I desire to see those oppressed liberated to pursue their highest potential unencumbered by oppression (self and systemic) in various forms.

This is my desire even though I understand the universal truth that for freedom, there must exist its antithesis of oppression. Where there is no duality, there can be no power. There can be no exercising of our divine where there are no challenges being imparted to us by the Divine Creator.

Therefore, To Heal A People is most critical about creating a framework for personal, communal, and universal freedom and liberation. To Heal A People is an affirmation and a declaration. It is a paradigm and an instruction guide. It is a call and a response. It is both thought and action, the declaration of war on the darkest parts of our nature and a call for restoring peace within.

To Heal A People!

How to Use This Book

This book is meant as a guide. It’s built on ancient collective knowledge and real-life experiences, making it a footprint of immemorial healing concepts. What’s within these pages are tried and tested ideas, concepts, habits, and healing practices.

During a lengthy discussion on acceptance, an African elder once told me, Eat the fish and leave the bones. What he meant was that while there may be things that don’t necessarily work for me, that’s ok. Take what you can use and leave what you can’t or don’t like. This book isn’t meant as a cure-all for everyone - it’s simply a proposed roadmap for Individual and Collective Healing. And like any good map, there are several ways to get to where you want to go.

Throughout this book and the accompanying workbooks, there will be what I call LoveWerk Challenges. I encourage you to do them earnestly. We have created separate workbooks for those who want to take a comprehensive life-altering dive into changing bad habits, examining outdated beliefs and healing wounds that block you from living the life you truly want to live. I highly suggest you offer your whole Self to the exercises; you can only get out what you put in. Lastly, thank you for taking the time to read this and invest in yourself. I am deeply grateful and honored that you have chosen to walk this journey with me.

Now... Let’s get to work!

Part One: My Manifestation

Manifestation (noun)

A public demonstration of power and purpose (Merriam Webster n.d.)

1

Born In Righteous Rage

To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost always. – James Baldwin

It was September 17th, 1970, and two high-afroed sisters who could have easily been related to Angela Davis, stood in a crowded Safeway line in the Northeast part of Denver. That part of town was considered the Black part, a highly relative assignment given that Blacks in Denver were only 12% of the population.

The two sisters were in the Safeway trying to cash a check. With a disdainful scowl, the white woman, who I imagine was wearing horn-rimmed glasses with cheap plastic beads on a string, too much blue cheek blush, and an old-fashioned, even for 1970, beehive hairdo, was making what should have been a very simple transaction a particularly difficult one. The circumstances that brought these two forces together had to have known that the outcome would be