You belong here.
Community is everything.
Are you coming?
Belonging is a feeling of security and support.
It's a sense of acceptance, inclusion, and identity.
Scientists tell us that Belonging has a multitude of benefits. Including: improved physical health, increased cognitive functioning, enhanced mental health, and better self-esteem.
It's vital for us as humans.
YET, FOR MANY OF US IT FEELS ELUSIVE, COMPLEX AND LAYERED.
IT CAN FEEL HARD TO CULTIVATE.
We know it when we feel it.
And when we don't.
Many of us seek belonging in spiritual communities.
Because we know on some level belonging gives a home to our Spirit.
Those communities can also be fraught places. Especially for Black women.
I See You…
Yearning for a spiritual community that celebrates and understands your Blackness.
Because it is impossible to feel at home in a spiritual community when you’re constantly being made to account for, explain or defend your Blackness.
My work with the Black Goddesses over the last seven years has shown me first hand the power of knowledge and the healing synergy that comes from carefully curated community.
I am inviting those who identify as Black Women to join me and a mighty group of women in:
A Membership of Like-Hearted Women
Igniting Their Inner Goddess!
What if we don't feel like we belong?
The feeling of not belonging is a universal experience.
It's important to know - it's not just you.
In my experience, Ancestral ruptures are a profound and often unnamed aspect of this phenomena.
People who don't have a sense of belonging often say they feel:
- isolated and alone.
- disconnected from Spirit and their ancestors.
- plagued by self-limiting thoughts and behaviors.
- stuck in patterns repeating past humiliations, losses and traumas.
- broken apart, squirreling pieces away so they can fit into the box of the moment.
When you join the Black Goddess Reunion you will be enveloped in a loving space where you can have your tank filled in joyous community.
I'd Like To Connect With My Ancestry and Cultivate Belonging
NATALIE D.
"I have this inexplicable sense of joy and I realized it is our group!"
Welcome to the Reunion!
We're So Glad You're Coming!
Every month a Black Goddess will be our guide as we explore various topics including, but not limited to:
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Value and In/visibility
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Rage & Memory
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Dreams & Spirituality
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Shadow Work
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Myth, Medicine & Magic (Healing)
We will also have special guests, monthly trainings, and happy hours so that you can really connect with other spiritual Black Women who are doing healing work in the world.
And the best part about all of this? We get to make connections and have these conversations away from prying eyes, in the comfort of our own, private container.
My vision for The Black Goddess Experience is that it becomes a space where members can:
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Remember the sovereignty of their Black Body,
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Reconnect with lost histories, and
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Reignite the relationship with their ancestral wisdom.
This is a project that is still in motion, but as founding members, we will work together to create something rejuvenating and amazing!
Incredible value for $39/month, right?
Join me and let’s rewrite our stories!
About your host:
Dr. Giavanni Washington
Is a Hay House author and Creator of the Black Goddess Oracle Deck. The BGW decks are the ONLY Oracle deck that features photos of Black women embodying the Goddesses from Africa.
Dr. G comes from a long line of educators, moonshine makers and medicine women who took away pain even when the rupture left them with only whatever was in the pantry.
She is a diviner and intuitive healer with a special knack for recognizing the best version of you.
She fervently believes you can reach the next level AND stands at the threshold gently supporting your migration from one plane to the next.
When she's not talking with the Ancestors, she's out hiking with her husband, son, and pup Pumpkin.
How do we create belonging?
For much of my life, belonging eluded me, too.
Instead, I carried the shame of being an outsider, the grief of not being enough, and the pain of not being seen.
I often felt I just couldn’t win.
Everything about me was made wrong. I was too tomboyish, too tall, too brash. I inhabited a body that was always offensive to some impossible-to-pin-down sensibility…
BUT THE MOST HURTFUL ACCUSATION THROWN MY WAY WAS THAT
I WAS NOT BLACK ENOUGH.
I always buckled under this indictment because I didn’t know my history.
I did not have a relationship with my ancestors and their ancient wisdom.
That rupture was a huge tear in the fabric of my belonging.
Reconnecting with the past through ancestry gave me ways (and tools) of mending that I wasn't expecting.
- Remembering lost histories,
- Unearthing the power of Black Goddesses,
- Being supported in community...
These are the things that shifted my sense of belonging.
I'm Ready To Shift My Belonging in the Reunion
Why I want this for you and me...
I’ve always hated history.
I couldn’t stand it in high school and I didn't like it in college, either.
It wasn’t until recently during a conversation with a friend that I realized the genesis of my utter and deep disgust for the subject.
In the 11th grade, our school district-approved history textbook summarized the entirety of slavery with the following sentence: the slave master often forced his affections on the slave girl.
I remember looking up aghast and horrified that in one sentence the Black American experience had been collapsed into this violent moment and the woman in this scenario reduced to a receptacle for her owner’s carnal desire.
When I protested this language - a perspective that removed all moral responsibility from the enslaver - I was met with silence.
No one said a thing!
I was the lone Black person in the room. I had no allies, no community and I was left to calm my confusion and quiet my rage...on my own.
This single sentence created an unsafe learning environment and, worse, took me out of my body.
ONE SENTENCE!
Now multiply the impacts of this one sentence by years, decades and centuries of microaggressions, institutionalized racism and discrimination.
I’ll wait…
It wasn’t until years later that I could articulate my problem with the way history was taught:
It dehumanizes.
It erases.
It gaslights.
Here’s the truth I really didn’t understand back then:
Black History didn’t start 400 years ago…and enslavement isn’t the sum total of the Story.
Had I known then, for example, that Black Goddesses existed with full cosmologies and mythologies guiding their adherents through all the cycles of life.
or
Warrior Queens protected their kingdoms for hundreds of years and successfully fought off would-be colonizers (waaaay before America, the country, was a thought).
or
Women as diviners, political leaders and business-savvy merchants were common place in pre-colonial Africa.
If I had known these things…
I may have been able to stand in my Sovereignty when reading that sentence instead of shrinking - embarrassed and isolated - in a room full of white kids.
If I had known these things…
I may have sought out the safety of my sisters who would have loved me up in the aftermath of that in-class assault.
If I had known these things…
I may have been able to confidently stand on the shoulders of these giants, locating myself as a daughter of their wisdom, strength and discernment.
But I’m grateful for that single sentence.
That moment was the start of a life-long journey dedicated to healing the ruptures of colonialism and supporting others as they reconnect with lost histories, reclaiming their birthright!
