Hello, my loves,
This is a reflection on the intersection of artificial intelligence, cultural identity, and spiritual reclamation. Plus two new offerings designed to help you deconstruct the internal effects of Empire, bridging the gap between energetic architecture and lived experience, moving from a place of pain toward a state of creative empowerment. Watch the video or read the words; the choice is yours xxx
Sometimes, even as a writer, even as someone who can express themselves pretty well through writing, I still get tired. And when I feel like this, the thing I want to do is reach for AI.
I have no problem with AI when it comes to helping us as humans navigate the masses and masses of information that are available to us, especially since I live in Portugal and I can't just go to the library and research what I need to research. Even though my local library is across the road from me, it doesn’t carry the kind of information I need, and it certainly doesn’t have it in English. So, for someone like me who does not have the privilege of access to all of this information, something like Claude is pretty useful. So when I am critical of AI, I am critical of using it to make pictures of you and your dog in Met Gala outfits; I’m critical of major data centres that impact the poorest communities and care nothing for the environment, for the rich and privileged to become more rich and privileged, but I’m not ignorant to the fact that some remote and marginlised groups may actally benift from some asspects of AI, including when it comes to medical diagnoses.
As a brown woman who lived in white Australia, I had a lot of issues with diagnosis and going to doctors and being told that because of the colour of the skin I live in, I was at risk for certain things. Because of my skin colour and my ethnicity, I would feel pain differently. No one explicitly used the words “exaggerate’ or “hysterical”, but the implications were there. People of my ethnicity tend to exaggerate our pain, exaggerate our symptoms.
And I often wonder if it was AI, you know, if it was a machine, right? I don't know, maybe maybe I wouldn't have been subjected to some of the stuff I was. So, I think this discourse on AI and it being “the end of the world” comes from a place of immense privilege. From people who have never had to sit in rooms where their very existence was looked at suspiciously, and they had to justify their feelings and lived experience.
It's funny because this idea of people of the global majority and their knowledge, their ideas not being taken seriously, has really been something I've been exploring a lot with my work.
I'm an intuitive. So, it can be hard to explain what happens in your body when you're working with someone. But recently in a session, the Goddesses Lakshmi and Durga and Kali and Saraswati were all right there with me. And I began to feel really uncomfortable. I'm a doctor, a woman of science. But I am also a woman of Tamil descent. The first in my lineage to have the privilege to bridge two worlds.
I had to really sit with this discomfort. The holding of the paradox - working with goddesses and working with science. To be honest, Goddess work, as it exists in the world right now, gives me the ick. It’s why I gravitated to working with archetypes instead. No lineage or appropriation there; archetypes are just patterns of energy. Accessible. Much less buy-in and devotion required.
In a low moment (not proud of it), I actually went into Claude, and I asked it. Do I have a right to work with the Hindu Goddesses?
We get so bogged down, so out of touch with our intuition, so dependent that we have to reach for AI to confirm what we already know is deep within us. I knew it already. I mean, I have literally been to India, to Pondicherry, where my family is from and stood at the feet of statues of Lakshmi. I have seen it with my own eyes. And yet, I still could not believe that I had a right to it, that I was entitled to work with the energy of these deities.
This is what Empire does. This is what White Supremacy does. This is what Colonialism does. It disconnects us. It tells us to reject the evidence of our eyes, our ears, our Intutive Body Intelligence and instead believe its truth.
White spiritual women work all the time with these Goddesses. With no lineage, no lived experience, no authority, no accountability. Nothing but the blind belief handed to them by Empire that because they like it, they are entitled to it. Why did I, a daughter of the lineage, feel so out of touch with it?
I felt like I wasn't allowed to. I had no claim. Even though I grew up in predominantly white spaces, I never inherited an ease within them. That feeling of entitlement never rubbed off on me. As an outsider, I had to earn Whiteness, and I felt I had not earned the Goddesses. Plus. I felt like it had been cheapened and it was trashy. Stolen from me and trodden on, tizzed up with a shade of lipstick that never suited me.
I felt anger bubble up inside me. Anger towards my mother. Why did she not teach me? Why did she not grab it and hold it close to her heart, protect it and share it with me? Why was I left to learn this divine wisdom that was our birthright from white women?
But I already knew why. We moved to Australia; she was told that our knowledge - our lived experience, what we grew up with, what she grew up with - was not good, that it wasn't right, that it was somehow lesser than. She internalised that. She embodied it. Out of love for me, she wanted to make the world easier for me. So she stopped speaking our native tongue. She didn't teach me about the goddesses that had shaped her life and lived experience - the lived experience of my grandmother and my great-grandfather. And I can't be angry at that. I mean, I can be, but not at her. I can be angry at the systems that were created to keep me and my mother and my lineage away from what is truly ours, that made me doubt myself, my medicine, and what I can offer to the world.
My work in the world at the moment is a huge reclamation of my lineage.
And a fierce devotion to destroy the systems that robbed my mother and me of the Goddess.
The Body as an Altar.
A coming together of my lived experience, my lineage, my love for things in the human world. The body as an altar, the altar as the temple.
In Tamil Siddha medicine, we speak of the body as the kōil, the temple - the place where the divine resides. An altar is like an external version of that. And when we do altar work, it's like we are creating the energetic architecture of our temple outside of us. It is a representation of who we are, the work we're doing.
This series is designed to address a single issue, at an introductory price of €800 for the first 4 bookings.
Over 4 sessions, we will work with 4 Deities whose cosmic qualities manifest through your consciousness. We are not “summoning” something external, but are calling forth qualities that already live in the cosmos and in you.
The Body as a Portal
A powerful foundational session that illuminates where the systems of Empire live in your body and how they have fucked you over.
Full disclosure. These words I mine. I spoke them from my heart, and then AI created the transcript, which I edited and added to on my own.
All my Love,
Leandra xxx
