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Noosim Naimasiah, PanAfrican Scholar-Activist and Coordinator of Research and Strategy at Ukombozi Library
The term Spiritual Innovation is one I became familiar with after my contact with Sacred Design Lab and one that I have found useful in defining the reframing of spiritual traditions around new contexts and encounters. Spiritual innovation, to me, is the practice of recreating our relationship with our ancestry and our shared divinity, particularly during times of political upheaval. I found clarity in personal and collective practices anchored in ancestral wisdom and responding intentionally to our daily lives. It is in this convergence of memory, creativity, pain, and ancestral dialogue that I find possibilities for spiritual innovation.
I have always been very aware of my spiritual connection to others and to the great divinity. I was brought up Catholic and began to question quite early on, some of the contradictions and interpretations that undermined my Africanness. I explored various religious traditions before settling on an agnosticism. I felt that my politics, as an activist against imperialism and for Pan African woman-centered communalist liberation, was antagonistic with religion. However, my journey in seeking healing from the numerous reproductive health problems I faced led me to meeting African healing practitioners who have been of immeasurable help and guidance in my journey. Therefore, even in very practical ways, African healing modalities – especially those sustained by women and centered on divine feminine entities – have been of immediate and very profound influence in my life.
I am constantly faced with my own suffering and the suffering of my community from deep poverty and its progeny - debilitating health conditions, war, dispossession, substance abuse, mental illness. It seems endless. We are alienated not only from the products of our labour but also from ourselves and our powerful spiritual heritage. Spiritual consciousness re-centers us, providing meaning to laughter, joy, prayer, and economic activity, anchoring our lives in something deeper than mere survival. Spirituality serves to sharpen our liberatory consciousness and practice. At Ukombozi Library where I work, we seek to bridge the historically inextricable spheres of politics and spirituality.
It is from this experience that I thought it would be useful to form an African community of healing practice, anchored in ancestral wisdom. It is not easy, especially, and tragically, in the continent to find a community of healing practitioners from African indigenous traditions. This is because, of course, of colonial demonization of African spirituality, which was not necessarily a religious practice, but embedded in every facet of life. The diviners, midwives, prophets, rainmakers, herbalists, griots, priests and priestesses, blacksmiths, alchemists and elders contain a wealth of historical spiritual knowledge that transcends many epochs. To harness this knowledge, that has been in a constant state of renewal and revival, is to claim a particular ancestry, even as we are refashioning it to engage our current problems and contexts. How do we revive African epistemologies that are grounded in ancient spiritual traditions in ways that make sense in the world we live in?
I think the liberalization of spirituality is a serious problem. We have to distinguish between the ways in which we seek to create more accessible and expansive ways to engage our spiritual traditions and the ways these traditions find diluted interpretation outside of their contexts so that they become intelligible to audiences for either commercial gain or for social and political attenuation on radical and anti-imperialist propositions of justice. Capitalism has not spared spiritual networks and knowledges. I have become wary of the new spiritual formations, mostly adopted from the West, with people for instance, now calling themselves witches, adopting a de-islamized Sufism, becoming self-declared healers after attending two exorbitantly priced courses and highly individualized and commercialized practices that have global (read: Western) mentors who enforced a mysticism that leads to narcissistic individuals un-anchored in any community or communal practices.
How do we de-link our spiritual gifts and practices from an ever-commoditizing function, sometimes by reckless or malevolent practitioners or sometimes by genuine practitioners who still need to survive in a world that re-presents every entity through an economic register? And how can we sustain a spiritual consciousness that is not annexed from community, from social justice or from liberatory praxis? I suggest – spiritually anchored cooperatives that affirm people-centered, communal, spiritually-anchored production and reproduction of life.
Read More Definitions of Spiritual Innovation
- Ristina Gooden, Spiritual innovation leader and scholar focused on Black women
- Sandy Hong, Spiritual innovation trainer and practitioner focused on the US and Korean diaspora
- Edina Leković, Muslim thought leader and community builder
- Sid Schwarz, Jewish thought leader and convener of spiritual innovators
- Susumu Shimazono, Japanese sociologist of religion
- Cristine Takuá, Maxakali Indigenous philosopher and educator
- Brandon Vaidyanathan, Catholic sociologist and spiritual innovator
