I love waiting rooms.
This is not really on brand for me—I’m deeply impatient. But waiting rooms invite something nothing else in my life does: contemplation.
I don’t go on my phone. I don’t even open a magazine.
If there’s a window, I look out of it and ask myself: what in my life needs more time to be seen?
It also soothes the particular anxiety of sitting across from an often white, often male doctor—something about the enforced stillness steadies me.
This week, in a waiting room, something finally landed.
I am really proud of myself.
That sentence doesn’t come easily to me. A few years ago, a therapist had me take a test to identify my dominant inner voice. I scored as the stickler. I didn’t need the results explained—I knew immediately where it came from. It is the legacy of my mother. She could criticize the way I brushed my teeth. Nothing was ever quite right. Pride was suspicious.
So when pride arrives now, it doesn’t come casually. It comes earned, hard-won, trembling. I am letting this shit go. From now on, I’ll be proud.
What do you need to be reminded of at the end of this year?
What did you do despite everything?
It doesn’t have to be big. It doesn’t have to be small.
But I’m asking you—especially if you come from a long line of sticklers, of people for whom nothing was ever quite enough—to make this a practice:
tell yourself what you’re proud of.
Finally:
What do you commit to no longer holding back from yourself? What are you done postponing? We’re not postponing giving praise, love, safety to ourselves anymore. We’re giving it now.
In the last two years—without a home, moving wherever would take me, going through a devastating breakup, watching genocides unfold on my phone, losing my Congolese father—I built a program that has taught hundreds of people around the world practice the somatics of abolition communally, from their bedroom. So many of them—suspect every single one—have let this practice ripple into their communities, in the most honest way possible: small, close, human. This program has always been about creating relationships that hold the weight of abolition, that can hold the complexity of our longings and our mistakes.
I come from a long line of people who would be described as inconsolable.
Mistakes mean the end of a relationship. Apologies are read as weakness. We don’t know how to be held. We don’t touch. We don’t cry. We don’t speak the things that terrify us.
This program turns toward all of that.
It’s the program I desperately needed when I was younger. This program is how I write myselves in.
It’s also the only somatic program I know where all the teachers are Black and brown, most of them queer and trans. And while I am held by wonderful humans who help me run it, I created this program alone. I built the curriculum. I reached out to teachers I deeply admire—every single one said yes, which I still don’t fully understand. I dreamed it directly from the technology of the Kongo Kosmogram.
LPF is deeply intentional. It’s structured around four liberatory needs—Safety (Body, Earth), Belonging (Soul, Water), Connection (Mind, Air), and Dignity (Spirit, Fire)—and offers a blend of somatic education, community calls, somatic spaces and guest workshops to support participants in embodying liberation.
My ancestors and I are very proud.
And in that same waiting room, another truth arrived: this will be the last year I teach it. I feel the call to make my world less wide and much deeper.
So if you’ve been thinking about joining, let this be the last call.
As a reminder, these are the guest teachers this year:
See you on the field for the very last time dear one,
Stay ungovernable !