Hope Dealer with José Rico

Reclaiming Roots & Returning Home with Cecily Relucio

• Jose Rico • Season 1 • Episode 2

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What does it mean to find hope and resilience amid life's darkest moments? Journey with us as I sit down with Cecily Relucio, whose story of overcoming adversity is both gut-wrenching and inspiring. Cecily opens up about her parents' immigration from the Philippines to a predominantly white, rural town in Illinois during the mid-1960s, facing cultural alienation and the harsh realities of living in a Sundown Town. She also shares her personal experiences with gender-based violence and the trauma of witnessing her mother's abuse, all while maintaining an unyielding pursuit of safety, love, and community.

Cecily's powerful narrative doesn't stop at personal hardship. She delves into the broader implications of structural violence, gaslighting, and the pervasive influence of colonial and imperial systems carried through her bloodline in the US. Her journey of recognizing her own agency amid adversity is a testament to the transformative power of self-love and community. We explore the critical role of reclaiming indigenous knowledge and fostering connections to land and life as sacred, linking personal empowerment to collective resistance against systemic oppression.

In this episode, Cecily also reveals the significance of reclaiming ancestral wisdom for liberation. She discusses her work of founding Umuwi and the crucial role of ethnic studies in developing critical consciousness. We talk about the necessity for BIPOC educators to practice decolonized, re-indigenized ways of knowing and the importance of creating spaces of safety, connection, and wholeness. Lastly, we reflect on the value of divine guidance, community support, and self-mastery in the healing process, drawing inspiration from the historical solidarity between Black and Brown communities. Join us for a profound conversation about resilience, agency, and the power of collective care and storytelling. 

F.L.Y. L.I.B.R.E. a guide for healing and liberation can be purchased here: amzn.to/4iCzAAM

Jose Rico:

Buenas familia, soy Jose, Rico or Rico, if you know me from the hood. Thank you so much for your attention today. It means everything to me and I want to welcome you to Hope Dealer, which is a podcast about our journey towards hope, resilience and joy through the stories that we carry about our return home, and my intention for our time together is to remind us that we carry powerful medicine within us that is our guide to our transformation. Thank you so much for joining me. I am so grateful to be able to introduce you to incredible people, incredible spirits that will share their journeys with us. All right, everyone. Welcome again to another episode.

Jose Rico:

This is actually the second episode of Hope Dealer and this is a podcast about the journey towards hope, resilience and joy through our stories of returning home.

Jose Rico:

And, as you got a sense from the first podcast where you heard a little bit about my story, got a sense from the first podcast where you heard a little bit about my story, my intention is really to be able to provide a space with listeners and guests to connect with themselves and allow for their story or spiritual transformation.

Jose Rico:

Come through and hopefully you'll hear it in the voice that they're sharing this out of deep generosity and love. Today, we are coming by beautiful trees, obviously, the lake animals everywhere and just a beautiful sound of cicadas that you cannot hear. But many of you in the Midwest are very familiar by now and just want to be able to share our surroundings with you, and one of the reasons why I wanted to do this podcast was because I wanted to have heart-to-heart conversations with people that I love, with people that I admire and with people that I've learned a great deal from, and so I was very excited. I am very excited that the first person that you're going to listen to is my compañera and guest, Cecily Emperio de Lucio, who I'm just so glad to be able to be collaborating with her today. I want to be able to be collaborating with her today. I want to be able to just share what I have been able to learn from her, but for her to be able to share that with you. So welcome, Amor.

Cecily Relucio:

Thanks for having me.

Jose Rico:

You know I want to start real quick just for you to tell your story and, as part of the background right, I've actually had the privilege to knowing your story as a witness both your personal and your professional transformation over the past few years, from you know your childhood story where you grew up in Coast City, all the way to right now creating this incredible organization, mui, and creating that community. So if you can, just by way of introduction, you know, tell us a little bit about your story, where you grew up, you know who your family was and what do you think is important for people to know about you to actually get a sense, for them to know who you are?

Cecily Relucio:

Thank you for the opportunity. So I am the daughter of Perlita and Gerio and Wendo and Sil. They are immigrants from the Philippines. They immigrated in the mid-1960s and the borders were opened up to many people of the Asian diaspora. My father was who attended medical school and um was able to come to the US on a visa to complete a training that actually was part of the program of extracting labor from our motherland was to train our people to live and serve in the diaspora. So my parents immigrated to Chicago. My father came first and then my mother followed a couple years later and my older sister was born in Chicago and then I was born in Chicago and then, when I was two years old, my parents went to a little town in northern Illinois called Bay City, illinois, again part of this sort of workforce program where foreign medical graduates would be placed in various towns and cities across the US.

Cecily Relucio:

I don't know the full story of how we ended up there, so a little bit of context. Full City is a rural, predominantly white town. There were a handful of mexican immigrant families, one other biracial, korean and white family, no black family, which was the early 1970s, and I always just had the sense that we did not belong, the messaging, the way that people would talk to me, the way that people would talk about my family were that we were foreigners, that my parents had funny accents and just everything about how that was so forward of who we were, our culture, our language, our ways of being were alien. I learned much later as an adult that the town where I grew up is on the Sundown Town Registry. Town where I grew up is on the Sundown Town Registry. If you are not familiar with Sundown Towns, they are towns that enacted anti-Black violence and lynching against Black people. So boom, porn listing.

Cecily Relucio:

And so when I learned that much later as an adult, it just made a lot of what I experienced in my and was still carrying and holding in my body and in my psyche um make a whole lot of sense, um about the context in which I um. So a lot of my experience in that community was just about survival, and part of how I learned how to survive was to stay small, to be silenced, to be invisible. For the most part, although I can look back on myself as a young people, young person, and also understand that I I had a really strong will to be and to feel safe, uh, to be and to feel loved, to feel connection, to feel belonging. Um, even in a landscape like the one that I just described, I am so. Not only would the environment in which I raised really confuse and are really alienating, disorienting and sometimes hostile, I also experienced a lot of that in my home life. So I'm a survivor of gender-based violence. I am a survivor of vicarious trauma, growing up witnessing my mother be physically, emotionally, mentally abused by my father and also witnessing that and sometimes intervening in it when my sister is unaccompanied.

Cecily Relucio:

Yeah, I'm just pausing because I'm learning how to practice, not just bypassing the weight of my own experiences. I'm sharing, sharing you, yeah, and to just honor all those younger versions of myself that learned how to survive, and not just to survive, to heal and to be enjoying pleasure, feel embodied and full. A lot of my experience, of my healing journey, my spiritual journey, has been about healing all of those other selves who had to survive Really really challenging circumstances and learn how to transform all of that suffering into purpose, into love, into milk. It's an understanding of the nature of my own healing journey and what I can offer to others as I accompany, you know, as we accompany each other in our healing journeys. Yeah, I'm, even through all that you know, even through all of those forces and God situations that you know, even through all of those forces and situations and circumstances that shaped me.

Cecily Relucio:

Something I can realize now is love has always been present in some form. Right, whether it was, love has always been present in some form, whether it was the love of my mother or my sisters or extended family cousins, the love of a handful of teachers who really did love me, you know white women who extended care, who extended safety and refuge, who could see something in me even when I couldn't see it in myself or those aspects and dimensions of myself weren't being affirmed. And I think that had a lot to do with my decision to become a teacher, to become an educator, because of the loving care that I was able to receive and be the beneficiary and be the beneficiary. Yeah, I think I am 53, just turned 53.

Cecily Relucio:

It's been a beautiful and very complicated and sometimes very isolating and very lonely and scary journey. Very complicated and sometimes very isolating and very lonely and scary journey. But I can reflect back on a lot of that now from the place where I'm at and see myself as always being connected in some way to what our nervous systems are called to do. Our nervous systems are wired for connection, for belonging, for safety, for love, and I can see all of my younger selves and look back at them now with love and compassion and deep, deep gratitude for the ways that they have always been seeking and never stop seeking, but all the things that we need in order to survive and to thrive. That's human being, and I really think that my connection to my own vitality and my own life force has been the constant in terms of what has provided like, what has been the driving force, Seeking meaning and purpose from all of these experiences.

Jose Rico:

Thank you for sharing such personal and painful parts of your history, but also being able to read the resistance and the love that comes with that, and from that you know I resistance and the love that comes with that, and from that you know I. To hear you say that you have shrunk yourself, that you are quiet, that you're demure. It's almost a polar opposite of how I know you as as strong, as loving, as always being a voice for injustice. So you know it's good for us to know that that happens and that that is a transformation. So I really appreciate you sharing where you are and where you are now. I think that's important for us to understand and I think one of the things that I you know.

Jose Rico:

What I want to go a little bit deeper in is that you know my researching of you. This transformation obviously happened in different parts of your life and there were different people or different circumstances. Whether it was your first grade teacher saw you in a classroom, or whether it was a moment in your workplace where you had to stand up for yourself. What could you share with us about any one of those moments and what that transformation said about you that you knew was always there, but at that moment you claimed it. So what are those moments to you as you really reflect right now? What do those moments mean to you that you really lack right now?

Cecily Relucio:

what do those moments mean to you One? You know, when I talk about and I share my story, I think it's really important to talk about survivorhood. I think it's really important for me as a woman, as a woman of color, as a P of color, as a Pinay, as a member of the Filipino diaspora, because what I've found is what in me, talking about that and talking about how that all had shaped me, I realized that it offers others permission to share things that they don't talk about, things that we don't talk about, that we then shame fosters guilt, it fosters the abandonment of our wounded hearts. And so I found that every time I talk about it, what it opens up and what it allows space for in the conversation are other women's stories of the violence they have experienced. And I think I'm pretty sure that I don't know a single woman of color who doesn't have a story of violence that they've experienced, oftentimes in their family of origin, oftentimes that they, you know, perpetrated by a male family member, and also oftentimes in intimate partner situations. You know, so I think, for a lot of folks, young folks who do justice and liberation work, oftentimes they'll have stories about. You know, I got into organizing, like on my campus or as a young person, you know, organizing around issues that were impacting my community.

Cecily Relucio:

And for me, I think my journey and my understanding of justice and healing and liberation really began in my family origin. My mother transitioned to having me claim to the ancestral plane the day after my 24th birthday and I have a younger sister and she was 14 at the time and before my mother, the week when she was about 16 or 17 years old, I was in therapy for the first time, talking with a therapist very matter-of-factly about the violence, the abuse that was present in my childhood home. And the therapist stopped me and she said, she asked me and I'm kind of bowing do you understand that that's not normal or entropy? And I was the first time I had ever heard that or even considered that something else was possible. It was so normalized from what I had experienced. And then the second question, in a line of conversation that I remember her posing, was asking me about my younger sister and whether or not she was being abused. And did I understand that I was an adult and I could intervene? All of that was completely. It was so much dissonance an adult and I couldn't intervene. All of that was completely so much dissonance and so much like it woke me up because I had not recognized that as a 26 or 27 year old that I actually had agency to confront my father and to intervene and to stop full cycle of abuse in the family.

Cecily Relucio:

And so sometime shortly after that conversation the universe is wise in terms of the messages that it gives us my father called me. It was probably 9 o'clock at night and he told me to come to the house it's our home city, I was living in Chicago To come get my sister, because if I didn't he might kill me. And so I did. I scared the shit out of me. I didn't know what I was doing. I just knew that that was what was needed, something at the time. So I made the drive with my partner at the time and we picked her up and we brought her back to the city. Um, and I knew that that would not be enough.

Cecily Relucio:

And so over the course of the next few days I talked to a bunch of people and again the universe is wide my sister, my younger sister's boyfriend at the time.

Cecily Relucio:

His mother was a guardian, a court guardian for known people, and she talked with me through the process, and so I reported him.

Cecily Relucio:

I went to the school, the school that I attended high school, at the school that I'm sure people viewed as the model family you know, all these doctors, children successful by a lot of measures and I went to the people who were running the school, many of whom were my high school teachers, and I told them what was happening, and I told them that they needed to report him to DTF child services.

Cecily Relucio:

Wow, and so I, you know yeah, there's so much more I could say about that time but I think that for me, was this moment where, as an adult, I not only recognized right, the injustice and the violence, but I was able to tap into my agency and I was able to be surrounded by the right people at the right time who could support me through really unfamiliar territory to get our family to a better place. One of my high school teachers agreed to take my student so that she wouldn't have to go back, and so we were really able to just change the trajectory of my sister's life and of our family's life in a very real way, and I think that for me, you know, it's in my, you know, mid, late 20s when I recognized, like I began to fully step into my courage when I was like change and some you know change of being, hence I interact back once in a while.

Jose Rico:

So those and you know change of being would have changed Iraq back in 2009 so those like you, like you were mentioning those, the moments when you decided and you were called upon to take these actions and you had the universe and other people there supporting you. You know, I think oftentimes when we talk about our own awakening or consciousness, we talk about it from an external political perspective and oftentimes we don't see how that relates to our own personal and familial circumstances and, like you mentioned earlier, the need to be able to obviously see the parallels but also learn those lessons. And I think that it's very instructive, right, because you know, oftentimes in our conversations, when we talk about the political world and what's happening at this moment, you know these moments, the last five certain years I always see that you have not just a political understanding of things but a relational understanding. I think that, I think, is really important whenever we try to analyze what's going on, whenever we try to analyze what's going on and I really enjoyed our conversations about what would happen if, because a lot of it is based on your understanding of the relational dynamics of power and violence right, given that, I want to actually move towards that in a broader context right, in terms of what you've learned, have you stepped into, uh, into your power.

Jose Rico:

Uh, you know, if you could share your thoughts about the moments that we're living in right now and how the structural violence and the gaslighting and everything that we're facing as folks, that I mean you know the way I look at this is that I mean, you know the way I look at this is that this colonial project is still hell bent on eradicating us and we're still hell bent on not allowing that to happen. Right, so we're still in conflict. From your perspective, from the work that you do, from the community of people you're in relationship with, how do you see this moment and what is it that you think you and the community you represent are called to do at this moment?

Cecily Relucio:

Yeah, I'm still kind of working through this understanding that's come to me in recent weeks, and it's not a new understanding. I feel like I'm just moving into a different relationship with you. Know, all of these systems of domination, beginning with imperialism, right global conquest, various forms of colonialism, settler colonialism, zionism as a form of settler colonialism, us settler colonialism all the different types, capitalism, racial capitalism, neoliberalism all of these systems that are driven by and rooted in a logic and a practice of domination, violence, extraction, subjugation, are all about the desire to eradicate the indigenous, what is indigenous to us and all of us are indigenous, all of us, even white people, can trace back their indigeneity, their indigenous ways of knowing their relationship to land and life as sacred. All of us can trace that back. But all of these systems of domination have to erase and eradicate and devalue and subjugate what is indigenous and what's our indigenous knowledges and what is the being, in order to continue and in order to get us to buy into it, get people to to continue and in order to get us to buy into it, get people to buy into it. And so I'm really thinking about the way in which that connects to what is happening right now in Gaza in now, in Gaza, in Sudan, in Congo, in Haiti, all of it is about trying to sever us from our ancestry, from our culture, from the land, from each other, from relational ways of being and an understanding of the sacred worth of all life. And so that's, you know, that's what the Zionist project is, and so I'm really thinking about the ways in which Palestine is freeing me by helping me be in a different relationship and not expanded in a deep relationship to my understanding.

Cecily Relucio:

And so, for me, the work of ethnic studies, which is what my organization, uluwi, ethnic Studies Uluwi means to return home and to follow, which is one of my mother tones. Yes, the history, the history of the social movement, the recentering of our first-person narratives, building our critical consciousness around how these systems of domination operate and how we have resisted them for centuries. I think all of that is important, and what we need to be practicing all day, every day, is an indigenously centered way of being in relationship with ourselves, being in relationship with each other, having those relationships in our families, not just out in the world. Right, because that contradiction, that contradiction, that disconnection, you know, we can be in struggles for justice, but if we are still treating each other in extractive, competitive ways that are about separation and binaries, right, we're still not moving in a way that we did.

Cecily Relucio:

What I believe is the antidote and the way forward through all of it is the return to our indigenous and you know that understanding has been informed by a lot of people, it's been informed by you, it's been informed through study and through practice. And you know that's where I want have realized, that's where I want to need and being called to spend my time. You know, I think studies are the pathway for reclaiming and recentering and practicing decolonized, re-indigenizing ways of being in relationship with each other, in relationship with the man and with our own selves. You know, sometimes, you know, I think, it can be some of the hardest work.

Jose Rico:

So you called, you called Uma Wee, your toddler, your toddler that sometimes you're behind and chasing, and for me it's been great seeing a passion project turn into something real and can affect so many people. And I've seen it as you making a call to action and right away you've already. You wanted to create this as a home place for educators. Tell us what is the call to action that you are, that you're making for BIPOC educators and why do we need it? Yeah, yeah.

Cecily Relucio:

So I've been sitting for several months with just a question in my spirit of what is the name of the new organization going to be. And then I was listening to a podcast or a talk, a recorded talk between Sonia Renee Taylor and Adrienne Marie Brown, and they opened the conversation by talking about home and the relationship to home. And then that's when I remembered, right, how important returning home and creating home has been, like, you know, a call and a theme in my life. And so I did a bunch of Googling, because I lost my mother tongue to try to understand different ways to you know, words that have home as meaning, and I came across holy and I loved that it was a verb, that it was about. You know that it's constantly emotional. It's a practice, right of returning home.

Cecily Relucio:

And then I found Dr Lenny Mendoza Strobel's writings on decolonization. She has an exact quote on what it means to return home, and she has an exact quote on what it means to return home. And so returning home is returning, you know, intellectually, emotionally, spiritually, to our ancestors, to our motherlands, to our decolonized and indigenized ways of knowing before we were colonized. It's a return to that state, and even if we cannot fully return home. It's the work of seeking to uncover and to reclaim who we really are, our truest, most highest essence and form, who we would be if we hadn't arrived here on Turtle Island, you know, whether that was by force or by choice. So, and then we, you know, kind of, one of our sayings is that ethnic studies is a home place and the understanding of home place comes from the writing of Val Hooks. It comes from a Black feminist radical tradition. That is about what Black women under you know, chattel slavery in the US. Us and many, many colonized peoples have done, which, again, is what our nervous systems are wired to do, which is create safety, create connection, create wholeness together, even if it's temporary, even if we can be displaced from those home places, even if that making of home place comes at a price.

Cecily Relucio:

Right that we understand that that is our, you know, we have a. It's our right, it's our divine right to have those things and to you know and to see that act of resistance, and you know, an act of resistance and love and joy, even within extremely oppressive conditions. So you know, school, us schooling, is a site and structure of a lot of violence. It's a colonial project. Lots of people have studied this and written about it.

Cecily Relucio:

It was never made for folks that the US Empire wants to subjugate, right, it's an instrument of our subjugation, and so I think that the call for critically conscious, justice-centered educators is to heed that call to return home, a call that I believe that our ancestors keep trying to follow back and to help us to remember and to reclaim our power.

Cecily Relucio:

You know, I think that the call is to resist and to refuse what the us human project wants us to do, which is to police yellow, black and brown bodies to police, to surveil, to contain, uh, to assimilate uh, yellow, black people, um, into their you people, into the place that we were meant to hold in US society, and to infuse all of that, oftentimes in a subversive way, by creating something else entirely, which are spaces of love and collective care and truth-telling and the practice of collective values. You know, I think of ethnic studies as decolonizing studies, solidarity studies and, as you know, an inherently insurgent project, and so it's figuring out who's down to do that and then us swatting up and having each other's back and engaging in study and care and fasting, so that we can sustain these commitments in the face of empire which does not want us to engage in.

Jose Rico:

So that's a big call to action, but I think what you know, what caught my attention is when you refer to the call to action being informed by our ancestors. Right, and one thing I've learned in my practice in order to be aligned and to listen and to hear what they say, you have to be able to be still enough and open enough and have to get your ego out of the way as much as possible. So one of the areas that I do want to go in a little bit is what are those ways and those practices and knowings that you have that allow you to be able to listen to your ancestors, but also for you to manifest the things that you want to manifest in your life? In your life? What are those practices that give you hope and that allow you to make this assertion about what you think is necessary for our liberation?

Cecily Relucio:

I think for me, yeah, it really has evolved a lot over time, you know, and I I think that the constant have been well, I think that I am a reflective person and think that I, at many points in my journey, that I've engaged in some critical self-reflection and I feel that is what has led me to therapy. I've done talk therapy for plus 20 years in general forms, you know. I feel like it has led me to the things that I've read and conversations that I've had with people. It has been my desire to understand, to make new loans and to confront the traditions of my life when I felt out of my mind, felt dissatisfaction, felt no, it's to like really to understand what is that about? What is the sense of satisfaction that I feel? That you know why am I going through this period of depression, that I don't want to medicate and not work with them. So I think for me that has been one of the things and it's led me to, you know, a lot of different practices, my current practice that I've been engaged in last three or so years and I work with a holistic health practitioner who engages a lot of different practices and you know I came upon that we'll get into a lot of different practices that we need, and you know I came upon that and that practice found meaning during one of the most overwhelmingly difficult times in my life. That's why during the pandemic, about a year into it, when my daughter was experiencing multiple mental health crises and hospital elevation, you know that I can't even say that I fully understand. But you look at the conditions of wildlife during that time and one year in the middle of a pandemic and shit was scary and young people were cut off from their friends, from their social circles, from just all. You know anything that resembled their life prior to. You know anything that resembled the life prior to. You know the field war shuts down in the period of isolation.

Cecily Relucio:

It was also a few years into the separation and divorce Her father and I, and it was middle school and early adolescence. I didn't understand it at the time, but the woman that I worked with and continued to work with would tell me you need to work on yourself. There are things that you need to work on yourself. There are things that you need to work on. See learning within yourself and I promise you don't abandon yourself, right, even though the motherly instinct and you know, what we're told is like I'm supposed to pivot my entire life to try to help my child be in crisis. And, saul, she checked in to me. There is a relationship between the healing work that you need to do and the healing work that she needs to do. And so, yes, support her, show up for her, do all of those things and don't neglect yourself and don't bypass the work that you need. And so you know, again, going back to you know celestial beings in the universe showing up for us in ways that we may not even recognize, but we need.

Cecily Relucio:

I do remember logging into the Zoom for the first time and you know tearing up because there was a recognition like I'm supposed to be here. I don't understand why I don't, you know, I can't see all of the reasons why, but I know my spirit knows that this is the support and the help that is going to get us through this crisis and beyond. And so you know, we meet every week and it just so reminders me that there's always work. There's always mirror work, spirit work, there's always. We need to be constantly involved. So even, you know, when we got through the crisis period and was like, oh, maybe I don't have to working with her anymore. And then, you know, my ancestors would tap her on the shoulder and be like, tell her this thing, this message, give her this message. And then it would be like, okay, let me sit my ass back down. And then I get over myself thinking that I don't have to be in practice, right, that I only have to be in practice when I'm in crisis, you know, when the family won't fight you. Uh, and so, yeah, we.

Cecily Relucio:

I think what the work that we have done together is about creating a more open channel between myself and my guides and my angels and my ancestors. It has been about, you know, clearing and releasing things that I've been holding in my energetic body and my emotional body and my physical body. It has been about just learning how to love myself and show up for myself in the same way that I do that for other people, and to recognize my soul and my body and my spiritual body as sacred and worthy of my own attention. And a lot of the practice is just about redirecting me back to pour into my soul and to keep doing my work to feel, to evolve, and I do believe that a lot of that work is what can create the conditions for my organization to take off. You know that toddler um to grow up real fast, you know, and and take off in ways that I had a lot of doubt.

Jose Rico:

You know, and whatnot you know had to really work on my practice and where needs would fade, we need to, like, say yeah and just to, to, to listen and to trust and to not try to intellectually let's all mind things in the way that I past selves, past meetings, would have done, and over-reliant on my intellect, on my productivity, on all of those ways that I've learned to get far, you know definitely to get far, yeah, and I've seen how, like you said, that work on yourself has really manifested in the relationships that you have with others, and particularly in bringing together an incredible group of people to support umui and the work that we I mean these are some of the most incredible folks in the area that I've that show up whenever you call them that uh are willing to put in the work, both intellectual, but also their time and their love and their care, and so I mean I think you could. The evidence that you have, that you're pouring into yourself, has actually showed up in the relationship with others, is there. That is a testament to you. But also in the belief that you can show up for yourself does not mean that you are neglecting other relationships and anything else.

Jose Rico:

The last question I have for you is the last question I have for you is you have been very intentional about sharing this healing journey. May be you know in a similar situation like you, who were either educators or survivors or folks that want to pursue their dreams and start something different. What would you share with them in terms of what they should pay attention to in their spiritual journey to be able to take these, these, these next steps or this upcoming uh phases in their life? What would you share that you think is relevant from your spiritual journey, that you want to share with people who might be wanting to venture there but may not know?

Cecily Relucio:

one that I do believe, that we are all surrounded by divine beings who love us, who see us even when we don't see ourselves. That if we become still enough and suspend a very human you know human-centric ways of being, we can play back to the ways that, even in moments of our deepest, darkest pain and suffering, we're not alone. Two, I think, surrounding ourselves in human form with divine beings and we are all divine beings surrounding ourselves with the love and the care and the support that we need and that we deserve to become self-actualized and to be able to really be in right relationship you know, reciprocal relationship, relationships that aren't extractive, right and aren't rooted in an ethic of domination. To surround ourselves with knowing people who love us and who truly want the best for us, because we can't do this alone. And then three, to just keep doing our work, whatever that work is, and that work is different for everybody, and I see this a lot I.

Cecily Relucio:

I experience this in younger selves, I see it in justice oriented people that I know and love very deeply, and we're not always engaging in our work, and sometimes we engage in quote unquote the work of justice, um, so that we can escape having to examine and heal the parts of ourselves that are most in need.

Cecily Relucio:

Well, our love and our attention and need to be welcomed under the roots of our belonging in order to, in order for us to be fully integrated, and that there's. You know, I had to unlearn a lot of shame and I had to unlearn a Western. You know pathology that made me think that my father's, the way that my father acted out his trauma, was because he was an individual, you know, pathological, broken, rather than looking at the systems that had contributed to how he had learned how to survive. And so, you know, we can create spaces where we not shame ourselves for having shame right, can tend to that shame, can release it, can notice it and release it so that we can do our work, to be whole and and to return home to ourselves that's life all over and we all have it and to understand that that self-mastery in community with others is our pathway to our spiritual evolution.

Jose Rico:

Great. Well, I am so blessed and grateful that I am taking this pathway and evolution with me. So thank you so much for your words of wisdom and I continue to look forward to being the number one volunteer at a new week. Thank you, your history books got it all wrong, so I come to you with a song. In 1810, black and brown fighting together On a day I'll always remember.