I originally published this on Substack, as a part of the Soulwork Newsletter. I have since made the decision to withdraw from that space because of AI data scraping and other nefariousness.

Soulwork is the name I have given to the spiritual, intellectual, and experiential framework I developed while trying to survive my life.

Soulwork was born from burnout and the betrayal of institutions I had given myself to. Institutions that took what they needed from me and handed back something smaller and more diminished in return. Soulwork was born from the moment I quit my job without a plan, scared and certain simultaneously, knowing only that I could not keep surviving inside systems that asked me to betray myself daily.

I didn’t know then that I was walking in someone else’s words. But I was.

Dr. Katie Geneva Cannon, founding mother of womanist theology and one of the most important Black women intellectuals of the 20th century, named the mandate long before I needed it. Her call to “do the work your soul must have”, was a theological and ethical imperative to refuse to let oppression dictate the terms of your becoming.

That refusal is at the root of Soulwork.

Soulwork is how I keep returning to that call. It is the framework I built out of theory and testimony, and the intellectual tradition of Black women who have always made a way out of no way.

Soulwork did not come from nowhere. It has mothers.

It comes from Audre Lorde, who insisted that the erotic is a source of power and self-authorization, rather than a horny distraction from serious work. Who taught us that poetry is not a luxury. Who showed us, in her own biomythography, that a Black woman’s life is a legitimate site of world-making knowledge.

It comes from Patricia Hill Collins, who named the matrix of domination: the argument that race, class, gender, and sexuality do not operate as separate systems of oppression but as interlocking ones, producing a structure that Black women occupy at multiple pressure points simultaneously. Collins argued that Black women’s location within this matrix gives us a view of how power actually works that no single-axis analysis can produce, and that centering that knowledge is a methodological commitment to getting closer to the truth about all of our lives.

It comes from the Combahee River Collective, who wrote in 1977 that if Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free, because Black women’s freedom requires the dismantling of every interlocking system of oppression simultaneously.

It comes from Katie Geneva Cannon, who argued that Black women’s moral wisdom is not a lesser ethics (the way our erasure and invizibilization has lead the masses to believe) but a more complete one. Cannon argues that surviving conditions of chronic suffering and forced endurance with integrity intact is itself a form of moral theory.

Soulwork stands in this lineage. It extends it. And it insists, as all of these thinkers insist in their own registers, that the place the world has treated as a site of maximum extraction is also, precisely because of what it has survived, a site of maximum knowledge. Soulwork reorients the question of who knows, from where, and toward what end.

Soulwork is organized around five pillars:

We distinguish between labor (energy expended), work (labor organized for capital), and vocation. Vocation is labor that makes us more free; it is oriented toward human flourishing rather than profit. We ask: Are you doing the work your soul must have? Or are you just doing some shit?

Wisdom travels in recipes, proverbs, and voice notes as much as in books. Soulwork democratizes authorship, centering community elders as co-theorists. Wisdom asks us to know and name who we are in relation to those who have come before us, those who surround us, and those who come after. Wisdom is equal parts decolonized scholarship, lived experience, and self definition. We remember, and in remembering, we decolonize knowledge.

Knowledge is co-produced and sustained through collective bonds. In Soulwork, we are validated through relational accountability. Community refers to the strategies and behaviors that maintain and enhance our collective bonds. We don’t heal alone, and we don’t work alone.

Advocacy grounds Soulwork in political struggle and manifests in naming, resisting, and transforming oppressive labor conditions. This is the site where Soulwork becomes praxis.

Self-care is not a consumer category or a spa day. It is the womanist imperative to tend to the whole self. Self-care encapsulates the strategies, technologies, and thought processes necessary to maintain as much emotional, physical, spiritual, and financial wellness as ones body will allow. Ritual, celebration, and joy are ways of knowing who we are beneath what the regime has made of us.

This framework is for those who have given everything to institutions that gave back less than they took. For those who are brilliant and exhausted simultaneously. For those who know that the work they are doing is not the work they were made for.

What Soulwork offers is a framework rigorous enough to name what is happening and grounded enough to sustain the work of transformation. It offers a lineage, a reminder that you are not the first person to have tried to survive with your soul intact, and that the people who came before you left maps.

Soulwork does not promise ease. The extraction is structural, not a personal failure. It is made by Black women and people of marginalized genders, for us first. Like womanism, it is not exclusive, but it carries two conditions for those who enter:that you cite the source, and that you acknowledge what that source is.

The knowledge here was produced in a social location the world has treated as a site of maximum extraction. To use it without naming that is to participate in the very regime Soulwork is working to dismantle.

Do the work your soul must have.

That is the whole of it.