Dear Readers,
When I was in college, I was ferociously devoted to social justice. I was a feminist, an environmentalist—every “ist” you could name—and I lived it to the extreme.
I took only two baths a week to save water. I rode my bike everywhere to avoid fossil fuels. I wore exclusively secondhand clothing to reduce fashion waste. In fact, I owned two outfits total, plus one for yoga. I had a single pair of worn‑out Chinese slippers and, more often than not, simply went barefoot. Once, I showed up at the airport without shoes because I had genuinely forgotten that people were supposed to wear them.
I started our school’s first organic garden. By every external measure, I was a devoted soldier in the revolution.
Then everything changed.
The Awakening I Didn’t Ask For
One summer, I took an internship to study native medicinal plants. Instead, I accidentally met a spiritual teacher. Over those months, I fell in love with the teachings and began a journey of awakening I had neither planned for nor wanted.
For the first time, I experienced inner silence. I saw that my mind was wildly untamed—scattered, reactive, constantly on high alert. I realized I didn’t just want to fight external systems; I wanted to understand the one inside my own head. I wanted to learn how to cultivate inner awareness.
I became a spiritual person, even though I did not want to be one.
In my mind, spiritual people were privileged and self‑absorbed. I hated that image. I wanted to be a high‑impact human. I wanted to change the world, not sit on a cushion contemplating my navel while the planet burned.
But the call to awakening was too strong to ignore.
When I returned to college that fall, my environmental friends were disturbed. They worried, unanimously, that I would forget the cause—that I would abandon the fight and focus instead on “just myself.”
To make matters worse, I feel in love that summer with a man…. who owned a car. One day, I borrowed it and drove to campus instead of biking.
My friends saw me.
They confronted me: I had lost my values. Lost myself. I was being swallowed by the vortex of fake spiritual people who cared more about their own enlightenment than about justice.
I had no language then to explain what was happening inside me. I only knew it felt true. Essential. Non‑negotiable. Albeit embarrassing.
It has taken me decades to understand why.
The Colonization Nobody Talks About
We know the history. Colonization took land. It took resources. It displaced and decimated entire peoples. This much is documented, studied, mourned.
But there is another form of colonization that runs even deeper, and we rarely name it:
The colonization of the mind.
Empires did not only seize territory; they seized something far more intimate. They took people’s relationship to themselves. They severed communities from their languages, ceremonies, cosmologies—from their understanding of who they were and why they were here.
They said:
Your ways are primitive.
Your gods are false.
Your medicines are superstition.
Your relationship to the land is naive.
Your songs, your stories, your visions—they are inferior to progress, to reason, to modernity.
Generation after generation, this message was internalized. The colonization moved from the external world into the interior one. People began to believe it themselves. They began to feel shame for the very things that had once made them whole.
This is the colonization that persists today, even among those of us whose ancestors did the colonizing. Modernity has colonized everyone’s mind. It has told all of us that the rational is superior to the intuitive. That productivity is the measure of a life. That the material world is the only real world. That the sacred is a fantasy for the weak.
We have all, in our own ways, been severed from our indigenous selves. In fact, even today, many of the indigenous ways of ceremony are illegal in many countries.
Why Spirituality Is Not a Luxury
Here is what I could not articulate to my activist friends all those years ago:
You cannot give what you do not have.
If we fight for justice from a place of fragmentation, reactivity, and unexamined wound, we will recreate the very systems we are trying to dismantle. We will burn out. We will turn on each other. We will win battles and lose ourselves.
I have watched this happen in movement after movement. The righteous rage that fuels the fight eventually consumes the fighters. The shadow goes unexamined. The trauma stays unhealed. And we end up reproducing the hierarchies, the cruelty, the dehumanization we swore we would end—just wearing different clothes.
Spirituality is not an escape from justice work. It is the foundation of it.
When we cultivate inner awareness, we begin to see clearly. We see our own conditioning. We see where our activism is rooted in genuine love and where it is fueled by unprocessed pain. We see the colonization that happened in our own minds—the ways we have been taught to distrust ourselves, to override our bodies, to silence our knowing.
And in that seeing, something revolutionary happens: we begin to remember who we actually are.
Not the self shaped by systems designed to make us compliant, productive, consuming, separate. But the self beneath all that. The self that is still connected to the earth, to each other, to something vast and sacred and unbroken.
The Stand That Comes from Remembering
When we wake up to our true nature, we do not become passive. We do not float away on a cloud of spiritual bypassing, indifferent to suffering.
We become more capable of taking a stand.
Because now our stand comes from wholeness, not from fragmentation. From love, not only from rage. From clarity, not only from reaction. We act because it is the natural expression of who we are—not because we are trying to prove our worth through sacrifice.
This is the revolution that colonization fears most: people who remember themselves. People who have reclaimed their minds, their bodies, their connection to the sacred. People who cannot be manipulated by shame or seduced by the promise of belonging to a system that was designed to use them.
The revolution on the outside begins with the revolution on the inside.
Not because the inner work is more important than the outer work, but because they are the same work. A mind that has been colonized will build colonizing structures, no matter how progressive its politics. A mind that has been liberated will build liberating structures, even in the smallest gestures of daily life.
An Invitation
To my fellow activists, I want to say: your inner life matters. Your healing matters. Your spiritual awakening—whatever form it takes—is not a betrayal of the cause. It is one of the deepest services you can offer it.
To my fellow spiritual seekers, I want to say: your awakening is not complete until it moves through you into the world. Enlightenment is not a private achievement. It is a gift that wants to be given away.
We need both. We have always needed both.
The mystics and the activists.
The inner revolution and the outer one.
The remembering of who we are and the building of a world that reflects that remembering.
This is the intersection where I have spent my life. It is not always comfortable. It is rarely understood. But I have come to believe it is the only place where lasting change is born.
The colonizers knew that to truly conquer a people, you had to conquer their minds.
May we know, with equal clarity, that to truly free a people, we must begin by freeing our minds.
In Everything We Trust,
Sylvia
