Intuition: The Healing Frequency of the Present
Artwork by Robert Pruitt
Context
In Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval, Saidiya Hartman explores the degradation of Black women’s narratives and experiences throughout history. Her reconstructive efforts, generated through historical analysis and intuitive composition, resurrect realities that have the ability to unravel predominantly white and masculine frameworks for liberation. In conversation with Arthur Jafa, Hartman describes her understanding of overlooked intuitive social movements. These moments are perfect alignments in collective consciousness that create an opportunity for individuals to produce similar responses to larger truths and social conditions. While they are not strategized, these intuitive movements cultivate conditions for social change. These trends of collective cooperation are highlighted by Hartman as being especially prominent amongst Black femmes and unrecognized by movement building coalitions and institutions of knowledge production.
During the Weeksville Heritage Center’s Sensing History event, Black archivists engaged in discourse around the nature of the intuitive Black archive. The intuitive Black archive lays the groundwork for understanding the role Black matriarchs play in the conservation of Black culture through generations. Examples of material artifacts sustained in Black households included various forms of furniture, photographs, traditions and oral histories.
Intuition: The Healing Frequency of the Present
The Black experience in the United States is extremely nuanced. Black people are subjected to notions of separation that extend far beyond standard studies of psychological abandonment. Academic discourse around communal healing relies heavily on understanding the root cause of Black trauma and suffering for the creation of modalities that support in Black healing. As a result of the heightened visibility of Black oppression through police brutality videos, political statements and twenty-twenty’s other clarifying offerings, the conversation around Black healing has become mainstream. Still, the discourse remains stagnant and dependent upon a collective return to the inception of inequity. Reparations hearings require elaborate explanations of the atrocious acts committed by white Americans throughout history, as though these same transgressions are not present today. The true blessing of this historical moment is that it has cultivated a resurgence in holistic health and spirituality. Integrative approaches to Black healing based in cultural and spiritual understandings of oneness. Black people are turning away from Maslow’s outdated model of fulfillment and exploring and innovating theories of cooperative realization.
As an energy worker, I have had the opportunity to syncretize energetic approaches to healing with Black archival concepts of time, space and nature. Conversations about the role of Black matriarchs in preserving culture bleed into my understanding of the human biofield as a record of intergenerational memories. Biofield Tuning, a modality created by Eileen McKusick, uses tuning forks to tune the vibrations created by emotions harbored in the human body. In order to utilize this modality, one must possess a basic understanding of the human energy body. In a presentation describing her theory of the structure of our energy bodies, she identifies the left side of the body as the area of the field that carries the most ancestral information. Energetically, the left side of the body is associated with feminine energy and the right is associated with masculine energy. Some ancestral information is also present in the right or masculine side of the body but is minimal. The genetic construction of infants is conducted in the womb and ancestral programming is encoded in our being throughout this process. Socialization is a responsibility denoted to femmes in society through early adulthood in many families. Communal healing is a realm that is traditionally led by femmes. Somehow, the conversation about large scale solutions to centuries of state sanctioned genocide has not centered the Black femme experience or methods of healing.
Our intuitive state is simultaneously our most natural and powerful state of being. Every being has access to it’s omniscient power but none quite like the Black femme, who has endured centuries of suffering and had to reconnect painfully in every lifetime. Sexual assault, brutality, subjugation and disrespect are everyday experiences for Black femmes presently. They do not have to think hard to cultivate a deep understanding of their ancestors' suffering. This is a point made clear by Saidiya Hartman when questioned about the accuracy of her work by Arthur Jafa. Across so many disciplines it’s suggested that we abandon aspirational notions of a cure all remedy for Black trauma and suffering. That we instead bring our awareness to the present moment and our current needs. Healing is omnipresently available to us through reconnection with our intuition; a practice cultivated, sustained and perfected by the Black matriarch.