A Black Woman’s Spiritual Awakening Hits Different

The Return to the Power We Were Taught to Fear

The day I was born a black girl, I was taught subservience. That my source of peace, well-being, forgiveness, and grace exists outside of me. That I have to have ask for permission to exist in my life-giving abilities. That I have something to prove, and therefore suffering and striving is required in this life.

Before my mind comprehended it, my body rejected it…

Many women find spirituality and embrace the divine feminine with ease, but for Black women, our awakening is layered with resistance. Not from outside forces alone, but from within, mainly because we were conditioned to believe that loving ourselves, fully and unapologetically, was dangerous.

In this way, many Black women are conditioned to be everything but free-thinkers and free-spirits. We are often the appointed caretakers, the strong ones, the self-sacrificing nurturers. Our softness, hardened away, our divinity externalized, our intuition silenced. This is why our journey is different and more complex in ways we are still unpacking. It’s not just about healing our feminine energy. We are reclaiming our foundations.

This must be a holistic process, where there is a realization that our power is not outside of us. God is not separate. Divinity is not a distant entity judging us, it is us.

This is why you might feel resistance to calling yourself a goddess. Or, feel discomfort when you see another black woman truly embodying her own. It’s complexities are deeper than you may admit. But, you know deep down there’s something there for you to look at.

Why it might be hard for you to call yourself, Goddess

I remember speaking to a friend about my book titled: A Goddess Complex, years before it’s release, and I could hear and see the layers of discomfort come over her as I disclosed the title. She wasn’t ready to receive this yet, and I understood why.

It’s arrogant, it’s ego, it’s selfish.

Yes, and it’s your redemption.

A black woman’s ego is not baneful when rooted in love for herself, it is her divinity.

To love ourselves, exactly as we are, is the highest act of goddess alchemy. It is how we rewrite the codes, how we reshape the feminine energy of this world. Our bodies have birthed, our egos have set trends, our essence has built entire industries, yet we are the last to be credited as divine.

And meditation is great, but Black women need more than that in our spiritual practice for awakening. All the modalities are fun to explore, but we need more than crystals, astrology, and binaural beats.

We need the alchemy.

Because our awakening isn’t a one-time event…it’s ongoing, layered, and deeply personal. There is so much to unpack, shed, and integrate. And if we don’t have the right tools of awareness, the process can leave us frightened, discouraged, disturbed, and distracted.

This is the root of why I write. To get raw, to get real, and most of all to help us get comfortable with saying, I AM GODDESS.

A goddess could force, fight, and martyr herself for a cause, but her most radical power?

Loving, centering herself, her body, and her full form.

Fearlessly, creating herself over and over, generation after generation, darker, thicker, bolder, brighter, undeniably divine.

This is why our awakening is different. We are not just remembering who we are, we are undoing the shame, the conditioning, the centuries of being told we were not enough. And every time we choose ourselves, our beauty, our peace, our joy, our security, our softness, our sensuality, our intuition, we are affirming that we are, in fact, free.

The goddess awakening is a return to what has always been within us. It is the moment we stop seeking and start remembering. It is the knowing that we are not just dark-skinned bodies moving through this world; we are cosmic, infinite, and divine.

What caused you to question what you were taught?

When did you first feel your shift in awareness or your own power rising?

For me, it begin with my body crying out with menstrual problems, fertility issues, weight fluctuations. Noticing the sensations, the aches, pain, the discomfort, and the many ways I chose to conform rather than express and explore.

The Indoctrination Begins Early

From the moment we enter this world, many of us are born into heavy religious programming that places us in a box of servitude, submission, and limitation. We are told who to worship, how to behave, what to fear. Our natural gifts, our quirks, our intuition, our connection to the unseen, our ability to divine, we are scared away from. They warn us that it’s dangerous and demonic. We are handed one book, one narrative, one path, one perspective, one belief. To question it is to risk shame, ridicule, and condemnation to hell.

The traditions and spiritual systems of our ancestors were labeled evil, primitive, or outright dangerous. The wisdom passed down from the women before us was stripped away, replaced with ideologies that made us forget our own power. Our intuition, our ability to heal, our natural connection to the divine; all of it was severed and replaced with fear.

Respectability was placed on a pedestal.

Be good.

Be presentable.

Don’t glitter too much.

Don’t be too loud, too wild, too sensual, too bold, too free.

Our mothers and grandmothers taught us this as survival tactics, not because they didn’t want us to be powerful, but because they feared the price of standing too boldly in our actuality. The goal was to be palatable enough to exist without too much resistance, to blend in just enough to be safe. This pain and constraint goes back many generations. Living deep in our beliefs. It feeds off our lowest thoughts, insecurities, fears, and worries as black women.

But we aren’t just black, we are Goddesses.

We existed way before the notion of a race called: black was a thing. That part of us is beckoning deeper exploration and acknowledgement. But, in order for us to see her, recognize her, and deliver her from “evil”, we have the work of off-loading the guilt and shame and removing the red tape.

This is so important in your spiritual journey, because each of those fear and demonizaiton layers, lock you into different levels of resistance. Resistance to your internal knowing.

We often deal with more levels of deep resistance and over-efforting as black women.

Resistance is the antithesis of your divine feminine flow. It creates internal conflict. It creates distance from ease aka disease. It blocks you off from your inherent divinity. And, your divinity is your creativity, your magnetism, your magic, your wealth, your wellbeing, your peace, your joy, your sacredness, your fortune…your goddess self!

When I started my journey into mythology, spirituality, and the ancient arts I was immediately aware of how most of the popularized visual representation of gods and goddesses are constantly canonicalized as Greek and Roman (european figures). There it goes again, I thought.

I was confronted with another unique experience as a black woman in her awakening… another layer to weed through.

I’ve Never Seen A Hero Like Me in A Sci-Fi

For centuries, we’ve been given a limited image of divinity. And, for us it’s always one that does not reflect our black skin, hair, and likeness. From childhood, we were taught to worship a god that looks nothing like us, angels with porcelain skin, saints with European features. The only women presented as divine, mystical, or godly were always from Greek and Roman mythology, as if ancient spirituality didn’t exist before them. But it did. And it began with us.

That which is futuristic is also archaic, reminiscent of tribal, ancient, and African relics.

Before Athena, there was Auset (Isis). Before Aphrodite, there was Hathor. Before Hecate, there was Sekhmet. The nubian woman was first divine mother, the goddess, the vessel of sacred wisdom in the oldest civilizations known to man. But we were never meant to know that.

This is why race and skin color do matter in spirituality.

Not because our divinity has a race or limitations, but because representation has subconscious power. The ability to see oneself in the divine is the key to unlocking it within. And, your Matriarchal Ancestors are the first and most important layer to your inner goddess awakening.

Demonization of Our Ancestral Wisdom

All women are united in a shared feeling of disempowerment because of the patriarchy in religion. But, I’ve noticed that uniquely black women are disconnected from our spirituality because African spiritual systems and indigenous knowledge were demonized and erased, forcing us to disconnect from our innate power. We were directed into subservient archetypes by force. And, as we stayed evolving and persevering in our divine feminine aspects of the mystic, the lover, the ruler, the healer, the warrior, or the high priestess; we also see the wounds in our ancestral line of being labeled witches, crazy, whores, jezebels, hussies, bitches, heifers, and sluts as a result.

But now, we get to take our power back and remember. We get to awaken.

When something shifts around us or inside of us, we get this golden opportunity to see beyond the illusion.

When you get sick and tired of being sick and tired. You realize we were never meant to be saved. You get to break cycles of self-sacrifice.

We stop placing our value in how much we can give and begin asking, What do I truly desire? We reclaim our sensuality, indulge in pleasure, and explore spiritual freedom. We embrace our full expression, no longer shrinking ourselves to fit into a world that was never built for us.

Awakening is not a one-time event.

Awakening isn’t just a moment of clarity; it’s an ongoing process of peeling back the layers of deception, misinformation, fear, and trauma that have kept us beside ourselves, literally disconnected from the body’s intelligence. Different experiences will expose this in many areas of your life over time.

Cognitive dissonance is what happens when we start to remember. The body knows. It holds the wisdom, the truth, the divine codes. But when we are conditioned to ignore her, taught to fear her, we suppress our intuition. We ignore our intuition and disconnect from what feels true. We become fragmented and split from our inner goddess.

The real awakening is returning to the whole of you.

Awareness.

Mind, body, and soul in harmony.

The divine truth of your being is not something you have need to seek outside of yourself. It is already here, waiting for you to listen, to trust, to become.

This is why we awaken everyday, more and more the goddess within. Because she has never been lost. She was only buried under beliefs and burdens that were never served her well to carry.

Goddess-ing (as I call it) is a lifestyle and a life’s work.

It’s a process that unfolds over time and begins with asking questions and acknowledging what our body feels when we don’t listen to her nudges.

When we call back to our ancient wisdom, explore our spirituality, we are not the ones borrowing or appropriating another culture, we are revisiting our evolution. We are seeing how our divine feminine energy, regenerated, recreated herself time and time again. Rising out of destruction, through alchemy. We are seeing ourselves in ways that religion, race, culture would never allowed us to. And in doing so, we are activating something deeper. This is something that was never truly lost, just hidden and modified.

Our ancestral knowledge was not forgotten, it’s been hidden in plain sight. The spiritual systems of our foremothers although demonized, were rewritten as something dark, something evil. But, they played in our face turning African deities into saints.

Hoodoo, Ifa, Vodou, Kemetic wisdom were ways of life, systems of balance, healing, and deep connection to nature, the divine feminine. But we were told they were wicked, that to embrace them was to invite destruction. And so, generation after generation, we severed our ties to our own magic.

A Goddess Complex is Remembrance

Remembrance is a return to oneness, wholeness.

The whole of you is one with Source.

Your body is your compass, your creative vessel, your divine instrument. But when you’ve been conditioned to override its signals, and when you push past exhaustion, numb discomfort, suppress desires, and prioritize external validation over internal alignment, you become split from yourself.

This is why you feel like you’re always chasing something. Why rest feels unproductive. Why softness feels weak. Because your body, the part of you that knows how to flow, create, and attract, has been silenced under layers of conditioning.

The realignment isn’t about “being more feminine and less masculine.” It’s about becoming whole again. Celebrating the dance of all your body’s wisdom, trusting its rhythm, and remembering that your true essence and power has never been in how much you can do, but in how deeply you can be.

Our awakening, the Black Women’s journey in spirituality is different.

It’s alchemy.

It’s self-actualization.

It’s deification.

Join me for a safe space in the chat to discuss more.

Know that you are seen, you are loved, you are appreciated.

Thank you for being here.

A Goddess Complex by Isa Orr is FREE on Kindle Unlimited.

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