Hi Reader.

I didn't send you a single email in August or September, partially because I have been busy (I still ammmmm), but that's not the whoooole story. The whole story is that I have spent years trying to build every platform and do every single thing, and every time I spread myself that thin, I end up back at the same instruction my grandmother, Emma Jane Baxley, gave me in a meditation ten days before she transitioned. I'm still learning how to return and return and return to it. I just talked through some of the details of that meditation on my IG today. You can view it HERE.

So this email is me doing what I said I was going to do and being who I said I was going to be. I am a teacher, and so I'm going to teach.

But first of all, it's Hoodoo Heritage Month.

October recognizes those who kept the old ways alive in plain sight. They prayed for the sick on their porches and front rooms, they hung a hand-painted sign on the porch and wrapped their heads in white and held the Bible up high while keeping a root in their pockets, and they never once asked anybody's permission to be holy. They knew they were.
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I come from people like this. On both sides. I have evidence that my own grandmothers and great-grandmothers read dreams like the morning paper, and they knew a visit from an ancestor when they got one.

I have never said this out loud: The dream work, the spirit tools, the altar talk, every worksheet or journal I ever asked you to keep by your bed, in allllll ways, has always been Hoodoo. I just never named it out loud. Maybe I was protecting the work, maybe I was protecting myself (probably both), but I'm grown (allegedly); I'm initiated (with the shrines to prove it), and the work deserves to be called by its real name.

Which is why it feels like Spirit's own timing that I'm moving back to New Orleans this season, right in the middle of Hoodoo Heritage Month, to reclaim the portions of my ancestral inheritance that have been sitting down there waiting on somebody to come back for them. I'm going home to stand closer to the ground my people prayed on and to learn something about myself that I could only find out at the Mississippi River.

And with that... Dream Yourself Free is back.

Some of you remember when Dream Yourself Free was a three-month cohort, and then a six-week intensive, and then I put it down because I did not want to spend the rest of my natural life promoting it (no shade to my younger self; she was tired, though, baby bois and girls). But I never stopped believing that Black people have to learn how to dream ourselves free, and I never stopped doing that work at my own altar and in my own dream archive.

For October, November, and December, I'm bringing it to my Patreon as an exclusive mini cohort.

In October, we'll be talking about how we were taught to stop trusting our dreams, who taught us that, and what it has cost us. In November we're building the practice, which means manifestation, dream incubation, and keeping a dream archive of your own. In December we're making it daily, because your spirit work has to become a breath and not a random thing you remember when you're in crisis.

Every month on the "Saw Things I Imagined" tier (or above), you get a teaching from me, a live group coaching session on Zoom, and a worksheet to do the work between sessions. We go live for our first session Thursday, October 15, then Thursday, November 19, and finally Thursday, December 17, and every session is recorded for replay because life happens.

There is a version of this program that was $1600. And we had a tiiiiiime!
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Right now it's at the $50/month "Saw Things I Imagined" tier (or any tier above). So (insert eye balls looking at you emoji)

[Join Dream Yourself Free by October 15] Patreon.com/ebonyjanice​

And come find me on Instagram.

If you only know me from this inbox, you're missing most of the conversation. Instagram is where I'm teaching out loud (most frequently) right now, where the sermons start as three-minute videos before they ever become a Patreon series or a Substack essay. Come follow me there and talk back in the comments.

[Follow me on Instagram] [Instagram.com/ebonyjanice]

I'll see you in the dream world. And if you're joining us on October 15, I'll see you on Zoom too.

EbonyJanice

*OHHHH -- If you're subscribed here and not Black or don't have intentions of joining the Patreon but would like to support someone else's subscription -- please just reply to this email and I'll share details about how you can donate (tax exempt) to my non Profit: Emmas Legacy Foundation.