breaking our erotic chains

From the very first Juneteenth, the celebration was embodied. People sang, feasted, held each other. They moved in public, with joy, as free people — & those embodied actions were what made the Emancipation Act real. Not the piece of paper, the bodies.

That instinct — to mark freedom with the body — wasn't incidental, it was the whole point. And we still gather that way. The cookouts, the music, the dancing — every year, Black people insist with their bodies that joy is ours to claim.

What slaveholders tried to own was never just the labor — it was the feeling, the capacity for pleasure, for rest, for desire that belonged to no one but the person inside the skin. Every system of anti-Black oppression has understood this, even when it couldn't say so directly: control the body, manage the pleasure, determine what Black life is allowed to feel.

Audre Lorde argued that every oppression must corrupt the sources of power within the oppressed that could fuel change — and the erotic is exactly one of those sources, which is why we've been taught to be ashamed of it — told it's frivolous, secondary, something to earn after the real work is done. The suppression of Black pleasure isn't incidental to white supremacy; it's a feature.

Your capacity for joy doesn't require their permission. Your breath doesn't answer to anyone's legislation. Your pleasure — tended, claimed, practiced — is a form of power they've spent centuries trying to locate & extinguish, and they keep failing, because it lives somewhere they cannot reach.

Join us for a ritual in that tradition — with a twist. On June 20th, we gather to do what our ancestors did: insist, with our bodies, that Black life is not only about surviving what gets done to us. We are here to feel fully, without apology; to deepen joy & root ourselves in erotic sovereignty — as medicine, as inheritance. That insistence is not separate from liberation work — it is liberation work. What makes this ritual different is we will be using breath & self-pleasure as the conduits, to literally & figuratively manifest our erotic sovereignty. Gathering to practice this together, on this particular day, is its own act of resistance.

This ritual is designed for the descendants of those kidnapped Africans transported to North America and whose enslavement legally ended with the Emancipation Act — if that lineage lives in your body, this gathering is for you.

Why a group ritual?

From the very beginning, Juneteenth was never meant to be marked alone. The power of that first celebration wasn't just in the joy — it was in the witnessing, the being held, the feeling of your own freedom reflected back to you in the faces of people who understood exactly what it cost. Celebration in community does something that solitary practice cannot: it transforms private feeling into collective truth.

When we gather to practice erotic sovereignty together, that same principle applies. Your joy becomes more expansive when it's witnessed. Your pleasure becomes more grounded when it's held in a field of others doing the same work. And the resistance embedded in that practice — the defiant insistence that Black life is meant to be felt fully — lands differently when you're not the only one insisting.

What happens in the Ritual?

Rituals do not run strictly in "mundane time", but here is the basic structure:

• Political Grounding—the framework of erotic sovereignty as direct resistance, why they keep coming for the same territories, what reclaiming pleasure does to the body politic

• Spiritual Grounding

• Ancestor Invocation

• Blessing

• Introductions

• Break

• Energy Build through breath, facilitated and then self-directed self-touch

• Focused Energy Beam

• Vision Journey

Cameras may be on for the first five parts of the ritual, and will then be shut off after Introductions.

Investment

The Ache Di:

• Garden Tier: $35

• Meadow Tier: $55

• Savanna Tier: $75