Discernment, Reclamation, and Navigating the Apocalypse with Richael Faithful

Jamee Pineda  0:15  
Hi, I'm Jamee Pineda and this is the decolonizing medicine podcast might hear my dog chewing her little bone in the background. Anyways, I am a queer non binary trans person. My ancestors are Tagalog and Chinoy my healing arts practice is located at fruit camp in Baltimore, Maryland. My guest today is Rachelle faithful. They are a black, conjurer, folk healer, shamanic practitioner, and cultural worker rooted in DC and Virginia. Since initiation in 2015, they have supported 1000s of kindred ancestors and spirits in spiritual direction, energy, medicine, divination, as well as magic and death to the ship. Their work has been featured in color lines, the route and other platforms. For Shall we have third mysticism into other work around Healing Justice, strategy, conflict transformation, movement lawyering and community organizing. Just for context, this episode was recorded on June 29 2022, right after the overturning of Roe v Wade.

Good morning Richael. How are you today?

Richael Faithful  1:42  
I'm doing as well as can be expected to. Yeah, how are you maintaining?

Jamee Pineda  1:49  
You know, a lot of shits really rough right now. But I'm finding my places of joy. I'm finding my places of connection and love. Yeah, I mean, I don't know if there are spaces, right now, for me at least where those things don't those things. They have to coexist together. That is just, it's just how it is? Yeah. So my first question for you, which I guess is relevant to what I just spoke about, is how did you come into healing work?

Richael Faithful  2:27  
I always appreciate this question. I think my answers are different every time depending where I am in understanding not only my own healing journey, but also where we are collectively. And I just feel this week we entered into, you know, we're speaking at the end of June. And I feel like we've entered into even a different dimension of this time period. Where I think the stakes are quite high. And that's at least felt for me, and therefore makes me even more committed and invested. And also appreciative that this is the way I've moving and the people around me have been moving. So I think what a way of answering that question is, like, all of us are many of us, I entered into healing work, in part to find myself. And I think also like a lot of people and happened in a way that wasn't very linear, right? There are bits and pieces of my life that I remembered as being pivotal because I was following a question or inquiry. And I think that's still true for me, if I'm following an inquiry for a certain period of time, it leads me to these different places. And the challenge has been brave enough to keep saying yes to that inquiry where it brings you. So I remember, even as a disillusion teenager in a space, I grew up in Northern Virginia, in a particular part of Northern Virginia, that was pretty white, really fluent, really evangelical. And also, yeah, just and pretty buttoned up in a lot of ways. And that was not my family, that was not me. And so a lot of finding myself and healing was even trying to validate where I existed in this particular part of the world. And this is, you know, pre internet, really. So a lot of finding myself was also just like, actively trying to connect to people that at least identity levels we may not have a lot in common with but we were the outsiders of the community. I was doing my best to read books and stories to come into the city as often as I could, just to locate myself, and I made that connection to politics earlier on. So I was doing activism, even high school. It wasn't until later that we really got grounded in spirituality for me. I knew what I was not I was not an evangelical Christian. And I felt connected to some of the ways in which my mom experience spirituality, which is more of a connection to nature, and understanding universe or God, or whatever connects us as being very amorphous, but intelligent, and complex, but inherently loving. All things that were not at least demonstrated to me through the evangelical Christian community I lived in. So through college, I was interested in more contemplative practice and did some of that on my own. That deepened when I left college. For me, that trajectory then brought me back into DC, where I found a people of color Sangha, which helps me really ground in some really important teaching through a mindfulness and some around the Dharma. But mostly, that allowed me a space to be in that meditative practice. And the story goes from there where I found energy work in Reiki, I had an affinity for that. And that expanded my worldview and my sense of like, what healing that was even possible could be. And that brought me home over a series of years to the tradition I'm most connected to now, which is conjure, right, the southern US based practice of enslaved Africans, part of the African diasporic set of spiritual traditions. And that was like, almost like a whole decade journey that I just described to you and trying to locate and find myself. So my healing work continues very much on a spiritual level, but I'm also spending a lot of time these stages on my own emotional healing, continuing to do different levels of my trauma work. Understanding why I still like, the ways in which I react to things are things that that really activate me deeper into somatic practices and

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