Lakshmi Quotes

Do more than:Stop self-destructing. Save each other. Not have a nervous breakdown or six by twenty five. Decolonize our minds, our hair, our hearts. Transform into the phoenixes we were all meant to be.

I find, that, in general, alliances based on friendship are the only things that last. Not alliances based on words and letters.

When you find yourself in one of those mystical/devotional frames of mind or in am emergency and you feel you want to pray, then pray. Don’t ever be ashamed to pray or feel prevented by thinking yourself unworthy in any way. Fact is whatever terrible thing you may have done, praying will always turn your energy around for the better. Pray to whomever, whatever, and whenever you choose. Pray to the mountain, pray to the ancestors, pray to the Earth, pray to the Tao (but it won’t listen!), pray to the Great Mother, pray to Jehovah, Allah, Buddha, Jesus, Lakshmi, Siva, pray to the Great Spirit, it makes no difference. Praying is merely a device for realigning the mind, energy, and passion of your local self with the mind, energy and passion of your universal self. When you pray, you are praying to the god or goddess within you. This has an effect on your energy field, which in turn translates into a positive charge that makes something good happen.

Misunderstanding is one of the worst of ill feelings which can spoil many lives.

It [i.e. disability justice] means we are not left behind; we are beloved, kindred, needed.

Life is but a play of chance in the game of choice.

I said I loved her. That was when all the problems started

I was told that Ganesha sat between Lakshmi and Saraswati. My quest to attain the blessings of both goddesses explains my physique.

We can't be responsible for other people's reactions to us, Lakshmi," she said. "We can only make sure our intentions are good.

Disabled people caring for each other can be a place of deep healing,” says Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha in Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice.

A "matriarchal world" does not mean matrilineal or that one queen shall rule the world. It simply means "a world in which a Mother's Heart leads all social institutions, corporations, and governments." All humans-men, women, or transgender-can embody a mother's heart if they so choose. We are destined for extinction as a human race unless a mother's heart assumes leadership of the world.

Lakshmi massages Vishnu’s feet. Is this male domination? Kali stands on Shiva’s chest. Is this female domination? Shiva is half a woman. Is this gender equality? Why then is Shakti never half a man?

Inclusion without power or leadership is tokenism.

A Disability Justice framework understands that all bodies are unique and essential, that all bodies have strengths and needs that must be met.

Is understanding that disabled people have a full-time job managing their disabilities and the medical-industrial complex and the world—so regular expectations about work, energy, and life can go right out the window.

Simply being born female in our society is to grow up being told your worth as a person is tied to how slim and attractive you are. Even for those of us lucky enough to have evolved parents, the message is still driven home by the world at large.

I realize how much I have wanted this and not gotten it [good love], realize how much it is branded in my heart that, to be happy, alone, and childless is a fucking gift that most women get brainwashed into relinquishing.

To me, one quality of disability justice culture is that it is simultaneously beautiful and practical. Poetry and dance are as valuable as a blog post about access hacks - because they're equally important and interdependent.

Women have been looking for a cape and have been handed an apron for centuries. But here was a man who wanted to help women swing their apron around, let it flutter down their backs and watch them soar through the clear blue skies

Janaka gave his daughters to the sons of Dashratha, saying, ‘I give you Lakshmi, wealth, who will bring you pleasure and prosperity. Grant me Saraswati, wisdom. Let me learn the joy of letting go.’ This ritual came to be known as kanya-daan,

In the morning stillness, when the world is just waking up and your conscious mind hasn't fully taken over, you may feel a connection or passageway to another world, and a feeling that something is about to happen in yours. It's like a quiet storm is coming. You can feel the distant rumble of thunder on the horizon, yet you have no idea of the deluge your life is about to experience.

We're sistas. We treat each other like sistas. That's the blessin'. That's the problem. We come together cause we're both bein' fucked over by the same people. We get close. And then we fall in love with each other cause us third world diva gals are beautiful and blessed like none other.

we eat for our stomachs, but we hunger with our hearts.

The thing I always wanted to say is that surviving abuse sucks. But it's also a choose-your-own-adventure story.

Nonetheless, with tears coming to her eyes she was also recalling every time that she had been cruelly teased and bullied for no reason that she could relate to. None of it had ever been physical, yet somehow the names she had been called, and the remarks made about her family, had scarred Lakshmi far deeper and more perpetually then any hand could have inflicted.

After meticulously analyzing videos of 185 venture capital presentations — looking at both verbal and nonverbal behavior — Lakshmi ended up with results that surprised her: the strongest predictor of who got the money was not the person’s credentials or the content of the pitch. The strongest predictors of who got the money were these traits: confidence, comfort level, and passionate enthusiasm.

It's dark because you're trying too hard," said Susila. "Dark because you want it to be light. Remember what you used to tell me when I was a little girl. 'Lightly, child, lightly. You've got to learn to do everything lightly. Think lightly, act lightly, feel lightly. Yes, feel lightly, even though you're feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.' I was so preposterously serious in those days, such a humorless little prig. Lightly, lightly—it was the best advice ever given me. Well, now I'm going to say the same thing to you, Lakshmi . . . Lightly, my darling, lightly. Even when it comes to dying. Nothing ponderous, or portentous, or emphatic. No rhetoric, no tremolos, no self-conscious persona putting on its celebrated imitation of Christ or Goethe or Little Nell. And, of course, no theology, no metaphysics. Just the fact of dying and the fact of the Clear Light. So throw away all your baggage and go forward. There are quicksands all about you, sucking at your feet, trying to suck you down into fear and self-pity and despair. That's why you must walk so lightly. Lightly, my darling. On tiptoes; and no luggage, not even a sponge bag. Completely unencumbered.

Brynne Tvarika Lakshmi Balamuralikrishna Rao was a lot of things. She was an amazing cook, and a fierce wrestler. She had an awful temper and once tried to crack a cinder block just by barreling into it headfirst. Granted, she got knocked out for an hour, but the cinder block definitely had a line through it, so that was pretty much a win. Brynne was even fairly decent at playing the harp, though she hated admitting that her uncles, Gunky and Funky, had signed her up for lessons on that instrument. But if there was one thing she was known for, it was never giving up. She absolutely, flat-out refused.

And so I was left with a mantra, a sort of haiku version of our relationship: I don’t regret one day I spent with him, nor did I leave a moment too soon.

Things have a way of turning up when they want to be found, though they may not always be the things you actually want to find.

Like many immigrants, I had always kept my Eastern and Western lives compartmentalized.

Cooking was something women did to nourish and nurture their families, whereas for men it was largely something they did professionally to gain money and status.

Brynne Tvarika Lakshmi Balamuralikrishna Rao had always been strong. Like, so strong that even her shadow bristled with muscles and other shadows would wither away in its presence.

Diwali is about setting goals, not accumulating gold. As Lakshmi comes from Lakshya, meaning Goal.

Honest wealth (Devi Lakshmi) can’t come and stay in a home where someone is infected with the Asurrah of lust.

Mainstream ideas of “healing” deeply believe in ableist ideas that you’re either sick or well, fixed or broken, and that nobody would want to be in a disabled or sick or mad bodymind. Unsurprisingly and unfortunately, these ableist ideas often carry over into healing spaces that call themselves “alternative” or “liberatory.” The healing may be acupuncture and herbs, not pills and surgery, but assumptions in both places abound that disabled and sick folks are sad people longing to be “normal,” that cure is always the goal, and that disabled people are objects who have no knowledge of our bodies. And deep in both the medical-industrial complex and “alternative” forms of healing that have not confronted their ableism is the idea that disabled people can’t be healers.

Sometimes surviving abuse isn't terrible. Sometimes, when you leave your whole life behind, it feels blissfully free. Stepping away from everything you've known. The bliss of your very first door that shuts all the way. Wind between your legs. Stopping everything that happened for seven generations. Free. Free. Free.

Durga is the strength and protective power in nature, Lakshmi is its beauty. As Kali is the darkness of night and the great dissolve into nirvana, Lakshmi is the brightness of day and the expansiveness of teeming life. She can be found in rich soil and flowing waters, in streams and lakes that teem with fish. She is one of those goddesses whose signature energy is most accessible through the senses. You can detect her in the fragrance of flowers or of healthy soil. You can see her in the leafed-out trees of June and hear her voice in morning birdsong. If Durga is military band music and Kali heavy metal, Lakshmi is Mozart. She’s chocolate mousse, satiny sheets, the soft feeling of water slipping through your fingers. Lakshmi is growth, renewal, sweetness.

People’s fear of accessing care didn’t come out of nowhere. It came out of generations and centuries where needed care meant being locked up, losing your human and civil rights, and being subject to abuse.

Too often self-care in our organizational cultures gets translated to our individual responsibility to leave work early, go home - alone - and go take a bath, go to the gym, eat some food and go to sleep. So we do all of that 'self-care' to return to organizational cultures where we reproduce the systems we are trying to break.

Access is complex. It is more than just having a ramp or getting disabled folks/crips into the meeting. Access is a constant process that doesn’t stop. It is hard and even when you have help, it can be impossible to figure out alone.

Memory can move very swiftly. Words do not possess the same swiftness.

Every woman has a record of her body—a closet full of jeans and bras of various sizes, albums full of photographs revealing periods of weight gain and loss.

I could worry about his health but somehow not about my own. We throw ourselves away a little each day.

Commitment is easy before a relationship requires compromise and obligation.

How anguished must be the ocean, to sigh in waves

Everything that smells sweet, doesn't taste sweet!!

Ethical use of anything sets everything right, and also makes space for more.

Many of us who are disabled are not particularly likable or popular in general or amid the abled. Ableism means that we—with our panic attacks, our trauma, our triggers, our nagging need for fat seating or wheelchair access, our crankiness at inaccessibility, again, our staying home—are seen as pains in the ass, not particularly cool or sexy or interesting. Ableism, again, insists on either the supercrip (able to keep up with able-bodied club spaces, meetings, and jobs with little or no access needs) or the pathetic cripple. Ableism and poverty and racism mean that many of us are indeed in bad moods. Psychic difference and neurodivergence also mean that we may be blunt, depressed, or “hard to deal with” by the tenants of an ableist world.

Diwali (Lakshmi Pujan/Amavasya) is the darkest night of the year. And our ancestors have taught us to overcome darkness with light. When the moon is not shining, neither the sun, sky is dark; India glitters. Proud of being part of such a wise and one of the finest tradition. Diwali is practicing "तमसोमा जोतिर्गमय" . . . Happy Diwali to all. May der b light in your life. . .

It’s not about self-care—it’s about collective care. Collective care means shifting our organizations to be ones where people feel fine if they get sick, cry, have needs, start late because the bus broke down, move slower, ones where there’s food at meetings, people work from home—and these aren’t things we apologize for. It is the way we do the work, which centers disabled-femme-of-color ways of being in the world, where many of us have often worked from our sickbeds, our kid beds, or our too-crazy-to-go-out-today beds. Where we actually care for each other and don’t leave each other behind. Which is what we started with, right?

Perhaps I didn’t voice my unhappiness soon enough; rather, I spent more time feeling like a disappointment and scrambling to patch our cracks than I did considering whether he required an unreasonable level of tending.

Understanding that it’s a sacred task to not shame each other for being in bed in a world where completing the Ironman or going to Zumba is shoved down everyone’s throats with no understanding of how “healthy” can hurt.

I always thought that what Rajima did with those cast-off peels was a metaphor for how she dealt with her arranged marriage. She transformed those peels, with palm sugar for sweetness and tamarind for tang, into something precious.

Disability Justice allowed me to understand that me writing from my sickbed wasn't me being week or uncool or not a real writer but a time-honoured crip creative practice. And that understanding allowed me to finally write from a disabled space, for and about sick and disabled people, including myself, without feeling like I was writing about boring, private things that no one would understand.

Recently, Stacey Milbern brought up the concept of “crip doulas”—other disabled people who help bring you into disability community or into a different kind of disability than you may have experienced before. The more seasoned disabled person who comes and sits with your new crip self and lets you know the hacks you might need, holds space for your feelings, and shares the community’s stories. She mentioned that it’s telling that there’s not even a word for this in mainstream English. We wondered together: How would it change people’s experiences of disability and their fear of becoming disabled if this were a word, and a way of being? What if this was a rite of passage, a form of emotional labor folks knew of—this space of helping people transition? I have done this with hundreds of people. What if this is something we could all do for each other? How would our movements change? Our lives? Our beliefs about what we can do?

If white healers slap “healing justice” on their work but are still using the healing traditions of some folks’ cultures that aren’t their own, are primarily working and treating white middle-class and upper-class people, are unaware or don’t recognize that HJ was created by Black and brown femmes, are not working with a critical stance and understanding of how colonization, racism, and ableism are healing issues … it ain’t healing justice.

To enter the corporate rat race, you need to become a rat.

A name is a marker of identity but there are markers we cannot change, like the color of our bodies.

It is well to love beautiful things, but do not let them possess you.

At the end of a marriage, no one wins. There is only anger, sorrow, guilt, emptiness, and defeat.

At first, I was grateful to be the object of such intense desire. Yet what’s flattering in the first year can be suffocating in the eighth.

We throw ourselves away a little each day.

When you’re angry you act according to your emotions, not with your mind.

Dont just rest in ur nest, spread your wings and find your zest!!

Hearing doctors tell you that you can’t get pregnant does not extinguish the hope.

Maybe that old adage about not being able to have a good apartment, a good relationship, and a good job at the same time is true.

I once asked her if she was happy. “That depends on what I am able to get done today,” she said, laughing.

I cannot remember what we talked about except that we never stopped talking.

He was everything I wasn’t. He was a lot of what I wanted to be.

As Indra’s wife, Lakshmi is known as Sachi and Indra is known as Sachin.

Lakshmi, goddess of wealth,

As we walked to the T, Lakshmi spoke with despair about Isabelle's cardigan, about how smart it was, and how effortlessly Isabelle trod the fine line between sexy and angelic.

It's not about self-care - it's about collective care. Collective care means shifting our organizations to be ones where people feel fine if they get sick, cry, have needs, start late because the bus broke down, more slower, ones where there's food at meetings, people work from home - and these aren't things we apologize for.

But now I was home. In my home, home home, once and for all. I had had various apartments before in quite a few cities over the course of my life, but this was the first one I owned, and it felt good. A roof over my head and a place to be private, to cry, to laugh, to gorge, to hope, to dream, to wallow, and to pray for things was a salve to my soul.

From Brahma Puran ब्राह्मीं च वैष्णवीं भद्रां, षड्-भुजां च चतुर्मुखीम्। त्रि-नेत्रां खड्ग-त्रिशूल-पद्म-चक्र-गदा-धराम्॥ पीताम्बर-धरां देवीं, नानाऽलंकार-भूषिताम्। तेजः-पुञ्ज-धरीं श्रेष्ठां, ध्यायेद् बाल-कुमारिकाम्॥ Meditate on youthful Brahmi* and Vaishnavi* surely, With six hands, four faces, three eyes gives safety, With sword, trident, lotus, wheel, globe, mace be, Greatest – yellow dressed, well decorated elegantly.

For years awaiting this apocalypse, I have worried that as sick and disabled people, we will be the ones abandoned when our cities flood. But I am dreaming the biggest disabled dream of my life—dreaming not just of a revolutionary movement in which we are not abandoned but of a movement in which we lead the way. With all of our crazy, adaptive-deviced, loving kinship and commitment to each other, we will leave no one behind as we roll, limp, stim, sign, and move in a million ways towards cocreating the decolonial living future. I am dreaming like my life depends on it. Because it does.

5. When Begging Ends I love the idea of Divine Source. It reminds us that everything, the fulfillment of every need, always emanates from the One. So if you learn how to keep your vibration high and attuned to That, whatever is needed to sustain you can always occur, often in surprising and delightful ways. Your Source is never a particular person, place, or thing, but God Herself. You never have to beg. Furthermore, Divine Source says that whatever resonates with you will always find you. That which does not, will fall away. It’s that simple. When Outrageous Openness first came out, I experienced this as I took the book around—some stores were simply not drawn to it. But knowing about Divine Source and resonance, I didn’t care. I remember taking it to a spiritual bookstore in downtown San Francisco. The desultory manager sort of half-growled, “Oh, we have a long, long wait here. You can leave a copy for our ‘pile’ in the back room. Then you could call a ton and plead with us. If you get lucky, maybe one day we’ll stock it. Just keep hoping.” “Oh, my God, no!” I shuddered. “Why would I keep twisting your arm? It’ll go easily to the places that are right. You never have to convince someone. The people who are right will just know.” He looked stunned when I thanked him, smiling, and left. And sure enough, other store clerks were so excited, even from the cover alone. They nearly ripped the book out of my hands as I walked in. When I brought it to the main bookstore in San Francisco’s Castro district, I noticed the manager striding toward me was wearing a baseball cap with an image of the goddess Lakshmi. “Great sign,” I mused. He held the book for a second without even cracking it open, then showed the cover to a coworker, yelling, “Hey, let’s give this baby a coming-out party!” So a few weeks later, they did. Sake, fortune cookies, and all. Because you see, what’s meant for you will always, always find you. You never have to be bothered by the people who aren’t meant to understand. And anyway, sometimes years later, they are ready . . . and they do. Change me Divine Beloved into One who knows that You alone are my Source. Let me trust that You fling open every door at the right time. Free me from the illusion of rejection, competition, and scarcity. Fill me with confidence and faith, knowing I never have to beg, just gratefully receive.

शान्ताकारं भुजगशयनं पद्मनाभं सुरेशं विश्वाधारं गगनसदृश्यं मेघवर्णं शुभाङ्गम्। लक्ष्मीकान्तं कमलनयनं योगिभिर्ध्यानगम्यं वन्दे विष्णु भवभयहरं सर्वलोकैकनाथम्। I bow to Vishnu, Master of Universe unquestionably, Who rests on great serpent bed, peaceful perpetually, From His navel sprouts Lotus of Creative Power surely, He the Supreme Lord of cosmos undeniably does be. - 146 - He supports the entire universe and all-pervading be, He dark as clouds with beautiful Lakshmi form glowingly, He the lotus-eyed, whom yogis see by meditation only, He destroyer of `Samsar’ fear – the Lord of all `loks’ be. - 147 -

Everything in my family has taught me that it's safer to be a happy spinster than to try and love anybody. And, let's be real, when you look at the entire white colonialist capitalist ableist patriarchy, you don't see a whole lot that looks that great in terms of love and romance for surviving queer Black and brown femmes. Not a whole lot.

Life can be a beautiful journey if you accept who you are and accept the people around you for what they are.

Do not let others drive that vehicle, called life, for you. Grab that steering wheel and discover unexplored destinations.

Tell me, comes the song, have you brought me the moon?

I once asked her if she was happy. “That depends on what I am able to get done today,” she said, laughing. She told me that the completion of her daily tasks was the only thing she felt she had control over. They were a form of meditation, of salve. Kept busy, she had no time to ruminate and no time for opinions, certainly not feminist ones. I pressed her: “I mean, are you happy with your life, Rajima?” “I don’t know,” she said uncomfortably, as if she’d never really considered such a question. “When there is little you can do, you do what you can.” Happiness for my grandmother seemed to be a verb rather than a noun. She had so little control over her own life. Yet she took control, out of thin air for herself, when she could.

Teddy taught me about kindness, about love that is unconditional; a sentiment not dependent on acceptance, approval, or the expectation of something in return. It was the first time I would ever feel this from a man who wasn’t my grandfather. And I didn’t know what to do with it at all. If only I’d embraced our differences sooner. I didn’t know it then, but we had so little time left.

In time-honoured fashion, this is really the eldest daughter-in-law’s investiture as the earthly, domestic symbol of the goddess. It is she who channels Lakshmi’s blessings on the family. In her is vested, by an understanding of priestly transference, the household’s economic prosperity, well-being and harmonious daily life. Beside it, her other daily chores as eldest daughter-in-law –supervising the cook and cleaners and servants and household accounts, caring for her elderly parents-in-law, looking after their meals and medication, deciding which tasks can be ceded to the wives of her three brothers-in-law, keeping a family of twenty (including the servants) ticking over without hiccups or mishaps –all these appear as milk-and-rice, as uncomplicated, bland and digestible as infant fare.

Fair trade emotional economics are consensual. In a fair trade femme care emotional labor economy, there would no unconsensual expectations of automatic caretaking/mommying. People would ask first and be prepared to receive a yes, no, or maybe. I ask if you can offer care or support; you think about whether you’ve got spoons and offer an honest yes, no, or maybe. In this paradigm, it’s the person offering care’s job to figure out and keep figuring out what kind of care and support they can offer. It’s the person receiving care’s job to figure out what they need and what they can accept, under what circumstances.

I’ve noticed tons of abled activists will happily add “ableism” to the list of stuff they’re against (you know, like that big sign in front of the club in my town that says “No racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism”) or throw around the word “disability justice” in the list of “justices” in their manifesto. But then nothing else changes: all their organizing is still run the exact same inaccessible way, with the ten-mile-long marches, workshops that urge people to “get out of your seats and move!” and lack of inclusion of any disabled issues or organizing strategies. And of course none of them think they’re ableist.

In the car inching its way down Fifth Avenue, toward Bergdorf Goodman and this glamorous party, I looked back on my past with a new understanding. This sickness, the “endo-whatever,” had stained so much—my sense of self, my womanhood, my marriage, my ability to be present. I had effectively missed one week of each month every year of my life since I was thirteen, because of the chronic pain and hormonal fluctuations I suffered during my period. I had lain in bed, with heating pads and hot-water bottles, using acupuncture, drinking teas, taking various pain medications and suffering the collateral effects of them. I thought of all the many tests I missed in various classes throughout my education, the school dances, the jobs I knew I couldn’t take as a model, because of the bleeding and bloating as well as the pain (especially the bathing suit and lingerie shoots, which paid the most). How many family occasions was I absent from? How many second or third dates did I not go on? How many times had I not been able to be there for others or for myself? How many of my reactions to stress or emotional strife had been colored through the lens of chronic pain? My sense of self was defined by this handicap. The impediment of expected pain would shackle my days and any plans I made. I did not see my own womanhood as something positive or to be celebrated, but as a curse that I had to constantly make room for and muddle through. Like the scar on my arm, my reproductive system was a liability. The disease, developing part and parcel with my womanhood starting at puberty with my menses, affected my own self-esteem and the way I felt about my body. No one likes to get her period, but when your femininity carries with it such pain and consistent physical and emotional strife, it’s hard not to feel that your body is betraying you. The very relationship you have with yourself and your person is tainted by these ever-present problems. I now finally knew my struggles were due to this condition. I wasn’t high-strung or fickle and I wasn’t overreacting.

I don’t want to be fixed, if being fixed means being bleached of memory, untaught by what I have learned through this miracle of surviving. My survivorhood is not an individual problem. I want the communion of all of us who have survived, and the knowledge.

At the risk of seeming like a Christian, or a Che Guevara poster, love is bigger, huger, more complex, and more ultimate than petty fucked-up desirability politics. We all deserve love. Love as an action verb. Love in full inclusion, in centrality, in not being forgotten. Being loved for our disabilities, our weirdness, not despite them. Love in action is when we strategize to create cross-disability access spaces. When we refuse to abandon each other. When we, as disabled people, fight for the access needs of sibling crips. I’ve seen able-bodied organizers be confused by this. Why am I fighting so hard for fragrance-free space or a ramp, if it’s not something I personally need? When disabled people get free, everyone gets free. More access makes everything more accessible for everybody.

Disabled Cherokee scholar Qwo-Li Driskill has remarked that in precontact Cherokee, there are many words for people with different kinds of bodies, illnesses, and what would be seen as impairments; none of those words are negative or view those sick or disabled people as defective or not as good as normatively bodied people.9 With the arrival of white settler colonialism, things changed, and not in a good way. For many sick and disabled Black, Indigenous, and brown people under transatlantic enslavement, colonial invasion, and forced labor, there was no such thing as state-funded care. Instead, if we were too sick or disabled to work, we were often killed, sold, or left to die, because we were not making factory or plantation owners money. Sick, disabled, Mad, Deaf, and neurodivergent people’s care and treatment varied according to our race, class, gender, and location, but for the most part, at best, we were able to evade capture and find ways of caring for ourselves or being cared for by our families, nations, or communities—from our Black and brown communities to disabled communities.

Grief is an important part of the work. So many of the movements I’ve been a part of in my lifetime—the movements against wars in Afghanistan/Iraq and against Islamophobic racist violence here on Turtle Island, movements for sex work justice and for missing and murdered Indigenous women, movements led by and for trans women of color, movements for Black lives, movements by and for disabled folks and for survivors of abuse—involve a lot of grieving and remembering people we love who have been murdered, died, or been hurt/abused/gone through really horrible shit.

Although containing and denying grief is a time-honored activist practice that works for some people, I would argue that feelings of grief and trauma are not a distraction from the struggle. For example, transformative justice work—strategies that create justice, healing, and safety for survivors of abuse without predominantly relying on the state—is hard as hell! What would it be like if we built healing justice practices into it from the beginning? Everything from praying to the goddesses of transformation to help us hold these giant processes and help someone acting abusively choose to change to having cleansing ceremonies along the way.

Most sick and disabled people I know approach healing wanting specific things—less pain, less anxiety, more flexibility—but not usually to become able-bodied. And many of us don’t feel automatically comfortable going to healing spaces at all because of our histories of being seen as freaks, scrutinized, infantilized, patronized with “What happened?” prayed over, and asked, “Have you tried acupuncture?” and a million other “miracle cures.” Able-bodied practitioners without an anti-ableist analysis—including Reiki providers and anti-oppression therapists—often see us as objects of disgust, fascination, and/or inspiration porn. Mostly, these practitioners dismiss our lived expertise about our bodyminds and their needs, or on the flip side, they tell us we’re “not really disabled!” when we insist on the realities of our lives. This carries over into organizing, where, even in HJ spaces, often when the crips aren’t there, there’s no access info and no accessibility.

The eighth level of empowerment and law of manifestation is to call on the Planetary Ascended Masters for help for your every personal spiritual desire and need in your spiritual mission. The inner plane Ascended Masters will be an unseeing source of guidance and supply in ways you cannot possibly imagine. Some of the Planetary Masters I call upon are: El Morya, Kuthumi, Djwhal Khul, Serapis Bey, Paul the Venetian, Hilarion, Sananda, Saint Germain, Lord Maitreya, Lord Buddha, Sanat Kumara, Allah Gobi, Lanto, Portia, Mother Mary, Quan Yin, Isis, Lakshmi, Vywamus, Helios and Vesta, Melchior, and the Lord of Sirius, to name just a few. If it is a really important prayer, call in all of them.

Where is this place our baby bodies sprinted towards even when we were holding still for as long as possible? Flight gave birth to birth. Fragment genius comes down to this                    heaven of ass thwack, the miracle of taking it the miracle of sweet good girl best girl good girl finally made it               made it home We don’t always know where this place is. We stumble looking for the light switch, the exit sign.

The insidious reasons for a brown girl’s self-loathing won’t be surprising to any woman of color. I cannot rightly compare my own struggles to those of another minority, as each ethnicity comes with its own baggage and the South Asian experience is just one variation on the experience of dark-skinned people everywhere. As parents and grandparents often do in Asian countries, my extended family urged me to avoid the sun, not out of fear that heatstroke would sicken me or that UV rays would lead to cancer, but more, I think, out of fear that my skin would darken to the shade of an Untouchable, a person from the lowest caste in Indian society, someone who toils in the fields. The judgments implicit in these exhortations—and what they mean about your worth—might not dawn on you while you’re playing cricket in the sand. What’s at stake might not dawn on you while, as a girl, you clutch fast to yourself your blonde-haired, blue-eyed doll named Helen. But all along, the message that lighter skin is equivalent to a more attractive, worthier self is getting beamed deep into your subconscious. Western ideals of beauty do not stop at ocean shores. They pervade the world and mingle with those of your own country to create mutant, unachievable standards.

As Mia Mingus wrote in her essay “You Are Not Entitled to Our Deaths”: “We know the state has failed us. We are currently witnessing the pandemic state-sanctioned violence of murder, eugenics, abuse and bone-chilling neglect in the face of mass suffering, illness, and death.29 In my and many others’ nightmares, this is a final solution for disabled people: all COVID mitigation strategies are thrown out the window so abled people can shop, work, and watch football, and disabled people either die or stay within our immune-safer bubbles for the rest of our lives. I believe in disabled resilience, but my suicidal ideation popped up again when I thought about that. I don’t want a future where I never get to have in-person communion with people I love again, where I get harassed for wearing my N95 in the supermarket, and/or where most of the people I love are living with even more disability from long COVID with no government support, or are dead.

Indeed, food and femininity were intertwined for me from very early on. Cooking was the domain not of girls, but of women. You weren’t actually allowed to cook until you mastered the basics of preparing the vegetables and dry-roasting and grinding the spices. You only assisted by preparing these mise en places for the older women until you graduated and were finally allowed to stand at the stove for more than boiling tea. Just as the French kitchens had their hierarchy of sous-chefs and commis, my grandmother’s kitchen also had its own codes. The secrets of the kitchen were revealed to you in stages, on a need-to-know basis, just like the secrets of womanhood. You started wearing bras; you started handling the pressure cooker for lentils. You went from wearing skirts and half saris to wearing full saris, and at about the same time you got to make the rice-batter crepes called dosas for everyone’s tiffin. You did not get told the secret ratio of spices for the house-made sambar curry powder until you came of marriageable age. And to truly have a womanly figure, you had to eat, to be voluptuously full of food.