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The veil is thin. So are the boundaries.
At Café + Copal we spill the ancestral tea, stir the holy chisme + say the things they told us to keep quiet. This is where stories + soul truths get offered at the altar of liberation.
Think smoky altar vibes meets kitchen-table confession.
Pour your café.
Light your copal.
Estás justo a tiempo.
🧿 🧿 🧿
Madre Ixchel is a lineage keeper, spirit worker + unapologetic guide for brujes ready to break up with colonial narratives + reclaim ancestral magia that’s messy, holy + real. With over 25 years walking this path, she holds space so our gente can conjure lives of liberation, kinship + deep belonging.
Decolonial Praxis: What It Looks Like In Magia + Brujería
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[00:00:00] Introduction to Decolonizing Spiritual Practice
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[00:00:00] The veil is thin, so are the boundaries. At Cafe + Copal, we spill the ancestral tea. Stir the holy chisme and say the things they told us to keep quiet. This is where stories and soul truths get offered at the altar of liberation. Think smokey altar vibes meets kitchen table confessions Pour your cafe and light your copal. Estas husto a tiempo.
[00:00:25] I'm Madre Ixchel your cosmic comadre and host for this podcast. Welcome, welcome.
[00:00:31] So my friend, we need to have a chat about decolonizing specifically in spiritual practice. So if you go online into social media spaces, a lot of conversation about decolonization, particularly in the spiritual field, you hear it being equated to pre-colonial, like we're trying to practice exactly how our ancestors did pre colonization.
[00:00:58] And if that's your kink, by all means, I don't wanna get in the way of you and your joy, but diminishing the work of what decolonizing is, down to something so simplistic. It's superficial, and it's an easy way to get distracted away from the real work, which is actually challenging to who you are, your current identity and your current ideas about the world.
[00:01:22] Understanding Coloniality vs. Colonization
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[00:01:22] So let's start off with some definitions. What exactly is coloniality and the difference between that and colonization? So colonization is the physical process of invasion. Conquest oppression and coloniality is the ongoing system of power thought and social organization that emerged from colonialism, but continues even now. It describes the logic and the structure of domination that persists in our politics, economics, culture, spirituality. And our knowledge,
[00:01:54] we can identify coloniality as a living system that shapes today's hierarchies like race, gender, class. It upholds the idea of western ways of knowing being and organizing society as superior. It erases distorts and devalues indigenous, black and other subjugated people's knowledge systems spiritualities and ways of life, and it infiltrates how we relate to power land and our own bodies.
[00:02:26] So decolonizing is the active, ongoing process of dismantling these colonial structures. Not only in the material world externally, but also within ourselves.
[00:02:35] It means challenging and undoing the systems of domination, extraction, hierarchy, and erasure that's imposed by colonialism and maintained through coloniality. It is reclaiming indigenous, black and marginalized ways of knowing, being, healing and governing, and also relating to land and spirit. And it's rebuilding relationships of reciprocity, kinship, and sovereignty that colonialism sought to destroy.
[00:03:03] So decolonizing is a profound restructuring of power, worldview, and relationship internally and externally.
[00:03:12]
[00:03:12] Key Elements of Decolonizing
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[00:03:12] Some key elements. Of decolonizing is that it's material. It's fighting for land, back reparations, and abolition of oppressive systems. It's cultural and spiritual, which means restoring, erased languages, ceremonies and cosmologies. It's personal, unlearning, colonial mindsets of superiority, control, and extraction. And it's collective, it's rebuilding communities rooted in mutual care and indigenous sovereignty.
[00:03:44]
[00:03:44] Decolonizing in Magia and Brujeria
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[00:03:44] So what does that look like specifically in our own practice in
[00:03:47] magia and Brujeria?
[00:03:48] Decolonizing our spiritual practice is about more than just. Honoring ancestors ot trying to live in a way that, that they did pre colonization. It's a radical realignment of how we relate to power, land, spirit, and community, and it's our refusal to reproduce colonial logic. That divorced us from those ancestral practices and ways of being.
[00:04:11] Decolonial Praxis in Practice
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[00:04:11] Before I get into the details of what this actually looks like in Praxis,
[00:04:15] I wanna frame the details.
[00:04:17] Something that I've learned. Both from material world practice, but also in relationship to spirit is that they have no interest in us going backwards. They very much want us to tap into their wisdom and ways of knowing and bring that forward into the present.
[00:04:37] If you've been around in my space for a while, you may have heard me say this phrase.
[00:04:41] Our medicine needs to meet the moment,
[00:04:44] so my own personal approach is not trying to relive something that existed 500 600 plus years ago.
[00:04:54] It's allowing their knowledge and their wisdom to inform how we live now in the present.
[00:05:00] Because we are blessed, we're privileged to live in a time where we have access to more information. And more resources than our ancestors did.
[00:05:10] So when I say decolonial praxis, I'm talking very much about the present and the future and what that can look like.
[00:05:17]
[00:05:17] Spiritual Reclamation and Integrity
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[00:05:17] So decolonial praxis is spiritual reclamation. It means re-rooting our practice in ancestral cosmologies, so educating ourselves, doing research, learning about our creation stories, elemental frameworks, concepts of time and space. Our calendar systems timekeeping instead of defaulting to the Western systems.
[00:05:40] And it's also acknowledging that magia is. Woven from deep relationships with our lineage, land and spirits.
[00:05:51] It's honoring the land that we exist on. We make offerings and build reciprocal relationships with the spirits where we currently live, and also our ancestral lands.
[00:06:02] It is rejecting extractive spirituality. I've shared some of my story from the early days of my own personal practice, but also how I started in my business, and it was rooted in the new age, and that whole realm of belief and practice is littered with extractive practice cherry picking. Teachings and practices from different cultures without actually learning the history of the origins and the cultural context and the fullness of the traditions that they come from.
[00:06:34] So, my own journey, you know, I had to check myself. Like I said, this practice isn't about staying on the shallow end, and it's not only pointing the finger out there. We have to point the finger at ourselves. And so there'll be moments when your feelings get hurt, when you feel defensive, but we have to be willing to self-examine on this path.
[00:06:52] And so our spiritual practice must be done in integrity. It's giving credit, it's offering reciprocity, and it's also making amends. When we realized that we participated in extraction and appropriation.
[00:07:08] Relational Ethics and Liberation
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[00:07:08] It's embracing relational ethics.
[00:07:11] So the foundation of our practice is about being in kinship, with the ecosystem that we exist in.
[00:07:17] That means we have to consider the impact of our working, not only just ourselves, but any other person who may be impacted. And our larger community, which includes the more than human world.
[00:07:29] It means we practice consent and reciprocity. So we ask permission from land, from plants, from spirits. And we offer something in return for what they give to us. It means watching our language and our attitude towards the spirits whose help we seek.
[00:07:46] It means integrating liberation and justice.
[00:07:50] We see our spiritual path as intertwined with dismantling colonial systems, which includes anti-blackness, anti indigeneity borders. And the penal system, we support land back language revitalization, abolition as acts of spiritual responsibility.
[00:08:09] It means restoring indigenous rhythms.
[00:08:12] So we learn about and pay attention to and align our work with our ancestral ways of keeping time.
[00:08:19] And we center ceremony that honors and acknowledges death, grief, and collective wellbeing, and resisting the colonial push for linear ascension.
[00:08:29] It means we honor the messy, cyclical nature of healing.
[00:08:33] We understand that healing happens in cycles. It's full of returns and reckonings, and we accept the more challenging. Aspects like death, loss, destruction.
[00:08:43] We acknowledge them as sacred teachers, It means healing from internalized colonial shame.
[00:08:49] We shed the judgment that's been taught by colonizers who call our ancestral practices. The devil's work, demonic evil.
[00:09:00] We release any shame and any fear by reclaiming our ancestral practices.
[00:09:05] And we reclaim our language and our own symbols, and even the words used intended to diminish us. It's working with our. cosmograms and symbols and it's claiming "bruje" to be subversive.
[00:09:22] It means we respect specificity and lineage. We name the traditions that we draw from. We credit lineages, elders and teachers.
[00:09:33] It means staying humble and curious, letting your spirits and your community teach you and call you in to be corrected, and we unlearn the colonial attitude and arrogance. That the way we know is the best way and the only way.
[00:09:50] And finally it means we center collective liberation.
[00:09:54] We're looking for ways that our spiritual work can help dismantle systems that harm our people and other marginalized folks. So we stand up and we speak up. We support struggles for land, back, reparations, abolition. It's all part of our spiritual integrity and putting feet on our values.
[00:10:13]
[00:10:13] Conclusion and Call to Action
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[00:10:13] I wanna challenge you to pick one of these things and bring it into your practice now. And I'd love to know what it is, so feel free to send me a dm.
[00:10:23] That's it for today mi gente. May your cafe and your copal always be strong. Take what you need and pass the rest to your ancestros. If this stirred something in you, please share this episode and don't forget to rate and follow the podcast. Gracias por esta aqui. Nos vemos pronto.