Afro-Indigenous Feminism — The Soil Beneath Queen Mindset Leadership®

Søren Kierkegaard: Life Can Only Be Understood Backwards, But It Must Be Lived Forwards

I'm a student of consciousness, human liberation, and collective creativity. It's only now, looking back at 39 years of my existence and the history that led to my birth, that life is starting to make sense.

It's very on brand with another consciousness great, Carl Jung, who posited that the first 40 years of the human life were for research; and it is only after 40 (more or less), that we actually start to live.

Much of this decade has been spent writing and reading, asking great big questions about the meaning of life, the fundamental nature of existence, and what we're all supposed to be doing here.

I've been a philosopher all my life. But in a feminine body, under systems of oppression, that philosophy becomes feminism. And in a body whose gender was desired and wished for, the feminism is anchored.

My mother dreamt of me years before I was born, and my father supported my mother's dream of safely bringing another child into the world. It was the 80s in Dominican Republic, my mother had already suffered two miscarriages after having birthed my brother, and she wanted me, a girl, to exist. 

Years later on another land, I'd go on to teach four psychology of women classes, finally learning the language and frameworks to understand the feminine experience. It was there that I started to learn about gender identity versus gender, about how the human sexuality of women differs, and about how we exist, survive, and thrive under patriarchal systems that deems women inferior by birth.

That type of unconditional regard for myself and my gender by my parent shifted something in me. And later, when I would fall into the self-led reprogramming replete with therapy, coaching, and hundreds of books, I began asking even deeper questions about the underlying purpose of the feminine in this world and cosmos.

I am essentially trying to answer: “What does liberated leadership look like when the feminine is no longer severed from body, ancestry, spirit, and truth?”

That question sits directly inside Afro-Indigenous feminist inquiry.

Why Afro-Indigenous Feminism? 

If Feminism can be said to be a framework that centers the power of the feminine—

And Afro / Black Feminism is the framework that centers race along with gender, and other intersections—

And Indigenous Feminism centers Mother Nature and our relationship to land, cycles, and the cosmos...

Then Afro-Indigenous Feminism as a whole teaches us to integrate all that has been disparaged in a post-colonial, Western world. It teaches us to remember that our bodies are part of our intelligence; that the community can be served without self-abandonment; that spiritual consciousness is just as important as cognitive development, and that systemic awareness systemic awareness in resistance to colonial, patriarchal, capitalist, and anti-Black structures is key to collective liberation.

Afro-Indigenous Feminism has roots in my own mixed race Dominican-American identity, as I've pulled from different ways of thinking (epistemologies) that are both political and economic, relational and spiritual, ecological and psychological, and most importantly, embodied. 

We have bodies, hearts, spirits, and minds, and those four are different intelligence systems that guide you into what your collective purpose is. We have one Earth, one assignment for coexistence, and infinite ways of getting there, along with challenges that keep us fractured from our selves, each other, and the land.

If Queen Mindset Leadership® is the map of how to expand your decolonial consciousness, then Afro-Indigenous Feminism is the soil that centers those that have been most abandoned by humanity, seeing to integrate those perspectives and answers on what we need to collectively thrive on Earth.

The Questions That Drives My Work

In my keynotes, workshops, coaching, and conversations, I'm asking different questions that integrate these different thought systems. At its core, Afro-Indigenous feminism asks:

• What happens when women—especially women shaped by diaspora, colonization, racialization, and ancestral rupture—return to themselves?
• What happens when leadership is no longer rooted in domination, extraction, performance, or hierarchy?
• What happens when healing includes the body, the land, the ancestors, creativity, ritual, and collective liberation?
• What happens when feminine power is reclaimed not as superiority over men, but as reconnection to life itself?

Equality within the same systems is merely survival, adapting even. But to question and rebuild the systems themselves takes a creator's mindset. When we realize that all that which is human-made can be rebuilt, we are encouraged to reimagine how systems show up differently structurally and in our lives.

This question pushes back against what we have culturally accepted as normal: hyper-productivity, conquest, emotional suppression, domination over nature, rigid gender roles, disembodied leadership, and relational extraction. These are not normal, and they are no longer serving even the majority.

Afro-Indigenous feminism therefore becomes: decolonial, embodied, cyclical, relational, spiritually aware, emotionally honest, and sovereignty-centered. It does not reject intellect, but rather unites it with intuition (spiritual intelligence), body (somatic intelligence), and heart (ancestral intelligence).

How I Got Here: From I/O Psychology to Autoethnography

Just in the last year of teaching in the Dallas community, I stumbled across a different style of research that has more afro and indigenous roots: autoethnography. Ethnography is the study of groups of people, but the observations and studies were often coded as "objective" because the male, white gaze was set as the standard lens of viewing. But when I view oppression or anything else in society, I'm viewing them through my own identities and systemic lens of oppression. It is not neutral, and I report on that honestly.

This is how my teachings have evolved from the traditional objectivity learned in Industrial/Organizational Psychology, to the contextualized. Everything I teach gets filtered through my own: 

• lived experiences,
• embodiment,
• relational patterns,
• emotional intelligence,
• ancestral inquiries,
• systems analysis,
• rituals,
• spirituality,
• observations,
• creativity,
• and symbolic meaning-making.

In contrast, Western colonial epistemologies tend to separate: intellect from body, science from spirit, humanity from nature, leadership from emotion, productivity from rest, individual from community.

But these are artificial separations. Pick up any book that describes the totality of a system, whether it's biological, artistic, political, and more, and you'll find that the world and cosmos are a lot more connected than we can imagine. Fragmentation served a purpose—and the specialization that has arisen in the last three centuries has also served its purpose—but the persistent collective burnout and disengagement points to a systemic problem. It's time to make things whole again (the literal meaning of the word integer).

In my classes, teachings, and newsletters, I use multiple ways of teaching this wisdom. Below is a breakdown using the four elements, the seven chakras, and the four bodies as alternative examples to the same knowledge: The Earth represents and teaches us what is also within.

Afro-Indigenous Feminism: Four Elements and Bodies

If you've been following my work the last year, you've seen me talk about the four elements ad nauseam. I taught two versions of Creative Liberation at the Creative Arts Center before retiring the class, and my newsletters have been organized by them in 2026. Why? Because the four elements / bodies allow us to connect to our actual planet and surroundings. Yes, they're embedded in the seven chakras (a blog for another day), but they're typically more accessible to those not in the spiritual spaces.

When I speak on podcasts with those that have PhDs and/or more traditional leadership expertise, I use the four bodies as a bridge into deeper conversations about why multiple types of intelligences are needed in leadership. We live in a world that centers only leadership of the mind (fire) in our decisions in and out of work, and then we wonder why "the world is on fire." Because that's the element we're collectively in.

While I have more detailed writings about each of these elements and bodies, below is a starting point to get you started on relating to these elements as you evaluate your healing / liberation journey.

1. Earth — Stability, Body, Land, Ancestors

Earth, of course, is the planet we live on, and it can be likened to the Body component of the Four Bodies, and the Root Chakra of the Chakras. This Element is primarily focused on:

• survival - embodiment - lineage - food - labor - home - cycles - ecology

Earth asks:
How do we root without domination?

Decolonizing BODY: Healing embodiment, restoring rhythm, honoring intuition, releasing shame and survival conditioning.

2. Water — Emotion, Intuition, Healing

Water, the element that is both abundant on Earth and rare in the rest of the solar system / cosmos, is foundational to life. We cannot exist without it. In the Four Bodies, this can be Heart. In the Chakras, this is the Sacral Chakra, focused on both emotions and creativity. This Element is primarily focused on:

• grief - sensuality - emotional truth - pleasure - fluidity- relational intelligence

Water asks:
What happens when women stop suppressing feeling?

Decolonizing HEART: Relearning love outside domination, sacrifice, and possession; building reciprocal relationships and collective care.

3. Fire — Power, Transformation, Sovereignty

Fire, one of the few elements we "discovered" on this planet. There are countless mythologies surrounding the element, and it both exacerbated our growth as humans (cooking food made us and our brains meatier) while being just as destructive. In the Four Bodies, this can be Mind, and in the chakras, the Solar Plexus. This Element focuses on:

• visibility - rage - purpose - creativity - leadership - courage - self-definition

Fire asks:
What must burn for liberation to emerge?

Decolonizing MIND = Decolonizing thought, interrogating inherited beliefs, studying systems, reclaiming intellectual sovereignty.

4. Air — Consciousness, Language, Imagination

Air is the thing that we need the most to breathe, the element most abundantly provided us by the plant world. In the Four Bodies, Air is represented by Spirit. In the Chakras, this corresponds to the upper chakras (Throat, Third Eye, Crown)—the realms of consciousness, vision, and sacred connection.

• storytelling - voice - symbolism - thought - spirituality - vision - possibility

Air asks:
What realities become possible when consciousness shifts?

Decolonizing SPIRIT: Reconnecting to meaning, ancestry, ritual, cosmos, and sacred existence.

Together, these four bodies represent the first layer of Queen Mindset Leadership®: Creative Awakening. Creative Awakening teaches: You are not broken. You are whole. The fragmentation was taught.

In subsequent posts, I'll get into the next layers of the model, and how you can step into the deconditioning process more fully.

Integration Guidance & Reflection

If there's one thing I've learned in my search to know and understand myself in this world, is that everything fits together. I've incorporated quantum and astrophysics into healing and liberation before (check out my blog for more!) and love approaching human existentialism through these different lens.

For my activists and feminists, how was it reading this? What other epistemologies have you learned that have expanded your sense of the power of the feminine?

If you're ready to apply this wisdom to your own life, take my Creative Embodiment Assessment, a ~20-30 minute journey into your own psyche and what parts of you need more abundant love.