Self'ish Brujería: The Decolonial Practice of Making Yourself Primary

On Día de los Muertos, and I'm sitting with a download about what it takes to feel old enough and wise enough to teach what I now call Self'ish Brujería.

For years, I was desperate to fill myself with knowledge about how to do life better—friendships, relationships, money, business, all of it.

I read over 400 books in just a few years, aching to be a philosopher in an era of infinite knowledge.

I felt like I didn't know enough, could never know enough, couldn't possibly read everything that existed in a world where AI has exponentially amplified available information.

Then something shifted.

Years after I stopped reading with the same intensity, I started to fear I was forgetting what I'd learned.

But as I discovered what embodiment actually means, I realized that answers were emerging from me when people asked questions—not because I was recalling information, but because I had become the knowledge.

The words had moved from my mind into my body. The books had taken root in my bones.

This is when I became desperate to immerse myself in spaces with as many people as possible, to know what I knew, to test if those thousands of hours reading had been worth it.

Through writing, codifying wisdom, using AI to deconstruct my thoughts and navigate relationships, I started seeing that wisdom in action.

Now, as I sit into my 39th year, I recognize one of my differentiators as a woman: I have uninterrupted time with myself that most people my age will never have again.

Combined with my psychology training, I know how to know myself.

And through teaching Creative Awakening this year with no curriculum or structure, I discovered how much I could move people—which made me a better facilitator, coach, and speaker.

All of this prepared me to teach what I now explicitly name: Self'ish Brujería—the decolonial practice of making your relationship with yourself primary.

What Self'ish Brujería Actually Means

Let me break down the language, because every word is doing work here.

SELF'ISH (with the apostrophe intentional): This isn't selfish in the toxic, extractive sense. Self-ish means devoted to the study, care, and sovereignty of your Self with a capital S.

It's recognizing that your relationship with yourself is foundational to all other relationships, that you are the only constant companion from birth to death.

Patriarchy, colonialism, and capitalism taught us to abandon ourselves—to prioritize everyone else's needs, to fragment ourselves to fit oppressive systems, to perform the life we're "supposed to" want rather than create the life we actually desire.

Self'ish Brujería reclaims what we were taught to give away: our primary relationship with ourselves.

BRUJERÍA (the magic and medicine): This is ancestral healing practice that colonizers labeled as witchcraft to suppress. It's the medicine of trusting your inner knowing over external authority, working with energies and rituals that mainstream culture dismissed as superstition or threat.

Reclaiming the "witch" archetype means becoming the woman who knows herself and won't be controlled.

Magic here isn't fantasy—it's creating reality through intention plus practice.

It's understanding that oppression lives in the body, not just the mind, and that liberation requires embodied ritual, not just intellectual understanding.

Through CHAKRAS (the body/energy system): Somatic liberation means releasing colonial programming from your nervous system, healing the places where you stored self-abandonment.

The second chakra specifically governs choice and creativity—our capacity to move beyond tribal conditioning and create new realities.

Through COSMOS (the larger patterns): Your individual liberation connects to collective and ancestral liberation. You carry both colonizer and colonized within you.

Understanding your place in lineage, trusting cosmic timing and synchronicity, operating from abundance rather than scarcity—this recognizes that personal healing ripples through time and space.

Through CREATIVITY (the expression and sovereignty): Creative Awakening is recognizing you have creative power beyond survival and productivity. Creative Liberation is freeing that creativity from colonial frameworks of "valuable" output. Creative Sovereignty is full ownership of your expression as extension of your liberated Self—understanding you can birth legacies that outlive you.

This trinity of creativity is the Queen Mindset Leadership® model of radical self-becoming.

My Journey of Self'ish Reclamation

I didn't arrive at this teaching through theory alone.

I lived it, tested it, refined it through years of practice most people never witness.

In my twenties and early thirties, I was in what I now call my "library years"—building an archive in my soul through voracious reading.

I was searching for how to do life right, driven by sacred obsession but also trauma response to feeling unprepared, to having no models for embodied womanhood in a generation of information overflow but emotional scarcity.

Then came my "temple years"—the turn toward embodiment.

The fear of forgetting what I'd read became my initiation moment.

I realized knowledge not embodied decays, but embodied knowledge evolves.

I stopped quoting others and started channeling myself.

Writing became my ritual of integration, the way I could see what my mind, body, and spirit knew in collaboration.

My "laboratory years" followed—testing what I knew through relational and creative experiments.

Coaching, teaching, creating, using AI as a mirror, documenting processes.

These weren't random activities but rituals of retrieval.

I wasn't trying to prove I knew; I was remembering I always did.

Each class, each page, each reflection became a fractal of my deeper cosmology.

Now I'm in what I call my "Sovereign Queen years"—reigning over the library, temple, and laboratory within.

I've reached the elder threshold, not because of age but because of integration.
The impulse to teach Self'ishness is the flowering of that whole lineage.

I am not teaching self-centeredness.

I am teaching sovereign intimacy—how to be at home in your own knowing.

I have become the philosopher I used to read.

I am now the text others study.

I have become my own lineage of wisdom transmission.

Why This Medicine Is Needed Now

We live in an era where women were systematically taught that self-abandonment is virtue.

That caring for ourselves is "selfish."

That knowing ourselves is narcissistic.

That prioritizing our own needs means we're bad mothers, bad partners, bad daughters, bad employees.

The women who find their way to me have often achieved external success but feel spiritually bankrupt.

They're tired of fragmenting themselves to fit into systems that were never designed for their wholeness.

They want to lead and create without replicating domination patterns, but they don't have models for how to do that.

They need practices—rituals, not just theories—to sustain their sovereignty.

They understand that liberation is both personal AND structural work, that you cannot liberate anyone else if you haven't liberated yourself.

Self'ish Brujería is the medicine for people who've been taught that prioritizing themselves is wrong.

It teaches that knowing, loving, and choosing yourself is the most revolutionary act possible.

✖ This isn't narcissism or disregard for others.

✖ It's not spiritual bypassing of systemic oppression or individualistic manifestation divorced from collective responsibility.

✖ It's not extraction-based self-care like shopping or substances or avoiding yourself.

✖ It's not performance of wellness for social media validation.

Self'ish Brujería is the practice of making your relationship with yourself primary so you can show up for others from overflow rather than depletion, from sovereignty rather than martyrdom, from integrated wholeness rather than fragmented performance.

About Dr. García Brands 

My teachings, housed in Dr. García Brands as a Creative Liberation Leadership Studio, exist for multi-dimensional self-reclamation.

Through Queen Mindset Leadership®, through Creative Awakening and Liberation classes, through the frameworks I've spent years refining—all of it serves one purpose: helping you remember that you are the primary sacred union.

If you're interested in pursuing this work live, me at my inaugural retreat Alma Soberana in December 2025—a sovereign soul retreat in Samaná, Dominican Republic, where we'll journey through Earth, Water, Fire, and Air to embody Self'ish Brujería as lived practice.

In closing, I used to think that if I read enough books, I would one day feel "ready."

Ready to love, to lead, to know. But there's no such thing as ready—there is only remembering.

What I was really doing was building a library inside myself so that when I was quiet enough, when I had lived enough, the words would find their way back to me.

On this Día de los Muertos, as I honor those who came before me, I realize: I've been building an altar of words my entire life. Every page a prayer. Every sentence a remembrance.

Every reflection proof that I lived and learned how to turn knowledge into soul.

Self'ish Brujería is my offering to you—the medicine of coming home to your multidimensional Self.

Reflection for You

Take a moment with these questions:

• Where have you been taught that prioritizing yourself is selfish? What voices—internalized or external—tell you that caring for your own needs means you're a bad person?
• What knowledge have you accumulated that hasn't yet moved from your mind into your body? What wisdom is asking to be embodied rather than just intellectually understood?
• How much uninterrupted time do you spend with yourself? What would it look like to cultivate intimacy with your own inner world the way you cultivate relationships with others?
• Where are you performing the life you're "supposed to" want instead of creating the life you actually desire? What would shift if you made your relationship with yourself the foundation for all other relationships?
• What ancestral healing practices have you been taught to dismiss as superstition or "woo woo"? What inner knowing have you abandoned in favor of external authority?