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Eréndira Jiménez Esquinca: embrace grief, embrace change, embrace love
97 Plays2 years ago
How do you stay true to yourself when love and relationships change? Whether it’s romantic love, spiritual love, or friendship love, Eréndira Jiménez Esquinca is gently figuring it out.
Eréndira talks about redefining her relationship with Christianity, listening to the body, paying attention to grief, and following love — wherever it leads. We chat about her work with Spirit School of building a container where the work of decolonizing Christianity can happen.
CONTENT WARNING: grief, loss, trauma, divorce, Christian hegemony
Check out Eréndira’s website: erendirajimenez.com
Check out Spirit School, her principal work in decolonization: spiritschool.us
Check out her podcast, I Don’t Know… https://open.spotify.com/show/1Swt8rGKi4Rng32WvSnDEe?si=26b2448b54eb442a
Follow her on IG: www.instagram.com/_erendira_
Follow Spirit School on IG: www.instagram.com/_spiritschool_
(un)common good with pauli reese is produced in Southwest Philadelphia, on the unceded land of the Lenni Lenape tribe and the Black Bottom Community.
Check us out on Instagram and TikTok: @uncommongoodpod
Subscribe to our YouTube Channel: youtube.com/@uncommongoodpod
we chat to ordinary people doing uncommon good in service of our common humanity.
We are creating community that builds relationships across difference by inviting dialogue about the squishy and vulnerable bits of life.
thanks for joining us on the journey of (un)common good!
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Transcript
Complexity of Love and Hope
00:00:00
Speaker
Even as I can glimpse something that I know is true about love, it's still not all of it. For me, that feels really hopeful. Right now, I'm really grappling with the grief and the sadness and the loss that is embedded in love.
00:00:16
Speaker
is it feels hopeless to kind of land there because underneath all of that is a kaleidoscope, one glimpse of love. In a few months time, in a few years time, that kaleidoscope will have shifted and I will have learned something new about the texture of love.
Introduction to Podcast and Guests
00:00:42
Speaker
It's Uncommon Good, the podcast where we chat to ordinary people doing uncommon good in service of our common humanity. I'm Pauli Rees. Fam, I am delighted, delighted to bring to you today Erendira Humanes Esquinca.
00:00:56
Speaker
And Indira is the host and creator of the podcast I Don't Know and of the online learning platform Spirit School, a tool, a container that she is building where the work of decolonizing Christianity can happen.
00:01:12
Speaker
A quick content warning off the top, we do talk a lot about grief, loss, trauma, divorce, and Christian hegemony.
Redefining Christianity and Spiritual Life
00:01:21
Speaker
So if these things are not right for you to listen to, feel free to switch this one off and we will catch you in the next one. We go on to talk about how Arendita is redefining her relationship with Christianity, how she is listening to the body,
00:01:34
Speaker
how she is paying attention to grief and following love wherever it leads, all in service of deepening the spiritual life. It was an incredible privilege and honor to get to chat to Erindira on this one, to catch up a little bit since our times in Divinity School. Please enjoy my chat to Erindira Jimenez-Eskinka.
Erendira's Inspirations and Tap Dancing Journey
00:01:59
Speaker
I cannot explain how incredibly excited I am that you're here, Erin Deere. Thanks for doing the show. Thanks, Paulie. I'm excited. So the question that I want to get started with, what sort of things are inspiring that sort of lifts you up and brings you some joy at the moment?
00:02:24
Speaker
That's a fun question. Well, I think on a very basic level, I started taking tap dancing classes. What? Yeah, I tap danced very briefly when I was a child for a musical that we did and I loved it.
00:02:48
Speaker
And then when I was in New Orleans a few months ago, I was walking into this thrift store and I found a pair of shoes that fit me perfectly. And I was like, I think this is a sign. So it took me two months, but I got into dance classes and then on the first day of my class, the shoes broke.
00:03:08
Speaker
I bought new shoes, but it was good. It was like it got me in the door and I've been going for a few weeks and it's super silly and I'm really bad and also I'm not as bad as I think I am.
00:03:26
Speaker
I'm in this class with I think the next youngest person is probably in their like late 40s all the way up into I think the oldest persons in their 70s. So it's fun. We're all just kind of learning some basic steps together. So that's lighting me up. That's beautiful. Yeah, it's really fun. It's really fun.
00:03:48
Speaker
So there are two things, before you go on to the next thing, there are two things that I just want to grab. One, New Orleans, at least for me, best adult vacation weekend in the country. Well, I got COVID on my second day there of a week-long trip. So that was not great. I was basically stuck in my hotel room for many days, but
00:04:16
Speaker
It was okay. You got to know the decor of your hotel room very well. Exactly. It became like a mini sort of like an unanticipated like monastic cell. Yeah, it's a nice way of putting it. But I had been before and it really is. New Orleans is fantastic.
Musical Theater and Personal Growth
00:04:35
Speaker
Yes. Yeah. And then so the tap you. So you did it when in childhood, which I think is amazing. What what musical was it? Oh, Crazy For You.
00:04:51
Speaker
That's a Gershwin musical, isn't it? Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. Yep. I was a folly girl, is what we were called. Do you remember anything from the experience of, like, doing the show and, like... Oh, my gosh. ...like childhood, Arandira, like, being excited about TAP and the world of the great American music? Yeah. I, um... I remember a lot about it. Uh, so...
00:05:24
Speaker
It's taking me back. So I think there's like one scene that was so cool. So kind of to preface it, the teacher that ran the musical program, he was also really connected with the San Diego Comic Opera. So he was connected with like the local theater companies. So these were like not
00:05:51
Speaker
like half-assed productions. They were very elaborate. So there's this scene in Crazy for You. So it starts off in New York and
00:06:06
Speaker
there's like the the director of the show and he has all of his like folly girls and we wore uh flapper dresses and so i had this teal flapper dress that i was obsessed with um teal flapper tassels amazing and we would like all come out like flapping like the first scene is us like flapping onto the stage with our little tap shoes
00:06:31
Speaker
And then the main character somehow ends up somewhere in the southwest. And so there's this scene where we're in a bar and the, I guess, the cowboys or whatever are playing jugs and it's...
00:06:58
Speaker
I don't know. It was so ridiculous. And then there's this like tap scene. So we're like tapping and there's like the jug horns going and I don't know who is doing the music. And then the tap scene ends where we like get up and alive.
00:07:15
Speaker
and we fall into each other. We basically domino into each other. We practice this for weeks and weeks, and so we all learn how to fall so that our legs split out. Then the last person was one of the boys, and they caught us. There's 10 of us that just
00:07:48
Speaker
One, that's amazing. Two, the
00:07:59
Speaker
I 100% believe the art of the fight choreography level precision that it takes to fall and not fracture a hip even at 12 or
Creative Projects and Exploring Love
00:08:11
Speaker
whenever. It was so good. It was so good. Yeah.
00:08:14
Speaker
I think that would have loved to keep doing theater, but it was not something my parents wanted me to do long-term. So I did do a couple of shows with the comic opera when I was 10 to 12. I did a musical called Man on the Moon, and then we did Pirates of Pen Dance. That was with professional actors, and those are very, very cool for this little young person.
00:08:41
Speaker
Absolutely. Yeah, like being a male-voiced person, a male-bodied person that I am, like those sort of pattern song roles are like one of the first things that you learn. Like if you did like a bachelor's degree, like in voice performance, what should I do? So it's like, what fun. Yeah.
00:09:03
Speaker
It was great. So anyway, now I'm back trying to tap. But some of that metal memory is still there. So, you know, just squishies like trouble. It's in the body. Yeah, exactly. It's fun. I feel like fun is so important. Like in the world that we live in, where there's a lot of things that are decidedly like that we need to endure that are decidedly less fun. Definitely. You know?
00:09:30
Speaker
So yay, brilliant, amazing. What else is in that list of that space of inspiration and hope and joy right now?
00:09:42
Speaker
Yeah. So I am also, I would say two more things. So one of them is I study human designs. I don't know if anybody's familiar with that system, but I've been kind of engaging, learning. It's kind of a synthesis of astrology and I Ching and sharper centers and
00:10:09
Speaker
it's a really beautiful way and some like physics and stuff as well we talked about neutrinos. It's a really neat way of thinking about energetics and like the ways that we carry energy in our bodies and the ways that we move energy out into the world and it's a system and there's like logic
00:10:30
Speaker
That's a part of it, but also it's very abstract and very intuitive. So it's fun for me to kind of learn something in a very kind of linear, rational, logical way. But then also there's a lot of space in the system to just kind of feel your way through it.
00:10:49
Speaker
So I study that and I have a teacher and we meet once a month and then I do my reading on a site and that's just really exciting. I'm gonna start offering readings and stuff hopefully soon because I think it's a really helpful language in terms of expanding archetypes and expanding just like spiritual language that connects us to ourselves but also the collective and so I just think it's great. Yeah.
00:11:17
Speaker
And then lastly, I'd make in my zines. So that's just always an adventure. Do you have do you do like all the print and like the production of like the physical work at home or do you have like a print shop like locally? No. So I do it all online and then I send it off to a printer and the printer prints it and then I get the copies. But I do all of the formatting, obviously all the writing, all of the design. Yeah.
00:11:48
Speaker
Tell me about the most recent one. Is it a prose project, poetry, a mix of both? So I did my first round of zines last year and two of them were prose. One of them was more abstract thoughts. This round, two of them are
00:12:15
Speaker
Yeah, pros. One's more of like an essay. One is, it's gonna be a lot, I'm still trying to figure out how long it's gonna be. And then I have one that's like more poetry and images. So the one that's poetry and images is kind of thinking about like time and space and location and it's kind of the ways that we like
00:12:43
Speaker
are shaped by land and transform as we like move through time and space. Those are more just like
00:12:52
Speaker
Yeah, poems and more abstract thoughts. And then I have an essay on kind of the ethics of becoming and like dwelling in belovedness and exploring the connection between belovedness and becoming. And what does that mean for our relationships with others?
00:13:14
Speaker
And then the last one, the one that I'm still editing a lot of writing for is called Expanding Love. And so that's a little bit more of my own personal explorations of non-monogamy, polyamory, relationship anarchy, intimacy, love, home, self, the divine. It's just like stuff.
00:13:40
Speaker
Yeah, like bedtime reading. Exactly. Like bathroom reading. Yeah, it just sort of sits in the place where the TV guy used to be and you sort of pick it up, read a paragraph or two and put it right back down and then...
00:13:57
Speaker
on top. So, um, yeah, that, that's like the biggest project. The other two are pretty easy. They just, I just need to do some light editing with them, but the expanding love is, um, just writing that I did over the course of a year. And so I'm really trying to distill it into, I don't know. I don't know what it's going to be distilled into a story, but also imaginations and also
00:14:29
Speaker
uncertainties and questions that still are there. So I think when you talk about love, there's not really a lot of, I think there's solid things that we can land on and there's always still so much mystery. So it really, I think it like leaves a lot of the mystery hanging.
00:14:45
Speaker
Yeah, I'm in and I wanted to talk about that like as we were getting ready and like we were getting ready for the podcast One of the things that you mentioned is just this question What is love baby? Don't hurt me. Don't hurt me. Not that last part but but like that's that's such a good question and I feel like now it's not something that we ever just really Asked that question unironically
Transformation and Vulnerability in Love
00:15:12
Speaker
Right. And trying to piece that apart from all of the ways that we know it from having experienced what we think it is. So I'd love to hear a little bit more about sort of like what's kicking around up there, like in the noggin.
00:15:33
Speaker
I think one of the reasons that love can feel so overwhelming or intimidating or scary, I know that for me when I come into relationships that feel really loving, they also activate really old wounds and fears and stories that
00:16:00
Speaker
are not true necessarily, but are embedded deep enough that they feel true in the moment. I think to really encounter love is always an invitation to transformation. I just don't think that love is static. There's always an element of change that's involved in loving and being loved. The more that I learn about change,
00:16:30
Speaker
it's just like there's always going to be feelings of like loss and grief that accompany that as well. I think there's just like no way to change without letting go and when you let go inevitably there is like a loss
00:16:49
Speaker
And yeah process of just like sadness of like wow maybe to serve me really well at one point, but it's not anymore and That means I'm gonna have to like let go of certain relationship dynamics or certain like ideas about myself or certain patterns that like kept me safe, but actually you were not really keeping me safe and Grieving the the people that were a part of that formation a grieving Yeah, all sorts of things and so I think
00:17:19
Speaker
The love part for me right now just feels a lot more about vulnerability and transparency and learning how to allow myself to be seen and known in ways that are really terrifying because it means that I won't stay the same.
00:17:41
Speaker
So I think one of the things that I'm hearing is that to experience love in the way that you're describing is to experience change. And because change involves a sense of releasing loss and grief, to experience love is to
00:18:04
Speaker
participate in an experience of loss or maybe grief is that
00:18:13
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's definitely a part of it. Is that too much transit of property? No, no, no. I think that's a big part of it. I think for me, that's one of the reasons why I sometimes find love really difficult to stay in is because they're
00:18:34
Speaker
Even as there's all of these highs and joys and light and beautiful moments, even as I'm moving through that beauty, there's also this inevitable
00:18:51
Speaker
There's like, I am going to change through that love. And as I changed through that love, and as you changed through that love, we're both, whoever I'm relating to, whether that's a parent, whether that's a sibling, whether that's a lover, whether that's a friend, whether that's myself, as I am engaging in this dynamic of exchange, we're never gonna be the same people again in this moment.
00:19:20
Speaker
And that is both beautiful and devastating to know that this moment that we're glimpsing is asking for our becoming. I don't know if that makes sense, but I try not to dwell on this sadness too much, but I think it's always there for me.
00:19:47
Speaker
but I don't think that that grief or sadness is a bad thing or something that is meant to be avoided.
00:19:54
Speaker
That I think is, is at least for me, one, it resonates for me personally, like thinking about like my experience of love and loss and grief by definition. It seems like so much easier to carry if that's like built into love by design rather than necessarily being something that is an unfortunate like consequence of love, I guess. And I don't even know if they're different.
00:20:26
Speaker
I think you're naming something that I don't quite have the words for you and I think I'm still in this process of excavating and discovering, but I think that if there is room for grief and sadness in love, then it actually opens us up to loving in deeper and more vulnerable ways.
00:20:49
Speaker
Everything old is new again. And consequently, I suppose everything new is old. Everything new is old again. But it feels like such timeless wisdom, but it also feels so new at the same time. Yeah.
00:21:09
Speaker
There's so much of yourself of who you are that changes because of the experience of love and the loss and grief that are attached and also the beauty, like two sides of the same coin, perhaps. Is there anything that you notice that feels like through all of that love and all of that change feels largely the same? Yeah, I mean, I think
00:21:33
Speaker
I think that things that feel the same are this sense of unknowing and mystery and kind of expansiveness, that there's just so much room to discover.
00:21:53
Speaker
that even as I say these things about love that there is like Continue to be like more intricacies more Things that I just don't know that like for me to be encountered So even as I like can glimpse something that I know is true about love It's still not all of it. And I think for me that feels really hopeful that you know, even as I
00:22:23
Speaker
Right now, I'm really grappling with the grief and the sadness and the loss that is embedded in love. That doesn't feel hopeless to me.
00:22:38
Speaker
to kind of land there because underneath all of that is that it's just like a kaleidoscope, right? Like it's just this like one glimpse of love and hopefully in a few months time, in a few years time that kaleidoscope will have shifted and I will have learned something new about the, I don't know, the texture of love.
00:23:00
Speaker
And so that's this continual learning that we all get to do. And so I'm glimpsing something right now that feels really hard and heartbreaking and beautiful and this
00:23:13
Speaker
kind of melancholy sort of a way and it doesn't stop there.
Spiritual Journey and Yale Divinity School
00:23:18
Speaker
Again, because I'm changing, you're changing, love is changing. And so with another shift, I will kind of learn about another aspect of love. I guess I'm basically just saying that love feels fractal and that it's
00:23:32
Speaker
True. Always. Thinking about like the toy kaleidoscope from childhood and how beautiful that was and that the beauty is that it was always different even though all of the components were exactly the same. Right. And it would be much less interesting if it were always the same picture. Yeah. Yeah.
00:23:52
Speaker
So walk me through the journey that gets you to today. Because I know you from the time that we were together as students at Yale, specifically Berkeley Divinity School at Yale. But tell me how does, how does Aaron de la Jimenez from like however many years ago,
00:24:22
Speaker
in this moment, talking about love in this way. Yeah. What's, what's the journey like? He goes back to, um, like great grandmother. Um, and yeah, yeah. Um, so
00:24:42
Speaker
I guess I will share that the zine is not a one-off. It's a piece of the work that I do through my business called Spirit School. Spirit School is what I like to call a decolonial learning and support container. It is a space for
00:25:12
Speaker
unraveling the stories, the practices, the communities that support our connection to the divine and to ourselves. And in the context of Spirit School, that's decolonizing church and decolonizing spirituality and
00:25:30
Speaker
working to unravel ourselves and our stories from the lineages and systems of oppression, colonialism, imperialism, capitalism, patriarchy, white supremacy that are just deeply embedded in us.
00:25:49
Speaker
That's where the zine comes from. It comes from the work that I do in that context. And so that work starts with my great-grandmother because my great-grandmother is Soke. She is Rauchiapas Mihiko. She is indigenous and she was not born Christian. She also was illiterate for her life.
00:26:15
Speaker
And she was kind of, I don't know, growing up in Mexico. That was, if people don't know the history, Chiapas is the most indigenous population state in Mexico. So there was a big push to kind of bring literacy and
00:26:42
Speaker
and to colonize again these communities in the late 1800s and early 1900s. So my great-grandmother was converted to Catholicism from the Catholic and that kind of started this journey for my family in terms of
00:27:05
Speaker
needing to find a way to relate to systems of oppression, systems of power, and learning how to fit and fit and make that work. My work is deeply related both to religion, spirituality, and also education. So I tell the story that my great grandmother was illiterate because my grandmother, this is all on my maternal side, my grandmother was one of the first
00:27:34
Speaker
schoolteachers in the state of Chiapas. And so she became a teacher, I think, in her late teens, early 20s. And it's actually really funny to walk through Tuxalatas, the city that she lives in with her, because everyone calls her Fridofé. Fridofé. She's a celebrity.
00:27:58
Speaker
And she taught a lot of people in this city. And then my grandmother ended up meeting some Protestant missionaries. And so my grandmother converted from Roman Catholicism to becoming Presbyterian. And so there's this move within my family of kind of assimilating both through religion and education.
00:28:25
Speaker
So then when we get to my parents' generation, my mom and my uncles, there is a lot of professionalism. So I have one uncle that's a doctor, one uncle that's a lawyer, one uncle that's an architect, and my mom was trained as a chemist, and now is a nurse, and they all did higher education.
00:28:44
Speaker
for them, religion is a part of their life and is also deeply complicated in a lot of other ways. But for my mother, that kind of moved her and my father from Mexico
00:29:00
Speaker
to the United States. They moved for my dad's Ph.D. program. They landed in Salt Lake City and they joined the Church of the Nazarene, which is like Wesleyan and a little bit in gentle and parts of the country. So, yeah, my story kind of
00:29:27
Speaker
is pulling at these threads of religion and spirituality and education. So when we moved to San Diego, which is where I grew up, my dad got a teaching job at this Christian college here. And I was kind of embedded in this very white evangelical culture with the expectation that I would really excel in school and academics. And that
00:29:57
Speaker
That idea I always assumed that I would get a PhD like it was not really Was it really a question in my mind I don't have one I said don't play it I get it I have two master's degrees and that's enough but yet, but the the the narrative in my life was that like higher education was really important and so was having a really active and engaged spiritual life
00:30:29
Speaker
That I think got complicated for me as a young person because of the ways that
00:30:37
Speaker
the concepts of God, the relationships of God to God, the ways that they were being handed to me just didn't make sense. And so in my church, it was very read your Bible and do your morning devotions. And I tried those things, but that's just one, not my rhythm. And two, I was like, well, I just feel like there's more. And I think that I just have questions.
00:31:06
Speaker
And also, like, I just am 15. I'm 16. I, you know, I'm exploring relationships in school. I kind of want to go to some parties. I kind of want to drink. I don't think that makes me not a Christian. So what do I do with that? I had this, like, real sense of, I don't know, God existing outside of
00:31:30
Speaker
the stories that I was being handed, but also not having anyone to really bounce that off of. It is so really wondering for a lot of my adolescents, like, am I Christian? What do I believe? Like, is this all in my head? I like pray in certain ways. I like read my Bible in certain ways, but it doesn't resonate with anyone. And so what does that mean for me? And I ended up at a small Christian school for college and that was, um,
00:32:00
Speaker
as you know, like most Christian universities are, like very complicated with their legacies, but also the ways they build community. And so most of my friends when I was in school left the church and I found my way into the theology department. So. I feel like every Christian college, mine included, shout out to Greenville College. Yeah.
00:32:29
Speaker
They're really good at doing that, right? They're really good at presenting the unanswerable questions. But then the place and the support to be able to have the conversation, the difficult conversation around them is
00:32:55
Speaker
somehow just either not there yet or needs to have or is not like I guess seen as the purview of the school as something they need to provide or is forbidden by like whatever policies of belief that they have to to like create the community. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
00:33:23
Speaker
And so we have to, we ended up having to build community in different ways, right? And, um, and so that felt complicated too, because we, even as, you know, these late teens, early twenties, young adults, uh, we're still pulling from conceptions of community that we grew up with. And so, um, even as I think many of us were
00:33:47
Speaker
learning about anti-capitalism for the first time and dumpster diving and solidarity with the unhoused, but also just not really knowing how to engage with the world in a real way because we were just learning how to do that for the first time.
00:34:08
Speaker
and you know most of my friends or many of my friends were coming out as queer and like that really wasn't a space that my school was holding very well still is not holding very well and yeah so so there's for me was this real question of
00:34:27
Speaker
these parallel kind of tracks that were happening where my friends, where we'd grown up in very similar contexts, mind you, they were all mostly white. And I had not. And so I think there might have been some difference there. They're kind of like, there's a lot of hypocrisy in Christianity.
00:34:46
Speaker
I weren't out and I was like, that's valid. And for me, I am starting to take these theology classes and starting to take some classes in spirituality and simultaneously working for a city program with
00:35:01
Speaker
low income youth of color and I'm surrounded by non-white people for the first time and I'm like well actually like I think there's a place in this story for like the margins and actually like the more I read about Christianity the more I read about the mystics the more I read about the months the more I read about folks that are like radically like subverting
00:35:24
Speaker
systems like the more I think that there's like actually a place for me here and I am really kind of curious about like what that means and so and why for some people it feels
00:35:40
Speaker
it feels necessary to kind of believe and step out of a system or a story and why for other people it feels like there's still potential within the system of the story to repeat. That was I think a question I was holding in my early 20s and so from there I moved to Kentucky.
00:35:57
Speaker
And I was newly married, I married last week too. And so me and my now ex-husband moved out there so I could do this master's program in spirituality, because that's what I was gonna study. I was gonna like figure out what is spirituality? What is this thing that connects us to each other and to God? And I don't know, I was... What is God?
00:36:28
Speaker
It was not idealistic, I don't think. In hindsight, it was just like, wow, there was still a lot of structure around something that over time has become more nebulous and vague.
00:36:48
Speaker
And all of that was happening at the same time as I was finding my way into the Episcopal Church and also doing social work and really having to grapple with my own body living in Kentucky, my own
00:37:08
Speaker
And then when I was doing social work, working with undocumented families, refugee families, black families, and foster families, and really coming into this place where I was like, wow, there's places where I have power and privilege and places where I really don't. And so what does that mean?
00:37:28
Speaker
And I was totally alone in those wonderings. And a lot of unraveling happened for me in my early 20s, a lot of really low points where I just really couldn't feel gone, but also still knew that divine was there. And so there was just this like,
00:37:47
Speaker
My 20s were very beautiful and very messy. There was a lot of bumping up into people and communities and institutions and systems and learning. And the more that I did that, I think I started to settle, but I also started to settle into just kind of clarity of
00:38:18
Speaker
Maybe the dissonance between words and actions.
00:38:23
Speaker
of just how easy it is to say one thing and do another, or how easy it is to want to be something, but then not have the capacity, the strength, the vision to figure out how to actually live into a new reality. And so by the time I got to Connecticut, which is where we met, I was in a really deep, deep unraveling,
00:38:51
Speaker
That was, like, years in the making. So now I'm at Yale Divinity School. I'm at Yale. This is kind of the culmination of my great grandmother's illiteracy. Yeah. And now here I am in an Ivy and I have, you know, in my family lineage moved from
00:39:12
Speaker
Roman Catholicism to Protestantism to Evangelicalism and now to this body that's like this is all like white Christianity and like none of it makes sense to me. Like none of it makes sense with my body. Like none of it makes sense with my history. None of it makes sense with my stories and I don't know what to do with this because now I've found myself in an institution that is actually the epitome of like white colonialism and
00:39:39
Speaker
like how how do I make sense of that and the next I was 2016 the next four years were just I just felt pummeled over and over and over and
00:39:54
Speaker
One, because there is a divorce that was happening. And two, because I was having to rethink my ordination. But three, also, I think I was really starting to see myself clearly and the work that I was being called to do, which was actually no longer being embedded in an institution. And so then that totally reorients all of your relationships. Really, it cost me a lot.
00:40:19
Speaker
to step into something that I knew was like really true for me, which was work of accompanying folks that feel that kind of restlessness within systems and folks that are also kind of holding that tension of, you know, the stories that shaped me for me and raised me are in many ways incompatible with like the stories and systems and spiritualities that I like live, work,
00:40:49
Speaker
play and pray it and so what do I do with that?
Spiritual Uncertainty and Faith Exploration
00:40:57
Speaker
So that's my story.
00:41:01
Speaker
So there's something that really struck me. And I suspect that this might dig a little bit deeper into the question of stories being held together like two, I mean, we talk a lot. I remember one of the things, one of the catchphrases of Yale in particular is like learning how to live in the tension.
00:41:27
Speaker
and like not lose yourself in the process. So one of the things that I heard you say, I think, if I want to make sure that I have it right, he talks about not being able to feel God, but still having a very clear sense of the divine. And I would really love to tease out the distinction there. What do you think it is that causes
00:41:51
Speaker
that difference between what God is and what the divine is for you. Yeah. I think I grew up with this idea of, um, I don't know, like that a relationship with God would
00:42:21
Speaker
somehow mean this constant presence or this physicality to God, maybe. Abodiment, incarnation, maybe. Yeah, good words. Good theology words. We weren't using those words. I don't know if we were using those words in my church growing up, but it was more just that God is your friend. I grew up Evangelical, so like Father God,
00:42:50
Speaker
As you're praying like Father God just and so like there was this sense of like personhood maybe to to God and
00:43:04
Speaker
I think I experienced maybe glimpses of that in my life, but that's never really been how I've experienced God. For me, there's been something maybe more disembodied or more transcendent to
00:43:23
Speaker
to my spirituality and so that's I think why when I was a young person I was like I don't think I'm a Christian because I am not experiencing God in these like material like tangible ways that everybody around me is talking about like for me there was there was just mystery and
00:43:50
Speaker
It was not that it wasn't relational, but the relationship was not immediate is the word that's coming to me. It felt more like
00:44:07
Speaker
Yeah, I know that there is a God because I am making ice cream at home with fresh blueberries from the farmer's market and like lavender that I picked from the, you know, like it was just like there was still my heart.
00:44:27
Speaker
I know. There was a step removed, maybe, if that makes sense. It felt like there was something between me and God, but that God was still in this thing that was in between, but was not personified. And so that in many ways expanded how I experienced
00:44:48
Speaker
I think back then, I would have still called it God. And over time, just settling into the divinity and these mundane moments and these mundane experiences, not mundane in that they didn't mean anything, but just that they were like,
00:45:16
Speaker
I don't know. I still don't have words for it. It still just feels very, yeah, ineffable in many ways. Maybe that's the part of it that... Yeah. I mean, at least from my experience of evangelicalism, that so much of what constitutes belief and participating in belief is that there is a right belief
00:45:45
Speaker
And that there have to be specific relationships, perhaps, centered in personhood and in human relationships that need to be there, need to be right, need to be related to in order for that particular flavor of Christian spirituality to work.
00:46:15
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. And I think for me, it was like it never felt like those things were like wrong or bad. It just wasn't my experience. And so it felt really important
00:46:31
Speaker
It still feels really important for me to say if your spirituality requires other forms, I celebrate that. I think what I am always trying to get at is that
00:46:47
Speaker
Similarly to this experience of love, there's just so much more. And that as we continue to move through life and our engagement with both our humanity and with our divinity, and with those around us, both human and non-human alike, land kin, that our conceptions of love and the divine are also always kind of expanding and shifting and changing.
00:47:17
Speaker
I think for folks that in my work that I do with Spirit School, I do a lot of one-on-one coaching. One of the things that comes up a lot is grief. Again, the loss of
00:47:36
Speaker
loving and knowing in certain ways right that as you change like that means that certain relationships can't actually like go with you and that includes relationships to institutions that includes relationships to organizations that includes relationships to communities um and like and really orientations to your own identity so you know if you are like
Creation and Evolution of Spirit School
00:47:59
Speaker
a faith leader and you're in in
00:48:02
Speaker
part of a faith community that no longer is resonating. What does that mean for your identity? That's also tied up in your expanding conceptions of the divine and the source and self. Absolutely. There's so much there.
00:48:26
Speaker
that I suspect we'll probably circle back to, but I want to pivot a little bit and get into Spirit School because I first started hearing about the Genesis of Spirit School from Instagram.
00:48:41
Speaker
And you had this magnificent thing that sort of led into that, that I thought just sort of showed the genesis of like your thinking. That was the sort of totem that kept you consistently sharing with the world through this specific format, your thinking. And that was that you would do, you would do outfit for like outfit of the day posts.
00:49:08
Speaker
And it would be this phenomenal post, long Florida ceiling link mirror. There would just be so much incredible life and vitality in the photo. And then you would get to the couple hundred words or so that just always touches on what you were working on. And so I would love to know
00:49:38
Speaker
what the process is like from working it out in socials to getting to this place of, I mean, a school with modules and curriculum development, and ironically, systems for learning. Yeah, it's funny. Well, I will say that the systems I use are not
00:50:10
Speaker
Well, I love getting dressed. I have so much fun getting dressed. It's one of my spiritual practices. It's one of the ways that I really encounter my own emotions.
00:50:41
Speaker
Yeah, I think this like the playing with like textures and colors and sheets and prints and and at least when I think about dressing myself like proportions and you know just kind of like thinking about like what is what is happening on the inside and how is that going to like
00:51:04
Speaker
do I want to present that out into the world? Knowing that there's for me not a distinction between the stories that I'm telling about myself and the stories that I want to share with the world. It was funny. I don't even remember why I decided to start doing it. I think I just was
00:51:30
Speaker
Oh, I do remember. I remember what happened. I started a new job. I started a new job in an institution that was pretty quickly starting to kind of zap me of my life and energy. And so in a lot of ways, getting dressed was an act of resistance.
00:51:52
Speaker
It was a way for me to kind of sever respectability politics and continue to
00:52:02
Speaker
to choose to be myself in a system that did not expect my body to be in that space when it was conceived up. And so every day I would get dressed, and as time went on, I would get dressed, and I was very angry. I was very anxious. I was very depressed. All these big, big emotions were really starting to move through my body. And what I was putting on
00:52:32
Speaker
There was Arbor in a lot of ways it was this like Like you don't own me. I own myself and I like I Stand in like my autonomy. I stand in myself expression. I stand in like my in my trueness and It was
00:52:56
Speaker
There were moments, especially when a supervisor started following me on my Instagram. And then there was this tension of like, well, what do I keep sharing? Because I did feel like I didn't really feel back in those posts. I was pretty honest about the things that I was processing and moving through, particularly related to that system and institution. And I was like, I cannot stop talking about it just because, but the fear of losing my job was actually always there.
00:53:25
Speaker
the fear of if I speak my truth, will that cost me my stability? Then there was this moment of is my stability worth it if it's going to cost me myself? Is having the salary, is having the benefits, is having the pension, is having all of that actually worth it if I have to compromise who I am and my integrity?
00:53:56
Speaker
Ultimately, the answer was no for me. It was just like, I can't, I cannot do that. It is actually destroying my mental health, my emotional health, my physical health, my spiritual health. It's not worth it. So then what do I do?
00:54:14
Speaker
And that really kind of opened up the space for me to start imagining like, what would I do? If I could do whatever the hell I wanted in this world, what would it be? And it was really scary.
00:54:30
Speaker
because I had no plan. I'd never started a business before and I literally had no idea what I was doing.
00:54:46
Speaker
ended up really, and I still am, and I want to own this piece of my story that I have a lot of support from my parents financially and just emotionally. And so in a lot of ways, I was able to take a risk because I had community around me that was
00:55:06
Speaker
just willing to support a wild idea. I remember just telling my dad, I don't know what I'm doing. And he's just like, that's OK. That's why you do these things. You don't know. You're not going to know for years. It's probably going to take you a few years to make any kind of money to get clarity on your direction. But he's like, if this is the thing that you want to do, I'm going to support you doing it.
00:55:33
Speaker
And so that's a privilege a lot of people don't have as they're kind of embarking in these new things, maybe from blood family. But I think there's always support and encouragement from chosen family and the people that know us and care about us and want to see us flourish. But it does require a certain amount of vulnerability to accept that kind of generosity and support. And so that's been a big learning for me.
00:55:59
Speaker
But anyway, all that to say that even as I, in spirit school, honestly, even in two years has undergone so many iterations. I kind of like went in with an idea of like, okay, it's going to be this like online community and we're like, I'm gonna gather a lot of what spirit school has been, has been me learning about what, like what my strengths are and what
00:56:23
Speaker
what I actually can't offer, not what I like wished I could offer, not what I hope to be able to offer, but what I actually have the capacity for like bringing it to the world, which are actually very different things. And so there was a lot of having to kind of like renegotiate ideas of myself and shedding a lot of like shoulds.
00:56:46
Speaker
and being really comfortable with pivoting and taking a risk and, quote, unquote, failing. And also, I think for me, in particular, is learning my own rhythm. So I am not the kind of person that could work.
00:57:09
Speaker
day in day out like I need a lot of rest and so really for that first year of sphere school like my body was just in like decompress mode and so I was really kind of trying to build something from a place of ease which meant that like there just wasn't a lot of push and I had to like wait for
00:57:32
Speaker
the inspiration to come when it wanted to come. I had to wait for the energy to come when it wanted to come. And that was really scary at times because I was like, how am I going to make money if I am listening to my body?
00:57:47
Speaker
because my body doesn't want to do anything. And so in this capitalist system, that doesn't work. But I also was like, I really trust my body. And that's really around the time that I also discovered human design. And human design is a really body-centered system, even as it's super logical at its core is that our body knows
00:58:10
Speaker
Our body knows its strategy and it knows its authority. And so when we're kind of leaning into trusting those things, like the right movements will happen. And yeah, so now Spirit School is I think less of an actual community. It's a very dispersed community because I actually think the folks that I work with one on one are very connected. And I think there's still room for bringing some of that together down the road. But right now,
00:58:39
Speaker
Spirit School is more like a place for story sharing. And I think that's where I've been moving into this next year. My gift is gathering people. It's not in content creating and it's not in, I don't know, like universalizing. It really isn't in these kind of like individual stories and being able to see the connections that are kind of happening in the collective.
00:59:08
Speaker
And I have this incredible gift of being connected to really amazing people that are engaging in the colonial work in their own context and with their own people and in their own ways. And so I really want Spirit School to be a hub for that kind of story holding.
00:59:29
Speaker
so that people can say, oh, well, you want resources on X, Y, and Z, well, Spirit School's the place to go for that. And it's less of me needing to be the teacher and more of us learning with an alongside one another. And this isn't a hierarchy, right? We don't have folks that are no more the gurus. It's just some of us are a couple of steps further along. And all that means is that we have a little bit more story to share.
00:59:58
Speaker
Um, but that doesn't mean that like our story is better or worse. Like my story is better or worse than anybody else's. It just means that I have, I've been on, I've been on this like journey process that like will be for the rest of my life for a little bit longer than you have. And so I have a little bit more wisdom, but eventually you're going to be on your own journey and you're going to have your own wisdom. And so like, where is, where is the container for that? And that's really what I want Spirit School to be.
01:00:23
Speaker
I'm just hearing you talk about it and there's echoes of Paulo Freer and Pedagogy of the Oppressed. There's echoes of Maslow just thinking about theories of education and knowledge of self. There are so many, as you said, body-centric
01:00:47
Speaker
Here's that theological word, incarnational practices that advise the direction you are taking this work compared to all of the
01:01:08
Speaker
all of the other models of education and of knowing and ways of knowing that you could have chosen.
01:01:18
Speaker
I mean, I don't think any of it was really conscious. I was a psychology major, so you're right, like Maslow, all of those like psychological, young, like all of that's there. I think it's also kind of like it's shown up in different ways and right now I'm
01:01:43
Speaker
spending time thinking about archetypes in different ways and so there's a lot of like Carl Jung that kind of gets pulled out from there, but also Yeah, I don't know it's it's not conscious and I and I think that's I Think for for many of us
01:02:09
Speaker
like being given permission to just like be able to intuit in your creation, that you don't have to like consciously like sift through every single thing you've learned. Like really trusting that like the things that like were meant to land have landed. And so like when you go to create or build, you're pulling at things that are just like already like deeply a part of you.
01:02:39
Speaker
And so someone else may be able to trace that like you just did. But I don't sit down and think, oh, OK, I'm going to pull from polyperia. OK, I'm going to pull from Maslow. But it's there. But it's not because I am trying to make those connections. But I think we're all so interconnected that it just ends up happening regardless.
Organized Religion and Entrepreneurship Lessons
01:02:59
Speaker
We build off of each other. And then we all also put our own individual spin on the gifts that other people have already put out into the world.
01:03:09
Speaker
When you think about the space of spirituality, which has been so central to the work that you've done, and spirituality expressed specifically in the context of perhaps a sense of structured religion that you have so much experience with.
01:03:34
Speaker
structures of religion business like there's that relationship too that I'm sure like we could spend hours talking about but is there something that that structured organized religion can learn from the fluidity and the
01:03:55
Speaker
the volatility of entrepreneurship, or at least is able to learn? I mean, will they choose to learn is probably a different question, but is there something that organized religion could learn? Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, Spirit School is intuitive creation, but it's not
01:04:19
Speaker
individual creation. It is deeply connected to kind of like spirit prodding and kind of spirit urging. And that requires having to posture myself differently in terms of time. That's one thing. I think in terms of certainty, that's another thing. In terms of production, I know there's more,
01:04:47
Speaker
But especially in terms of time, one, that I think time and production are actually really closely intertwined, but that we want things to happen quickly. And when you are
01:05:05
Speaker
building something from the ground up, there's no way of knowing how much time anything is gonna take. I had vast plans from Spirit School that I was like, I will be able to do this in whatever, how many months' time, how many days' time, weeks' time. And really, there are things that I thought about two years ago that I'm like, just now, two years in, starting to say, hello.
01:05:32
Speaker
Okay, I can kind of see it like I don't even see it like I can just kind of see it like I'm even starting to kind of get an outline for the like this form of something and so I Think I've been a person in the past. It's like I need to know like I need like I I need to
01:05:53
Speaker
Well, and I guess certainty is a part of that, right? I need to know now, and I need to be sure. And I can't do something until it's fully formed, fully concrete. And the only way that you come into any kind of certainty is over time. But even over time, that sense of certainty is going to change. So you may have this idea of production, a product,
01:06:20
Speaker
that is completely upended both through time and the knowing that accompanies that. So what does that mean for structured religion?
01:06:34
Speaker
I think one of the things that I see is that a lot of people are wanting to move more towards this fluidity in their spirituality. At the very least, wanting to learn how to fold multiple stories at the same time, multiple systems at the same time. Structured religion can either choose to create space for that or
01:07:01
Speaker
But if it doesn't, I don't know. I think for structured religion, it's commandeered time for centuries. It's oriented the world to its own time. And I personally feel time being unbound in a lot of ways. That's going to be a real struggle for something that has relied on time in certain ways. Structured religion has also necessitated an amount of certainty.
01:07:29
Speaker
in order for there to continue to be like a movement. And I think it's going to need to create space for uncertainty. I think also Christianity in particular has made humans products.
01:07:45
Speaker
you are saved into something, right? Like you then become a means of production for a system to continue to expand across the world. And so can we see humans as not something that are needed in order for something to endure?
01:08:05
Speaker
I don't know. This feels very fuzzy to me and I'm just kind of talking it out. Do I believe this? Do I not believe this? I don't know. I feel like there's something true in there, but I'm not entirely sure. The connection just yet. I don't know if that makes sense.
01:08:22
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, we'll just have to have you back on the show in a year and like see what you've discovered because of that. Well, I just feel like that relationship of all, whether it's organized
01:08:40
Speaker
religion whether it's specifically it's like Christian like Christianity which I suspect is easy for you and I to talk to because like that's that's a religion that both that both of us have practiced over time for most of our lives and Then and then economics like the way that the way that we and specifically to distill that down like the way that we communicate value to each other and because value is so tied up and in in meaning
01:09:09
Speaker
the way that we communicate meeting is a measure of value. And that measure of value as a state of economics becomes somehow intertwined with human, well, I mean, to use an Episcopal term, because that's common to both of us, value becomes intertwined with human dignity.
01:09:33
Speaker
Yeah, I think you got the threads that I was trying to put out there. You're going to weave in them together. I don't know. I don't know. Like that. So TPD on this conversation. This question of.
01:09:49
Speaker
how we find meaning in the place of spirituality in a world that is so defined by money as the tangible expression of relationship, I think is just going to linger with me for some time because we all have to eat.
01:10:10
Speaker
Yeah, I think I am kind of also I had to do a lot of work around the relationship between spirituality and money when I was starting my business Because there was a part of me that was just like this is You know like You like spirituality is something that Belongs to be all like it like it feels maybe it's just cuz like that's how it feels for me, but it just it feels so
01:10:40
Speaker
tender. It feels so... I don't know.
01:10:51
Speaker
is something that has been and continues to be abused. Spiritual authority is something that has caused a lot of harm. How do I provide spiritual support in a way that is
01:11:13
Speaker
ethical and is compassionate and is grounded and that like also recognizes that I'm doing it something really unique and I have like very particular gifts that
01:11:32
Speaker
I do deserve to be compensated for. Maybe the question is of mutual worthiness. Your spirituality is worthy of being held in a certain way, and my spiritual gifts are worthy of being matched in a certain way.
01:11:56
Speaker
My hope is that as the folks that I work with, as our relationship unfolds, then they're empowered to then provide spiritual support in transformed ways as well. And so I think this is the place that requires the most trust for me. And it's still a question of what is ethical spiritual support in a great stage capitalist world?
01:12:24
Speaker
that our structured religion has contributed to the formation of and thus like folks no longer feel like they can trust spiritual spaces and institutions. And so then what does that mean for the work that those of us who are engaging in spiritual work in new ways and ways that are really trying to be like radical and disruptive? Where do we fit into all of that? And I think
01:12:52
Speaker
over time, I think that Spirit School will actually have some of those answers. But right now, it's still in the unfolding, so I don't have too much to say yet. I can't wait to see what that becomes. How
01:13:10
Speaker
Spirit School, to call back one of the words that you used very early on in their conversation, what the container of learning that Spirit School is allows to germinate from the stakeholders
01:13:35
Speaker
the beautiful souls and inspirations that you haven't even met
Vision for Regeneration and Future
01:13:42
Speaker
yet. Okay. I can't wait. Yeah. Me too. I have one final question for you. All right. What do you want the world to look like when you're done with it? Um,
01:14:09
Speaker
I was scrolling on Instagram the other day and I stumbled on this artist. I couldn't even tell you the name of the person, but they had these kind of dystopian, maybe utopian, who knows, photography that is kind of like
01:14:33
Speaker
It was very surreal, but it was photography, but I couldn't tell like what was real or what wasn't, but essentially it was kind of this like, I think it was like LA landscapes, but they were just like covered in overflows. And so there was this like real sense of like land reclaiming, like
01:15:00
Speaker
the harms that humans have caused. I have that image, and at least for me, they're still humans in that picture. We're humans in the picture, but I think about what would it look like for us to really... I hope the world is slowly starting to
01:15:33
Speaker
allow for a re-growth. And that feels like a really big dream just because it would require so many people to let go. And it would require a lot of people to face that creed.
01:15:54
Speaker
And I don't know if we're quite ready as a collective to experience mass grief. I think we were handed opportunities for that in the last few years.
01:16:09
Speaker
are glimpses of the potential for that. I think I'll wrap it up by saying that I think grief is really generative. I think Greece is the place that new dreams and imaginations can grow out of. New ways of loving grow out of that grief just to bring it back full circle. I hope for a world that
01:16:39
Speaker
is maybe in the process of that deep grief. Yeah, maybe I'll say that. Thank you so much for being on the show. Thank you. It was a really special conversation. I appreciate it.
01:16:56
Speaker
My thanks to Erendira Jimenez-Eskinka. You can check out her website at ErendiraJimenez.com. You can check out Spirit School at SpiritSchool.us. And you can listen to her podcast, I Don't Know, everywhere you listen to podcasts. You can follow her and Spirit School on all social media platforms at the links in the episode description.
01:17:21
Speaker
Thank you so much for tuning in to Uncommon Good with Paulie Reese. This program is produced in Southwest Philadelphia on the unceded land of the Lenny Lenape Tribe and the Black Bottom community. If you enjoyed listening to the show, please support us by leaving us a five-star review and a comment and subscribing wherever you listen to podcasts. It really does help people find us.
01:17:42
Speaker
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