OCEAN | E-Bulletin

Reflection. Remembrance. Return.

The bulletin ‘Ocean’ has arrived… taking it’s first gentle ripples into the world.

It is bringing a rhythm and a tide which carries memory, reflection, ritual and ancestral presence direct to your inbox with care.

You’ve arrived at a space shaped by collective grief and the longing to return to ancestral ways. There is a quiet knowing that ancestral connection brings healing - healing that doesn’t come in noise, but in deep listening. So listen to your inner voice for guidance and wisdom as this bulletin quietly flows through, once a month, with offerings from the Decolonise Your Life body of work. This space will share:

• Reflections, rituals, recipes from people decolonising their lives, warmly named “decolonisers”

• Extracts from the Decolonise Your Life series of online guides; the first guide is called ‘Decolonise Your Kitchen’

• Decolonisers’ stories from the Living Archive

• Also from the Archive, a taste of ancestral food and wellness practices

• And finally, Letters Around the Fire: these are letters from decolonisers asking questions about life as they walk their own journey of remembrance and repair

This first Issue marks a sacred beginning — a gathering of everything that’s been whispered into form over the past months. Read with intention and… listen deeply.

Greetings, I am so glad you are here, I hope you will find this bulletin helpful, informative and nourishing. I have had many busy months creating Decolonise Your Life… checking and double checking and in some cases triple checking that everything is in place to launch and birth this offering.

The launch of the website is linked to the launch of the first Practical Guide in the Decolonise Your Life series of guides, it is called “Decolonise Your Kitchen”.

When a reader accesses this guide, they are taken on a personal journey of discovery, one step at a time, gently guided into the ecosystem of Decolonise Your Life and all it has to offer.

There are two distinct pathways into Decolonise Your Life, one is for the Black diaspora and one for the wider Community.

This is not about exclusion — it is necessary to create the foundations for healing the different lineages. In this way no one is silenced and no one is asked to translate their pain in order to be heard.

What is this work about?

When I first put pen to paper many months ago to shape this work, I didn’t know what the end result would be. For more than three years I had been telling myself that my work needed to change and I should be offering something that was more aligned to my growing ancestral knowledge.

I just didn’t know what that looked like. I never knew what shape my work needed to take. All I knew was that, I was being called to transition from counselling, therapy and theatre to something more ancestral. And I had to trust, that although I was unclear about how, those guiding me knew that the transition could and would become a reality.

The rhythm of my life in the UK was making me ill, that needed to change.

The foods I chose to eat matched the pace of life… fast. Or the foods were genetically modified; plastic rice and vegetables (literally) and waxed seedless fruit, my whole lifestyle was not working for me any more.

My search for ancestral meaning in my life, led me to listen more inwardly, and over time, I understood the calling.

Wise Elders and Ancestral Support

Over the past year, Decolonise Your Life, has found form and gathered inspiration and guidance from wise Elders and Ancestors in the UK, USA, South Africa and Jamaica. They helped me to make sense of what I was to do, I wasn’t sure what I was creating, I just LISTENED, trusted and wrote. Even when the inspiration seemed confusing and impossible, way off the charts, I didn’t question what I was hearing, dreaming or feeling, I just kept building the foundation and here we are today.

I say this to encourage you to LISTEN to your inner voice and those people in your life you consider wise Elders. These people often turn up in our lives unexpectedly. They are there for a reason. In life, we don’t always know the end of a thing. But guidance and inspiration can be found around us, if we just slow down and listen. If we push through fears and doubts, procrastinations and discouragement from those around us we will not be guided wrong. Even if what we are doing makes no sense at all, trust that your ancestors know the sense and have your back.

If you decide to decolonise your life to whatever level suits you, trust it, trust that it is what you are being called to do. You don’t need to know the end of that journey. And even if you begin a journey that leads to nowhere, there will be a lesson in that for you too. No life experience is a wasted experience.

So, as we gather together, here, through this bulletin, may you find something within it that helps you listen inwardly - and outwardly - with the heart of an Elder and the patience of the sea. I hope you decide to journey with the Guides and the website and find your own wisdom and pace to decolonise your life.

Until the next Issue, may the ancestors guide your path.

With love,
Lyala

There is a silence beneath the Ocean waves…

Not an empty silence.

But a silence full of memory.

Full of names.

Full of longing.

This ocean I speak of is not just a body of water… it is alive, with rhythm and memory. It is the space between who we were, back then, before the interruption of life through the middle passage and colonisation and who we are becoming now as we reach out for ancestral wisdom.

It is the grief that carried our ancestors across a vastness to lands unknown, and the healing that calls us back today, calls us back to who we are.

Let this bulletin arrive like tidewater - gentle, rhythmic, steady.
Listen for the messages from the deep. Listen within.

THE PRACTICAL GUIDES

The first guide, in the Decolonise Your Life Series is called Decolonise Your Kitchen. It was quietly launched in July 2025. Decolonise Your Home, will be the next guide. Look out for details in the next copy of Ocean.

THE LIVING ARCHIVE

The Living Archive is called ‘living’ because it continues to grow from the contributions of decolonisers from the Black Diaspora. There are decolonisation stories, recipes, photos and spirit led reflections inspiring others to decolonise their lives.

Each month I will share offerings from the archive with reflections for you to take away. Below is the first offering… A tender fragment, of a lived story from someone who found their way back to ancestral eating after years of survival-mode eating… and a few questions for you to reflect on.

• Offering From the Living Archive:

  “...Decolonising my life didn’t happen in one big awakening. It happened in the kitchen. It happened when I realised I didn’t want to perform wellness — I wanted to be well. I didn’t know I was hungry for my own culture...”

  🌿 What does it mean to “perform wellness”?

  This decoloniser speaks of performing wellness. This happens when we enact the appearance of being well, often for others or for social expectation, rather than truly feeling or embodying wellness.

  It might look like:

  • Posting green juices and yoga poses while feeling emotionally exhausted and not being involved in making green juices or doing yoga

  • Saying “I’m fine” when you're not, because vulnerability feels unsafe

  • Doing rituals for display, rather than for spiritual alignment

  It’s often tied to respectability, or survival - performing wellness to stay accepted, liked or in control. We can all fall into this trap.

  ✨ In contrast, being well means:

  • Choosing what your body and spirit actually need

  • Honouring rest, boundaries, slowness

  • Letting wellness be what it is for you, looking messy, quiet, personal or ancestral

  • Reconnecting to what feels like home, not what looks like health

  

  ✨ Reflection Questions: Transition & Return

1. Where in your life have you been performing wellness rather than truly feeling well?
   What might shift if you chose nourishment over image?

2. What does ‘being well’ feel like in your body, outside of anyone else’s definitions?
   Can you remember a moment you felt genuinely whole?

3. What are you hungry for that you haven’t named yet?
   Not just food — but memory, connection, permission?

   If you feel called to, you can share your thoughts in the comments section of this site. Hearing from readers is always a blessing. Thank you.

   **Please read the note about comments at the end of this bulletin.

This month’s chosen letter came from a woman who found her spirituality had been awakened through yoga. She lives with her mother who does not welcome ancestral practice. This decoloniser received a heartfelt response from the Elder and a ritual offering to free her voice from silence.

The ritual offering is shared with you below.

• Find a small bowl.

• Each night, whisper one sentence you are afraid to say out loud.

• Cover the bowl with a cloth or leaf.

• In the morning, pour the silence into the earth or into water (e.g. river, ocean).

• Do this for 7 nights.

  Let your breath begin the unbinding of your silence.

If you find that you are carrying something that needs release, the Whisper Bowl ritual may support you. It is helpful in situations where:

• You may need to let go of a name, a fear, a story, a role that no longer belongs to you

• You may need to whisper what you’ve never spoken aloud — it may be carrying shame, desire, regret, love, guilt, anger, fear

Offer it up to the ancestors… to Spirit in a whisper. And in that whisper — you are naming and releasing the situation, creating space for something new. Any space created must be filled, we don’t leave it empty. So after completing the ritual, you fill the space with something more aligned to who you are or who you want to be - just name it, to yourself, what do you want to fill the space with?

A ritual is not just symbolic. It is spiritual.
Something shifts when we place our pain, our longing, or our prayer in a vessel — and let it go with our breath, with our words… in a whisper.

Mucus-Release Immune Support Tea
A warm, ancestral blend of ginger, thyme and lemon - Clearing. Calming. Connecting.

This tea is a reminder that ancestral healing can begin in the body.

This herbal tea blends fire (spices) with roots and leaves to support the body's natural clearing process, stimulate circulation, and honour the tradition of using simple earth-grown medicine for resilience.

Ingredients:

- 1 thumb of fresh ginger (sliced)

- 1/2 tsp cayenne pepper (adjust to tolerance)

- 1 small stick of cinnamon or 1/2 tsp ground cinnamon

- 1 sprig fresh thyme or 1/2 tsp dried thyme

- Juice of 1/2 lemon

- Raw honey to taste (optional)

- 2 cups warm water

Preparation:

- Bring water to a gentle simmer.

- Add ginger, cinnamon, thyme, and cayenne to the water.

- Allow to steep for 10 minutes, covered.

- Strain, add lemon juice and raw honey if desired.

Sip slowly, allowing the warmth to move through you.

Submissions are not received for creating content on the Decolonise Your Life site, so sadly all submissions cannot be used.

But every submission, donation and recipe received this month - was held in ceremony. Thank you for your generosity.

Until the tide returns next month,
may you walk gently, and
may the ancestors walk with you.

If this space has stirred something in you — if you've felt remembered or returned to, in some small way — you are invited to give in reciprocity… a sacred exchange.

To support the work click below

[May Your Generosity Be a Blessing On Your Lineage]

ABOUT DECOLONISE YOUR LIFE

Colonisation didn’t just take land — it reshaped how we see ourselves, how we nourish our bodies, how we connect to our ancestors, how we live, love and heal. Decolonise Your Life is offering to take you on a journey to decolonise your life.

If you know of someone that would be interested in this subject. Please Share.

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