Decolonization gets invoked constantly in spiritual spaces. It appears in workshop descriptions, Instagram bios and Substack headers — deployed as a signal of alignment rather than a commitment to change. The word has accumulated so much rhetorical weight that it has started to collapse under it.
So let’s make it structural.
Decolonization is not a feeling, a vibe or a phase of personal growth you pass through on the way to something else. In the context of spiritual practice, it is an ongoing process with specific demands — demands that can be organized into three distinct pillars. These pillars are not sequential steps so much as simultaneously operating commitments. You don’t complete one and move to the next. You hold all three.
Here is what that actually looks like.
Pillar One: Restoration
Restoration is the scholastic work — the unglamorous, time-intensive project of uncovering what colonialism buried, suppressed or stole outright.
Colonial powers understood that the most effective way to subjugate a people was to attack their cosmology. Manuscripts were burned. Ceremonies were criminalized. Sacred sites were renamed, repurposed or destroyed. What survived often survived in fragments — in codices hidden from the Inquisition, in oral traditions passed underground, in the memory of communities who paid an enormous price to preserve what they could.
Restoration means going after those fragments with rigor and respect. It means engaging seriously with primary sources — the Maya Codices, temple inscriptions, archaeological records and the scholarship produced in ethical collaboration with living indigenous communities. It means visiting museums not as a tourist but as an investigator, reading ceramic traditions and iconographic programs as the theological documents they are. It means taking folklore seriously as spiritual literature rather than dismissing it as pre-scientific superstition.
This work is not romantic. It is slow, often frustrating and requires significant tolerance for uncertainty — because many of what was destroyed cannot be fully recovered. But the partial recovery is still recovery. And every fragment reclaimed is a direct counter to the colonial project that tried to erase it.
Restoration is also fundamentally an act of magical reclamation. What you uncover doesn’t just fill historical gaps — it expands the cosmological framework available to practitioners, enriching the magical worldview rather than diminishing it.
Pillar Two: Accountability
Accountability is where most people stop. It is also where the work gets most uncomfortable — because it requires looking honestly at who profits from spiritual traditions and who gets erased in the process.
The commodification of indigenous practice is not a fringe problem. It is structural. Non-indigenous practitioners have built significant platforms and revenue streams on traditions they accessed without lineage, without permission and without redirecting resources back to the communities those traditions belong to. This is the $1111 @Ngel nUmBURz workshop problem — charging premium prices for access to knowledge that belongs to peoples who have never seen that money.
But accountability here requires nuance, not a blunt instrument. There is a meaningful distinction between a non-indigenous practitioner profiting from appropriated tradition and an indigenous elder who commodifies elements of their own practice out of economic necessity — to sustain their community, fund cultural preservation or simply survive within an economic system imposed on them by the same colonial forces that disrupted their tradition in the first place. These are not equivalent situations and collapsing them produces bad analysis.
What accountability demands is honest examination of the specific dynamics in play. Who holds authority in this space? Who is being credited and who is being erased? Who is profiting and who is being extracted from? These are not rhetorical questions. They have concrete answers that require concrete responses — citation, compensation, platform redistribution and the willingness to displace yourself from positions of authority you haven’t earned.
Pillar Three: Reconstruction
Reconstruction is the creative dimension of decolonization — and it is the most frequently misunderstood.
Reconstruction does not mean recreation. The pre-colonial past is not fully recoverable and the attempt to perform an imagined pristine antiquity is its own form of distortion — a different kind of fabrication from the New Age inventions it seeks to replace, but a fabrication nonetheless. The goal of reconstruction is not to freeze tradition in amber. It is to build living practice that is genuinely rooted in historical and cultural reality while remaining functional in the present.
That means adopting rituals informed by rigorous restoration work, adapted for contemporary relevance without sacrificing their internal logic. It means incorporating modern knowledge where it genuinely illuminates rather than dilutes. It means building spiritual frameworks expansive enough to hold both ancient cosmological architecture and the conditions under which practitioners actually live today.
Critically, reconstruction only works when the first two pillars are already load-bearing. Practice built without restoration is built on guesswork and fantasy. Practice built without accountability reproduces the extractive dynamics it claims to oppose. Reconstruction is the synthesis — but it cannot substitute for the foundation.
A Call for Meaningful Change
The forces of colonialism have not disappeared. They have evolved — from military occupation to economic dominance, from missionary religion to the emergent framework of technocratic authoritarianism, where control over information, attention and reality itself is increasingly concentrated in the hands of those who have never demonstrated any accountability to the communities they affect.
Decolonization with genuine intention and rigorous standards is not a defensive posture. It is an offensive one. Communities that do this work develop spiritual frameworks with actual structural integrity — practices that hold under pressure because they are rooted in something real, led by distributed authority rather than charismatic extraction for the gram and oriented toward genuine transformation rather than the performance of it.
The three pillars — Restoration, Accountability, Reconstruction — are not a checklist. They are a sustained commitment. The work is generational. But it begins now, with the practitioners willing to hold the standard.
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