The Time Is Now: Stepping Into Our Collective Cultural Authority
Hello Beautiful Warrior,
If you're new here, we're grateful for your presence.
“When your heart is open to possibilities, you start to notice small things that can lead to enormous discoveries.” -- Dr Masaru Emoto, Renowned Japanese Scientist, Author, The Hidden Messages in Water
As a Cultural Architect and Lead Researcher at KDPM Equity Institute, I'm continually seeking spaces where knowledge can breathe, where research meets lived experience, where discoveries can unfold in community, and where we can practice cultural authority with intention. As part of this community, you play a crucial role in shaping this space. Thank you for your presence. Cultural Communion is where we share Nyansapo Wisdom Knots that braid together ancestral insight, rigorous research, and the daily work of stepping into our dreams and who we are becoming.
For many of us founders, CEOs, creatives, leaders, bold dreamers and visionaries, it's rare to find spaces where we can explore our work with ease, curiosity and support in practice with community. Spaces where we can learn, rest, wander, imagine, and build alongside others without needing to have all the answers.
This is why I'm sketching the beginnings of my first Dream Big Creative Residency. There is no blueprint. I'm letting myself build it as I go. What I do know is this: the Caribbean is part of the story. The land. The ancestors. The memory. This residency is how I'm researching, leading, and preparing for our boldest dream yet: the KDPM Purple Paper Series. November is a month of harvest, gratitude, and returning home to ourselves, to our purpose work, and to our collective cultural authority. It reminds us that our essence is not something we brand; it is something we build, tend to, protect, and live.
“Sometimes I wish I could photosynthesize so that just by being, just by shimmering at the meadow's edge or floating lazily on a pond, I could be doing the work of the world while standing silent in the sun.” - Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants
This is Part I of our November series: Becoming Cultural Architects, New Words to Create New Worlds:
“When your heart is open to possibilities, you start to notice small things that can lead to enormous discoveries.” -- Dr Masaru Emoto, Renowned Japanese Scientist, Author, The Hidden Messages in Water
Part I: The Vibrational Architecture of Belonging
Why words matter and how they shape our reality through neuroscience, water memory, and ancestral wisdom.
Part II: The Columbus Effect of Branding (Coming Soon)
How colonial language restricts our brilliance, and how we reclaim narrative power through emotional and cultural Intelligence.
Part III: Building Cultural Houses as Acts of Authority and Self-Trust (Coming Soon)
Homecoming as a practice. Sovereignty as architecture. The mini homes we build within ourselves.
This series weaves ancestral knowledge, neuroscience, emotional Intelligence, and cultural leadership into a living framework, inviting you to design and inhabit your own path into cultural authority.
New words create new worlds.
Are you ready to begin your journey?
Welcome home.
The Vibrational Architecture of Belonging
On Ancestors and Ancestry: The Origin Story of This Work
“Even a wounded world is feeding us. Even a wounded world holds us, giving us moments of wonder and joy. I choose joy over despair. Not because I have my head in the sand, but because joy is what the earth gives me daily and I must return the gift.” - Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants
Everything we inherit on this Earth has its own vibrational frequency, including the word 'ancestor'. When you hear the phrase ancestor, what vibrations does your body remember? Is it fear, confusion or avoidance?
"Ancestor" comes from the Latin antecessor, "the one who goes before," from ante (before) and cedere (to go, to walk). The term enters English through Old French ancestre. It originally meant a foregoer, a path-opener, one whose steps make your steps possible. Sources: Oxford English Dictionary; Harper, Online Etymology Dictionary.
Before we journey into vibration, language, and cultural houses, I want to share what I've learned about ancestors and ancestry. When I first heard the term and phrase, I felt fear, then got curious about it by exploring how I knew about this concept, who taught me, and whose voice was vilified or celebrated in that learning.
Like many of you, most of what I had learned was from a Eurocentric perspective, leaving me culturally malnourished and leading me to seek sources that offered both lived expertise and cultural wisdom.
Here's what I learned.
When I speak of ancestors, I'm not speaking of distant, abstract figures. I'm speaking of living wisdom carried in our bodies, in our knowing, in our inherited ways of being that science is only now beginning to understand as epigenetics, somatic memory, and intergenerational transmission.
Ancestry is not just who came before us. It's the Cultural Intelligence encoded in our cells, the rhythms we recognize without explanation, the knowing that arrives before language can name it. It's the reason certain songs make us weep, certain foods feel like homecoming, certain practices feel like remembering rather than learning—and why some skills, knowledge, or wisdom feel like déjà vu, like "I've been here before."
This is why I believe that vision, or what we can dream or what we are passionate about, is an answered prayer we uncover through ritual and practice.
Our ancestors didn't just pass down stories. They passed down somatic cultural knowledge, wisdom held in the body, in gesture, in breath, in the way we move through the world. This series honours that transmission. Everything I share here has been whispered, sung, danced, and dreamed into being by those who came before and by the land itself.
Culture is Endemic Wisdom
“The land knows you, even when you are lost.” - Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants
Culture is how we make meaning of the world. It is our collective memory, wisdom, and way of knowing that roots and mirrors our belonging. So what happens to a soul when access to indigenous wisdom, oral traditions, and our original technologies of belonging are limited, or shadowbanned?
What happens to humanity's collective soul when entire groups are redlined from their cultural knowledge systems, or penalized for expressing them?
What happens when we treat endemic cultural brilliance the way colonizers treated endemic species expendable, replaceable, or, worse, as resources to extract and rebrand?
These are the questions and conversations that matter, keeping me up at night. My birth country, Iouanalao Hewanorra, is home to an endemic species: the St. Lucia whiptail, as well as other iguana species found nowhere else on Earth. Endemic means native to a specific place, evolved uniquely to that ecosystem, irreplaceable if lost.
Two Indigenous peoples, the Lokono (Arawak) and Kalinago, named this island after the same creature:
Iouanalao (Lokono/Arawak): "Land of the Iguanas"
Hewanorra (Kalinago): "There where the iguanas are found"
Two people. Two languages. Same sacred recognition.
When two different cultures name the same land after the same creature, that's not a coincidence. The iguana taught me something essential: endemic wisdom can't be replicated elsewhere. Just as you cannot transplant a St. Lucian iguana to another island and expect it to thrive with the same vitality, you cannot strip cultural knowledge from its roots and expect it to maintain its power.
Our cultural brilliance is endemic. It evolved in specific soils, under specific stars, through specific struggles, tended by our people and celebrations. It carries the frequencies of the land that raised us, the languages that named us, the ancestors who dreamed us into being.
Your somatic cultural knowledge, the wisdom your body knows, the wisdom your heart knows before your mind can name it is endemic to you. This knowing is proof of your Cultural Authority. It cannot be branded, franchised, or made "scalable" without losing its essential nature.
And like endemic species, endemic cultural wisdom requires protection, preservation, and the right conditions to thrive.
The iguana taught me that vibrational architecture must match endemic wisdom; you cannot force St.Lucian or Caribbean brilliance into colonial structures any more than you can force an iguana to thrive in the wrong ecosystem.
Why Words Matter: Vibrational Architecture Begins with Sound
“When a language dies, so much more than words are lost. Language is the dwelling place of ideas that do not exist anywhere else. It is a prism through which to see the world. Tom says that even words as basic as numbers are imbued with layers of meaning. The numbers we use to count plants in the sweetgrass meadow also recall the Creation Story. Én:ska—one. This word invokes the fall of Skywoman from the world above. All alone, én:ska, she fell toward the earth. But she was not alone, for in her womb a second life was growing. Tékeni—there were two. Skywoman gave birth to a daughter, who bore twin sons and so then there were three—áhsen. Every time the Haudenosaunee count to three in their own language, they reaffirm their bond to Creation.” - Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants
The wisdom of Dr Robin Wall Kimmerer led me down several rabbit holes into the wisdom of water.
I've been digesting both the brilliance of Indigenous scholar Dr Robin Wall Kimmerer and Japanese scientist Dr Masaru Emoto's The Hidden Messages in Water, and it has shifted not just my personal narrative but also the words I use to describe myself, navigate the world, our work, and our cultural expressions.
Masaru Emoto's The Hidden Messages in Water reminds us that "words have their individual and unique vibrational frequencies, and words have energy that influences the universe." ¹
Emoto's research revealed what our ancestors always knew: everything is vibration, and vibration creates form.
The Water Experiment acknowledges the vibrational power of language to shape reality, to heal or to harm. This understanding lives in our bodies as cultural memory, even when colonization tried to erase it from our minds. This is the vibrational architecture our ancestors knew: words create worlds.
That vibe you felt off about that space, person, or situation? This is your somatic cultural knowledge speaking, the inherited wisdom in your body that knows what your mind hasn't yet named. This is why the words we communicate with ourselves and each other literally shift and shape reality. And this is why the language we use to describe our endemic cultural brilliance matters profoundly. This is Cultural Authority in practice.
From Homage to Homecoming: The Intelligence of Surrender
When I surrendered to the Intelligence of all living beings, to nature, and to Black, African, Caribbean, and Indigenous women scholars, books, and research, both living and ancestral, everything shifted. My self-image shed like iguana skin. My identity transformed. And the cultural houses I was building evolved beyond what I could imagine. For years, I had paid homage to St. Lucia, acknowledging her from a respectful distance, referencing her beauty, her history, and our people. But homage still positions you as an outsider, a witness rather than a co-creator. Surrendering invited a different practice.
Surrender meant letting St. Lucia's full wisdom,her Lokono and Kalinago roots, her endemic species, her volcanic soil, her hurricane seasons, the land, the light and the people move through me rather than being about me. The wisdom from being a bush girl? That's Bush Girl Epistemology—epistemology means "a way of knowing." It's the wisdom of being born in what back then was called in the middle of nowhere, literally in the middle of the bush, within the crevice of a mountain, crossing a river to climb the hill to the main road to walk to school.
I had the honour of being born in Banse, La Haut, La Grace, and Laborie. I was born, held from and with the many rivers, the many mangoes, guavas, oranges, coconuts, and bananas, as well as breadfruit and the numerous other villages I had the joy of being immersed within,and feel grateful to call home for the first twenty-five years of my life. This knowledge, what I call Bush Girl Epietemology, comes from living close to the land, from tending to it, from washing your clothes and bathing in the river, from catching crayfish, doing your homework and reading by candlelight and kerosene lamp, from being, eating, grieving in and with community, and from the teachings of elders and the revelations of the Earth.
The wisdom from being a bush girl? That's Bush Girl Epistemology—epistemology means "a way of knowing." It's the wisdom of being born in what back then was called in the middle of nowhere, literally in the middle of the bush.
This knowledge, the iguana I never saw, and learning through somatic wisdom today didn’t just teach me metaphors; she taught me the essence of being and how to surrender to our endemic wisdom. To be chosen for one’s cultural purpose, to be fully engaged in my work. The Success System I designed, rooted in this wisdom and our many peaks, which were once perceived as an external framework, has now become my inner home.
I discovered a deeper essence of St. Lucia through the vibrational resonance of her Indigenous names, Iouanalao and Hewanorra, which had anchored within me. I was no longer constructing something separate from my cultural roots. I was letting my roots reawaken and rearchitect me—re (again) + arch (origin, first principle) + tect (builder). To be rearchitected by your roots is to be rebuilt from your origin, by your first principle, through what was always endemic within you, the land that chose you and all assigned to you from generations before.
Robin Wall Kimmerer writes in Braiding Sweetgrass about the Anishinaabe word puhpowee, the force that pushes mushrooms up from the Earth overnight. She reminds us that in some Native languages, the term for plants translates to "those who take care of us." This knowing, this cultural potency, lives within us. When we surrender to its presence, it becomes the cure for our unavoidable self-cultural abandonment. We move from borrowed soil to a culturally nourished self, where cultural authorship blooms not from construction but from emergence. Not forced, but puhpowee.
This remembering changed everything: how I write, teach, create, lead, and build. Dreaming Bigger took on new meaning in every season. The bigger the battle, the bigger the dream. Where I once asked "How do I brand my skills?", I now ask "How can I honour this wisdom's puhpowee,through what rituals, what practices, what tending?" I still systematize, but differently now. Through our partnerships and communities of practice, like The SIistertalk Group Collective, we build ecosystems designed for trust and rest, for stewardship and cultural perpetuity. If we are the global majority, how do we build systems that share best practices and knowledge, not hoard them? Where systems of collaboration support emergence, not just efficiency?
Building towards a practice of cultural authority
The shift from "How do I brand my skills?" to "How can I honour this wisdom's puhpowee?" reveals something deeper: something we've normalized, be it personal or professional, what I call cultural abandonment.
Cultural abandonment, which I define as a form of institutional betrayal, even when unconscious, especially when survival required it, leaves us psychologically exhausted, building on porous soil, a sinking sand, and if you will, treating our endemic knowledge as supplementary, our scholarships as secondary, our ancestral wisdom as optional. This further depletes our inherent heritage advantage, loops us in a personal and relational betrayal and gaslighting loops that keep us from owning our Cultural Authority. This is why I don't use the term "Impostor Syndrome": it is way deeper than that.
Authority through Authorship surrenders to what wants to emerge through your being, creative expression, purpose, position, your specific lineage, land, and lived experience. It restores what abandonment depleted. It returns us to the cultural soil that was always ours.
Naming Cultural Abandonment nourished my soil. This surrender didn't just change my work, it changed the vibrational architecture of how I exist in this world and through my practice.
The Vibrational Architecture of Belonging
Now we understand three essential truths:
First: Words carry vibration that literally shapes the water in our bodies and the reality around us. This isn't a metaphor; it's measurable science that confirms what Emoto documented, what kotodama teaches, and what our ancestors have always known.
Second: Cultural brilliance is endemic; it begins within and evolves in specific ecosystems and cannot be transplanted without losing its essential nature. The iguana showed us this. Our own bodies know this. Have you had bush tea with your 'endemic cultural brilliance?
Third: Surrender allows us to build from multicultural frequency rather than borrowed frameworks, words or ways of knowing. When we stop paying homage from outside and allow wisdom to move through us, we shift from cultural adaptation to cultural authorship. We embody cultural authority.
So what does it mean to build cultural houses with vibrational architecture that honours all three truths?
It means choosing, curating, and creating words that create symmetry rather than fracture.
It means protecting the endemic nature of our cultural brilliance rather than forcing it into colonial frameworks that demand we be "scalable," "consistent," or "marketable."
It means building from frequencies that belong to traditions of wisdom rather than traditions of ownership.
When I say I'm building cultural houses instead of brands, I'm not just choosing a different language. I'm choosing a different vibrational architecture for my life and work, one that honours the endemic nature of my cultural brilliance and creates space for others to do the same.
The work of Masaru Emoto reminds us: "Love and gratitude" are the words that must serve as the guide for the world. These are the words, and therefore the frequencies I want forming the crystals of water in my body, in my work, and in my legacy.
Huts & Houses as Living Cultural Architecture
This understanding transformed my work entirely. Here's what it looks like when you choose vibrational architecture over branding and honour the endemic nature of your creative capital and cultural brilliance. Each house is built on a foundation of vibrational architecture where wisdom informs structure, where frequency determines form, where the words we use create the worlds we inhabit.
Each hut and house exists in a constant state of evolution — shaped by vibrational architecture that honours how our people have always built: with intention, with relationship to land, and with frequencies that protect, nourish, and guide. This architecture informs our:
Foundations/Ground
Ancestral wisdom, Indigenous knowledge systems, clay-and-earth memory, breath of the land, and lived experience the ground, the soil our feet recognize and remember.
Walls / Wattle & Weave
Not just walls, but woven boundaries, like wattle, bamboo, palm, or timber that protect without closing us off. They filter frequencies: letting in what nourishes, keeping out what disturbs.
Circular Frames (the Hut’s Body)
The architecture of the round hut that allows energy to move, sound to travel, and wisdom to circulate. No sharp corners everything returns, integrates, and flows.
Doors, Arches & Thresholds
Intentional openings for those who honour the space. Thresholds that require a shift in frequency before entering a pause, a breath, a recognition.
Windows / Openings to Light
Spaces that invite vision, transparency, air, and illumination.
Designed not only to see out, but to allow what wants to emerge to be witnessed.
Inner Rooms / Chambers
Specialized spaces for different needs rest, creativity, ritual, learning each with its own resonance, just like rooms in both huts and houses evolve with purpose.
Hearth, Fire Pit & Kitchen
Whether the central fire of a hut or the modern kitchen this is where nourishment is created and shared. It carries the frequency of sustenance, reciprocity, and community gathering.
Altars / Sacred Cloth / Shrine Corners
Spaces where the sacred is honoured, the highest frequencies tended, remembered, and renewed.
Courtyard, Yard, and Garden Spaces
Where we plant what must grow for future generations, imagination, creative rest, herbs, stories, seeds, possibilities and fields of regeneration.
Cultural Authority as a Living Home
This is what cultural authority looks like in practice: a living, breathing ecosystem of wisdom, mirrored belonging, and Integrated Intelligence built through vibrational architecture that honours our endemic brilliance and the ancestral ways our people have always embodied.
Just as the endemic iguana of St. Lucia (which I still haven’t seen) once thrived within its own specific ecosystem before colonial disruption altered its natural conditions, our Cultural huts and houses we build within and externally honour the cultural ecologies from the soils, the winds, the waters, the ancestors from which they emerged, from you who shaped and styled them with every breath you take.
You are your living home. You build worlds with your words. You shift narratives with your presence. You are the living word.
And through your essence, your words, how you dance through the world, you create spaciousness for others to build their own endemic expressions of cultural authority, shaped by their lands, their elders, their particular ways of home-making.
You are a cultural authority. You are its living home.
The Vibrational Architecture of Your Becoming
This is vibrational architecture: choosing the words, structures, and frequencies that create coherence, not fracture, in the water of our bodies and in the worlds we are building.
This is endemic wisdom: honouring that your cultural brilliance evolved in specific soils, under specific stars, through specific rituals, migrations, struggles, and celebrations and that it cannot be replicated, copied, or transplanted without losing its soul. Bush Girl Epistemology is real.
This is cultural authorship: surrendering to what wants to emerge through your being, purpose, position, lineage, land, and lived experience building from multicultural frequency rather than borrowed frameworks, colonial language, or externally imposed blueprints.
When we understand these truths together, we stop asking:
"How do I brand myself?"
And we start asking:
"What is the vibrational architecture of my becoming?"
We stop forcing our endemic wisdom into colonial containers and begin building cultural huts and houses that honour the specific frequencies of our brilliance, circular when they need to be, woven when they need to be, grounded when they need to be.
We remember that love, gratitude, and clarity are ultimate frequencies the vibrational materials that must guide not just our work, but our worlds.
#ConversationsThatMatter
What words are you using to describe yourself and your work?
What is your endemic cultural brilliance, the wisdom that can only come through you, from your specific lineage, land, and lived experience?
What is the vibrational architecture of your becoming? If you were to build a cultural hut or house instead of a brand:
– Who/what would be in or on your foundation?
– What frequencies would you protect behind your woven walls?
– Which ancestors would you honour at your altar?
– What nourishment would you cook in your hearth?
– What are you planting in your garden for future generations?
This is Part I of the November 2025 Cultural Communion series. Part II “The Columbus Effect of Branding” explores how colonial language restricts our brilliance and how we reclaim narrative power through emotional and cultural intelligence.
