Na, the Root Ritualist
Meet me.
I create.
I dream up worlds in my body and offer them in ritual.
I am powered by a practice of pouring love into myself.
I shape a full body yes.
I wallow in the wild and dance with desire.
I am a performance ritualist, erotic educator, and loquacious lover. I am an herbalist, cacao lover, dancer, singer, yogi, conjurer, gleaming glitterbeam, all that. Blackity Black. Queer, twentyfine, mama, and forever a student of Audre Lorde. My artistry is the well through which I conjure my power. I plant futures in my palms in service of people who craft an abundantly free world. I no longer fear my deepest cravings. I am sweetening, softening, slowing, and surrendering. One question I keep returning to is, “am I loving myself in this very moment?” I am in my “embodying the erotic” era.
the erotic root is my ritual medicine practice — and my life’s calling. My medicine is movement, cacao, herbs, yoga, reiki, burlesque, Black feminism, writing, singing, wailing, shaking, massaging, surrendering. It is my walks in the morning, it is my womb holding. It is oiling my crown. It is bathing in Playa Negra. It is swinging my hips and rolling my neck and daring to surrender to all of my desires. I am in this practice. I am in this ritual.
I guide women back home to themselves by awakening, activating, and honoring their erotic power — the life force that ignites pleasure, creativity, intuition, and liberation.
I write to you from Puerto Viejo, on the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica - the place I came to heal and accidentally found home. I arrived in the middle of the pandemic, during heartbreak, burnout, and exhaustion. I thought I was coming here for three months to heal. Within an hour of my arrival, I felt something ancient inside of me exhale. This land reawakened me. It taught me how to slow down, soften, and remember.
Thank you for being witness to me.
I’ve been dancing since I was a little girl, making art in living rooms, on Bed-Stuy Stoops, at the Brooklyn Museum with my mama. On the step team, on the color guard, in my high school dance company. During my transition to college I left my love of dance behind. Dance was always a deep love language, but adulthood and survival pulled me away from my body. I have survived heartbreak, abuse, depression, psychosis, and more, yet years later I’ve returned to my body under the deep healing that this land has to offer.
My grandmother, Shirley Palmer, became the first ancestor I truly felt. Through her, I found ritual. Through ritual, I found myself.
My first performance ritual — “she looks at you” — cracked something open in me. I realized how much grief, memory, and untold stories I carried in my bones. And I realized how erotic power could transform it all.
When I read Audre Lorde’s “Uses of the Erotic: Erotic as Power,” I finally understood what my spirit had been trying to say: The erotic is not frivolous. It is freedom.
That moment began my “reclaiming the erotic” era.
“The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self, and the chaos of our strongest feelings. It is an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire. For having experienced the fullness of this depth of feeling and recognizing its power, in honor and self-respect we can require no less of ourselves.”
— Audre Lorde
Burlesque came next — sensual, sacred, subversive. My debut solo, “Recovering Undercover Overlover,” became a study in why I gave my power away so easily… and how I could finally take it back.
I performed some more.
And then I lived my way into a new self.
I got out of an abusive relationship.
I left the United States and moved to Costa Rica alone.
I found the right medicine protocol for my bipolar disorder.
I survived a heartbreaking abortion.
I terminated the relationships that dimmed my light.
I studied Black feminism, herbalism, reiki, yoga, cacao medicine, and somatics.
I built a nonprofit.
I found secure, tender love.
I birthed a miracle baby.
I became a woman I barely recognized — softer, clearer, wilder, wiser, sovereign.
What I teach is not theory.
It is lived practice.
It is embodied remembrance.
It is erotic power reclaimed.
I understand, with the Combahee River Collective, that our liberation requires addressing the interlocking systems of race, gender, class, and sexuality together - not separately. And I understand, with Audre Lorde, that reclaiming our erotic power - our life force, our creativity, our capacity to feel fully - is essential to that liberation.
This is why my work is both deeply personal and inherently political. When you reclaim pleasure, you refuse powerlessness. When you come home to your body, you practice freedom.
the erotic root is my ritual medicine practice — and my life’s calling. I guide women back home to themselves by awakening, activating, and honoring their erotic power — the life force that ignites pleasure, creativity, intuition, and liberation.
If you are here, it’s because some part of you is ready to remember.
Welcome home.
“The erotic is not a question only of what we do; it is a question of how acutely and fully we can feel in the doing.”
— Audre Lorde