However, there is one gem that even surprised me. In fact, as it left my mouth I said out loud, “I think that one was for me.”

I grew up believing I could protect myself from bad things by being a “good” person. Some of the traits of a good person in my youthful view were not getting angry, keeping the peace, not being a burden, and not ruffling any feathers.

As a result I have spent most of my life perfecting deescalation and people managing by hiding my true feelings and needs. Hiding, in general.

My young mind hadn’t yet matured to understand that the reasons people harm people are far more complex. I would learn much later in life through varied forms of grief and pain that it is often the nicest people, who suffer in silence the most.

But there’s more to this revelation about hiding. There’s a deeper truth I was afraid to say out loud, afraid that it would make me a target of others’ envy or disdain.

Inherently, I knew I was meant to be in the light. I knew I was meant to be centered and highly visible. Instinctively, I knew this meant I would have a lot of enemies.

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Ifa teaches us that enemies are not simply people who outwardly express dislike towards you. More often than not your enemy is close by. Specifically they are called enemies of progress; people who cannot selflessly witness your joy. We feel them around us everyday, but we don’t want to admit what we know. These are people we outgrew a long time ago, but keep around based on nostalgia. These are people who respond to our joy with stories about their misery. These are people who plant doubt into our ideas and secretly…well let’s be honest…feel intimidated by our successes.

Yes, they can and often are family members, spouses, besties, and parents.

When we shrink and hide, we cast a shadow over our lives that is so wide, our enemies cannot be distinguished from our own fears and insecurities.

When we step into the light and into our full power, all faces are visible, all intentions are revealed.

I have never been safer than I am now. I have the same number of enemies I have always had, only now, I can see them clearly.

And they can see me.

I pray joy brings light, safety, and power into your life, and that we no longer create safe space for those who would impede our progress.

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When I arrived here four and a half years ago, I was wildly depleted. I had reached a point in my life and marriage where I’d surrendered to circumstances that I found myself unable to change or escape. I was on a path of numbing to survive.

The opportunity to visit Egypt felt like an opportunity to say YES to something—anything—that could feed me. It was a chance to get away, to escape, and to feel temporary relief, all while learning something new and interesting. I had no idea the Red Sea was calling me. I had no idea the concepts I would learn and explore over the next few years were about myself, not this ancient culture.

At forty years old, I was still pretty green when it came to travel and navigating new spaces. I immediately felt a connection with the land, the culture, and the people, but what I now recognize is that I was experiencing these aspects with a bias for the good, and a deep need to be somewhere that felt like a cure for my wounds and aches. In many ways I idealized it, held it as the antithesis of what I was struggling with back in the U.S. This was 2021, and in addition to home dissonance, I was feeling deeply unsafe in the U.S. on the heels of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and so many other Black lives that were taken. Sharm El Sheikh became my refuge.

As I reflect on the context of my visit to Sharm in 2021, I am careful not to accuse myself of creating illusions or fantasies. I know what I experienced was deeply real. The ease, the sense of safety, the wonderful mystery of the ocean. I fell in love, and in doing so I fed a part of myself that was bolder, softer, neglected, and forgotten.

Sharm El Sheikh and the Red Sea, fed the malnourished Raven within me. The sea reminded me of her existence and gave me teachers who led me into the water by hand. I learned how to breathe here. I learned how to allow, and I committed to exploring and discovering who I am under the water. With the strength and love I found here I returned to the U.S. defiant, resolute, and hell bent on creating my own reality.

And I have. I am living a reality I once dreamt of; I am the pattern master of my existence. I am so grateful.

In 2024, I experienced the unexpected ending of one of my primary relationships in Sharm. This betrayal marked the end of Sharm as my place of refuge, and the beginning of another grief cycle I didn’t believe I had the capacity to survive.

One of my teachers didn’t just drop my hand, they harmed me in the process. Suddenly, everything about Sharm and my water journey came into question. The betrayal followed me across the world, and the rose colored glasses faded to a stormy grey. The wild wonderful sea became heavy with grief and I was unsure if I would ever return.

It was, without exaggeration, devastating.

Life in the states felt transitory at best, my hope was to find home in Sharm. Home had become a trigger word for me after so much change and loss in my marriage and family. With this recent and unexpected loss, I found myself in limbo.

Where was home?

Even the thought of reestablishing a home felt scary. What was the point if they all came tumbling down after I poured everything inside of me into them? Home was a mirage, one I did not have the desire to chase anymore. From this place of despair, I forced myself to answer one question:

What would bring me joy?

What would I need or want in order to stay alive and keep exploring, discovering, and learning through this life?

The answers came over the months that followed:

I want to stay soft in spite of these feelings.

I want to love and be loved safely.

I want a permanent home, one that I don’t have to leave or grieve.

The answers became prayers, and the prayers brought new people, new energy, new habits, new understandings.

I changed. Pain taught me a powerful lesson. It takes strength to hold power; it takes the capacity to hold light and dark to discover who you are, and what is true about the world that surrounds you.

The world isn’t rosy pink or stormy grey. It is sometimes a vivid blue, or a muddy red, or a navy black. All at once.

It was time to grow up and to step into difficult, but natural truths. No one is all good. No place is perfect. No home is permanent. You cannot escape yourself.

I am back here, in Sharm, with my Mother Water. I started my journey in Dahab, one of the last places I dived before everything shifted. Here I met, Tatiana Mendes, a water warrior who invited me into a deeper relationship with the sea and myself for a week. We laughed until we cried, we grieved, we witnessed for each other, and I made it six meters underwater on a single breath hold, for the first time. Something I would’ve thought unimaginable half a decade ago.

I felt the shadow of the culture. Witnessed aspects of daily interactions that use deception as a means of navigating poverty and subverting religious expectations. The male gaze felt less safe than I remembered.

My shadow emerged to meet this new experience. I saved my smiles for Tati, occasionally children and animals. I didn’t reveal the little Arabic I knew so I could hear what was being said and assess for authenticity. It was all very…American.

When I left Dahab I felt lighter. Even the sea and wind, which were both restless during my stay, calmed for the day of my departure. On the road from Dahab to Sharm I felt my stomach tighten again, as if clutching for round two of this journey.

Here I have had to fight through my own resistance to certain cultural truths I once failed to see. Cultural norms that explain why and how my relationship with my previous teacher ended is such an unkind way. I had to feel the sadness, shame, embarrassment, and rage that I was hoping to tuck beneath a story that would allow the version of them—-and myself—I once believed to be true to continue to exist.

But the sea demanded the story as sacrifice.

Under the water, both in Dahab and Sharm, she altered time and space, and I could see myself, once foreign to these waters, now a child of them. I no longer needed hand holding. My arms were free to spread wide or simply fold at my heart as I soared over and through underwater mountains of coral. No fear. No panic. Just a girl in the belly of the sea.

This trip has been filled with full circle moments. New memories are painting over the old ones, with more vibrancy and of a higher quality.

This isn’t just about the joy of grieving what I have outgrown, it is about celebrating my graduation.

The sea herself, reassures me it is time.

I have been supplied with more than enough to continue to new waters, new cultures, new homes (no matter how temporary).

I have grown taller, longer, stronger, smarter, and more confident thanks to this place and these experiences. I will likely return someday, when it will feel entirely different than it does now.

But the sea, the Red Sea.

She will always welcome me home.

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Yesterday I had my first open water freediving session With the lovely Tatiana Mendes (@therealtatianamendes on IG).

For those who are newer to this part of my journey, 4 years ago I was deathly afraid in water above 5 ft. I am talking full blown panic.

But I started having dreams about the water early 2021, just after I initiated to Oya.

She told me then: “You don’t have to learn how to swim, but you do need to learn to trust the water.”

When I visited Egypt later that year I had no intention of going into the water, but the folks with me were very convincing, and I remembered the dreams from earlier in the year, so I obeyed.

What followed was a mind blowing and life reorienting experience that I am still riding. The water changed everything about my life. Especially who I know myself to be,

There is no purer mirror than the water. The deeper and darker the water, the more intense the reflection.You have to be ready to see yourself in ways you never imagined, and it can drive you mad.

When I am dealing with water and water energy, I move slowly. I take small gracious steps to make sure I am honoring the reverence of it all. I remember that water isn’t static, it is dynamic, ever changing, like me. So I have to become more fluid, and I must learn to relax in circumstances and situations where that can feel like an unreasonable ask.

Joy centering is a deep relationship with authentic self, and authentic self requires deep awareness of our connection and impact on all that surrounds us.

Like the ocean, you can’t force your way into it, you ease your way in. You can’t knock the door down, you slide through.

I still have three more days to go. My body is integrating all that I have already encountered, learning in real time, and I am slowing down today to allow everything to sync up.

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One essay stands out, Inheriting Pleasure, formally published in Blood & Bajareque, but written at least two years before, around 2019ish. This essay is a must read for those engaging my joy work because it establishes joy as a birthright; one of the fundamental distinctions I make in my joy work that is often lacking in wellness branded joy.

If you are new to my work, I am sharing this essay with the hope that it grounds you fundamentally through this joy journey. If you have been on this joy journey with me for a while, I am sharing this to recenter you and remind you to keep the fundamentals at the center of your daily practice.

Joy is your birthright.

Enjoy the read!

Inheriting Pleasure

My first conscious act of pleasure was the day I told my ex-husband I wanted a divorce.

It was painful, frightening, and riddled with uncertainty. It was also my naked truth. It was a moment of unapologetic surrender to a deep yearning for freedom to be more than I’d become, and the first sign of my willingness to fight for a life that prioritized my desires.

I was 30 years old at the time.

Prior to that day I have no recollection of intentional or conscious pleasure. I’m not saying I didn’t have happy moments or enjoy activities with family and friends. I have many beautiful memories.

I’m saying I had no understanding of what pleasure was.

No example or conversation to guide me towards a pleasure-centered life.

I recall messaging that encouraged me to be less spontaneous, to be more tame, to act in accordance with a prescribed definition of acceptable, to attract less attention.

These messages were societal, cultural, and in the absence of a familial conversation around pleasure, these external definitions curbed my craving for pleasure.

It is only now, ten years after my decision to divorce, that I can recognize and label my decision a pleasurable act because I’ve defined pleasure for myself.

Fear of pleasure is sewn into the fabric of our collective Western consciousness, overtly and subliminally. I see it surface when I ask clients to identify joy and pleasure in their lives and tears form, as though I pricked them. Their eyes accuse me:

How did you know I have these urges?

How did you know I have these needs?

Our early conditioning falsely equates safety with fear, but the erotic doesn’t desire our fear: She demands our reverence in exchange for the spontaneity, passion, creativity, and unbridled energy She offers.

She expects her altar to be adorned with flowers, honey, copper, laughter, poetry, and any other natural by-product of our union with Her.

She is the opposite of fear.

For those of us who were colonized, She is a familiar spirit, one we used to welcome into our lives, homes, and bodies before we were taught to fear Her.

When I think about the landscape of social justice, the fight for equality and the struggle to create a society that is truly free, I know our liberation is inextricably tied to our ability to embrace the erotic, to access PLEASURE, and to reclaim JOY as a birthright.

Pleasure, joy, and the erotic pour from the same place, along with grief, pain, and sorrow.

We’ve been taught to limit our access to the latter three. *(I would now amend this to say we’ve been conditioned to limit our access to all of the above.)

Stories of survival, blind patience, and turning cheeks have conditioned the Black experience to be defined by trauma, but pain isn’t our sole inheritance.

Our story isn’t defined by our survival, it is PRESERVED by it.

The core of our story is that in the midst of it all we claimed our bodies with pleasure.

We moved them in secret, in the sunlight, against each other, and on our own.

We moved our bodies until we created jazz, rhythm and blues, and hip hop.

We moved our bodies until we created economies, traffic lights, open heart surgeries, hair care empires, and social networks.

We moved our bodies and created generations, legacies, and unparallelled social movements.

We moved our bodies and preserved our ability to feel and connect in the midst of systemic and strategic disconnection.

What a gift!

What an inheritance our ancestors have given us!

All that’s left to do now is to claim it.

It will be scary and uncertain. It will feel foreign at first and we will question if we are doing the right thing.

Our ancestors will remind us to bathe nude in the moonlight, to adorn our waists with beads, and to encourage our parents and children to do the same.

We will bring the flowers and honey, unsure if She will remember us, but I promise, She will.

She remembered me. She caught the truth as it slipped from my mouth and I knew I could never lie to myself again. She offered me honey to soothe the bite marks on my tongue, and I no longer self-silence. She placed Her hand between my legs and taught me to enjoy the smell of my own flower.

Not only did She remember me, I remembered me.

Now I work for Her, pushing Black bodies to reclaim what is rightfully ours.

I’m gonna use every drop of my inheritance while this body exists to experience all the pleasure I am owed.

I will bring honey and flowers to as many altars as I can until we all remember.

It’s possible the greatest inheritance of all is the mystery of our survival, a secret white supremacy is salivating to discover.

How are they still here? How are they still loving, forgiving, and creating?

The answer thrives in the core of our being, sealed in Black skin they can never own.

It has been preserved for a time such as this.

It is quietly and powerfully ushering in the era of #blackgirlmagic, and has no equal.

The secret is out.

The only permission we need to access transformational pleasure and joy is our own.

Liberation is here.

Smell your flower, and enjoy!

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I’ve caught myself running through scenarios in my head, pre-planning my moves if I am detained for any reason.

As I allow myself to process recent events by imagining the unimaginable, I do what I teach you all to do. I ask myself, what would bring me joy?

Yes, even in that horrific moment.

Take a breath.

I know this gets heavy, and I know you’ve had to explore similar thoughts.

I imagine what would bring me the highest joy—- in a moment when I am being violently dehumanized and abused—- is to make sure my abusers know they have no power over me.

Maybe that would look like not speaking. A silent resistance.

Maybe I would focus all my energy on memorizing every face, voice, detail and witnessing for other detainees, listening to their stories, names, fears, making myself a living archive.

Maybe I’d replay Toni Morrison’s interview in my mind over and over again, the one where she deliciously and effortlessly lets her white interviewer know that she’s always known she was morally superior to the white folks she witnessed as a child. Maybe I’d wear her expression every time they scream a question at me I refuse to answer.

All of this would allow me to exercise my right to be alive on my terms, no matter the circumstances, and this is what joy work is about at the deepest darkest levels of humanity.

Joy preserves my sanity when systemic oppression attempts to snap my mind.

Joy maintains my focus when enemies are thriving off of my attention.

Joy rests beneath my tongue like an unsheathed sword I can swing at any moment.

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Behind every fierce protester we witness in Minneapolis and around the country, is JOY.

Remember, our definition of joy is:

“Every living thing’s innate and inextricable birthright, to choose at any and all moments, what brings them the maximum experience of aliveness they desire---without abusing or dehumanizing others.”

Every active person witnessing the actions of this administration has to ask themselves:

Does this bring me joy?

In other words: Is this what I desire? Does this make me feel more or less alive? What are my choices?

Here’s the best part

That inquiry activates the RIGHT TO ACT on that expressed desire. The inquiry activates a response to move away from a position of lack of joy, to a position of alive joy—-even if that position is standing between a rogue violent idiot and a scared neighbor.

Earlier this week I shared an IG post entitled, Oppressors Hate Joy, and Here’s Why. Here is a brief recap:

Joy is not about survival.

Joy is about evolution, innovation, adaptation.

Activating joy makes us unpredictable.

More difficult to control.

Joy transmutes fear into power and righteous rage.

Joy protects more than our right to live,

It protects our right to determine HOW we live.

Sometimes joy is honey on the lips.

But there are also times when joy is a knife between the teeth.

Whether you choose the honey or the knife, the most important thing to remember is you get to choose how you want to live and what is necessary to stay alive.

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Surprise, followed by an incredulous look, which often softens into curiosity as a question forms on their brow:

What does that look like?

One would assume my work is a piece of cake. Who doesn’t want more joy?

The wellness industry and advertisements paint joy as a self care strategy induced by bubble baths, dry brushing, and an image of a carefree blonde woman running on a far away beach—accessible by simply purchasing the right products, repeating a few standardized affirmations, and subliminally suggesting if you are not experiencing joy, it is your fault.

I consider these oversimplified, lazy, and duplicitous depictions to be enemies of joy. Their goal isn’t self/collective liberation or self/collective actualization. Their goal is money.

The truth about joy is much more complicated, but restoring our self/collective access to this powerful natural resource does not have to be.

If you are choosing to start your joy journey with me, you need to erase whatever you previously learned about joy. Let’s start with definitions.

According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, joy is a deep, intense feeling of great pleasure, happiness, and delight, often stemming from well-being, success, purpose, or connection.

The definition used by myself and my company, MarleyAyo, states that joy is every living thing’s innate and inextricable birthright, to choose at any and all moments what brings them the maximum experience of aliveness they desire--without abusing or dehumanizing others.

I believe these two definitions can coexist, however, trying to apply the widely used Merriam-Webster definition of joy as a state of happiness before applying my definition—joy is a birthright, joy is choice, joy is a metric, joy is aliveness—creates a relationship with joy that is conditional and unsustainable. Applying my definition of joy ensures those intense feelings of great pleasure are more than flashes of adrenaline, hope, and ego; it ensures that the lives we are living are rooted and centered around the joy of living and loving from our most authentic self.

Joy work with me requires more than bubbles, it demands bravery; it isn’t standardized for comfort, it is customized for effectiveness and sustainability; it isn’t far away from where you currently stand, it is buried deep inside you, ready to come to the surface.

So why isn’t teaching about JCL a cake walk?

Through the years of teaching about JCL, I’ve witnessed various joy barriers. Some are external and embedded in our societies, systems, and institutions. We address these barriers through two of our joy pillars: Joy Politics and Joy Culture.

The other barriers are internal and reveal a powerful inner knowing that when turned against ourselves can become a cage restraining our joy.

The majority of us know exactly what we want, but we pretend we don’t. We deny, project, distract, rationalize, and intellectualize our deepest desires away, often assisted by those around us. We do these things, because our deep inner knowing is aware that JCL will require change, conflict, and inevitably, loss. The lives we are living were not constructed with our joy at the center. We accepted a commercialized definition and settled for flashes of intense feelings in a life of compliance and conformity. We resist JCL, because aliveness requires a capacity to feel our full range of emotions and trust them. It requires hard conversations, life altering realizations, and living with one foot in the light (awareness) and one foot in the dark (creation).

Joy measures aliveness, not happiness. Aliveness is the point of this human exercise.

Joy asks, how much living can you hold?

I started this journey over a decade ago. There have been many times I regretted asking myself the question, does this bring me joy? I have died, I have grieved, and I have been altered by the truths that came through necessary and overdue conflicts.

I have also never been more clear, more steady, more alive.

This work is my invitation to create a life where you can live out loud. Unburdened, unencumbered, unchained.

It starts with a choice. Do you want to sit in a tub of $30 scented bath bombs pretending bubbles are enough, or do you want to take a deep breath, open your eyes, and dive below the surface?

If you choose the latter, I am here. My name is Thea. I teach people how to live joy centered lives.

It’s a pleasure to meet you.

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