Introducing Intersectional Mysticism
Mangrove Road is the home of Intersectional Mysticism, a new guidebook bridging science and spirituality in its intersectional feminist approach to the mystic tradition.
Intersectional Mysticism is a guidebook for accessing the depth and richness of human connection and creativity by invoking the life energy within ourselves and our communities. It combines teachings from ancient spiritual traditions with contemporary scientific insights to foster self-awareness, personal growth, and connections with human and non-human kin that support a sustainable earthly future. Starting from the physicality of the individual and expanding to the spiritual, relational, and collaborative, it distils insights across traditions, demonstrating how conscientious engagement with self, nature, culture, spirit, and community can enhance physical, mental, and emotional well-being, nurture honest and mutually nourishing relationships, and inspire collective healing, love, liberation, and social transformation.
I have been a voracious reader from an early age. Since I learned that letters were signs that spoke, I devoured any words I encountered – from leaflets and pamphlets to billboards and notices, to the encyclopedia in which my mother invested when I was eight. As a Filipina-American growing up in Seattle with regular summers in Manila, my consciousness was formed in the shadow of my grandparents’ experiences in the Second World War and my parents’ young adulthoods under dictatorship and martial law. They immigrated to the USA to pursue the American Dream, where they bore me in the early years of the heady and materialistic 1980s. I was raised a relatively mainstream Filipina Catholic in a leafy Seattle suburb and given a sheltered, lower middle-class-but-rising, American girlchild-of-immigrants life. Yet I always felt something fundamental was missing.
On my mother’s side, I come from a lineage of engineers, artists, educators, and holy women; on my father’s, merchants, investigators, entertainers, and good-time folks. Visionary, intuitive, bold, headstrong yet adaptable ancestors, especially women, are my inheritance. So it’s no wonder I became a spiritual, entrepreneurial feminist artist, activist, and scholar drawn to building community with those who love, work, play, think, and celebrate life in equal measure. But first, I was a reader, then I became a poet. My thirst for knowledge led me, in my teens, to an artistic activist life where I explored radical, decolonizing, and feminist ideas through dialogue, poetry, and music, sharing this experience with peers and prophets from across the country. Eventually, this became a spiritual path, on which I stumble daily but continue, one of many seekers of truth and wisdom.
As I departed from the Spanish colonial Roman Catholic Filipinx tradition, retaining only a devotion to ritual, incense, and the divine feminine, I sought knowledge from radical writers, teachers, and communities, especially pre-colonial indigenous knowledge from Asian-Pacific Islanders and Global South peoples. Through this, I began to understand the historical forces shaping the strange, often brutal era into which I was born. I felt particularly drawn to ancient Asian/Pacific Islander spiritual practices, and my path unfolded in unexpected ways.
I first encountered yoga when I tried to go to a women’s day spa that was unexpectedly closed, so I opted for a Bikram class at the studio across the street – however, in sweats, I was extremely overdressed! Nevertheless, the experience changed me, and I’ve been deepening my practice ever since. I tried some promising-sounding but expensive meditation classes, which I soon realised were the thin veneer of a disturbing new age-y cult, and jumped ship. I attended sanghas with Buddhist friends and heard them extol the virtues of chanting as a mode of manifestation. I met Amma, the Hindu hugging saint, who gave me a mantra - but she was not my guru. I apprenticed with Evelie Delfino Sales Posch in the babaylan (Filipinx priestess) tradition, informed by her blend of Western pagan and indigenous Filipinx practices. With her, I learned about energy flows, circle casting, and raising energy through song and rhythm, but ended our engagement when distance and cost both became prohibitive.
Through these explorations, I came to see myself as part of a lineage of spiritual seekers pursuing the ultimate truth: the ontological oneness of all existence, the core of mysticism. Theoretical study, direct instruction, and personal observation revealed that the world is composed of energy, or spirit—a view that anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro calls “the only sensible version of materialism.” Animism and mysticism, uniting many ancient traditions, make this Truth visible behind and between the technodeterministic mirages posited by late digital capitalism – and, as the saying goes, once seen, it could not be unseen. Honoring this insight by deepening my studies became a necessity, helping me amplify my intuition, heal, and connect in ways I hadn’t thought possible.
The traditions most central to my mystical practice and the healing modalities to which I subscribe fall into three groups: 1) those focused on enabling energy flow, like meditation, breathwork, music therapy, acupuncture, massage, and the physical + philosophical practice of yoga; 2) those that invoke subtle and invisible forces, direct attention, and soothe human nervous systems, like altars, rituals, and poetic divination practices, and 3) those that contain, raise and release energy, like West African griot traditions, drum circles, and freestyle ciphers, which underpin the American hip-hop and spoken word poetry culture into which I was initiated in my early teens. I handle these traditions with care, respecting their origins to avoid appropriation; ensuring my use, though adapted for my needs, honours their creators and cultural practitioners, and that the benefits extend beyond myself.
When this journey began, I was, at fourteen, the youngest member of a Seattle-based Filipinx American cultural and political organisation called isangmahal arts kollective. isangmahal (iM) means “one love” in Tagalog, the Filipinx (Manileño) dialect much of my family speaks. I spent nearly a decade as an iM member, learning about myself and my heritage, writing individual and group performance poetry, shaping a radical collectivist politics, and making art, education, and activism with the community we built. This process helped me understand and find pride in my complex cultural inheritance for the first time, saving my life in this and countless other ways. Sensitive and introverted, but confident and, thanks to my Dad passing on his karaoke host skillset, comfortable enough with a microphone, I was a natural performer and convener. In this nurturing environment, I became a youth worker, co-founding Youth Speaks Seattle, an arts education organization for young people, with my iM mentors and their networks. I led the organisation collaboratively, with increasing responsibility, through my early and mid-twenties.
I have always felt a calling to repair the brokenness around me and within myself, and to heal our hurting world. Leadership, to me, is a form of service, a building of bridges for others’ wellness and growth. Mentoring youth since I myself was a teen taught me to listen deeply, meet people where they’re at, and offer whatever help I could. But it also showed me the cost of burnout. The young people in the group were like younger siblings – or children – to me. With no boundaries or personal spiritual practices, I was stretched too thin, eating fast food on the go, rarely exercising, and smoking too much. Overworked and underpaid, I gave everything to others, leaving nothing for myself.
To turn a page, my mother helped me to look towards the future and move to the UK. At the University of Nottingham, in the mythical home of Robin Hood, I earned a master’s and PhD in entrepreneurship, studying how organizations are born, and how resources can be moved from places of high concentration to low. Now, as an academic in critical entrepreneurship and digital cultural studies, I approach my research and professional contributions through an intersectional, technofeminist lens. I propose, refine and resource community-building initiatives, moving them from margins to centre. I work, play, struggle, and learn within collectives I helped to imagine, creatively and collaboratively enacting entrepreneurial projects from infancy to fruition. I practice and prosper in partnership with others. Over 15 years of academic and personal growth, I’ve honed and clarified my expertise, and thus my purpose: to bring forth meaningful, transformative ideas through observation, experimentation and collaboration. I nurture and resource them, in order to build new realities from the ground up, teaching others this skillset along the way.
Now, I feel ready to share insights from my own practices—imperfectly employed, but nevertheless valuable. Through getting serious about care for myself and others, along with the spiritual and emotional nourishment of being and building in relationship, I have found grounding, passion, and contentment with my path. This sense of direction is what I aim to convey through Intersectional Mysticism as a creative project. I chose a Substack newsletter as a way for this first version of the work to be in the world, in an editable and commentable form, good for a recovering perfectionist who appreciates community feedback. Mangrove Road is its digital home, a space I intend to be capacious enough to grow other projects once this one is, in this form, complete. And while I’m informed by my academic training, Intersectional Mysticism isn’t written as an academic work. I am not a medical professional or master of any kind; these posts aren’t a substitute for medical advice or mental health care and support.
What I am is a pilgrim of the human family, aiming toward a destination unseen but intuitively felt, learning what it means to be alive along the way. For me, seeking the path, remaining open to its turnings, experimenting, reflecting, and retaining what resonates and is useful is the spiritual and scientific process of generating wisdom, and making meaning. I offer my findings to you in the hope they may inspire you, individually and collectively, to do the same.