Watchwoman Dispatch 002

Watchwoman Dispatch 002: Before We Begin, We Must Learn How to SeeFull Podcast Transcript [Music] Welcome back to Set Apart Conversations. I’m Shenera, and this is a Watchwoman Dispatch. I wanted to take a few minutes to share some updates about what is coming this fall through Mind, Body & Spirit Chronicles and Set Apart Conversations, this lovely podcast you’re listening to. October is Domestic Violence Awareness Month, and as I was looking through some of the work I wanted to develop for the month, I realized something that made me very happy. Some of it has already been done. Over the past year, I have written several pieces examining domestic violence, coercive control, hidden abuse, trauma, institutional betrayal, and the long process of rebuilding safety and self-trust. Rather than create entirely new material simply for the sake of creating something new, I want to bring some of those writings back into the conversation throughout October. One of those pieces comes from my Watchwoman writings, “Smiles That Deceive: How Predators Use Soft Intimidation.” Originally released October 7, 2025, it examines hidden abuse and manipulation and why discernment matters when intimidation does not necessarily look aggressive, loud, or obvious. Sometimes it comes with a smile. I will also be resurfacing several pieces from Voices from the Valley, a healing space for survivors to rise, reflect, and be heard. Voices from the Valley is a storytelling and reflection space within Mind, Body & Spirit Chronicles for people navigating trauma, betrayal, grief, addiction, spiritual rupture, and the complicated process of healing. It centers survivor voices while bringing together trauma-informed care, somatic understanding, mental health, spirituality, and the realities survivors often encounter within systems that were supposed to help them. One piece I will be bringing back from that section is “For the Ones Fighting Systems Bigger Than Themselves.” Originally released December 7, 2025, that piece is a grounding message for women navigating coercive control, legal intimidation, and institutional betrayal while trying to remain whole. I will also be resurfacing “Different Faces, Same Spirit: Why You Keep Attracting the Same Wounds in a New Body.” Released January 28, 2026, that piece explores repeated relational patterns through spiritual and clinical lenses, including trauma, familiar relational dynamics, soul ties, and the ways unresolved wounds can influence who and what feels familiar to us. Then there is “Harvested and Left Empty: What Domestic Violence Systems Take and Never Return.” Released March 5, 2026. I actually thought I needed to work on that piece, only to realize I had already written it and released it. So that was a pleasant surprise. Harvested and Left Empty examines avoidance, withholding, and system failures within domestic violence services, and what happens when survivors reach toward systems for protection only to experience another layer of harm. Finally, I will be returning readers to “Layer Trauma: The Body Finally Tells the Truth,” released March 19, 2026. That piece examines what happens when trauma accumulates across relationships, institutions, betrayal, prolonged instability, and the body itself. Throughout October, I’ll be resurfacing these writings across Substack, LinkedIn, and my other social platforms so that people who may not have encountered them when they were originally released can find them now. Domestic Violence Awareness Month has to be about more than telling someone to leave. We also have to understand coercive control. We have to recognize abuse that hides behind politeness, charm, institutions, money, religion, or authority. We have to listen to survivors after they leave. We have to examine what happens when they reach for help. And we have to make space for the long, complicated work of rebuilding trust in oneself after someone, or sometimes an entire system, has taught a person to distrust what they know. So if one of those pieces speaks to something you have lived through, witnessed, or are trying to understand or heal from, I invite you to revisit it with me this October. And there is another series returning this fall. I know. I know. In the summer of 2025, I introduced The Parting and the Plunder: Anti-Judaism, Cultural Theft, and the Remaking of Hebraic Faith Under Rome. Life required my attention elsewhere for a while, so I stepped away from the series. But I never stepped away from the question behind it. Over the past year, my understanding of those questions has continued to deepen through my study of history, psychology, sociology, Hebrew Scripture, culture, empire, religious formation, deconstruction, and decolonization. So this October, The Parting and the Plunder returns. The first full piece is titled: Before We Begin, We Must Learn How to See: Decolonization, Humility, and the Work of Questioning What We Think We Know. It will be released next month, and I will be posting the material, link, and date in October. You’ll be able to find it on Substack, Facebook, LinkedIn, Threads, Instagram, and the other platforms where I share my work. Before we begin examining Constantine, empire, the transformation of ancient Hebraic concepts, or even what eventually became Christianity, I decided that we needed to begin somewhere more foundational. With ourselves. Who taught us how to know what we think we know? Whose definitions did we inherit? Whose cultures were presented to us as normal, while other people’s cultures became strange, inferior, primitive, or something requiring explanation? How do we enter another people’s history without placing ourselves in the center? Those are some of the questions that will guide the return of The Parting and the Plunder. And I wanted listeners of Set Apart Conversations to hear a preview before the written piece is released. So what you are about to hear is the voiceover from Part One of the returning series. Welcome back to The Parting and the Plunder. And before we begin, we must learn how to see. The Parting and the Plunder: Before We Begin, We Must Learn How to See I created The Parting and the Plunder to explore a question that has become increasingly important in my own spiritual and intellectual journey: What happens when we move beneath the religion we inherited and begin examining the history, people, culture, and language that existed before it? This series explores anti-Judaism, cultural appropriation, and the remaking of Hebraic faith. But before we can examine those things, another set of questions has to come first. Who taught me how to know what I think I know? Whose definitions did I inherit? Whose culture was presented to me as normal, while someone else’s culture became foreign, inferior, primitive, or something requiring explanation? For me, this is where deconstruction and decolonization begin. It is not simply discovering that something we were taught received the teaching in the first place. And I include myself in that examination. There may be assumptions inside me that I have not recognized yet. There may be ideas I inherited through education, religion, or systems shaped by colonization that I have never seen. That requires humility. The Hebrew prophet Micah speaks of doing mishpat, justice; loving chesed, loving-kindness; and walking humbly with Elohim. That humble walk has become important to how I understand this work. Humility does not mean making ourselves insignificant. It means becoming willing to relinquish the assumption that we must always remain at the center of interpretation. That is also known as centering. Centering ourselves. My work as a therapist has taught me something about that. When another human being entrusts me with their story, I have to become quiet enough to hear their story. Their experience does not need to be translated through mine before it becomes worthy of being understood. My history cannot take over the room simply because something in their story reminds me of myself. I believe historically and culturally listening requires something similar. If we are going to enter another person’s history, we have to become quiet enough to hear them on their own terms. We cannot enter the ancient Hebrew and Jewish world carrying twenty-first-century American religious categories and assume those people understood themselves through our definitions. Before we call an ancient assembly a church, we should ask. Before we take words like Torah, covenant, Messiah, synagogue, temple, salvation, judgment, or even religion, and give them meanings inherited from centuries later, we need to ask: What did these things mean to the people whose world they actually belonged to? That is how I want us to approach The Parting and the Plunder. You do not have to arrive here with answers. Bring your questions. Bring what you think you know. Bring the things you are beginning to reconsider. Bring the evidence that complicates something I have written. Give yourself permission to say, “I don’t know.” And give yourself permission to come back tomorrow, next week, or six months from now and say, “I think differently about this now.” Transformation requires that freedom. This is not about winning an argument. It is not about replacing one form of indoctrination with another. It is about becoming humble enough to listen, curious enough to question, and secure enough to learn. So before Constantine, before Nicaea, before the institutional structures we now recognize as Christianity, even before Judaism, we begin with ourselves. We begin with the humble walk. And then we ask our first historical question: What was religion before religion became what we understand it to be today? This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit inspireyourmindbodyandspirit.substack.com/subscribe