adrienne maree brown - Journal of Radical Permission: A Daily Guide for Following Your Souls Calling

Thank you for the fear-facing choice to open this page and the page after and the page after that. Thank you for giving yourself permission because our individual acts of permission are both a contagion and an antidote. Permission is the cure that, when sipped, unlocks the cells of possibility in others after you. Every loved thing I have ever created in this world has been born of the viral magic of watching some divine being give themselves permission. Im telling you every contagious thing aint bad. In 2011, a plus-sized model in a black corset gave herself permission to be juicy and alive in a lingerie ad and it permissioned my sharing of the photo that birthed The Body Is Not an Apology and shifted the trajectory of my life.

You gave me permission today. Just this morning. You didnt even know it, and aint that how it goes? I woke up in my eighth week of a COVID delta variant lockdown in New Zealand, and the truth is, I felt despairing. As if this black tunnel of isolation might never end. I was soul lonely today. Yet I knew you were going to gift yourself permission to pick up this book and begin a liberatory journey into your own divine, incomparable power, and my present self promised your future self that we would meet on this page and begin this journey together.

Your permission may have been a dormant seed in you at the time I started penning this letter, and still that dormant seed of permission got me out of bed and showered today. It coaxed me to pray and eat and open a page to write to you. Permission gave your present self and my present self a shared future where we would meet. Permission alters space-time. Wild, right? Consider this journal a space to explore the alchemical nature of your own permission. Use it to discover what in you wants to be liberated to its own truth.

What small hidden part of you will you allow access to the sun and sky? How can you turn your own base metal into gold? What I love most about the possibility that lies in these journal pages is that they are certain to illuminate the profound yet overlooked examples of permission you have already unlocked in your life. You have always been your own best cure, and because aboriginal activist Lilla Watson told us... our liberation is bound up together, your cure is contagious. Your permission is an unalterable element in our collective freedom. You, my dear mad, miraculous scientist, hold the key to a thriving future for yourself, your family, your community, the whole of humanity. Yes, you are a key to the whole of humanity, and I pray this journal is a place where you give yourself permission to remember what you already always knew.

Love,
Sonya Renee Taylor

I want to whisper in your ear: you have permission. You have permission to fully embody yourself, your heart, your gifts, your pain, your brilliance, your love. My teacher-friend Makani Themba says we are a millisecond away from freedom. When I hear this, my heart moves in multiple directions. On one path, its clear that distance is measured by the move from individual to collectivetogether, we cannot be contained. On another path, I remember the tension of being poised on the precipice of freedom, the freedom to fully become myself, the freedom to understand something new, the freedom to embody something at odds with the shaping of society.

And down yet another path is the proximity of freedom, the felt sense of it, the knowing that it is just there, right there, for all of us, even when it doesnt feel like it. With this journal, we invite you to leap across time and space to your wholeness, your freedom. Gloria Anzalda said, I change myself, I change the world. Grace Lee Boggs said, Transform yourself to transform the world. I read in the Combahee River Collective Statement that the personal is political. In the waves echoing back and forth between these giants, I understand that there is a work that each of us must do within ourselves that makes more possible for the collective.

And I am daunted by the fractal understanding that we will not be able to claim something as a collective that we have not been in the practice of claiming for ourselves, in our bodies, with our time and our decisions, in our communication. With this journal, we invite you to claim yourself as a territory of change and transformation, an embodied possibility of liberation. Lorraine Hansberry said, I am a writer. I am going to write. Chadwick Boseman said, I am an artist. Artists dont need permission to work.

Ayanna Pressley said, My mother did not raise me to ask for permission to lead. This is a space where you dont have to ask permission to be you, to be now, to be raw, to be honest, to be free. No one else is going to give you permission to be your wild, unfettered, powerhouse, internal, magical self. No one else canit will feel like a lie or a push or a chaos or a crisis. When you have permission, you feel free from within, you embody freedom for and with others, and you raise the bar of connection in your life to that of liberatory relationships. This journal is an invitation for you to give yourself permission to live.

Love,
adrienne maree brown Journal of Radical PermissionCopyright 2022 by adrienne maree brown and Sonya Renee Taylor All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher, addressed Attention: Permissions Coordinator, at the address below.

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