I regularly reflect on the subject of decolonising spirituality.
Decolonising spirituality isn’t an abstract idea; it’s personal, persistent, and often uncomfortable. As a Cuban-born Pagan and Lukumi practitioner living on unceded Aboriginal land, I’ve come to understand that any spiritual practice I engage in is inseparable from history, power, and place. I carry the legacies of those who were colonised and enslaved, and I also live as a settler on stolen land, in a country built on the attempted erasure of its First Peoples.
Decolonising spirituality isn’t a single act. It’s a lifelong reckoning, a set of questions I return to again and again: Whose stories am I carrying? Whose voices am I centring? What do I assume is mine to touch, use, or reinterpret? What might reverence, humility, and responsibility look like in practice?
Spirituality under colonialism
Colonisation wasn’t only about land theft and forced labour. It was also about controlling meaning. Spiritual systems were a primary target because they connected people to identity, land, ancestry, and power. To colonise a people, you had to colonise their gods and spirits.
Missionaries accompanied militaries. Sacred sites were desecrated or replaced with churches. Traditional spiritual leaders were persecuted or outlawed. Ancestral languages were suppressed. Indigenous cosmologies were framed as devil worship or primitive superstition. Spiritual traditions were criminalised, or worse, turned into spectacles or commodities.
This did not end with conquest. Its effects are ongoing. Christian dominance continues to shape state laws, holidays, school curricula, and social values across colonised nations. Cultural erasure persists in the dismissal of Indigenous knowledge systems and practices as unscientific or irrelevant. Spiritual tourism exploits sacred rituals and ceremonies for money, clout, or personal transformation. New Age and Pagan spaces often reproduce colonial mindsets through appropriated practices, one-size-fits-all deities, and universalising frameworks that ignore cultural specificity.
Colonialism also taught us to view the land as property, spirituality as a commodity, and ourselves as separate from both. These values—white supremacy, individualism, extraction—are not just political distortions. They are spiritual ones.
Learning to relate, not consume
Earlier this year, I took a course called Honouring the Land: Elements of Magic, a core Reclaiming Tradition class, taught by SusanneRae Jones and Raphael Jerrepin Boodjarn. One of my goals for 2025 has been to reconnect with the foundations of my spiritual practice, primarily through the lens of animism. I wanted to strengthen my relationship with the natural world, not symbolically, but as a living presence.
What drew me to this course was Raphael, who is Aboriginal, and the focus on land and decolonisation. Raphael framed decolonising as harm reduction. That idea stayed with me. This process isn’t about being perfect. It’s about reducing harm to land, to spirit, to culture, and ourselves.
Raphael introduced the concept of consent with land, a reminder that the land has agency. It can say yes or no. Our rituals, harvesting, and offerings are not neutral; they are interactions. Like any relationship, they require consent. That means noticing when a place feels closed—listening to the language of birds, insects, weather, and gut instinct and accepting that hostility from the land is a form of communication, not something to override with incense and good intentions.
This wasn’t new to me in theory, but it shifted my practice. I’m less focused on “connecting” with the land and more committed to relating with it.
What does it mean to decolonise?
To decolonise spirituality is not to diversify your bookshelf or add Indigenous aesthetics to your altar. It is a deeper reorientation, one that calls us to examine our assumptions, unlearn entitlement, and cultivate spiritual relationships based on respect rather than ownership.
Decolonising spirituality means unlearning colonial frameworks, such as binary thinking, hierarchy, linear progress, and the belief that knowledge must be written to be valid. It means re-rooting in your ancestral lineages, however fragmented or complicated. It means re-localising your practice by learning the stories, plants, seasons, and spirits of the land you’re on. It means refusing extraction by recognising that taking what isn’t yours, even with good intentions, is still colonising behaviour. It means reducing harm by knowing that good intentions are not enough, and that spiritual actions have material consequences.
This is not about being politically correct. It is about being spiritually responsible.
In Honouring the Land, we explored how white supremacist culture shows up in magical practice. Drawing on Caroline Sumlin’s work, we identified traits such as perfectionism, individualism, urgency, the pursuit of comfort, the worship of written knowledge, and the notion of a single right way of thinking. These show up when we feel entitled to take from other cultures, when we get defensive about critique, or when we centre our comfort over someone else’s boundaries.
Even the urge to “get it right” when decolonising can be a form of white supremacy. The desire to appear especially thoughtful or well-intentioned often stems from perfectionism and fear, rather than from true relationship or accountability. When we fixate on doing it ‘correctly,’ we risk centring ourselves and our comfort rather than listening, learning, and reducing harm. What if, instead, we replaced that urge with presence, relationship, and humility?
Closed practices and the coloniser mentality
I explore this more fully in my previous post, Decolonising Pagan practice for more authentic, richer spirituality, where I wrote about cultural appropriation, closed practices, and white entitlement in Pagan circles.
Many spiritual traditions are closed, at least partially, not because they are elitist or exclusive, but because they are protected. They preserve cultural memory, protect sacred knowledge, and honour ancestral lineage. Lukumi, Vodou, Ifá, and many Indigenous spiritualities have established systems of initiation and community accountability. You cannot self-initiate into them. You are brought in through relationship and consent.
When outsiders mimic these practices—burning white sage, invoking orisha, offering ayahuasca ceremonies without lineage—they are not honouring spirit. They are engaging in spiritual colonisation. This happens because we’re steeped in taker culture, one where we believe we have the right to access, use, modify, and commodify whatever makes us feel good. But the idea that we can take without asking is not spiritual. It’s a coloniser mindset.
What might it look like in practice?
The website for the book Decolonizing Solidarity: Dilemmas and Directions for Supporters of Indigenous Struggles by Clare Land offers a helpful framework, a matrix of actions grouped into six categories: Acknowledgement, Honesty, Safeguard, Recognition and Respect, Representation, and Reparations.
Here are some ways these categories can inform our spiritual practice:
Acknowledgement: Know whose land you are on. Learn how to pronounce the names. Say a verbal acknowledgement. Include Indigenous imagery such as flags, signs, pins, or stickers. Mark important days and events.
Honesty: Learn the true history of the land—massacres, displacement, sterilisation, stolen generations. Don’t look away. The spiritual path demands truth.
Safeguard: Support campaigns that protect sacred sites and cultural heritage.
Recognition and Respect: Understand that Aboriginal cultures are the oldest living spiritual systems in the world. Respect the boundaries around them. Do not repackage their elements into your practice.
Representation: Centre and support Indigenous voices. Follow Aboriginal educators and practitioners. Donate to landback and sovereignty movements.
Reparations: Pay the rent. Share your resources. Support economic justice alongside spiritual justice.
This is where spiritual integrity meets political reality.
Walking with tensions
My path is braided and sometimes knotted. I practise Lukumi, the Afro-Cuban religion I inherited through blood and community. I also practise Paganism, primarily Wicca. These two traditions carry different relationships to colonisation.
Lukumi is a religion of resistance. It survived the Middle Passage, the plantation, and state suppression. It is protected by lineage, protocol, and spirit. It does not welcome casual interest. It demands commitment and consent.
Paganism is more open, but it’s not free from colonial baggage. Wicca, in particular, has absorbed fragments from ceremonial magic and idealised European folkways. It has power, but also appropriation. It offers flexibility, but also replicates hierarchy.
Living in Australia complicates things further. I practise on unceded land. I do not share in the Dreaming, and I do not seek to. But I can honour the land’s sovereignty. I can relate to it with humility. I can make offerings, not claims.
Your path may be braided and knotted as well. You may be navigating multiple lineages, locations, losses, or longings. You may be unsure of what truly belongs to you. That’s okay. You don’t need to get it perfect. None of us will. What matters is that we interrogate our practices with care, stay open to correction, and keep choosing relationship over entitlement. Decolonising is not about arriving at certainty. It is about walking with integrity, one step, one question, one offering at a time.
Living the questions
Decolonising spirituality is not a project to complete. It is an orientation, a path, a practice. It asks us to move at the speed of relationship, not urgency. To choose reverence over consumption. To honour the sacred by respecting its boundaries.
If you are on this path, too—fumbling, listening, questioning—I am with you.
Let’s keep walking.