Sh8peshift Your Life
Welcome to Sh8peshift Your Life, the podcast that helps you create the life you truly deserve. If you’re navigating the complexities of transformation, looking to deepen your spirituality, or just trying to cultivate authentic self-acceptance and empowerment, this is the podcast for you. Hosted by Zakiya Harris aka Sh8peshifter, each episode explores holistic healing strategies and candid conversations on relationships, wellness, intentional living, motherhood, and spirituality. From finding balance in chaos to uncovering your true potential, this is your space to shift your narrative, realign with your destiny, and create meaningful change. Tune in, take a breath, and start your next chapter.
Sh8peshift Your Life
Ancient Wisdom, Modern Sh8pes: Afro-Indigenous Cosmologies & The Path to Wholeness
What if the answers we seek are already woven into the cosmologies of our ancestors? In this episode of Sh8peshift Your Life, we journey through Afro-Indigenous spiritual traditions, exploring how they offer pathways to balance, resilience, and deep connection. From cyclical time to communal healing and earth-based wisdom, we’ll uncover ways to integrate these ancestral teachings into our modern lives for greater alignment and transformation. Tap into the sacred, remember your roots, and step into your highest frequency. 🌿✨
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Welcome back, Shapeshifters. Today's episode is all about Afro-Indigenous cosmologies. We are going to talk about African-centered understanding of the universe, how the universe works, and how that then impacts our values and shapes our lives. So first, let's start off with what do we mean by cosmology? What is a cosmology? A cosmology essentially is your understanding of the world around you.
It's your understanding of the universe. Do you believe in heaven? Do you believe in earth? Do you believe that the earth is round? Do you believe that there's outer space? All of those ideas around cosmology directly influence our day-to-day lives, the choices that we make, and the things that we give value to. And so it's important as we are now in this transformative time on the universe that we begin to align with and reconnect with those ancient principles that our ancestors taught us so many, centuries before. And the reason I say Afro-Indigenous is because for some odd reason, often when we talk about indigeneity, when we talk about original people, that Black people are just somehow out of the conversation. We can imagine Indigenous communities in places like North America or South America, but we don't actually think about the indigenous original people who existed as the first human beings on the planet. And we know that the spines is there and it is undisputed that those first people were people of African descent, that the connection between the black womb holds the mitochondrial DNA of all life and that it was her cosmology, which was the first cosmology that then went on to influence the entire world. And most of the world adopted that as truth until pretty much this 2025 year timeline that we're living in right now, which is connected to imperialism, patriarchy, and hierarchy. So it's easy to start normalizing certain values and beliefs and ideas because we have been part of a generation and many generations who that was the paradigm that we lived in. But I feel very strongly part of the nine year of 2025, part of the shit and the death and rebirth is that old system is dying. And what we're actually seeing right now is the last sand of whiteness. We are seeing white people come together from all parts of the earth to come to literally stake their claim in a world that is no more, a world that is dying, a world that is shifting. And so they are beating their chest. They want you to believe that they are winning. But the reality is if you just do the math, there's not even enough of that mindset. I'm not going to say white people, of that type of mindset in the universe. The majority of people don't believe that way. And so we're seeing new ideas, new models, new businesses, frameworks of people and countries in the so-called global south that are coming along and they're actually rejecting those ideas of imperialism. They're saying we don't need your loans anymore. We can create our own sovereign institutions. We don't need your government investment. We believe in the power of our people. We believe in the power of our traditions and the power of our ancestors. And so today I'm going to share with you some of those beliefs that are universal. So when we talk about Afro-Indigenous cosmologies, we're talking about universally held principles around the way the universe works and how that shapes and forms our beliefs and our values and our practices. And these are weights, as although they originated on the continent from people of African descent, then became the norm, as I said, for people all over the world and still wherever you are on the planet, the reality is that your lineage, your ancestors, even white people, even Europeans, were connected to people who believed in these ideas, believed in this cosmology before they were conquered by conquering tribes that brought in much of what we have normalized as today.
And so one of the terms that you've all, what many of you have heard is this idea of a worldview. And that actually is opposite to an Afro-Indigenous cosmology because as we know, what you see and what is reality may not be the same thing. There are, all of us can point to a time in our life where we swore we were saying something with our own two eyes. Maybe it was exactly as we saw, but our interpretation of what it meant of the significance couldn't be further of the truth. There are things that we have seen and that we could think are horrible only to learn it was exactly what needed to happen in the future. And so that is why Afro-Indigenous communities did not believe to trust just your eyes. So they reject the idea of a worldview and instead they posit this idea of a world sense. And what does it mean to have a world sense? It means literally to awaken your senses.
What am I smelling? What am I feeling? What is my third eye? The eye that you can't see that's wide open. What does that seem? What am I hearing? What am I tasting? When you think of the senses of your body, our ancestors wanted us to tap into our senses. They wanted us to know that sometimes you cannot trust your eyes. You have to look at the complexity and the dynamism and the multifaceted nature of our own visible beings as above so below the idea of a worldview. And as you step further into this idea of a world sense, because you are in a co-creative relationship with nature rather than having dominion, this is what Abraham had teachings, man was created, even though how can man be created when you have to be born through the womb of a woman and that then they had dominion, they were in control over the plant kingdom and the animal kingdom, et cetera. No, we believe that we are in co-creation with the earth, with the systems and cycles of nature. And so when you develop that world sense and you understand that relationship with nature, you begin to observe the laws of the universe. Laws like, wait, what's going on at...top in the cosmos, as above, is also going on below. You understand laws of nature like energy cannot be created, it can only be transformed. You understand the laws of reciprocity. So that is where these indigenous communities practice this idea of the universal law, that they did not abide by man's law if, man's law was in contradiction to universal law. And so, in fact, what that tells us is that the first laws were really placed to us by nature, by creation. You could argue by God. So when it comes to being righteous and it comes to maintaining your ee-wah, your sense of character, that we hold an allegiance first and foremost to the universe though we know that we live in a society where genocide was law, slavery was law, the extraction happening on the continent in Congo and the way the workers are treated, these are laws. But the question we have to ask ourselves are, these universal laws? And which laws are we going to be in alignment with?
And that leads us as we begin to get into alignment with these universal laws, we recognize that we are one, that everything is interconnected. We witnessed that during the pandemic where you could see that what happens on one side of the planet impacts the other side of the planet. That every action that we make connects others because we are whole, we are one. So, You don't get to just go up to Mars and leave the rest of the world behind, right? You don't get to just hoard 0.1 % of the world's resources and the rest of the 90 % just have to suck it up. No, everything is interconnected. So even for those of us who maybe have bought into this duke, depto, and gloom distraction, rhetoric, what I tell you is it's not gonna happen. At the end of the story, There won't be a bunch of billionaire white men taking off to Mars and leaving the rest of us here with a horrible plan. They can't survive without us. Their whole entire society is built upon us. But if you get caught up in this idea of separation, because that's their idea, right? They believe in putting you in boxes. They believe in compartmentalizing you.
They believe that you can't have anything in common with someone on the other. So I can't agree with someone if they're a Republican, even though if we may share the same values around homeschooling. no, if they're Republican, you can't believe them, right? So you see what that separation does. It moves us away from humanity. It lessens our empathy. And at the end of the day, it only hurts us because we are all going to be impacted.
So we talk about the future. And as I always say, you're making the future in the present moment. They can't make the future without you. So I don't care how many headlines tell you that the future is going to be dystopian, tell you that there's going to be Armageddon, tell you that it's going to be Gotham. That will only happen if you believe it, because you are part of the whole. And part of that whole means that you are part of the co-creation of the future in the present moment.
So stepping into that place of wholeness is going to give you an aspect to liberate yourselves from the idea of separation. And also, what does that idea of separation remind us? They want to separate because there's this idea of scarcity, right? Everything is built on the fact that there's not enough. There's not enough for everyone to eat. There's not enough for everybody to have housing. There's not enough.
for everyone to have high quality food and high quality edgy. It's just not enough. And I have to hoard. One person has to be a trillionaire. As my cargo reminds us, we don't need any more billionaires. What good does it do? What good does it do when you will not be able to spend your money in the next seven generations? But this idea of scarcity, which is directly rooted to the European experience in the Middle Ages when they lived in a place of food scarcity, they lived in a place of housing insecurity. Many of the first invasions in ancient Kemet were literally tribes from Europe coming into Africa because they were hungry. They didn't have enough food. And you pair that with a culture who had been living for thousands and thousands of years with gold and natural resources and food and harvest and abundance. And you see how that scarcity mindset over generations and generations begins to impact your entire, not world sense, but your worldview. Many of us who have come from communities that we did not have a lot, grew up in a scarce child, a scarce environment. Do you believe that that is the reality? Do you believe that we live in a universe where there's not enoughness? Because all you're going to do is perpetuate not enoughness. But the reality is not the mindset, the actual reality. If we look at the data, if we look at the signs, if we pull up the receipts, there is more than enough food to feed every single human being. There is more than enough space to make sure that every single person has a quality place to live has access to healthy water, has access to quality education. There are millions of pounds of food that are literally thrown away every day because of some weird bureaucratic law that says that you can't help. So it's not because we don't have abundance. If you'd ever grown a garden and you've had an opportunity to harvest, nine times out of 10, you're harvesting more than you can ever eat. We do not live in the scarce universe. We live in an abundant universe And so it's important that we maintain that mindset and we act within that. And we don't allow dominant noise to override the universal law that you have everything that you need. You have more than enough. Because when you believe that you have more than enough, then you recognize the grand spectrum of experience, the spectrum of options, the spectrum of utilizing your creativity. Scarcity focuses us in on the binary. But when we're able to dream new possibilities, we can move into the spectrum. When you think about the electromagnetic spectrum of light, that there's so many different gradations and you almost can't see one from the other. If you ever looked at a rainbow, you get a chance to witness the spectrum of opportunities. And that is what the universe is showing you in the sky. So don't get caught up in the binary and realize that we can choose through our creative currency, new ideas, new experiences and new levels of awareness. And that is going to move us into a place of new possibility. But you can't have that awareness if you're rigid. And this is another thing that we're taught. No, everything has to go. And I'm saying I'm talking like this on purpose. Everything has to go in a straight line. And if it doesn't, then I need to measure in high need for data. And that's why they're so data obsessed. That's why data is worth more than the price of gold. You're working with the open pineal gland. You're tapped into the power of your ancestors. You're utilizing the forces of nature. You know what's possible. You're not limited to a worldview. So when they tell you when they're pulling up the receipts and telling you in black and white, well, when they did the math, they don't know that one plus one doesn't equal two. One plus one equals three. For one or more people come together, they don't just create themselves, they create something new. So that is why we have to be able to tap into a flexible mentality, a flexible mindset of being able to be flexible and learning new language and learning new cosmologies and learning new ideas. And I always say the future belongs to the adaptable, flexible, creative ones because it doesn't matter what life throws at them. They're going to be the shapeshifters. They're going to be the ones who are going to find their momentum in any situation that you get in them. So flexibility rather than rigidity becomes your superpower. And that's what's so powerful. The more that we tap,
into the thousands and thousands of years of wisdoms of the ancients. We understand that we're playing a different video game. We don't have to try to create or break or rebuild a system. We are able to dwell and thrive and magnetize and be blessed within our own. And that is what that invites us to do. Another idea of the ancients is this idea of defending yourself. You know, Western Abrahamic tradition teach us to turn the other cheek. Something that we pray for and ifah, we pray for protection. We pray to defeat our enemies. We are not naive. If you cannot be a product of 500 years of patriarchy and hierarchy and somehow think you don't have enemies. What? Capitalism is built on excavating and killing and destroying and hoarding and extracting from people of color, from women from people who don't have as much access, even poor white folks. That's what capitalism is built on. So if somebody is coming and trying to take from you, if they are killing your family, if they are poisoning your water, if they are not giving you access to food, not giving you access to being a human, because that human right was given to you by the universe, they are your enemy. There is no amount of voting that's going to turn them on your side. There is no law that is going to be passed, that's going to mysteriously make sure that everybody gets along and loves you. That's why ancient people had tribes. The tribe maintained the same values. The tribe maintained a culture. A culture is the encapsulation of the practices of your cosmology. So yo, I don't rock with people who don't respect women. That's not part of our culture, right? I don't rock with people who destroy the Earth. That's not part of my culture that's not part of my cosmology so understanding That I don't turn the other cheek if you come against me We're going toe-to-toe and that battle might not always be in the physical realm It might be in the spiritual realm But the point is I'm protecting myself in the one of my past episodes I talk about some of the different spiritual ways that you can protect yourself protecting your peace protecting your time protecting your physical body, protecting yourself from electronics, like protection goes all the way down the line. But the point is you have to be in a state of that. And that doesn't take you into a victim state. That doesn't take you into a place of thinking that you're not enough. It empowers you. Even as I wear this beautiful robe that I got made in Nigeria, this is part of my defense. Those of you who've been seeing me and watching on YouTube.
My defense is my adornment, my adornment in the ancient textiles and the jewelry and the sacred metals and my natural hair, right? These are parts of my defense, but they're also parts of my adornment. So we get to reframe and imagine our defense in ways that are restorative to us. But your ancestors, all people on the planet defended themselves.
Okay, so this whole idea that I want to be nice and everybody's got to come to the party. No, they don't. No, everybody doesn't need to come to the party. Everybody's not part of your town. Everybody's not allowed in your home. And you don't bring people who are out of order into your home and then act funny style when they show themselves. And so defending yourself also is an inside out game.
Defending yourself and stepping in and having the self-awareness puts you in a place of human beingness versus human doingness. And so this society has cast a spell upon the people to make them believe that everything they want to achieve begins with an outward action, not recognizing that everything begins inside.
everything begins in the spiritual realm. That the intelligence of the seed is within the seed before you see the seed bear fruit. All the magic is inside. So you have to focus your energy inside first to know that within you dwells that sacred intelligence and it is from the inside out that you're going to be able to manifest. And so we're watching people literally put themselves to the breaking point stressing themselves out, anxieties that are all time high. People are on more medication to deal with their mental health than ever before, thinking that there's this external thing that they're gonna take that's gonna make them whole. And unfortunately, that's just not the case. I'm not saying that folks who are on medically prescribed medication, I'm not a doctor, I can't say what's good for you, but I'm saying there is no solution outside of yourself. And so doing the work within yourself, and I don't mean just in terms of your own personal goals, I mean even doing the work in yourself, even as it relates to global issues. If you're looking at the planet and feeling like you don't like global climate change and you want to restore the planet, go look at your personal environmental footprint. If you're having issues with, you know, global capitalism you might need to revisit how many streaming services you're paying for. Hello. If you're upset about, you know, the way that workers are being treated, you might need to revisit your Amazon Prime subscription.
You're worrying about the sex offender on the news, but have you tapped into the sex offender in your family? You're worried about other people's healing in their communities, but yours is a hot mess and you don't even talk to your family. So go within, y'all. Go within. It's an inside job. And it's not until your own household is in order that I was taught to even have the ability to speak on somebody else's life. You don't get to speak on somebody else's world until yours is in order. Also, Indigenous communities believe in ancestor veneration. I'm going to do an entire episode just on ancestors and ancestor veneration, but the point is they don't this whole idea and no disrespect, but I'm just going back on our seats. When we talk about Afro-Indigenous cosmologies, we believe that you come through the blood and bone of those who came before you. Period, point blank. And science is beginning to catch up with what the Indigenous knew all the time. That even three generations before you, the grandmother in your life held the eggs for her future grandchild.
You come from the people who came before you, all the way back to the beginning of your lineage. And that's why lineage is so important. So this whole idea is like, was a butterfly at one lifetime and then I was a dog. I mean, hey, that's not ours. You understand? That's how some people believe this. When we go back to what you believe, that's not what indigenous communities believed. They actually believed that they came from the blood ancestors that they were related to.
So that's your mama's daddy, mama's daddy, mama's daddy, mama's daddy all the way up. And that is why they all pay homage. Not only are they from those ancestors, but they believe that they are still in communication and that they are in co-creation with those ancestors because they believe that we are in a multi-dimensional universe. So just because someone is not allied in the physical realm does not mean that you are not able to contact, to reach out, and to receive support from them.
That is why funerals and death rituals and life rituals were so important because they wanted to ensure that those ancestors moved into the ancestor realm. And for those of you who did not know your grandparents or maybe were adopted or maybe whatever family trauma, you just don't know, know that those ancestors go back to the original people. So it doesn't just mean your immediate ancestors. You can keep going back. You can call on.
And that also speaks to the universal law of energy is not destroyed, it can only be transformed. That is in complete contrast to the new level of veneration and worship that this society gives where we basically worship celebrities and wealthy people. It doesn't matter how many people you had to kill, how many acres of land you destroy, how much water you poison, how many people you did wrong.
As long as you have money, then therefore you are success, right? And what that does is that goes back to that everything is outside of yourself that also speaks to this idea of extraction versus offering versus appeasing. When we go outside in nature, even if we're going to pick a plant, we ask for permission from that plant. We don't go into nature and think that nature does not have its own spirit. This is what the ancients believed.
Whereas you look at modern day society, which is built to this day, and I talked about this on a different episode, how even though we're supposedly living in this technologically advanced world, every piece of technology still has to go into the womb of the earth. So where's the breakthrough? They haven't found that the breakthrough, the genius still lies within the womb of nature. That is where the genius lies, within. Where do they get those minerals underneath the soil. It's a constant excavation. It's a constant extraction. You look at oil, this idea of mining. We're mining the resources of Mother Earth. We are mining the resources of the wounds of those of us born with wounds. That everything that the society is based on is based on what it can take out. But the anxious believe that they had to put in. That you don't, that we're already taking from the universe. She allows you to walk on her belly. She feeds you from her sacred waters. She feeds you from the beautiful plants and vegetables and fruits and flowers. She feeds you from the wildlife. She gives you the sun. She gives you the air. She gives you everything. And so we don't need to take anything else without permission. We need to give. We need to appease. We need to put an offering down. And so that is why many believe that a lot of the chaos that we are experiencing in the universe right now is because Mother Nature is unhappy. You cannot live for 2,000 years of excavation and mining her people, her resources, her nutrients, and never appease her and think that somehow you're not going to have natural disasters. Think that somehow you're not going to have constant war.
Think of somehow you're not gonna have separation othering. Everything that we're witnessing in the universe right now in terms of the tragedies that we're seeing is in direct relationship to how we have treated Mother Nature. And until she is centered restored, appeased, we will have no peace on the universe. And so we need to get right with her. Because like I said, when they put your heart on that scale,
You don't get to blame white people for why you did not maintain your own character. You don't get to blame patriarchy for why you decided that you didn't care about how you treated the planet, how you didn't care about your shopping and your spending. You didn't care about how workers were treated. You don't get to tap out. You're here. So you have to be responsible and accountable in your own way. There's some forces that we don't have control over.
However, that might mean that we might need to take a little bit longer before something comes to our door because we can't get it overnight. It means we might have to get in the car and actually go to a physical store because we don't want to keep supporting the same companies that we claim to be against. It might mean that we've got to work with somebody that gets on our nerves because we really believe in collectivism and cooperatism and mutual aid.
It might mean that I'm going to have a little bit less so everybody else can eat. This is the way these are the ideas of what it means to step into this place of offering in order to bring the universe back into balance, bring it back into alignment. And so that shape shifters are some of the core principles of Afro-Indigenous cosmologies of the ways that
people who came before you, who were able to create a pyramid, although no one has been able to build one since, who were able to create the first calendars. And we know that it takes 1,000 years to create a calendar. We know that these are the civilizations who birthed African civilizations specifically, that birthed more queens than all other civilizations combined, who never had to have welfare because they never had a time.
where the community went without. They understood, didn't mean everybody got along and they didn't have wars, but this whole level of a 1 % of people controlling over 90 % of the resources, we certainly did not have that. And we did not have that because all of these societies respected the cosmos, they respected the universe, they understood their positionality, and they placed themselves in a constant position of co-creation, collaboration, appeasement, sacrifice, and ritual. So think about your homework, because I'm big on homework these last two episodes. Think about some of the core principles that I named that really resonate with you. Think about some of the ones that maybe you need to research a little bit more. With everything that I do, I'm like, hey, don't take my word for it. Go do your own research, right? I've dedicated my life to the study of myself because I grew up inherently within me. knew that what I was being told by my teachers, by the mainstream media, I knew that it wasn't true. Something within me, my own sacred seed, my own intelligence, through the blood and bone of my ancestors told me that there was more. And so I dedicated my life to studying and to learning the ways of my people.
And the more that I learned the ways of my people, I realized that those were the ways of all ancient people. And then I realized that the more that I tapped into those ways, the more that I was able to hack the mainstream society's algorithm of death, doom, gloom, and destruction. And so all of those ways have given me a superpower. So when people come to me with their ideas of scarcity, when they come to me with their ideas of separation, when they come to me with their ideas of we need to be more...doing more stuff than being, I can reject that. Not just because I'm trying to say no, but because I can stand on the spiritual inheritance of those that came before me. All right, that's what I got for you today, shapeshifters. Until next time, keep shifting.
