The Legacy Trips Story

Because Mother Maya told us that our legacy is every life we have touched. So this is my 'build it and they will come' story, and now it's time to say goodbye.

5 years. 20 trips. Wow, what a ride it has been. And I am so very grateful for every moment of it.

When I led my very first antiracism + yoga trip to Montgomery in December 2018, I had no idea what I was embarking upon. Legacy Trips quickly became a community project. 12 facilitators, 12 Operations managers. And over 100 people came on these trips with us.

With tremendous love and care, we facilitated spaces for people to come and experience immersive, all-inclusive, racial and social justice oriented weekends for the purpose of doing collective learning and work in a supportive environment led by facilitators from the global majority where everyone sought to take accountability for educating themselves while integrating mindful action against oppressive systems and strategizing ways to affect personal and collective change with the goal of liberation for all.

Over the course of Friday night, Saturday and Sunday, our Legacy Trips participants visited the lynching memorial (The National Memorial For Peace and Justice), the Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration, and Selma where we walked across the Edmund Pettus bridge (or as one of our facilitators, Lettie Gore, renamed it the John Lewis bridge) in Alabama.

[This video is another installment in my visual audiobook series {usually for my paid subscribers only} where I read sections from my book, Are We Free Yet? The Black, Queer Guide To Divorcing America, and here I read Chapters 3, 4 and the very beginning of Chapter 5.]

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In addition to the 3 day weekend trips, we offered an intensive after care program for those who wanted additional support after their transformative time in Alabama with us, led by an incredible human and writer, Nya Abernathy..

We held monthly alumni calls to help our community stay connected and engaged, feel supported, and held accountable in their own ongoing anti-oppression work.

In July 2023, we went to Ecuador for a plant medicine healing retreat led by the only queer, BIWOC led plant medicine retreat center in the world, LaVida Divine Retreats.

We even hosted a writer’s retreat in Brooklyn just a few months ago in September.

We were able to provide several scholarships to folx who needed it.

People flew in from all over the country, many who had never even been to the South before.

Each trip was powerful in its own way.

So much joy and laughter that only comes from gathering together with like minded and like hearted individuals with a common vision and commitment to collective liberation.

So many tears and so much grief to witness and to feel, holding one another as we walked through those sacred spaces, and listened and learned about the truth of our nation’s history of racial terror and violence (which still continues to this day).

So many of us asking ourselves, ‘what is my part, what can I do, what difference can I make?’

So many hard lessons to learn.

I can’t say we did it perfectly every time. But I can say we kept coming back even when it got hard, even when we didn’t agree, even when we lost our way.

Legacy Trips taught me, taught us, what true community is.

Last night, we held our final Legacy Trips alumni call. It was so sweet and we shared memories and tears and where we will each go from here…because though Legacy Trips is closing this chapter, the work continues.

Thank you to every person who joined us on a Legacy Trip and who opened their hearts and shared a little bit of themselves with us. You presence has been a gift that I will always treasure.

And a very special thanks to our facilitators through the years: Lettie Gore, Tommy Allgood, Corey Leak, Nandi Kay, Jamal Taylor, Rebekah Borucki, Kina Reed, Patricia Taylor, The Gaddys, and Kohenet Dr Harriette Wimms.

And also, deep gratitude to our operations team and volunteers through the years: Chelsea Strawn, Kathi Norman, Susan Andrews, Olivia Bethea, Nya Abernathy, Alieshia Nunnally, Charone Smith, Colleen Shearer, Becka Eppley, Kohenet Pleasance Silicki…and my dear friend Jen Kinney who I couldn’t have done this without all these years.

I love you all.

Legacy Trips has been one of the greatest, proudest, and most important parts of my life.

A few of our beautiful reviews.

A Brief Timeline

12.2018: The very first Satya Yoga Trips takes place.

10.2029: I change the name from Satya Yoga Trips to Legacy Trips. 6 trips have taken place in less than a year.

2.2020: The only Legacy Trip of the year takes place. We sold out 2 trips this year despite Covid, even though the remaining trips of this year had to be canceled.

6.2021: After no trips in almost a year and a half due to Covid, Legacy Trips resumes and hosts 3 trips this year.

6.2022: 14 Legacy Trips have taken place with people of different racial and gender identities from all over the country.

10.2023: 5 trips this year, all sold out, and we held our first private trip, and we also went to Ecuador.

5.2024: The last Legacy Trip took place which was for the Jewish community.

A Terrible Twist That Nobody Asked For

As an antiracism educator and racial and social justice advocate who has done this work and led these trips to Alabama to bear witness to the legacy of lynching in the United States these past several years, 2024 has brought a personal loss to my life that I am still grappling and struggling with. Because even though I’ve walked through the lynching memorial about two dozen times with scores of people on these trips, nothing could have prepared me for the lynching of my very own nephew, Joshua, who was hung from a tree with his hoodie in Stillwater, Oklahoma, this past April…police say that he did it to himself.

And the truth is that between the genocide of the Palestinian people that the United States is supporting and paying for, and losing Joshua in such a horrific way, I am completely shattered, my heart is completely broken. This year has been the most painful chapter in my Legacy Trips story, and in my life. And I just need some time and space to grieve and to heal, and to not return to Alabama, or that country, for a while.

At this time, I feel complete with this part of my work. Perhaps there will be another iteration of these Legacy Trips at another time. For as I look back at what we have seen, heard, felt, learned, and accomplished together, I am extremely proud, but I also know there is still more work to do.

May we all find the grace and the strength to carry on, to continue the work towards collective liberation until all beings everywhere are free, and may we love and support each other as fiercely as we can until our time on this earth is done.

Praise the ancestors for the gift that Legacy Trips has been to me and so many others.

Thank for reading this, my Legacy Trips story, and for allowing me to share this part of my life, my heart, and my work with you.