Ep 264: From Schoolish to Sovereign to Savorist

In this episode, we'll explore the concept of savorism, a term Akilah coined to savor the spaciousness, slowness, and richness that comes from integrated unschooling.

Sit with us for storytime about how Akilah's family made the shift from conventional school to homeschooling to unschooling. It was an experience that caused her and her partner to pause, reflect, and listen more to their children's needs. Hear how they fought against the 'stuckness' of conventional schooling and forged their own paths.

This episode also gets into the important difference between pace and rhythm as we set out to design our days with our natural flow in mind.

Also, we send our heartfelt thanks to Megan, our fellow liberationist over at The Unschool Files, for her energizing words and strong commitment to the raising free people movement!

Links:

Shoutout to Meghan! You can learn more about her podcast, zine and Roam here:
https://www.flowcode.com/page/theunschoolfiles

Our dope beats are from these beatmakers:
https://www.instagram.com/akeemmuzikbeatz/

https://linktr.ee/Richeflex

https://www.instagram.com/sehratonin/

Other links:

https://youtu.be/PoMTrwRkZmk

http://mybrownbaby.com/2012/03/harmony-the-sustainable-alternative-to-worklife-balance/

https://savorcomplex.substack.com/

https://schoolishness.com/coaching/

https://schoolishness.com/savorade-coaching/

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:10

Hi Akilah. It's Megan. I'm feeling so many things about the podcast coming to an end, but I'm so here for this next chapter, the savoring and the personal manifesto path. I'm grateful for you and all of these experiences that you've shared over the years and really that you sat with some dope-ass thoughts and leaned into that so you could deliver some liberation tonic. You're really the groundbreaking game changer when it comes to unschooling and self-directedness. You have inspired so many. Your words are like a salve that people turn to over and over again when they're worried or confused or just want to feel like a regular person. You've paved an entire new way with your work and your language and your intention, and it is truly a gift not just to me and the unschooling community, but to the entire world.

Speaker 1: 1:14

I hope that you can feel all of the love that I'm sending you, all of the love in the cosmos.

Speaker 3: 1:32

You can't keep using tools of oppression and expect to raise free people. Peace and love. Akilah here Coming to you with episode 264 on the final season of Fair of the Free Child podcast. This season, we got a three-point focus. as you may recall, we talked about this at the top of this season. I'm sending off the podcast, so we're doing all the official eulogizing and sending off things. You're also going to find out by the end of this season where to get this work. now, if you're not listening to this podcast every week, like you've been doing since 2016, where else will you get this particular type of work? We're going to cover that this season.

Speaker 3: 2:26

The third focal point are the how-to guides sharing how you can navigate the work that I've put out over the past eight years, including the people, places and resources that I've learned from and with. We're starting next week with the beginner's path, because that's one of the. I think they're five paths the beginner's path, the home school to more confident, autonomy-centric path. We got the for me, not them, path for folks whose kids have no interest in leaving school, but we want to address our own schoolishness in different ways. We also have the whiteness-centric work life reality path And lastly, a been-unschool-in-but-ready-to-deep-amashit path. So next week we will be starting with the beginner's path and we'll be talking a little bit about this kind of flow right here. Let's let our anonymous listener tell you what's popping.

Speaker 2: 3:27

Akilah, you got me twisted with these podcasts. I'm here in Chicago like, oh my gosh, like I wish I was listening to your podcast when my baby was in my womb. I wish I listened to your podcast like before the pandemic. Oh my gosh. I'm just sitting here really because I'm like I was just so hard on my babies at the time. I had a first grader and a fifth grader and the girl was in fifth grade And I'm just like, oh my goodness, the creativity that could have came out of that time. But I was just so focused on allowing them to do that busy paperwork crap that they sent home with the kids for the pandemic and mad at my first grader, who has ADHD, who decided to just listen to the teacher while his iPad was up And the teacher only can see the ceiling fan. Oh my goodness, if I knew what I knew now, i would have been like let him see the damn fan. Hello, ah, girl. but that's okay, my kids are still in public school and you will hear more from this listener.

Speaker 3: 4:59

Love her. We've been chatting on and off through the voice memo option That is on my site raising free people calm, make sure you look at that little voice memo option on the right hand side Allows you to just talk to me. You know, send me a little something, something about what is being activated and showing up for you as you listen, and so that's what she did, and it really inspired the details of the beginner's path. This week, though, as promised, i'm going to tell you the details of our path from schoolish to sovereign, to savorist, and By the end you will understand what savorist and savorism mean.

Speaker 3: 5:49

Things I made up, like so many of the things that I share on this podcast, that are really just the result of the integration of this unschooling life, just living in my body, living in my points of connection, making me more available for these types of drop-ins to show up and come through, and so this whole work and world of savorism is the result of this eight-year focus on unschooling and de-schooling and points of connection and the shedding and What happens when you learn like I learned eventually not right away how to stop Replacing the spaciousness that unschooling was giving me with something else right not needing to fill a void, a Perceived void, but realizing that the spaciousness, the slowness, the savoring, that is The move, that is the vibe, that is the access point. So I'm going to talk about that in like 20, some minutes, a detail shortly, and I first, though, wanted to thank Megan, who you heard at the top of this. Megan is a fellow Liberationist who's also raising free people, including herself. She runs the unschool files really dope podcast and also a community zine. She's also the co-founder of Rome, a teen travel collective that I wish was out back in a day when my daughters were in this age range of 13 to 17 and would be interested in this. Sage is closing out 17 right now and has her own roaming interest going on, but this teen travel collective right here, i think, is so dope. I'm going to make sure that the link to it is on the show notes page, and Anywhere you listen to this podcast You'll be able to see the show notes page for the episode and that link for the unschool files. The Rome teen travel collective will be there as well as Megan's zine. So shout out to you, megan. I really appreciate your listenership and connection and the work that you are doing in the world. Thanks so much.

Speaker 3: 8:08

So this was a result. I created this as a result of a question that a member of our make it happen family shared with us Shout out to your mana. She really wanted to hear more about what embodying the savorist looks, feels and sounds like They actually I recorded this before that question, but it answers the question in so much detail that it was a really good fit. And if anyone is interested in learning more about Savarism how that's showing up for me I will make sure that there's a link to a video and a Post from my newsletter, the savor complex that talks about it. And I also created Coaching and I'm okay with calling it that because that's what it is actually Coaching for this savorism work. A couple different types of coaching actually savor complex coaching and savor aid. So all the details of that will be on the show notes page. Wherever you listen to this podcast, there's a link to the show notes. Check them out, and I will also drop the show notes on patreoncom Ford slash akila so that it's even easier for make it happen family to access all of that One family's framework from schoolishness to savorism.

Speaker 3: 9:43

We started out in school. We were on that school bus and then our children's reactions Created a slow leak in the tire. That bus was still going, they were still in school, but that leak slowed us down. With that slow leak, we sped up a little bit so we could get to a stopping point, get off the main road, we pulled over to the side and then we patched that tire There. There, hun, here's what you can do if you're bored. You can do this instead. We'll add this element will send you here. We'll do this. We patched that tire. We kept on going, but we were going at a slower pace, and slowing down of course Brings noticing, more clear noticing. So because we were slowed down, it allowed us to see more clearly and hear more clearly What was happening outside of our plans For our children and their educational journey. Their feedback, their insights, their needs became louder and more relevant and then important. So eventually we said, okay, let's get off that bus and get in our own car.

Speaker 3: 11:04

That was the step of moving from school to homeschooling. We were no longer going to school, but we took everything we could from that school bus and school life and just put it in our car. So we were doing school at home, which also offered a certain vantage point, like the slow leak in the tire of the school bus. We had a certain vantage point because now we weren't stuck on that one particular path But we still had the same destination of college ready K through 12 compliant. We're doing school at home and then we're realizing that this is a vantage point.

Speaker 3: 11:55

What else could we learn if we weren't stuck with just these books, if we didn't think that the majority of the learning came from what the books and the directions around the books and the curriculum taught us, if we weren't stuck with those books in that schedule of August to May with some breaks in between? what could we do? So then we realized one of the major benefits was that we were now out of the stuckness of travel at certain times a year Major point of liberation We did not have to go on break when everybody else was ready to buy tickets for break. So that meant we didn't need as many resources financially to move about the place and get learning in different ways. So then we traveled a little bit to explore information in different ways And then we realized that we could look at what was missing from school, not just how we were compliant with school, which was the focus before. One of the things that I've been obviously missing was broader, deeper cultural connection connection with our culture, our children's culture, outside of our family and our small circle of folks. Then we began noticing how the planning and process of travel offered such rich learning experiences itself before we even got to where we were trying to go.

Speaker 3: 13:28

This is when saviorism began, this work of savoring, because school was about keeping up with a particular pace, whereas what our homeschooling was becoming was a slowing down. It was allowing us to embrace imbalance. For example, much like my journey from employee to entrepreneur started with me doing a lot of the same things I did at my job trying to wake up at the same time, get dressed the same time so that I didn't lose my quote unquote rhythm. I started doing that at first for a significant amount of time when I left corporate America. Eventually, i began to realize that it wasn't about keeping up with that pace. It was about getting familiar with my rhythm. There was a difference. One was a pace that I was made to follow. The other one is a rhythm that I came with. Some of it was innate, some of it came as a result of me getting into a groove with my interest and my needs. The difference between pace and rhythm was another major move away from schoolishness to something else Getting in touch with my rhythm and the possibility of the multiple types of rhythm that I could tap into, depending on what I wanted to accomplish.

Speaker 3: 14:55

Yes, now we were in the driver's seat, not just getting off the school bus and into our own car and following the bus with a car full of the same stuff from the school. Now we were starting to drive and we were starting to determine myself, my partner Chris and our children. We were starting to determine the destination. Our life, what we had and what we felt we lacked was starting to determine our destinations. This was familiar because, way back in 2012, i was writing about the ways that I was unlearning the idea of work-life balance. I was already noticing work-life balance to be a form of confinement, just like a curriculum.

Speaker 3: 15:50

It wasn't about balance, it was about harmony. I'm hearing more people talk about it now and I love it because way back then is when I started to notice that my own rhythm actually called for a harmony where sometimes things would be imbalanced I would spend more time with one child or one project or one feeling, instead of trying to balance it out and touch all of the things and have it feel like everything is going at a pace that makes sense. No, sometimes I got to lean all the way over into one direction, because that's what it calls for. Life, unlike school, is not about trying to stay into the neat little boxes of time and topic. It's about having the skill, the confidence, the practice to pivot and lean and turn when you need to and to hold firm and ground and root when you need to. It is the discernment that's sustainable and healthy and supportive of my logistical needs and my emotional needs.

Speaker 3: 17:03

So when I really developed that type of intimacy, real connection with what it meant to harmonize, which had a lot to do with slowing down and noticing and witnessing and trusting into what I came to notice and what I witnessed from that slower pace, that was another point of moving away from schoolishness, because it was from that space that emergence began to be a very real and trustworthy thing in our lives, because these opportunities, these teachable moments that I was looking out for back then, they didn't need to be orchestrated, they were happening all the time, i actually couldn't even keep up with all of the learning that was happening. I didn't need to run in front of the lesson and present it so that they wouldn't miss it. I didn't have to run in front of it and give it a uniform and a song and a dance and an intro and an outro for them to learn from it. It was school that actually simulated poorly oftentimes life. It was school that actually tried to capture and tell the story of learning experiences, whereas I didn't need to do that. I needed to move out of the way oftentimes and then facilitate the unpacking of the experience, offer maybe some language, pay attention to what language they were developing, what directions were more rooted in, how they wanted to feel, but weren't considering how everybody else involved needed to feel.

Speaker 3: 18:46

Skills that were not about punishment and reward, but are about the same things that we as adults in our 40s and 50s are noticing now Worship, communication, language, confidence, willingness to be wrong, what it's like to manage when you make a mistake out loud, to move away from the idea that you will be shamed over into the reality that this is a possibility to refine and further connect. As a result of the mistake, these lessons were happening all the time. So school was doing a poor job simulating life experiences that needed practice, and because we weren't in school, we didn't need to dress up the experiences. We didn't need to announce something as mathematics. And then there were other things that we didn't even need to think of school language, like subjects, math, language, arts. All of that We didn't need to because school didn't even cover it.

Speaker 3: 19:55

So more and more, we started to become aware of the confines of this space that we thought was actually the path. So when you look up and realize that the path that you were on was riddled with more than you were willing to risk, you develop a different story around learning and around school. Because we already knew that one of the big risks of school was the lies. We knew that school was still talking about who discovered what and who was not valuable and who wasn't even visible in the textbooks. We knew that, but what we didn't know is the extent to which that path actually created atrophied muscles and unlearned skills The same things that we experienced when we were in school, their father and me but we didn't even name the things.

Speaker 3: 20:49

We didn't name these truths as important, like why we would spend all these years in school but leave and not have a basic understanding of adulting principles, of how taxes work and insurance and setting up a budget for yourself, and all of those things that we know are important but are not present in K through 12. We started to question things. So this mad question asking is another part of the framework How come this thing that we're being pushed towards for example, college right, becoming a college student how come this thing had these predatory elements that weren't addressed? They send you all these credit cards when you start college, but you don't have any education about how they work. And your parents didn't have time to give you that education either, because they were working in that thing that you were trying to get to, which was the job. So they didn't have time to teach you how to manage all those pieces.

Speaker 3: 21:50

So we were able to really notice those things and say, well, if school wanted to do something about that, it could, but it isn't doing it. You would actually have to try to figure out how to make more money to go to a better school that might be more aligned with the realities of what we deal with as adults or have people there who have the space to do that, because the teachers that I knew in public schools and in charter schools did not have the space to do what they felt was important and necessary with the students, because they had to be focused on compliance and test readiness, but the tests were not about the things that I, as an adult who is in the world outside of school, knew were necessary. So I started to make those connections and that is essentially what saviorism is The life that you design as a result of naming, noticing and beginning to integrate life skills, communication skills, collaborative skills, skills that you just don't get to nurture in school. Savoring is a three-part process of acknowledging harm, beginning to detangle from that harm, to de-school, from the cost of it and how it shaped you and your relationships, and then, once you begin to do that detangling and that discerning, then you can recognize connections that you weren't making before or you can establish new connections that you did not have the space or capacity to make before. And our process was really that, because once we were driving our own vehicle and once we had taken all the school stuff out of there most of it anyway we had the space to notice that the lessons were everywhere We were able to make connections that we were not even seeing as connected things before. Now that we're in this stage where we've recognized the harm and we've spent all those years de-schooling and detangling from it, that led us to some level of sovereignty to be able to make decisions outside of the fear and propaganda and effective marketing of the educational industrial complex. The sovereignty from that led us to this work of savoring.

Speaker 3: 24:19

Now that I'm beginning to detangle, what am I noticing? What are the connections that have already been there We're ancient, actually, i just wasn't tuned in And what are the connections that I can bring this version of the people I come from, coupled with everything that I am? What connections are there now that are actually beneficial to my community and my culture in ways that I was not able to do when I was focused on this singular goal of being exceptional and overperforming the other people that I could be in collaboration with? Who am I now that my personhood and my sense of connection and community are not oppressed by my studenthood? So, now that I've gotten this level of sovereignty moving from schoolish to sovereign, so that all these things can shape me the same way school shaped me, but far more aligned with myself, my knowledge of self, the reclamation of the parts of me and my culture that now get to sit in my everyday life, not just when I vacation.

Speaker 3: 25:39

This is that stage of moving now, with sovereignty, into something else, which is what I call saviorism, because once we did that, we were now in partnership with our children. What they were noticing about themselves, in their own ways of learning, their own preferences, their own successes, their own collaborative efforts with other people people in their age group also, people older than them, also people younger than them What were we noticing when they were removed from the confines of just mainly being with people in their age group and being ill equipped to communicate with other people because they didn't look or sound like them, or to communicate their own needs for fear of shame? What were we noticing about shame and the presence of shame in school culture? All of those things, the noticing and the detangling from that, created that sovereignty, and that sovereignty, one of the major benefits of that is confident autonomy. Confident autonomy can now be nurtured when you are out of the clutches of studenthood and the gaze, the multiple gazes, that students must navigate.

Speaker 3: 27:05

So then our goal went from college graduate to confident autonomy, and that includes collaboration, which they were able to do through projects that they did with other people, creating podcasts, stories that they wrote in collaboration with other people, other people's creative work that they took and adapted in collaboration and on their own places. We went to that were connected to all of our interests, the ways that we dipped in and out of some schools in different places so that they can connect where they need to, but not be confined inappropriately, and so eight years of us doing that really walked us to where we are now, where our youngest child is in school with her confident autonomy intact. Our oldest daughter took a different route working and experiencing life, interviewing different people who are in the industries that she's interested in, so she can test those waters and go down paths that are aligned with her own patterns of interest and learning, not being stuck in one place and following a path because that's where she started working different jobs to test out her adulting wings Things that I, as an adult in my late forties, i'm still understanding now in terms of that level of confident autonomy building and communal outreach in support of interest, tapping into people in her network, my network, her father's network really operating in the real world. This is what sovereignty has brought us and what it has done for me, specifically working right alongside my children to D school, seeing myself outside of my own student hood, seeing myself outside the myths that I'd created to keep myself safe from the grind culture of school, unlearning things about myself, having a personal leadership practice that has been recovered and reclaimed from what I needed to do and what my mother needed to do as a single parent, figuring out things and not having the space to think her thoughts and process her feelings and talk to her kids how she wanted to. She couldn't do that. She was tired and overworked And if Chris and I were not careful, we would end up going into another version of that same thing.

Speaker 3: 29:44

Because I had to recognize, or I got to recognize, through that slowing down, through being in relationship with my sovereignty, i got to recognize that my mother didn't struggle at the level for me and my brothers that she did for me to come back now and just do a different version of that same thing, but my kids would just be in nicer schools and I might have more language to talk to them, but I would still be talking to them less often than I wanted to and needed to because I was busy or tired or unfulfilled. But now that my knowledge of self, through those years of slowing down right alongside my children, these years of getting myself off the hook from being a certain type of parent or producing a certain type of child, that was over. Now Chris and I were in the process of trusting who our children were becoming, which gave them so much space and gave Chris and me so much space to be in healthier relationships with ourselves and our needs and the parts of ourselves that we could reclaim, now that we weren't just pushing to accomplish some version of the American dream, particularly as Jamaican people brought here with a very particular idea of what this country could do for us. That came with a lot of pressure and a lot of blind spots that our parents could not see because they shouldered a different level of weight than we could. But that came with a responsibility that I eventually recognized. My responsibility was not to fulfill the dream that my parents had for themselves or for their children when they moved to America. It was for me to get to my sovereignty, to learn what confident autonomy could mean for me, and then to move into something even sweeter, which is this saver complex. So in doing that we were able to discover and reclaim so many parts of ourselves and our creativity and our ambitions that were not rooted in what we were afraid of or how we compared ourselves, but about what we were, what we were comprised of, that ancestral work that got to live through us because we were not tired and comparison-ridden and fearful and competitive, where we could actually just collaborate or just be cool with exactly how things were. We had recovered our daughters and then ourselves from all those other gays out there that shaped us into these performative versions of our natural selves.

Speaker 3: 32:52

And so that's the framework, that's what happened for us, and really I think that anyone can look at this path and plug in where you are on the path or just use it as an example, a model, so that you can really look at your own version of your life. It might look very different for you. The work here is to look at how you get to savoring, how you get to that stage of being able to acknowledge harm, to detangle and deschool yourself from it enough so that you can start to notice existing important connections, or you have the space and capacity to establish connections that only you can make. So listen and re-listen to our path from schoolish to sovereign to sovereign and map out your own. I hope that answers your question, amana, and anyone else who's here and we talk about saviorism and is like, what's she talking about? And remember that the show notes page will give you many more points of connection, including something from my newsletter, something from our personal YouTube channel and anything else that I think will be a good fit.

Speaker 3: 34:23

Shout out to Naz, who is our co-producer this season, and also I got to shout out our beat makers. We got three consistent beat makers in our midst here. We got Jamie C aka Saratonin, and we've got Jared Akeem of Akeem Music Beats, who's also my brother. Love and appreciate you, jared, you are so talented. And Ryan, aka Richie Flex, who is my cousin, who is just like really killing the game right now. I love listening to what comes up for him, and I will make sure that their Instagram pages are listed on the show notes page.

Speaker 3: 35:03

So if you need dope beats for whatever you do in, you know you've got some resources that Akilah said they dope rock with them. Here's where you could find them. So you already know what next week is about, as I said at the top of this, we will be journeying through seasons two and three, revisiting the Ting, recapping it and just pulling some gems from that, and we're going to get into our how to guides, starting with the beginner's path. So make sure you stay connected to us wherever you listen to podcasts And if you have not joined our Make It Happen family over on patreoncom, forward slash Akilah, come on through and bring a friend. Late August, we are starting personal manifesto path. Our first course inside the Make It Happen family live meetups for multiple months with me and maybe a few of my homies about creating your own personal manifesto. All right, so, as always, thanks for listening and chat to you next week.