Sunday Thoughts: Radical Sacred Self-Love Journey

ODE to the Full Blue Moon in Sagittarius 

May 31 2026

One of the promises God made to me when I chose this journey was that I would be “unrecognizable” on the other side of it.

At the time, I thought that meant other people would see me differently.

But what I am beginning to understand is that the transformation was really about how I would see myself.

That realization has unsettled me more than I expected.

Because the truth is, I have spent much of my life wrestling with the tension between audacity and arrogance.

For a while I have accepted what I carry, the effect I have on people. I know what happens when people are fully seen, developed, challenged and loved in my presence. I know my capacity to help leaders become more whole, more effective, more human and more consequential. I know my work carries transformational power.

And still, there is a part of me that hesitates when I speak plainly about it.

Not because it is untrue.

But because I have experienced the world’s reaction to me when I stand in the integrity of who God says I am. Sometimes from the people who say they appreciate or love me. 

Not to mention, women, especially Black women, are taught early that naming the magnitude of what we carry is dangerous territory.

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A Harsh Experience

My earliest career memory of this happened when I was around 23 years old and "Ms. Pat" (who will forever go down as one of the worst leaders I ever worked for) ridiculed me in front of our entire team in a work meeting. It was actually a public execution disguised as a work meeting. I was a young ambitious professional who worked hard, was a fast learner and believed the evidence of my life up to that point: I was smart and I should trust that about myself. 

To spare you the details, let’s just say that "Ms. Pat" had given me feedback for weeks, “Your teammates don't like you. You need to fix it.”

After apparently failing to remedy this, one day I received a team meeting luncheon invite. What I walked into was an orchestrated effort by my boss to allow my peers, ten of them, to take turns telling me how much they didn’t like me. 

Now to be honest, my teammates didn’t know what they were walking into either. "Ms. Pat" was the kind of leader who knew how to apply unhealthy pressure on all. 

After the tongue lashing, my peers were dismissed and I stayed behind for a more indepth conversation with "Ms. Pat". 

Crying profuscuously from just enduring 30 minutes of harsh feedback from my peers. "Ms. Pat", sitting at the other end of a large conference room table, slid a box of tissues down the table to me. 

“I will give you a minute.” she said. 

I took at least 10,000 deep breaths to calm down. She proceeded, “Kenya you are arrogant. You think you know everything. You don’t listen.  I tried to let you fix it but you refused…”

Over the next several months I thought about all of the feedback I heard against the reality of my experience and behavior.  (BTW I immediately applied to work in another department and left Ms. Pat’s team a month after this incident)

Sure there were some things I learned from that experience that helped me for years to come but the message I received was something that would take me YEARS to completely unlearn: Be smart but not too smart. Talk but not too much. Be personable but not too personable.

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My Radical Sacred Self Love Journey Continues

The last 4 years or so on my radical sacred self love journey, I have faced the giant that started to take shape in me that day in the conference room with "Ms. Pat", and that grew bigger due to a myriad of other professional, personal and spiritual life experiences. 

This is the question that took shape for me:

At what point does minimizing myself stop being humility and become desecration?

That question has been sitting heavily with me.

Because I no longer believe self-betrayal is holiness.

I think many of us have confused fragmentation with humility.

Making ourselves smaller.

More digestible.

Less threatening.

Less clear.

Less powerful.

Less honest about what we know and what we carry.

But over these past months, as I have revisited years of journals, prayer, leadership, grief, community work, corporate life, embodiment, theology and truth, I have come to understand something:

My lived synthesis exceeds conventional categories.

There is no existing box large enough to hold all that I am becoming without reducing it.

And perhaps that is not failure.

Perhaps that is evidence.

I AM the kind of person that fields of study are eventually created from.

Not because I believe myself above humanity, but because some lives emerge at the intersection of things our current language cannot yet fully hold.

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Recently I was having a conversation with a dear friend about my journey, she introduced me to the term, womanist theology. She told me I sounded like a "womanist".

Although I had not heard of the term, after some research, I must say it feels "at home."

As of now, my contribution to womanist theology is:

The truth that a woman fully inhabiting herself is sacred. That embodiment, pleasure, sovereignty, presence and power are not distractions from God, but part of how many of us return to God after generations of fragmentation, survival and self-abandonment.

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What has surprised me most is that this inner work has changed me physically too.

When I look in the mirror, I look different to myself.

Lighter. Softer. More present.

People tell me often now that I seem younger. That my aura feels lighter. That I look like I am aging backwards.

And maybe that is what happens when a woman stops abandoning herself.

Maybe the body responds to truth too.

Maybe there is something spiritually exhausting about carrying the weight of your own suppression for years.

I have fully accepted the magnitude of my gift.

Even writing that still feels audacious.

But I no longer believe God was asking me to spend my life pretending less was given to me than actually was.

I refuse to remain estranged from what God created me to be.

And perhaps that is what Radical Sacred Self Love really is.

Not performance.

Not self-worship.

Not becoming someone new.

But the slow, often painful, deeply sacred journey of returning to yourself so truthfully that you become unrecognizable even to yourself.

To state it more clearly: What I now know is: Self-betrayal creates spiritual dissonance. 

And when you abandon yourself repeatedly, you also lose intimacy with your own aliveness, truth, discernment, and sacred knowing. 

What others experience from me today is not arrogance. It is not even confidence.

It is accurate self-recognition.