Part Five Practice: Decolonizing Your Imagination with Afro-rithms

(bright relaxing music) Hello, my name is Ahmed Best, and welcome to this Long Time Academy practice, Decolonizing our Imagination with Afro-Rithms from the Future. (bright relaxing music continues) In this practice, we like to say with every algorithm of oppression, there's an Afro-Rithm of liberation. The Afro-Rithm is here to cultivate your radical imagination, to decolonize your wildest ideas, and embrace the ambiguity around our futures by dreaming big. (bright relaxing music continues) In our time together, we will build your ancestral ability to create the future in which you want to live. You will feel the future as something that not just happens to you, but something that you can create and have agency over. (bright relaxing music ends) In order to excite the part of your mind necessary to free your radical imagination, we must first start with the breath. So get comfortable, just be in your body, be aware of your body, know where you are, and let the knowledge and awareness of your body give you comfort. We're gonna start with a deep inhale. Inhale deeply through your nose. And as you exhale, let the air of the exhale just part your lips. Don't force anything. Inhale again. And exhale. With Afro-Rithms, we like to feel the future, not just think about the future, not just imagine the future, but feel what we imagine, feel what we create. In order to feel the future, we have to wake up your gut brain. So on this inhale, I would love a deep, diaphragm-inflating inhale. Think of your diaphragm like a big balloon. And as you inhale, you inflate that balloon. And exhale, you just let the air fall out between your lips just like you did in the first inhales. Now, on this inhale, as you inflate the balloon in your diaphragm, think about your face relaxing. Inhale, your eyelids relax, your brow relaxes, your ears relax. And as you exhale, your cheeks relax, your lips relax, your jaw relaxes. Now we move to our head brain. In our world, the left hemisphere of our brain is overworked. We have meetings online. We're constantly checking our social media. We're always analyzing, troubleshooting, fixing things. The right hemisphere of our brain, where our radical imagination lives, needs to play. It needs to have that childlike play where there are no judgements. That's where our future for our radical imagination lives. It lives in that right hemisphere, so we must wake that up. We have to excite that right hemisphere of the brain so we can get to that radical imagination. On this inhale, think of the air traveling up through your nose, into the crown of your head, and swirling around that right side of your brain. And as you exhale, that swirl is like a lightning storm, and all the synapse of the brain, all those new pathways that you are going to create in your brain, just light up. Think about it like a lightning...