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Today I was thinking about the concept of 'spiritual hygiene.' How many of you remember Pig-Pen from Charlie Brown? When we were growing up, and I know I'm dating myself, Pig-Pen was this character in the Peanuts gang that always had a cloud of smoke around him. Wherever he went, there was a cloud of dirt. He was part of the Peanuts gang, he was in the crew, but he was also looked at very disdainfully. As kids, we thought that was funny. As adults, It’s not so funny.

Now I’m thinking about Pig-Pen as a metaphor for somebody that's in need of spiritual hygiene. I'm sure younger generations have something that they call that, right? It's usually the person who trauma dumps on everyone, like in the group chat in the middle of the night. Usually that person who has weird energy, and when they walk in the room, people are thinking, “Oh, here they go again!” Or the person that you know is going to say something negative about the situation instead of thinking positively. It's okay to talk about what's going on, but that person constantly has to be negative. There's no way that they can look at things in a positive light. Maybe young people just call that person “draining.”

Are you a spiritual Pig-Pen? Not in your hygiene but in your energy, your spirit, in the invisible weight you carry into every room, every relationship. Every attempt at rest, the unresolved grief never spoken aloud, the inherited anger, the shame woven into the family. I remember when movies like Rosewood came out, and people would say, "Oh, I don't want to watch that, because it's so negative. Even though it’s about our history." As you know, African people living in America need to address what happened; some people just want to forget it, it's in the past and they don't want to address it. They say, “I don't want to see any more of those “slave movies”. Well, the history has not been fully processed, and we may still be carrying it in our current time period. Believe it or not, we are still dealing with the emotional, physical, economic, and political ramifications of that period of enslavement. This spiritual dirt, it's things that we have not processed; sometimes also things that we have not processed in our family, in our community, in the world. We move through the world dragging the spiritual dirt behind us. Most of us have no idea it's there, but our bodies do. And the science now........

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