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There are conversations you hear, and then there are conversations you remember in your bones.Today’s Friday with Friends was one of the latter — not a performance of healing, but a return to the underworld of truth, the place where we stop pretending we’ve outgrown our wounds and instead ask:

What shaped me?Who shaped me?And who am I becoming now that I am telling the truth?

Because the Season of Descent isn’t poetic language — it is a spiritual instruction.It calls us back to the places we buried what we could not face, could not name, could not carry when we were young.And now, the body says:

It is time.

LadySpeech and I didn’t come to offer a tidy message.We came to tell the truth that lives beneath the tongue.The truth about lineage.The truth about shadow.The truth about becoming people our ancestors did not always know how to be — but desperately needed.

This is not the season for performance.This is the season for recognition.For sitting eye-to-eye with what raised us — the beauty and the ache — and deciding what we refuse to pass forward.

This is descent.This is devotion.This is the initiation of becoming.

Descent is not about sinking.It is about turning toward.Turning toward what was unfinished.Turning toward what still aches.Turning toward what still deserves to be loved.

Because we do not become free by rising above our past we become free by rooting into it, choosing what to carry forward, and what to finally put down.

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What follows is the heart of the conversation:

* the descent as initiation

* lineage without romanticization

* shadow without shame

* healing that doesn’t require erasing where we came from

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