do the work your soul must have

a primer to soulwork

I want to begin with something simple and radical:

Black people have souls.

That might sound obvious to you. But I mean it in the deepest, most disruptive way possible. We have souls—and they are worth knowing, protecting, listening to, and centering in all we do.

Soulwork is the name I’ve given to the spiritual, intellectual, and experiential framework I developed while trying to survive my life. It was born from burnout, from breakdown, from the betrayal of institutions.

Soulwork is a radical refusal of disposability. It is a tender, methodical turning inward.

It is Black liberation work at the level of the soul.

Soulwork isn’t something I invented from scratch. It’s something I named because I was trying to survive. But what I’m naming has a lineage. A lineage rooted in the lives and work of Black women who have always made a way out of no way.

One of those women is Dr. Katie Geneva Cannon, a founding mother of womanist theology.

She famously said:

“Do the work your soul must have.”

Those words are at the root of Soulwork.

Dr. Cannon was talking about moral agency and the sacred mandate to pursue one’s own purpose, especially in the face of dehumanizing systems.

I didn’t know I was walking in her words when I quit my job, but I was.I was doing the work my soul must have. Scared, yes. But also sure that I couldn’t keep surviving inside systems that asked me to betray myself daily.

Soulwork is how I keep returning to that call.

And I share it in honor of Dr. Cannon and every Black woman who has ever said: Not like this.

What Is Soulwork?

Soulwork is both a framework and a praxis, and it’s about more than making the decision to quit your job. 

It is how we survive, and how we reimagine our lives on the other side of survival.

At its core, Soulwork is the insistent belief that Black women and Black MaGeS (people of marginalized genders) are not just bodies to be used.

Soulwork is a Black feminist epistemology that holds that Black women and those of us who read as Black women (despite our self identification), possess ancestral, affective, and embodied knowledge, shaped through generations of labor, survival, and spiritual practice, that can liberate us all.

Soulwork resists the binary logic of body vs. mind, private vs. public, secular vs. sacred.

It understands labor not only as employment, but as doing, as devotion, as the exhausting and exquisite work of keeping oneself and one’s people alive.

Soulwork brought me back to myself. Back to a sense of integrity I didn’t even know I had lost. It gave me language for what I was feeling, and structure for what I was seeking. It helped me look honestly at the toll my labor was taking on my spirit, and offered me a way to turn toward restoration, not just survival.

To help others do the same, I’ve organized the soulwork framework around five foundational pillars.These are not commandments. They are not rigid.  They are containers—each one spacious enough to hold your truth. They offer language, not limits. Orientation, not obligation.

Let them meet you where you are.

1. Vocation: The Soul’s Relationship to Labor

Vocation is the sacred intersection between one’s labor and one’s life purpose. Vocation reframes work not as mere employment, but as spiritual calling and cultural contribution. Vocation privileges knowledge produced through the act of labor itself—our embodied expertise, craft wisdom, and the ritual rhythms of daily work.

Are you doing the work your soul must have?
Or are you just doing some shit?

2. Wisdom: Ancestral, Embodied, and Experiential Knowing

Wisdom refers to intergenerational, communal knowledge. It encompasses both formal theory and informal lore—recipes, proverbs, and prayers. Wisdom shifts what counts as evidence. It democratizes authorship. Community elders and “non-experts” become co-theorists.

We remember.
And in remembering, we decolonize what counts as knowledge.

3. Community: Relational Knowledge Practices

Community names the collective bonds through which knowledge is co-produced, shared, and sustained.Community validates knowledge through relational accountability. Claims are not peer-reviewed in isolation, but witnessed and affirmed in relationship.

We don’t heal alone.
We don’t work alone.

4. Advocacy: Translating Insight into Change

Advocacy grounds Soulwork in political struggle—naming, resisting, and transforming oppressive labor conditions.This is the site where Soulwork becomes praxis. Where research becomes resistance. Where theory becomes change.

Our knowing is not just personal.
It is political.

5. Self‑Care: A Restorationist Mandate

Self-care is both a defensive practice against burnout and a spiritual methodology for joy. In Soulwork, rest, ritual, and celebration are ways of knowing. They restore our capacity to listen inward and live outward with intention.

Rest is not a reward.
It is a right.

How to Begin

If you’re asking, What do I do with this?—you’re already on the path. Soulwork begins with a refusal to keep performing survival while calling it purpose.

Begin with plotting.

Sociologist Ruha Benjamin uses plotting to describe the quiet, imaginative acts of refusal that push against systems designed to wear us down. Plotting is about questioning the roles we've been assigned, scheming alternative futures, and moving in service of collective well-being.

I offer a tool called vocational mapping as a form of spiritual and intellectual plotting. It’s a practice of honest reckoning with your labor.

This is how you begin:

• Inventory your labor: catalog all the work you do including paid, unpaid, emotional, spiritual, invisible.

• Locate your longing: What work gives you life? What work takes from you?

• Distinguish necessity from extraction: What must be done for your survival? What is being taken from you under the guise of excellence, gratitude, or professionalism?

• Track meaning: Where does your labor align with your values? Where does it violate them?

• Name your yes: What, if anything, feels like the work your soul must have?

This is not a productivity tool. It’s a clarity tool.
It will not tell you what job to apply for, but it may tell you what truth you’ve been avoiding.

Do not rush this. Soulwork is slow work.
But it is exacting. It requires precision. It does not accept excuses or half-truths.

You will know you are doing soulwork when your body begins to unclench and your truth becomes undeniable.

Final Word: Everything You Say Is Scripture

In the Soulwork newsletter, I wrote: Everything Black women say is scripture. I meant it.

If you feel tired, like you’re drowning and no one is listening, I want you to know this:

You are not broken. You are not crazy. You are not lazy or unfocused or failing.

You are being exploited. And even so—your soul still lives. It has never stopped speaking to you.

You are the barometer. You are the archive. You are the scripture.

So do the work your soul must have.

Start there.