
Author • Educator • Soul Voice Activator
Meet Jackie
Author and Soul Voice Activator
Speak your soul's truth and change the world.
Jackie Graves
Jackie Graves is a High Priestess of the new Golden Age, a writer, teacher, and healer. She has taught writing for over thirty years and is a tenured faculty member in the English Department at Laney College. She loves to write—short stories, poems, personal essays, plays, and most recently a memoir. She believes in the transformative power of the written and spoken word, and has been blessed to witness many of her students change their lives through finding their voices in writing.
Jackie’s spiritual journey began after her sister suffered a massive stroke at the age of 38, four days after the birth of her sister’s first child. Despite the doctor’s dire predictions, after 7 days in a coma, her sister miraculously woke up. Jackie was initiated into divine feminine ways and wisdom while caring for her newborn niece and sister in the initial months following this trauma. Jackie’s path led to a dark decade of the soul and her subsequent rebirth as a lightworker shamanista priestess. Jackie chronicles this story in her upcoming memoir, Why We Wake Up: A Story of Stroke, Survival, and the Seven Keys of Soul Liberation.
Jackie’s unique brilliance is activating, awakening, and embodying light. Through her light, Jackie helps others to transmute shadow aspects, limiting beliefs, old stories, and conditioning that no longer serve. As a mixed-race woman, who has healed many ancestral wounds and integrated her white and Black lineages through her own embodiment, she carries codes of peace, oneness, soul liberation, and bliss. She helps other women leaders to liberate their voices in order to be the change the world needs today.



My love letter to you

You are successful in your career
and quite spiritual
yet you feel something is missing…
You know there is more.
Everyone looks at you and thinks you have it all together
From the outside,
You’re strong and powerful
You feel strong and powerful
You tell yourself you are strong and powerful.
And yet a part of you deep inside
is struggling
Suffering
Yearning to express a deeper truth
that no one has ever heard you speak
You see the world outside you is a mess
Racial, economic, and social injustice,
suppression, oppression, depression
It pisses you off
sometimes depresses or demoralizes you
and fires you up to do more
You know you are here to create a better world
You want to heal the world
But you can’t do it all
you can't do it alone
You want to hold it all together
to hold everyone up
but it’s exhausting
you’re running on all cylinders
all the time
you are everything to everybody
and maybe you dropped to last on the list.
Fires are burning everywhere—literal and metaphoric
Floods and superstorms, hurricanes, and tornados.
You keep hoping
praying
for the highest and best outcome.
You yearn to express yourself
to put your mark on the world
not just execute someone else’s vision.
You have a BIG vision
a deep yearning
a fire burning in you
You know you’re special—
you’ve heard that all your life
And yet it feels like this world wasn’t made for people who look like you
To some, it looks like you’ve “made it”
yet you long for more
You want to be seen and heard for your authentic self.
You know what’s in your heart and soul can help people
that you can make a difference to people.
You know you are the answer to many people’s prayers.
But you feel locked in a box
of other people's projections and expectations.
What if you start showing up differently?
Would you be letting down all those who relied on you?
Can you allow yourself to step out of the box?
Society has conditioned us all
in ways that really don’t serve us anymore
The old ways are crumbling
the old structures are racist, sexist, classist, homophobic
anachronisms
You want to create new structures
You dream
of new ways of being
new ways of thinking
new ways of creating
new ways of serving
new ways of living
You want to bring more authenticity to your life
more real
more juice
more aliveness
more in-touchness
more jazz
more sass
You know there is another way.
When you liberate your voice,
everything in your life changes.
You love yourself
and you liberate yourself
in every area of your life.
You feel proud, confident, courageous, and fulfilled.
You stop creating in reaction
to a world that never wanted a woman like you to succeed in the first place
You stop marching to someone else’s tune
You are no longer constrained by what society tells you is “right”
Your voice rings with authenticity and truth
When you speak, people stop to listen
You rally a team around your words
.
You speak your heart, even when it isn’t popular
You go against the current when the current looks crazy
You listen with an open heart
You are open to criticism
You do not remain silent in the face of oppression, injustice, inhumanity
You speak your truth
You speak and create HOPE
You envision and create POSSIBILITY
When you liberate yourself, you create more space
for the liberation of ALL.
Your words and actions have a ripple effect
on all those around you--
on the teams and communities and families, you lead
on the people, you touch
on the entire world
All you say aligns with your desires
You step out of self-sabotage
You become your own fairy godmother
You choose your YES
You LOVE yourself fully
and
You LIVE in full LIBERATION.