Devi Brown Is Teaching Us How To Heal At Our Own Pace, With Her New Book, ‘Living In Wisdom’ – Essence

Devi Brown is a healer, but not one who should be confused with a surface-level wellness practitioner. She’s certified to do this spiritual work because she’s been through some real things, like a turbulent divorce and painstaking grief, which ultimately led her to face her trauma head-on by choosing to seek out ways to heal holistically. 

Now, she wants to pass that same wisdom on to people who are seeking it with her second book, Living in Wisdom, which serves as a self-help guide for those who want to embody their authentic selves, embrace grief, and develop self-mastery. As one of the most sought-after wellness educators and creative advisors in the country, Brown has crafted a unique approach to healing that blends advanced meditation, breathwork, metaphysical philosophy, spiritual psychology, and holistic, trauma-informed facilitation, which is reflected in this book. Living In Wisdom takes the reader down an intimate path of seeking to understand specific practices that can lead us to our higher selves.

Brown intentionally shares ways to alchemize the pain you’ve experienced throughout life into purpose, healthily, by trying her curated, spiritually-based curriculum. She believes that we endure so much throughout our lives, and it can be hard to navigate. Her newest book is for those who feel like something is missing in life, are desperate for change, and want to get unstuck to experience joy, vulnerability, and self-knowledge. Sharing the wisdom she has gathered as a healer and master well-being educator, Brown guides readers along the path to self-mastery through a combination of spirituality, psychology, ancient wisdom traditions, edgy holistic self-care, and her own inspiring and surprising life experiences.

Throughout the book, readers will:

• Learn aligned decision-making
• Gain practices to alleviate internal suffering
• Expand awareness of their unhelpful patterns
• Discover an integrated approach to self-love and self-acceptance
• Live in embodied wellness

We spoke to Brown about how ‘Living in Wisdom’ captures her growth, both personal and professional, in terms of wellness, and what she wants readers to take away from the book.

ESSENCE: Why did you decide to create this book?

Devi Brown: I decided to create this book because I felt like there were a lot of pieces of the conversation within wellness that are missing right now. And from my experience as a teacher for over a decade, working with various demographics in healing, and having been on my own journey for over 20 years, I was able to gauge what was missing in many of these spaces. I felt like with this book, I wanted to bring forward some of the beauty and the fact that all of being alive is going to include grief, so not just like direct loss, though, unfortunately, so many of us will face that in this life, but the fact that just being alive, there is a lot of grief to be had with that and so many layers to it.

There are many great books, and many people buy them all. Still, they’re not necessarily seeing a change in the life experiences that happen to them, or in their interpersonal dynamics and relationships, or in how they feel about themselves. I was deeply there many years ago. And it’s the process that is missing. It’s about getting disarmed enough to sit still with yourself, not just for meditation, but for presence, to witness your life. And that has to be taught. This book provides a real process, not just tools, but a genuine sense of a devotional approach to caring for ourselves, so that it can transform our lives.

As someone who’s gone through a lot of traumatic events, sometimes it’s frustrating when specific self-care books come out because it’s rooted in buzziness.

I was seeking so hard for healing, and I was so sick of trends like I can’t even tell you, how infuriating it is to me, but I guess everything helps us to heal. I have to open my heart to that, but to see this work turn into such a buzzy, trendy thing at this moment, it’s like, on one hand, okay, we all need different entry points, so I’m glad the information is out there. However, I think it gets so misappropriated that it’s harmful. I think it’s creating a very manipulative culture and a very bypassing culture. 

How can Black women move beyond survival mode and back to themselves?

You know, I think it’s interesting with Black women. A couple of weeks ago, I attended a grief workshop and shared some of the practices from the book with an incredible group of phenomenally accomplished Black women. They were probably about 10 to 20 years older than I. They were phenomenal women who were the only ones of their kind in their spaces. And I remember I was getting ready to lead them in meditation, and I thought, ‘You know, we’re going to do some nervous system regulation so that we can be disarmed.’ And I remember one of the women saying, ‘Why would we want to be disarmed? ‘ And it was her first, very genuine response, and she wasn’t trying to minimize my work, but that is the first reaction we have, right, because, as a Black woman in America, when has it ever been safe not to be armored up? And that’s some of the nuance that I study in people and healing, right? Because that piece of it, like that fiber, is what can keep us from authentic joy, not the performative joy we’ve mastered, but the embodied joy, which is what I wanted to explore in this book subtly. That is the barrier to healing. When we look at this idea of not being ready to fight as an innate weakness, that has to be the resting state.

The turning point in my healing journey was realizing that I wasn’t working hard to heal anymore. I am just being and alchemizing this horrific pain. 

I want to even talk about healing through pain, because I think a lot of us on this journey who have faced challenging circumstances have to heal through pain until we realize we don’t, and it’s a momentary shift. And I didn’t believe that could ever happen for me. Then I started to have moments where it did happen for me, like that, where it was really about having a shifting conversation with God and telling God, ‘I understand. I have reverence for my experience. You don’t have to change a thing, but I’m more than willing to listen and surrender now. Please teach me through joy. I can learn through observation.’

Now, I can learn how to heal through a breakthrough thought. I don’t have to learn through death anymore. I don’t have to learn through betrayal. I don’t have to learn the hard way. I don’t have to learn through the things that break me. I can learn from things that inspire me or from things that help me build my capacity to see in others. 

How are you helping us redefine grief? 

We have to accept that grief is part of it, we have to admit that every possible human emotion is part of the divine plan, and no emotion is more important to God than the other. They are all equal in their value to our human experience. And it was really in building reverence that I could be present with darkness. We run from darkness as a society. 

How has this book helped with your healing and growth within the wellness space and overall confidence?

One of the most incredible and beautiful things about being patient with your journey and healing is understanding that it takes time to heal.

You might be exploring things for a year or your whole life, because our spiritual curriculum is meant to be explored through many lenses of who we are over many decades. You know, until the day we depart this earth, we’re never meant to be finished with healing. We get to relate to it differently and more, until it becomes wisdom, until it becomes the gift and the service you give to another. And that has been my most recent breakthrough.