Seeing Clearly: Discernment as Ancestral Practice, Spiritual Knowing, and Community Protection

There is a word that appears in nearly every spiritual tradition our ancestors carried — a word that has been flattened by self-help culture into a productivity concept and returned to us stripped of everything that made it sacred. That word is discernment.

To discern, in the way our elders used it, is not to optimize your decision-making. It is to see clearly — through the noise, the manipulation, the surface of things — into what is actually true. It is the capacity to know, in your spirit and in your body, what is aligned with your path and what will pull you off it. It is not a personal skill to be developed. It is an ancestral inheritance to be reclaimed.

What Our Elders Called It

Long before discernment became a chapter in a self-help book, our ancestors had names for it — and those names were sacred.

In Yoruba cosmology, the concept of ori — one’s personal spiritual intuition, one’s inner head — is the seat of individual destiny and knowing. To consult your ori is not to be selfish or inward; it is to align yourself with the path the divine assigned to you before you arrived here. Discernment, in this frame, is not about making smart choices. It is about recognizing your purpose and refusing to be pulled from it.

Among the Akan people of Ghana, the okyeame — often translated as the linguist or royal spokesperson — embodies communal discernment. The okyeame listens deeply, translates truth across registers, and speaks with measured wisdom on behalf of the community. Discernment, here, is not a personal trait. It is a role, a responsibility, a gift exercised in relationship.

In the Black church tradition that shaped so much of African American spiritual life, “testing the spirits” is a collective practice. Before a congregation follows a new teaching, a new leader, a new direction, the community prays together, listens together, and together asks: Is this aligned with truth? With justice? With God? Discernment is not done alone. It is done in company — with elders who remember, with prayer warriors who listen, with the community that will bear the consequences of the decision.

Discernment is spiritual before it is practical. Relational before it is individual. Communal before it is personal.

Discernment as Survival

For communities that have been lied to by powerful institutions — and this describes most Black and brown communities in America — discernment is not a soft skill. It is survival knowledge.

The history is long. Redlining was presented as sound housing policy. The Tuskegee syphilis study was presented as healthcare. Subprime mortgages were presented as opportunity. Gentrification arrives dressed as revitalization. Mass incarceration was sold as public safety. In each case, the community was asked to trust a system that was, in fact, extracting from them. Those who discerned correctly — who felt something was wrong, who asked harder questions, who didn’t sign — were protected. Those isolated from their community, cut off from elder wisdom, or simply exhausted by survival had less access to that protection.

When your grandmother said “something ain’t right about that man” before she could articulate why — that was discernment. When community members organized against a “development” that promised jobs but delivered displacement — that was discernment. When a congregation declined a partnership whose funding came with conditions that would compromise their mission — that was discernment. In each case, wisdom was protecting the community from harm dressed as help.

Discernment is not about personal success. It is about collective protection.

The Body Knows

One of the most important things our ancestors understood — and that trauma-informed practice is now restoring to scientific credibility — is that the body is an instrument of knowing.

Before the mind can name what is wrong, the body already knows. The tension in the chest. The unsettled stomach. The sudden fatigue in a room where something unhealthy is happening. The way the breath constricts when someone is lying. These are not imagination. They are data — gathered by a nervous system shaped by generations of lived experience, and by a spirit that is older than any of us.

“Pay attention to how you feel in their presence” is ancestral advice. “Sleep on it” is ancestral advice. “Pray about it” is ancestral advice. Resmaa Menakem, in My Grandmother’s Hands, names this somatic inheritance directly: the wisdom stored in the body is older than language, passed down through generations who survived by knowing. Discernment is a practice of attunement — to spirit, to body, to community, and to history.

Cultivating Discernment

Stillness. The noise of modern life is designed to prevent discernment. The ancient practice of silence — sabbath, meditation, prayer, sitting — creates the conditions for deeper knowing. If you are always moving, you cannot hear the still, small voice.

Elders. Discernment accumulates over time and is stored in people who have lived through more than we have. Before making significant decisions, seek out the wisdom of elders — not as a formality but as a genuine act of humility.

Community counsel. Bring your dilemmas to people who love you and have nothing to gain from your decision going one way or another. This is why our ancestors made major decisions in community — because the individual perspective is always partial.

Learning the history. If you understand the history of predatory lending in Black communities, you are better equipped to recognize it when it returns in a new costume. History is not academic exercise — it is protective knowledge.

Trusting the body. When something feels wrong before you can explain why — honor that. Sit with it. Pray on it. Bring it to your community. Give the feeling time to become language.

Seeing Clearly Together

At Ubuntu Village, we understand discernment as a community practice. No individual sees everything. No one person can hold the full picture. But when a community gathers its knowing — the elder’s memory, the young person’s fresh eyes, the healer’s somatic wisdom, the strategist’s pattern recognition — it can see more clearly than any of them alone.

I am because we are. Our seeing is sharpened by being in right relationship. Our knowing deepens when we bring it to one another. Community is the medicine. So is the slow, patient, practiced art of seeing clearly. Community is the medicine. So is discernment.

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References and Further Reading

1. Wande Abimbola, Ifá: An Exposition of Ifá Literary Corpus — on ori and Yoruba spiritual knowing
2. Howard Thurman, Jesus and the Disenfranchised (Beacon Press, 1949) — on spiritual discernment and community survival
3. Resmaa Menakem, My Grandmother’s Hands (Central Recovery Press, 2017) — on somatic wisdom and ancestral knowing
4. Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law (Liveright, 2017) — on institutional deception and the necessity of community discernment
5. The Wisdom of Discernment: The Oneness of Unity — Ubuntu Village

Michele Mitchell is the Founder, President & CEO of Ubuntu Village Inc., a 501(c)(3) nonprofit with programs in Kenya, Uganda, and Nigeria. A writer, advocate, and community strategist working at the intersection of ancestral wisdom, public health, and community power, Michele leads Ubuntu Village’s work to center communities as the protagonists of their own healing. She writes from the conviction that science and spirit are complementary, that healing is relational, and that community is the medicine. Read more about Michele, or connect with her on LinkedIn.