The inner work of liberation

The inner work of liberation
Issue 357 • July/Aug 2026

In this issue we consider the inner work of liberation and what we mean by inner, what comes from within, and where that ‘within’ is.

Lyla June considers the intention we bring to every act – arguing that this inner work is the foundation for disciplined, loving, alliance-building organising. Helena Norberg-Hodge locates us in community, arguing that technology amplifies the values of the economic system it emerges from. The inner work she points to is collective: the restoration of intergenerational, place-rooted ways of being that the global system has steadily dismantled. Nani Jansen Reventlow places us inside the systems themselves – insisting that climate justice, reparations, digital rights and racial equality are all threads in the same tapestry. Liberation then is perhaps not a destination, but a practice.

In The Slow Read, an extract from Selah by Báyò Akómoláfé acts as a necessary friction – questioning whether even our inner work can become a form of what he calls "oughtism": a rush towards familiar and tidy solutions.

Elsewhere, Nathaniel Hughes invites us to learn to live with the witch wound and listen to ancient wyrd wisdom, Satish Kumar meets House of Hackney’s Frieda Gormley, and Anna Souter considers the life and work of artist Ana Mendieta.

Lucia Pietroiusti reflects on dropping her phone in the Mediterranean and what the following days revealed about the genuine complexity of our longing to unplug. Among the callings to garden our inner landscapes, to sit with our wounds, and to tend the cracks from which new ways of being might emerge, there is also, quite simply, a phone in a bowl of rice – and the unexpected freedom that followed.

Highlights
The garden and the fire: Lyla June Johnston
Selah – a series of ecstatic irruptions: Báyò Akómoláfé
Counting the cost: Herbert Girardet
Soil – the thread that weaves: Sahil Ja
The poet as shapeshifter: Pascale Petit