For the ones who rose where they were buried — and the ones still waiting to be rescued.
🌱 For the Ones Who’ve Never Felt Named
Some stories don’t fit inside the trauma books.
Some wounds never earned a diagnosis.
Some survivors were never believed because the harm looked like home. Looked like care. Looked like church.
But looks can be deceiving. Here, we bring them into
the Light.
🕊️ Welcome to The Gentle Rise
This is a sanctuary for those who have come through the fire,
who know the ache of exile,
and who are now learning how to breathe in
the light.
You won’t find spiritual noise here.
You won’t be told to try harder, forgive faster, or silence your knowing.
This is a God-raised space — where resurrection is not metaphor,
but a cellular reality.
Here, I write from the other side of captivity.
Not only to remind you that you were never
forgotten — but to help you name what
happened, and find language that leads you
out.
And that even now —
the desert is beginning to bloom.
Where Psalms once held my collapse, Isaiah now holds my rise.
These reflections come from a living place — not a metaphor, but a cellular shift. In this sanctuary, Isaiah is not academic or abstract. He is breath. He is promise. He is the sacred soil where God plants the first miracles of resurrection in real time.
Here, I’m no longer mapping collapse. I’m noticing wonder.
The grief still moves, but it does not overtake. The flickers still come, but I am no longer held under by
the dark. I read Isaiah now not from the tomb — but from the soil just outside it, where the stone has been rolled back, and the light is warm on my face.
This is where the Gentle Rise begins:
In the softness of God’s voice,
in the newness of breath I’ve never had before,
and in the sacred joy that surprises me — because I’ve never known it until now.
Welcome to the rise. Stay as long as you need.
With love, always,
Raya
📖 Spoken aloud Isaiah Reflections
Where breath returns and the soil of resurrection begins to bloom.
When the time is right, you’ll find the reflections here.
This sanctuary is captivity-informed.
It speaks to survivors of closed captivity systems — especially closed spiritual systems — including those formed inside family systems, churches, or layered worlds where exits were not safe.
It was shaped by the kind of trauma that isn’t well-mapped —
relational, spiritual, and systemic, embodied
or hidden inside faithfulness or family systems
that erodes the soul quietly and over time.
If you’ve been told you’re too sensitive,
too spiritual, too emotional, too much…
you are not broken. You are not behind.
You were likely held in a system that was never
designed to let you live whole.
We call that captivity here.
And there is language for it now.
🕊️ Learn more about the Captivity Lens →
📖 Understanding the Lens: What It Means to Be Captivity-Informed
Not all trauma is recognized by current
frameworks.
Not all survivors are named by clinical maps.
This sanctuary holds space for those whose
trauma has never been fully seen —
because it was spiritual, systemic, embodied,
or hidden inside “faithfulness” or family
systems.
Because it didn’t fit the words already available.
Because it happened in the name of God.
Because it happened in the name of Family.
Here, we name it with clarity:
Captivity is not just trauma. It is a full
ecosystem.
And healing requires an entirely different lens.
The captivity-informed lens was mapped from
the inside —
a survivor framework forged within the very
system it exposes.
It honors complex religious trauma,
neurodivergent embodiment,
and the sacred process of healing with Real
Jesus as the One who sets captives free.
This is not metaphor. This is cellular
resurrection.
God did not just help me map captivity, He foreshadowed the seven breaths He would breathe
into me after rescue. Twice.
Learn more about Incarnational Neurodivergence here. The prophetic framework revealed and written inside captivity before I ever took my first breath of freedom.
The Gentle Rise 