Ashia: A Soft Story of Pilgrimage and Peace

by Jaiya John

A young woman named Ashia goes on a walk through a meadow and along a brook, falling into a sweet, dreamlike memory of her earlier encounter with an elder woman. Together, the young woman and the elder woman journey through a magical wilderness as the elder woman shares with Ashia insights for healing and blooming earned through many centuries of living. Insights that thrived among humans before The Great Forgetting. As Ashia encounters various non-human kin along their way, she experiences the loving messages these teachers hold for her. Ashia begins to release many skins of identity, shedding a lifetime of social conditioning. Ashia, the young woman, begins to remember herself. This soft short story for adults and children by the poet Jaiya John is a mystical delight of self-discovery that carries you, the reader, back home to yourself. Ashia is a medicine story. A sleep story. A meditative adventure through the veil of separation out into the divine fields where everything is intimately a part of everything. May the one song that is life sing to you through these precious healing words.

65 pages, Kindle Edition

Published March 20, 2025

About the author

Dr. Jaiya John was orphan-born on Ancient Puebloan lands in the high desert of New Mexico, and is an internationally recognized freedom worker, author, and poet. Jaiya is the founder of Soul Water Rising, a global rehumanizing mission to eradicate oppression that has donated thousands of Jaiya’s books in support of social healing, and offers grants and scholarships to displaced and vulnerable youth. He is the author of numerous books, including Fragrance After Rain, Daughter Drink This Water, and, Freedom: Medicine Words for your Brave Revolution. Jaiya writes, narrates, and produces the podcast, I Will Read for You: The Voice and Writings of Jaiya John, and is the founder of Freedom Project, a global initiative reviving traditional gathering and storytelling practices to fertilize social healing and liberation. He is a former professor of social psychology at Howard University, and has spoken to over a million people worldwide and audiences as large as several thousand. Jaiya is a former National Science Foundation fellow, and holds doctorate and master’s degrees in social psychology from the University of California, Santa Cruz, with a focus on intergroup and race relations. As an undergraduate, he attended Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon, and lived in Kathmandu, Nepal, where he studied Tibetan Holistic Medicine through independent research with Tibetan doctors and trekked to the base camp of Mt. Everest. His Indigenous soul dreams of frybread, sweetgrass, bamboo in the breeze, and turtle lakes whose poetry is peace.