Spiritual Technology for Black Families
COVERED SUNS
A sun is a source. It gives without being asked and returns without being called. Every person in a lineage carries one.
Covered Suns exists so that light is named, fed and protected across a whole life. Books, a school, a podcast, a table and a daily practice. One ecosystem, tuned to a single life across a whole year.
A sun makes its own light. Covered Suns is named for every person who does.
The Governing Principle
COVERED SUNS is a devotional ecosystem rooted in the African ancestral traditions of the Yoruba, Akan, Kemetic, Dagara and Gullah Geechee peoples, built for Black families, ages 5 through 99, and the spiritual guardians who stand in their corner. Every prayer. Every season. Every day.
The Imprint
The house COVERED built
COVERED is the daily practice. Ori is the classroom. Little Suns is the nursery. Rooted & Rising is the voice at the table. Covered Suns is the house that holds them.
The house holds a whole practice rather than a single book. Three devotional volumes. A daily app and a picture book for the youngest kings. A school of ancestral practice, guided journals, prayer and conversation decks, a rites of passage program and a weekly podcast at the table. Every offering is one instrument, tuned to a single life across a whole year.
Ori
Video courses taught by Black spiritual practitioners, in their own voices.
Ages five to twelveCovered Little Suns
A child speaking for themselves, before anything has contested it.
Fifty-two weeksROOTED: Table Conversations
Ancestral greatness at the family table, one conversation a week.
Weekly audioRooted & Rising
The voice at the table. Conversations on lineage and daily practice.
Illustrated narrativeThe King Who Forgot His Crown
A story for young readers about returning to who you have always been.
Daily companionCOVERED Daily
The app. It follows whichever edition you carry.
Fifty-two cardsThe Prayer Card Deck
Indexed to the seven centers, for the days a book is too much to open.
TrainingFacilitator Certification
For those carrying the practice into rooms of their own.
The Practice
One year. Four seasons. Seven centers.
Every work in the house runs on one framework. A year of daily prayer and micro-ritual, organized by season, aligned to the seven centers of the body, which this house calls by their Yoruba names. Five minutes of real intention is enough. Do it every day and watch what accumulates.
Days
One prayer and one micro-ritual for every day of the year. Light a candle. Place your hands on his shoulders. Speak three words aloud. These are anchors.
Seasons
You speak in Winter's stillness and in Summer's fire. You tend a creative life in Spring and sharpen inner sight in Fall. Every word is placed on purpose.
Centers
Seven places in a body, each with something to teach, arranged from the ground to the sky. Named in Yoruba, so the vocabulary belongs to the one who speaks it.
Winter
December, January, February
Ẹsẹ̀ · Root
Orí · Crown
Spring
March, April, May
Ẹmí · Sacral
Ọkàn · Heart
Summer
June, July, August
Ìwà · Solar Plexus
Àṣẹ · Throat
Fall
September, October, November
Ojú inú · Third Eye
On the Seven Centers
Where this framework comes from, and what we have done with it.
The seven-center model this practice is built on comes from India. It was worked out over centuries within Yoga and Tantra, written down in Sanskrit and carried into English by a small group of Theosophical writers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Those writers added something the Indian sources never contained. The tidy rainbow, red at the base climbing to violet at the crown, is a Western arrangement roughly a hundred years old.
We are telling you this early because you deserve to hear it from us.
So why keep it. Because it is a sound architecture and it has done honest work for a long time. Seven places in a body, each with something to teach, arranged from the ground to the sky. A year has room for such a shape. A morning has room for it.
What we decline to do is claim the frame as ours, or assign it an ancient Kemetic origin the evidence does not carry.
Here is what is ours. Yoruba thought has named the parts of a person for as long as anyone has counted. Orí, the inner head, the seat of destiny. Ẹmí, the breath given by Olodumare. Ọkàn, the heart. Àṣẹ, the power that makes a word take effect. Akan thought names kra and sunsum and mogya. Kemetic thought names ka and ba and ib and ren.
What the author has done is place our names beside those seven positions on purpose. Some placements are near exact. Others are her construction, made because the meaning rhymed. She names them as hers so you can weigh them as hers.
Orí was always the crown. We are only saying so out loud.
Memorizing this is unnecessary. The book moves through it with you, season by season, day by day. The Sanskrit names are not lost. They wait in the glossary at the back of every volume for any reader who arrived already carrying the vocabulary.
The Editions
Three volumes. One year each.
The same three hundred sixty-five days, spoken from three positions. One over him. One from inside him. One from inside her.
Nurturers Edition
For the one who covers
You already know how to do this. Something in your hands remembers. Mothers, grandmothers, aunties, godmothers, fathers and elders, praying over a life from outside it.
Order
Self Edition · Him
For the one who is covered
A Black male speaking in first person, from inside his own body and his own inheritance. Thirteen to ninety-nine, with a named figure standing beside every day of the year.
Ordernot yet commissioned
Self Edition · Her
For the one who covers herself
A Black woman in first person, practising on her own behalf after a lifetime of practising for everyone else. She is the subject of her volume exactly as he is of his.
In preparation
The Author
Dr. Nikka Lemons
Author · Scholar · Community Architect
Dr. Nikka Lemons has spent decades at the intersection of social justice, ancestral wisdom and community transformation, building COVERED out of love: the kind that refuses to let brilliance go unnamed.
She brings scholarly rigor, communal care and a poet's ear to everything she touches.
A scholar and community architect, she draws on the Yoruba, Akan, Kemetic, Dagara and Gullah Geechee traditions, translating ancestral wisdom into daily practice that a whole family can hold. Through the Covered Suns imprint she is building a body of work meant to be lived with across an entire life, from the youngest child learning his name to the eldest guardian who has covered three generations.
A name spoken in love, she believes, becomes its own form of protection.
Practice Together
Practice together. Rise together.
Seasonal devotionals, community announcements and early access to new work from the house.
Unsubscribe anytime. Your practice, your pace.
Begin your practice
365 days. Four seasons. Seven centers. One ancient knowing that your life is sacred.
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