While watching the conversation around race in America, and the rest of the world, over the past few weeks, I have of course been thinking a lot about the wellness world.
Wellness spaces, including my own, have long struggled with diversity, representation, cultural appropriation, trauma informed care, spiritual bypassing, and the whiteness of the industry.
As a white woman and white-owned wellness brand myself, I feel a responsibility to share what I am learning and, maybe more importantly, unlearning when it comes to shifting how we approach the world of wellness.
There are also so many BIPOC leaders and advocates who have been doing this work for decades, and I am sharing just a few of them below.
Now is the time to use the good parts of our wellness training. Let's take a deep breath. Open our hearts. Ground our feet. And dive in.
Here are some resources to get you started:
- Got Privilege? Examining Privilege in the Wellness Sector A Community Conversation by The Well Collective
- Spiritual Bypassing Tools That Avoid Confronting Racism (Is your spirituality racist?) by Mimi Young of CEREMONIE
- I need to talk to spiritual white women about white supremacy (PART TWO) by Layla F. Saad
- "Bro what does decolonizing fitness even mean?" by Ilya Parker of Decolonizing Fitness
Here are some questions we are asking ourselves:
- What is the why behind my wellness?
- Do I know where my wellness practice originated? If no, why not? If yes, how do I ignore or acknowledge those roots?
- In what ways do I use wellness to retreat from or avoid confronting issues in the world at large?
- In what ways does my wellness practice ignore or sacrifice the wellbeing of others, especially BIPOC?
- In what ways do I use my wellness practice to strengthen oppressive values like control and complacency?
And here are leaders we are learning from:
- Dive InWell
- Decolonizing Fitness
- Decolonizing Therapy
- Embody Inclusivity
- Hood Herbalism
- Irresistible Movements (formerly the Healing Justice Podcast)
- Spirit House Collective
- The Well Collective
- Heal Haus
^ This is an incomplete list, and we welcome your additions.