Welcome to Wellness

The first time I encountered a wellness or self-care practice was in 1999, my senior year at high school. I decided to take “college yoga” for a gym credit, instead of playing badminton half-heartedly with my classmates.

Yoga’s mystique of peacefulness appealed to me as an angsty and eccentric Black girl growing up in South Minneapolis. I fancied myself a spiritual seeker and felt drawn to yoga’s ability to bring metaphysical enlightenment and astonishing flexibility to devotees.

In other words, I thought I was gonna be able to drop it like it’s hot into some splits and levitate away from my teen-life drama.

I remember nervously trying the practice that would become an integral part of my life journey. The only person of color in a gym full of white dance-majors, I felt like I stuck out. We would bend, stretch, and extend into poses whose names were beautiful Sanskrit words I’d never heard before, with translations that almost told a story as we moved through them. Child. Warrior. Triangle. Pigeon. Corpse.

It was the Iyengar style, so the movements were deliberate, exact, and held with intensity. I was amazed to find out I could sweat and be exhausted from stillness.

It was the first time I’d experienced a “practice” for my body, mind, and spirit, and I fell in love. That love deepened over the years, even though I would sometimes still be the only “chocolate chip” in those yoga spaces.

As I got older, however, I realized that most of these spaces — despite their focus on wellness and transcendence — ironically reinforced whiteness, entitlement, and privilege, often by ignoring them, or pretending these things could not exist in “enlightened” places. In my experience, the people who had access to yoga classes, meditation retreats, acupuncture, reiki, and massage tended to be folks who did not look like me or share my socio­economic background.

And despite how transformative such practices have been in my life, I’ve felt guilty because so few people in my family and community could afford to engage in these practices or prioritize themselves in these seemingly superfluous ways.

Also, as a Black woman, it had been ingrained in me (and the world) that not only should I be able to absorb more pain, stress, and work, but that I should be able to do so with less rest and nourishment.

I share all of this because one can’t look at the state of health for BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and people of color) communities today and not see the ways that our history of oppression plays a role in how we experience and access healing. The experience of the Black body, for example, has absorbed the weight of enslavement, violence, and fear, as well as being objectified and made dispensable.

Many of the ancient health prac­tices within Indigenous, Black, Latinx, Asian, and even ancestral white com­munities were criminalized and undermined to clear the way for Western medicine. Many have been appropriated, repackaged, and made financially inaccessible.

In this moment, due in large part to social media’s egalitarian platforms and a rising consciousness about cultural appropriation and radical decolonization, we are seeing BIPOC healers and wellness leaders — or “wholeness” leaders, as Black Girl In Om’s founder, Lauren Ash, refers to her work — reclaim and offer access to healing for ourselves. This is being done radically, with love and justice. Even more so in the time of COVID-19.

Lipstick popping. Headwrap adorned. Melanin glistening. Wisdom dropping. The healers featured here have adapted their yoga education and doula mentoring to virtual platforms. They show us what we already got in our cupboards to care for our bodies. They ask their more privileged clients to support the healing of others who don’t have the funds. They insist on care for oppressed bodies in the midst of a global pandemic, all while interrogating and de-centering whiteness.

For all the upheaval and loss of the past year, these leaders are shining deeply and brightly, holding space, and lighting the way.