last updated:24.12.24
and I want to try and articulate it with as much honesty and care as possible.
If you are a white person teaching or facilitating any indigenous practices—especially those rooted in healing—I sincerely hope you have done the work beyond just learning how to monetize that practice.
By “the work,” I mean a deep, ongoing engagement with the cultural, historical, and spiritual contexts of the practices you’re sharing, as well as the ways power, privilege, and appropriation can show up in those spaces.
I say this with kindness, and also with the weight of my own lived experiences.
I enter such spaces with an open mind, curiosity and some expectation to belong. Yet more often than not, I leave feeling disappointed, unseen, and even a little heartbroken. These spaces, which are meant to be healing, rarely feel like they were co-created with my best interests in mind.
(me being a brown chica, early 30s going through her existential life crisis that involves healing from childhood trauma but also unlearning cultural norms and societal expectations of what women should be and shouldn’t be)
Maybe I don’t know what I am expecting but my heart wants to belong, yet it doesn’t. From ecstatic dances in Medellin, yoga retreats in Pisac, I swear I gave it my best effort. I so badly wanted to belong and find that transformation that everyone told me about.
You ask me to take a deep breath in and relax in your most soothing voice, with all the good intentions but do you understand why that breath hasn’t felt safe enough, grounded enough, home enough.
Do you see the layers of grief, distrust and cultural dissonance I carry.
It’s not that I don’t want to let go, to surrender to the breath you ask of me. It’s that my body, my heart, my soul— they are waiting for something more.
For acknowledgment, perhaps. For the kind of care that doesn’t just invite me to relax but understands why I haven’t been able to. That sees the complexity of what I bring into the room: a lifetime of holding myself together in a world that often feels like it wasn’t built for me.
I don’t expect perfection. Just some acknowledgment – a recognition of the complexity of these practices, the histories they hold, and the ways they intersect with my own story.
Maybe I am also unlearning my own fascination with the west, that it’s not all that it was made out to be. That at the core, you are also a human, with your own healing journey and doing the best you with what you know.
This thought humbles me, softens the bias I sometimes hold when I enter the spaces that fail to meet me where I am.
And yet, this understanding doesn’t negate the discomfort or disconnection I feel.
It doesn’t erase the frustration when I witness sacred practices being commodified, reduced to trends, or divorced from the communities that birthed them.
It doesn’t resolve the sense of loss when I see healing spaces that feel more like performances than places of true connection.
Maybe what I am trying to say is – you can do better.