Chapter 3: On Intuition and Unseen Things - Who Is Wellness For?

I was seventeen, maybe almost-just eighteen, short-haired and earnest, when I started working at David Jones, an Australian department store in Sydney, in the men’s suits department. In between the lull of the customers, I would chitchat with folks in other departments, especially the people in accessories, the section right next to me. My social life was limited, so work often felt like socializing.

One of my favorite coworkers was a forty-eight-year-old Italian-Australian breast cancer survivor and mother of three. Her name was Carla, and she spoke with passion, angst, and a soft fragility that was very moving to me. What I first noticed about Carla was that she was changeable, one could say moody. She had leopard-printed blond highlights and spoke with a dramatic twang. I was changeable, too, struggling to feel ownership over my body, not knowing what my worth was when I wasn’t being desired. Maybe Carla saw that in me, saw my body’s discomfort. One of her daughters was a punk lesbian, and I was at the age where I was longing for a mother, especially one who would teach me things. In our fleeting moments of reprieve, during the long hours on our feet, we would lean against the cash register inside our panopticon, surrounded by gaudy Guess wallets, and talk about life. One day we were cleaning out the corners of her kiosk, bent over the cascading variation of navy- and turd-colored accessories for men, when she shared that she had once suffered from a severe eating disorder. I listened, finding relief that another woman had also hated her body as much as I did mine.

For so long, I didn’t know it was a shared plight. Though I went to a girls’ public high school, I assigned power to everyone else around me, never once assuming that anyone could hate themselves as much as I hated me. So to hear Carla share her belief that her latent yet domineering self-hatred—all the ways she felt betrayed by her body because it wasn’t thinner, or more white—that she wasn’t blond-haired and blue-eyed, or delicate like another kind of white girl (I wonder if she even felt white), was the major reason that all these years later she had gotten breast cancer. She believed that the anger she had toward herself had metastasized into cancer in her body. That day she cried, softly, into a tissue. Though she was speaking to me, I felt she was really speaking to herself, maybe assuring herself of the truth in front of an audience—so she couldn’t take it back. Later I wondered if she’d ever admit it to me again.

This moment of Carla’s vulnerability would become a reference point for me throughout the years. I would return to it like an oracle, like an alarm. It became a moment in time so significant, so unparalleled, in the formation of self that it would change the very way that I understood time, space, and the consequences of the mind on the body. I was also ripe for this perspective, as I had already started seeing patterns within myself that were beginning to make me question my own self-destructive behavior.

I started cutting myself in high school. Never anything too sinister, but I enjoyed the way a blade, a safety pin, or sewing pin (which was sharper), or even the side of a steel ruler’s edge felt erotic against my skin. A release is a release—and oh how the pores on my body pulsed as I lined it with an incineration. I liked the way a bandage felt on a wrist afterward, a deluded but necessary act of care. Only the other day I was sharing this tidbit with my therapist, adding that this is why I have long believed I now have, and enjoy, many tattoos—it’s sublimating pain into resilience, grief into art. My first tattoo was when I was nineteen, a big year for me. I began getting tattoos to absolve my body of its sins, to carve myself a body I could be OK with. A body that was mine alone, determined by the markings that brought me closer to myself. This, my therapist has pointed out, was another way to show up for myself, to show up for my own pain, by nursing my wounds and tending to them after the act.

*  *  *

At the time that Carla told me about her theory, my sister had introduced me to a book called The Hidden Messages in Water by Masaru Emoto.^* I was beginning to comprehend the immense impact of energy and the very essence of it. My own body was a testament to self-hate, and so perhaps that’s why something clicked about how our own minds affect our very tangible physical health. I resonated with Emoto’s almost utopic conception: “When you have become the embodiment of gratitude, think about how pure the water that fills your body will be. When this happens, you yourself will be a beautiful, shining crystal of light.”^[1] It would be years until I would gain further clarity about how my negative thought process was internally destroying me, though it was a formative introduction.

In his 2005 review of The Hidden Messages in Water for the New York Times,^[2] Dwight Garner writes, “Every so often a bestseller comes along that, as Michael Korda put it in his book Making the List, makes us ‘question our sanity, or at least that of the American reading public.’” I was very conscious of the way people viewed things of a spiritual nature, even as a teenager. My sister beckoned me with strange self-help books that my father, an academic, would snort at, dismissing her entirely. Instead of championing her radicalism, my parents mocked my sister’s quirks. Privately I supported her, but in front of them I participated in bullying her. I understood, in the rationale of the scientific world, her spiritual, psychic, and emotional meridians were baseless. My father’s obsession with information, cataloging it like a Rolodex, was his primary motivation in life. To this day, my dad’s ability to reference academic text dumbfounds me, but back then, there was something he wasn’t considering: the world of magic, the world of spirit. And that his daughter was ahead of her time or, rather, tapping into something deeper. My sister trusted in what she was being drawn to. She’s the first person I ever witnessed to truly listen and stand up for herself.

The domineering patriarchal conception insists science is only what we know, without interacting with the possibility that there are also a lot of things we don’t understand—and a lot more we are yet to know about. That must shock people who want to believe in their own hubris. Western science clearly has a history of being racist and exclusionary, and throughout its conception there have been many examples. Among them is John Harvey Kellogg,^* an American medical doctor and eugenicist, who was also a major leader in progressive health reform, particularly in the clean living movement, a period of puritanical crusades across America.^[3] Kellogg, who looked like a sanitized Colonel Sanders, was a man who “chose to focus instead on improving the so-called superior white people, the Anglo-Saxons. Teaching them the proper principles of ‘biologic living,’ including whom to mate with, and what and how much to eat and exercise, would ensure supremacy in this life and the next.”^* In her book Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia, Sabrina Strings, associate professor of sociology at UC Irvine, notes that a lot of twentieth-century science and medical journals were determined by an obsession to uphold and protect whiteness, and thereby proliferate anti-Blackness by demonizing Black women’s bodies. “Interestingly,” Strings writes, “the relationship between fatness, disease, and inherent racial deficiency described in the medical literature did not appear to grow out of scientific findings but rather resulted from sentiment and impression.”^[4] Fatphobia (and thereby the demonization of fat bodies as being “lazy” or “uncouth”) is deeply interconnected with the history of white supremacy, and thus the subjugation of Black bodies in response.

But this sentiment is far more complicated and insidious. In a modern context, we know that in America, pharmaceutical industries have immense control over healthcare. According to the Harvard Public Health paper “Snapshot of the American Pharmaceutical Industry,”^[5] “The United States is the worldwide leader in per capita prescription drug spending, representing between 30 and 40 percent of the worldwide market.” The paper goes on to explain, “Further complicating the relationship between the pharmaceutical industry and patients is the fact that drug manufacturers in the U.S. are allowed to market their products directly to patients. Such practices add to the overall amount of national drug spending, since many of these drugs can be quite expensive.” The proof is in the pudding, as they say, and the more I traced the dots together, the more I started to understand that American and global medicine is just another industry trying to maintain the status quo: whiteness, patriarchy, and capitalism. It’s a market that needs to be fed, so I wanted to know—how (and why) do we keep feeding it?

*  *  *

In writer Cheryl Wischover’s essay “Can Wellness Be Scientific?” for The Cut, Charles Mueller, a clinical associate professor of nutrition at New York University, says “It’s very difficult for people like me to keep my head on when I hear about things like alkaline diets and detoxing. There’s no such thing as detoxing your body, absolutely no such thing.”^[6]

I could easily overlook a relatively innocuous statement like this until I started to think of how the statement was simply untrue. Undermining the cultural (e.g., Ayurveda^*), ancestral (e.g., sweat lodges), political (more on this in a second), and spiritual (Ramadan, Lent, a day of penance during Yom Kippur) action and knowledge that has been passed down, and has centuries worth of cultural proof behind it, puts us in a strange predicament when it’s done by someone with authority, who, like Mueller, has the backing of an institution. The more I started to think about how writing about wellness coalesces with those in power and therefore determines who gets to speak on the subject with authority, the more I realized we were in a trap of whiteness. In this instance, science is coded as “right,” but any system that governs with impunity should be questioned.

Perhaps the article’s question is also at fault, as it insinuates that wellness and science (again) are incompatible, or are both devoid of the other, without considering the dearth of knowledge that remains rooted in different Indigenous technologies (some might even call them “sciences”) that make up for the majority of modern wellness. “What is known through intuitive (ancient) knowing and unnerves the rational (scientific) mind is often dismissed as unprovable, irrational, or simply wrong,” Sebene Selassie, a Buddhist teacher and writer, documents in You Belong. She adds: “Power is wielded by those who master language and argument as well as access and resources.”^[7]

As I kept thinking about the importance of intuition and energy in traditional wellness practices, I began to see how the mischaracterization and dismissal was wielded by authoritative voices that were coded in “science” and the rationale of the West, which had to be accepted through force. Thanks to wellness marketing, the mechanics of wellness have been adapted into the capitalist machine, creating a system where people are still unconscious, still investing in individualism, without believing in the possibilities of community, openness, vulnerability, and a willingness to be well with each other. The many failures of the wellness industrial complex are the result of the disinformation it relies on, by negating the historical context that it leeches from.

In her book Women Who Run with the Wolves, Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés explains the way women have lost their sense of agency through the ages. “Early in the formulation of classical psychology women’s curiosity was given quite a negative connotation, whereas men with the same attribute were called investigative.”^[8] She uses gender as a binary, but to me it’s less men versus women than it is the attributes of one gender versus another—hence patriarchal methods versus matriarchal ones.

We could look at the binaries of science and wellness like this, where one is seen as more rational and intellectual, which is coded as masculine, while wellness is seen as intuitive, irrational, and therefore castigated as feminine. This is not a coincidence and goes back to the barbaric methods of the colonial project. “When we lose touch with the instinctive psyche, we live in a semi-destroyed state and images and powers that are natural to the feminine are not allowed full development,” Estés writes. “When a woman is cut away from her basic source, she is sanitized, and her instincts and natural life cycles are lost.”^[9] This could be used as an analogy for the Western world and how it has maintained power through colonization, and therefore suppression of globally Indigenous lifestyles. Perhaps because when we are sick—when we are unwell, depressed, when we are confused by our own power and agency over our bodies—we are easier to control.

To go back to Mueller, though not the same as “detoxing,” the merits of fasting offer incredible value. Labor activist Cesar Chavez, who called fasting “probably the most powerful communicative tool that we have,”^[10] described his relationship to fasting as a “sacrifice for justice.”^[11] For the New York Times, Mariana Alessandri, assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Texas, added another layer by speaking to the gendered connotations of the act of fasting itself, and who is believed and not believed in that narrative of spiritual fasting. Using as an example the French writer, philosopher, and mystic Simone Weil, whose connection to God and commitment to empathy was seen as spurious and untenable exaggerations, Alessandri writes, “In many of the subsequent accounts of her life, Weil has been labeled an anorexic,^* like St. Catherine of Siena, the 14th-century nun who was also convinced that she could reach God through her empty stomach. This was not the fate of Chavez, who is today still admired for carrying out a centuries-old ascetic practice, nor of Mohandas Gandhi—nor for that matter, Jesus Christ, who in the Bible is said to have fasted for 40 days and nights in the desert.”^[12] It’s important to highlight these stories because I believe the reason we uphold “science” and occlude “wellness” also impacts how we feminize and gender certain modalities. In her essay, Wischover cites professor Kevin Folta, chairman of the horticultural sciences department at the University of Florida, who quips, “I don’t remember who said it first, but the plural of anecdote is not data.”^[13]

The suggestion that the efficacy of ancient wellness modalities is purely anecdotal, without considering the vast histories—thousands and millennia longer than “Western thought”—that have brought us this information is a classic tactic of Western science. To mystify without engagement is a silencing tactic. It is also an imperial invention to esteem one source of knowledge over the other. To present an argument about something as expansive, illustrious, and profound as the world of wellness is simply a way to delegitimize one’s own argument by showing an archaic diligence to speak loudly to assert power. According to Alessandri, and thousands of years of spiritual practice as backing, “Some research now supports the idea that the body does well when it gets deprived of food for certain lengths of time.”^[14] As Chavez reminds us, fasting has tremendous reparative value, because being temporarily without food allows the body to heal.

White men of course love making grandiose statements in journals and newspapers, postulating their fancy ideas with unbridled sarcasm, like “Emoto’s book is filled with photographs of the shiny, happy crystals that form when water is shown phrases like ‘You’re cute’ or ‘Thank you,’ and also of the deformed, sorry-looking crystals that result when you show it ‘You fool!’ or ‘Satan,’”^[15] from Garner’s review. The apparently sarcastic slant is replicated in the Irish Times review (several years later) by William Reville, who writes, “There is always an audience for this kind of thing. Some people just want to believe in strange phenomena. Emoto’s followers are also likely to be into New Age phenomena like chakras, out-of-body experiences and past lives.”^[16]

Pay attention to language. Pay attention to the way the insults are ladened. It’s an important pronouncement, and it makes me wonder: Amid the conquest of patriarchal invention, colonization, and white supremacy, why do (white) men still feel the need to demoralize? To humiliate what they don’t know? Using the calling cry of the nihilist, they’ve weaponized critique as a way to thwart all ideas outside their own purview. Never questioning what encourages them to insinuate that intellectual rigor can only be found in their own limited ideas of the world, and that nothing else requires their focus or attention. How pathetic to live like this.

*  *  *

The word chakra is derived from the Sanskrit word meaning “wheel of light” or even “disk” or “vortex.” The earliest (known) written record of chakras is found in the Upanishads, circa the sixth century BCE, and the concept of the chakras exists in two parallel dimensions: one is the physical body (sthula sarira) and the other the energetic, known as the subtle body (sukshma sarira). This subtle body consists of energy channels (known as nadis) that are connected by portals of psychic energy, which is what we call a chakra. In early Sanskrit literature, the psyche naturally corresponds with the physical body, and they mutually affect each other. According to Indologist David Gordon White, the synthesis of the chakra energy centers was introduced around eighth-century CE in Buddhist texts, and in Theravada Buddhism the cakka was seen as a wheel that encouraged temporal dispensation through the wheel of dharma. “The Buddha spoke of freedom from cycles in and of themselves, whether karmic, reincarnative, liberative, cognitive or emotional.”^[17]

Unsurprisingly, the chakras are also similar to the meridians in Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), and qi and prana are two respective words to mean the “energy of life.” TCM relies on a similar concept of chakra, but the channels are called meridians, and similar to blocked chakras, symptoms of various illnesses are often seen as the impact of disruption, deficiencies, or imbalances of energy, or qi. Chakra imbalances may also be caused by stress, diet, trauma, lack of exercise, and disconnection from self or purpose. As prana, like qi, flows through the top of the head and down to the chakras, each chakra nurtures a distinct form of energy related to that specific aspect of what that energy center means. In correspondence, there are twelve main meridians in TCM. Each limb has six channels, three yin channels on the inside, and three yang channels on the outside.

There are seven chakras all together, and this is how they merge with TCM:

1. The root chakra is located at the perineum (Meeting of Yin). The spleen (yin) and the stomach (yang) are represented by the earth element and the first chakra. This chakra grounds us in the physical and is related to security and survival.
2. The sacral chakra is located between the kidneys, which is called Mingmen (Gate of Destiny), and on the front of the body just beneath the navel, called Spirit Palace Gate. The kidneys (yin) and the bladder (yang) are represented by the water element and the second chakra. It governs creativity, vitality, sexuality, hormones, kidneys, the urinary tract, and reproduction.
3. The solar plexus chakra is located in the soft space beneath the sternum called Spirit Storehouse and on the spine directly behind called Jinsuo (sinew contraction). The heart (yin) and the small intestine (yang) are represented by the fire element and the third chakra. This is the seat of our emotions. Blockages can manifest as anger, sense of victimization, poor me, and resentment.
4. The heart chakra is located directly in front of the heart (Center Altar) and on the spine at a point called Shendao (Spirit Path). The lungs (yin) and the large intestine (yang) are represented by the metal element and the fourth chakra. Blockages can manifest as heart or immune system problems, or even a lack of compassion.
5. The throat chakra is located in the lower part of the throat called Heaven’s Chimney and at the base of the neck on the spine (C7) called Big Vertebra. The liver (yin) and gallbladder (yang) are represented by the wood element and the fifth chakra. The throat chakra is all about communication. Blockages manifest as insomnia, inflammatory conditions, stress, tension, migraines and/or skin problems.
6. The third eye chakra is located between the eyebrows at a place called Yintang (Hall of Inspiration) and is called Wind Palace. Third eye chakra is linked to the pineal gland and is connected to the higher self, intuition, and psychic abilities.
7. The crown chakra is located on the top of the head and slightly back at a place called Hundred Convergences (or Meetings). It is the connection to higher realms and is associated with helping congestion, sinuses, and in calming the nervous system.

It is said that when chakras are blocked, emotional and physical problems begin. The conceptualization of the chakra system is to understand ways to heal the body, mind, and spirit, and in doing so, bring the chakras into alignment and balance. In a similar way, meridians describe the overall energy distribution system of Traditional Chinese Medicine, which helps us to understand the notion of carrying, holding, or transporting qi, blood, and body fluids around the body. We are more than just our physical body. We are made up of a system of various levels and dimensions of subtle energy that are interconnected and interdependent. This knowledge is rooted in the concepts of meridians and chakras and is important to acknowledge in the future of our society and of our species. The more we think expansively about the body—and its capacity—the closer we can get to truly healing because it contextualizes our existence, again, in a macro way, which means integrating the mind.

In The Gift of Freedom, Mimi Thi Nguyen writes, “Ideas of gender, race, and coloniality are central to these assumed scenes of liberalism, and to the global empires that found liberalism’s emergence.”^[18] In a nebulous way, capitalism—alongside the impacts of race, class, and colonization—has determined who gets freedom over their bodies and who doesn’t. I think of the concept of Taylorism, named after the nineteenth-century management consultant Frederick Taylor, who designed a method of optimizing workflow in factories, which then influenced classroom design, introducing the idea that children’s bodies needed to be optimized and controlled.^[19] This creation has severely impacted various realms of civil society—for example how we prioritize “work” and thus value, and also how we demonize others for “laziness,” i.e., the rhetoric used against Black people and fat people to further propagate the idea that a palatable whiteness was the apex of evolution, and everyone else’s responsibility (if they don’t fall neatly into whiteness) is to serve the idea of it. The more you cause a society to remain unhappy in who they are, believing that their value is dependent on their output, the more a void is created, which can easily be (momentarily) filled by leaning on products to fill a hole. If you can’t afford those things, or provide a service that is deemed “worthy,” the more you are forced to accept your inherent lack of value and submit to your position of servitude to the state, to capital, believing—maybe on some level—you don’t even have a right to be. Bring in abuse, trauma, as most humans have experienced some level of terror. Unloving parents, abusive partners, random acts of violence. Then bring in war, displacement, genocide. On top of this, let’s add in systems that are supposedly designed “for you” (governments, for example), because what is democracy if not an entity that serves the people? Why else does the United States invade other countries if not for the projection of democracy? So, what happens when that very system lies to you, subjugates you, imprisons you, steals from you? There’s a two-parter here: (1) We have to begin to understand that these systems that we’ve been told think about us, care about us, provide services to safeguard us, don’t actually. Because foundationally they can’t. I think about this in an energetic sense—when something is built on lies, how could that house of cards not eventually collapse? And (2) That it’s time to accept that we can demand more, but only when we identify the problem.

“Medicine tells us as much about the meaningful performance of healing, suffering and dying as chemical analysis tells us about the aesthetic value of pottery,”^[20] Ivan Illich writes snidely (but accurately) in Limits to Medicine. We’ve put Western science and medicine on such a pedestal, which therein causes a dangerous slippery slope. “The unexamined assumptions of the scientist both determine and limit what he or she will discover,” as the pioneering Czech-Canadian stress researcher Hans Selye pointed out. “Most people do not fully realize to what extent the spirit of scientific research and the lessons learned from it depend upon the personal viewpoints of the discoverers.”^[21] Like all systems, Western science and medicine, too, are not objective just because we say they are.

*  *  *

“Disease is never neutral. Treatment never not ideological. Mortality never without its politics,” Anne Boyer writes in The Undying.^[22] I’ve kept returning to this statement again and again, especially as Carla’s words about her cancer have stayed with me these many years. Sometimes people are able to articulate the exactness of an experience, and at the time when she and I were in each other’s orbits, I don’t think I was aware of how much my own self-hatred had governed me. “It is a sensitive matter to raise the possibility that the way people have been conditioned to live their lives may contribute to their illness,” Gabor Maté writes in When the Body Says No.^[23] In reference to the memory of Mary, a Native woman in her forties who suffered from multiple diseases, he asks: “What creates this civil war inside the body?” A question that no medical professional had asked. Nobody had wondered what this Native woman might have experienced, the sociocultural realities of her own life (e.g., how missing women are ten times more likely to be murdered than other demographics^[24]) or even how the epigenetics of a brutal endless genocide can live in your body as you remain unseen and unnoticed by the government that has claimed and settled on your land. Isn’t it important to understand a body’s holistic, psychological state at the onset of the disease? It’s what Socrates mentioned millennia ago: Where is holisticism in care? And why isn’t it valued? “Mary had been abused as a child, abandoned and shuttled from one foster home to another,” Maté writes, adding in her own articulation, “I was so scared all the time, but as a seven-year-old I had to protect my sisters. And no one protected me.”^[25]

When you are a survivor of childhood trauma, the entire world asks you to hide your pain. I have seen that people don’t want to be burdened with your reality, especially people who have had relatively good lives. So, they ignore your truths, your dimensions. Every friendship I’ve lost in my adult life has shown me that in most cases, people don’t want to afford others the complexity they want for themselves. I imagine all of this comes back to scarcity, a belief that there isn’t enough, that we all should be in competition with others. Deflecting real matters, we are forced to turn on one another.

I am also realizing, more and more, that I’m writing for people who feel their trauma every day but desperately want to heal by looking at it. I’m writing for people who have seen darkness in their lives, too, and have felt misunderstood for the weight of what they hold and carry. There is something bigger to work toward, and we need each other to do it. Being truthful and open about my experience helps me to gain a better perspective on my mother’s life and all the factors that made both my parents who they are. Over the last year, I’ve gained a lot of insight from my father about why he never intervened and his complicity in my mother’s violence. Like Mary, I protected my sister and father because I always knew, because I was told, that I was the one who could ease her off the ledge. So, my body became the soft toy to throw into the ring. I latched on to these roles well into my adulthood where I was the caretaker, reenacting my abuse again and again. Hoping for love and feeling as if the only way I would be loved was if I sacrificed all my needs and gave everything away. Then maybe somebody would love me.

“We tame our natural physical expression from an early age. We learn to police ourselves,” Selassie writes. “Through our families, communities, and society at large, we absorb messages about what is acceptable and not acceptable in terms of our existence: how to move, how to speak, how to dress, and how to belong or not belong.”^[26] There are so many details that go into becoming, into feeling like you belong to yourself, to your family, to society—or even to love—and so much of that comes back to how we are conditioned as children, then in life. It’s interesting to me how we, in the West, have allowed the veneer of capitalism—money and all that it can buy you—to become the logical reasoning for humankind, and not the investigation of the spirit and soul. It’s fascinating that this also, again, correlates back to a very gendered understanding of masculinity. The investment in nation-state, border, domination, war-mongering are all masculine traits in a very rudimentary sense. This is the same way rigidity, a lack of emotionality, and rationality—as well as a hefty dollop of cynicism—are also seen as masculine qualities, and thus rewarded in a society that upholds disconnection from what is right or fair, and rewards who can strong-arm the other more. Holding the scarcity-driven belief that power is not innate but stolen.

When I remembered, or rather turned and faced the light, the haunting ghost of my childhood sexual violation at the side of my neck, breathing on my ear forever, something just clicked, like I had always known but had finally strung the words together. I think this is always the first step of healing from abuse; it requires you turning to face what is looking at you. I put my eyes on the memory and saw what I had always known but was too afraid to say. My body carried the physical signs of my mental anguish for so long. It was in the countless UTIs, the countless yeast infections, a body always filled with mucus. In my parents’ home, I would wake up in my sister’s bed every morning with a pocket of saliva filling my mouth. I was constantly sneezing, coughing, and blowing my nose—but only ever at home. In the outside world I could breathe.

Society doesn’t support this kind of mental discovery, as there is very little support for children of sexual abuse. Yet according to a study on the impact of sexual abuse on female development,^[27] on average, we showed signs of cognitive deficits, depression, dissociative symptoms, maladaptive sexual development, asymmetrical stress responses, high rates of obesity, more major illnesses and healthcare utilization, dropping out of high school, persistent post-traumatic stress disorder, self-mutilation, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders diagnoses, physical and sexual revictimization, premature deliveries, teen motherhood, drug and alcohol abuse, and domestic violence. In addition, “offspring born to abused mothers were at increased risk for child maltreatment and overall maldevelopment.”^[28] I knew my body had been trying to communicate that something was very wrong for a very long time. At twenty-nine, I was ready to face the mental work needed to heal myself.

The way we deny our connection to the Earth is the same way we deny connection to ourselves. This happens in multiple ways when you are in the margins of society—but especially if you are a woman or femme person in this world—you are taught not to trust yourself and forced to accept the rules by which everything is governed, even when those rules weren’t made with us in mind. As a child I was encouraged to mistrust myself. If I was hurt, physically or mentally, I was told to get over it; even when my dad was being sweet, he was still being dismissive. The best of us do that to each other—deny our truths—and sometimes we do it to remain within the confines of the status quo, sometimes because the idea of facing something feels too big. I think back to a life before I accepted certain things about my childhood, when so much was unknown to me about myself but was right there, staring back at me. If I were to look myself in the eye, I would’ve had to do the impossible, blow up myself and my family. So instead, I stayed quiet, played by the rules, and made myself so small so nobody would question anything about who I was. But it was only a matter of time, I think I always knew that.

In Caliban and the Witch, Silvia Federici writes, “On the one hand, new cultural canons were constructed maximizing the differences between women and men and creating more feminine and more masculine prototypes. Women were inherently inferior to men—excessively emotional and lusty, unable to govern themselves—and had to be placed under male control. As with the condemnation of witchcraft, consensus on this matter cut across religious and intellectual lines. From the pulpit or the written page, humanists, Protestant reformers, counter-reformation Catholics, all cooperated in the vilification of women, constantly and obsessively.”^[29]

We have to begin to understand the feminization of wellness—by denouncing it through the language of being hokey or woo-woo—and insinuating that Western science is the be-all and end-all of information needed to understand who you are is a deeply dangerous template. That allotting intuitive understanding of yourself and your body is not, nor should be, your primary concern. Much like how God has been co-opted by a mediator like a priest, one’s own well-being has been co-opted by the lingering miasma of medicine and science that is, in its totality, not even invested in understanding your specificity as a human. Our bodies are merely data.

Civilizations that were destroyed by the advent of epistemicide and the colonization of the world were societies eager to expand, to know more. Historian and scholar Ali A. Olomi explained about the Muslims: “They had a deep, deep appreciation for ancient knowledge. They had an understanding that the ancient world had secrets and mysteries that needed to be preserved. So Persian forms of knowledge, Indic forms of knowledge, Greek forms of knowledge had to be preserved.”^[30] There was an inherent appreciation of the vastness of information.

In a paper on Cartesian philosophy, Enrique Dussel, an academic and philosopher, reframes Rene Descartes’s statement “I think, therefore I am” into “I conquer, therefore I am.” Descartes, who introduced the concept of dualism, was a strong believer that the mind and body are two different metaphysical substances, believing that the mind can exist outside of the body, and the body cannot think.^[31] The conceptualization of the mind-body problem, as dualism initiated, is an alarming reality for men like Descartes who were trying to understand the complexities of the human condition within, again, the confines of control and discovery. As opposed to acceptance and understanding. Recently I found myself working with a new massage therapist. After our first session, she explained that my QL (quadratus lumborum) was more engaged on the left side of my body. “It attaches from the top of the pelvis to the bottom of the ribs,” she noted over email when I asked her for further explanation. “What I’ve found is that when this muscle is more engaged on the left side, the person feels like they can’t present as their full self; like they have to make themselves smaller in some way to be accepted or received in certain situations.” A muscle told her everything she needed (also “kneaded,” sorry) to know. As Bessel van der Kolk writes, the body keeps a score of the mind’s workings.

*  *  *

I think part of unlearning these vast and failing systems is to learn to trust ourselves and our own wisdom, but we must also challenge the status quo and unpack how we play into domination. Holding ourselves accountable and listening to our morality and our gut is key, but then we must act. If we are holding ourselves to the highest standard, then it’s easier to trust that the people you allow in are also going to be as invested in holding themselves with as much humility as you are. If that’s not the case, question your relationships, because this restructuring is the cornerstone in the creation of a care network. In envisioning a future of care, disability justice advocates are some of the best thinkers reimagining a future for all.

In Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice, writer and educator Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha writes, “Crip emotional intelligence is understanding isolation. Deeply. We know what it’s like to be really, really alone. To be forgotten about, in that way where people just don’t remember you’ve ever been out, at meetings and parties, in the social life of the world. How being isolated, being shunned, being cut off from the social world of community is terrifying because you know that it can literally kill you. And that being alone also does not always have to be killing; it can also be an oasis of calm, quiet, low simulation, and rest.”^[32] We have the ability to accept the inevitable and change. To open, expand, and shift to listen to ourselves. In order to hold ourselves and each other better.

I think about that a lot, about Carla, about my mother, about myself, and the grief that comes with realizing that all those years you talked to yourself with disdain were because you were told to mistrust who you were. For me, that meant accepting violence, but sadly, that’s a common occurrence. Many of us are unlearning from our painful pasts. Many of us were forced to be silent, to be small. For everyone who has been made to feel like a burden by our families, the marginalized, the abused, the broken but whole—it’s time to move toward a new pattern of being. With each other.

Estés writes a utopian vision for who I want to be: “The medial woman stands between the worlds of consensual reality and the mystical unconscious and mediates between them. The medial woman is the transmitter and receiver between two or more values or ideas. She is the one who brings new ideas to life, exchanges old ideas for innovative ones, translates between the world of the rational and the world of the imaginal. She ‘hears’ things, ‘knows’ things, and ‘senses’ what should come next.”^[33]

In a lot of ways, this unique time, where we are on this earth, is calling us to return to ourselves, in ways we have never been called to before. This means returning to a way of being that is intrinsic, connected, and holistic. Not just with ourselves, but understanding that as a society, we can’t be fragmented and disconnected from the needs and realities of each other. “Care is feminized and invisibilized labor,”^[34] writes Piepzna-Samarasinha, but imagine if it was a reality for all. We need to get to a place where we can learn how to trust ourselves again. We need to understand that how we demonize intuition, women’s knowledge, and wisdom is deeply entrenched in the colonial project, thereby directly impacting how we engage with wellness, care, and the world of healing. It’s all connected. It’s time now we finally faced it.

Footnotes

* Emoto’s research has been widely criticized for his use of unconventional methodology. Detractors have suggested that because his results are not replicable using the standard scientific method, they are fraudulent, while supporters have argued that the scientific method cannot account for the unknowable, spiritual dimension of research.

* He is also the brother of Will Keith Kellogg, the founder of the Kellogg Company, as in, yeah—the cereal.

* “A clean living movement is a period of time when a surge of health-reform crusades, many with moral overtones, erupted into the popular consciousness. This resulted in individual, or group reformers such as the anti-tobacco or alcohol coalitions of the late twentieth century, to campaign to eliminate the health problem or to ‘clean up’ . . . The movements also coincided with episodes of xenophobia or moral panic in which various minorities were targeted as undesirable influences for medical or moral reasons.”

“Clean Living Movement,” Wikipedia, accessed September 25, 2021, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_living_movement.

* In Ayurveda there is panchakarma (pancha means “five” and karma means “treatment”), which outlines a process to prepare the body for detoxification and then five methods to remove toxins. It’s an important element of an Ayurvedic lifestyle.

* The correct term might be Anorexia mirabilis, which is now seen as a form of religious asceticism that largely affects Catholic nuns and religious women.