Introduction - Who Is Wellness For?

My life, alongside my wellness journey, has been an uncomfortable uttering at times.

I find most inner work for and about the self, especially in realms of “healing,” to be inordinately excruciating. We expect life-altering transformation in a weekend’s worth of work—just a skip, jump, and a head-first butt into evolution, but what they won’t tell you is this game of healing is a messy business. It requires a tenacity of self, a willingness to walk into the fire, again and again. True healing means that, at some point, you’re willing to die, cyclically, only to be resurrected as your truest self; it’s an understanding that the journey doesn’t end, you don’t just one day find enlightenment, much like how you don’t just arrive at happiness. It’s not a destination as much as it is a state of being that needs consistency as well as a desire to adapt. To become again and again and again, this state of unraveling is the nexus point for change.

I am one of those rare masochists who loves hard work. My specific astrological placements would explain that through my Capricorn stellium, i.e., specific placements that have determined my love of climbing a never-ending mountain—right, right to the top—dedicated to the self and evolution with a reverential hunger for spiritual edification. I always played it off as a quirk, but, in recent years, as I’ve come to understand myself more wholly, I’ve begun to question what came first: Was it nature or nurture that made me so determined to get better, be better? Sadly, the more I unpacked that question, the fractured layers of a childhood I was so quick to forget, eject, and escape became clearer.

Some of us, maybe many more than are willing to admit, don’t have pleasant memories of our childhoods to return to. The more I sought answers in my own life, the more the question became more global. If a lot of us can relate to immensely traumatic childhoods, what does that say about us as a species? As a society? Shouldn’t this warrant more questioning and investigation?

When I was young, I thought I was the only kid with a bad life. I saw other children have simpler family dynamics, yet all I knew was raging catastrophe. Violence was a norm, because I had a mentally ill parent and my days were saturated by my mother’s shrill screams. If I wanted freedom, it wasn’t worth challenging. My mother proved time and time again that if she didn’t get her way, she would punish you for it. She was domineering, the type of mother whose stare would knock you out, sweaty and gleaming with artificial regret for something you didn’t even know you did. My childhood was punctuated with her physical violence—rolling pins, remote controls, she loved the bottom of shoes and sandals to hit me with. My body, our bodies—my sister’s and mine—were hers to oppress and control. Yet the more she took away my power, the more I let her.

As the youngest, my role in the family was to keep it together. I was the sun, and I felt that for them. I felt that in how my energy diffused my mother’s anger, or how taking a beat for someone else (usually my father) was a way I wielded a power that I understood I had as a child. The power of diplomacy. I’m naturally willful, which is a strange paradox. I was a sick child in so many ways, always bent with allergies, forever frozen, bloated, out of my body. Because there was no refuge anywhere, I believed that I had to adapt to my shitty life, so every year I tried to accept it, accept the turmoil, the suicidal ideation my mother’s presence left me in. The way her groping fingers left my body forever in a state of distress. I didn’t know peace or reprieve. I only felt an anger I couldn’t express, and the more I wanted to, the more I grew fearful of doing so, inevitably shutting down. It took me a long time to understand that I was psychologically groomed and gaslit from childhood to adulthood about what kind of life I had been living. I don’t blame anyone for this, and I’ve come to understand many of us were raised in familial dualities.

*  *  *

On the outside we were a normal family, while inside there were multiple times (including two really dire situations) that made me realize I could die inside my own home. I was obsessed with John Wayne Gacy the year my mother tried to burn the house down. It was 2003, Bush had just entered Iraq, and I was a politically active kid, having formed the social justice club at school with my friend Manna. We went to protests and read Malcolm X’s biography.

I’m lucky that I found organizing communities young, because it gave me a resource to sublimate my pain. This was around the same time I began writing Like a Bird, a novel full of grief after the protagonists’ respective suicide and rape. My mother, that same year, like Virginia Woolf herself, walked out of our pale blue house after an argument with my father and told us that she was going to disappear and kill herself. Nobody stopped her; I knew my life would be easier if she were dead. Like Gacy, a clown turned killer, I saw my mother as a monstrous beast who tortured her victim’s lives with near constant fear . . . but on the outside, in public, she was on best behavior. She was charismatic, enthralled by laughter, beautiful—my own Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Because I saw her hidden parts, I saw her as remorseless as a murderer, a Medusa type, sick over all the bad things that life had dealt her. The bifurcation of self (the belle versus the monster) and because she is a Libra, meant there was a performance of self in public, a place where she could be free, she could thrive on the romance of that moment. Yet at home, in private, juxtaposed against her public self, she was a tyrant. I lived every day concerned by how her moods would swing, but there was no way to know. From a young age, I learned that I had to accept this burden of discomfort, this tragedy my life had become.

I didn’t grow up with socioeconomic advantages that allowed me access to a therapist or healers, and back in the 1990s in Australia there were few resources and little explanation of abuse and how one overcomes it. So, instead of getting the primary care that could’ve saved me, my early childhood life was so loveless that the only way to confront it was to pretend it wasn’t happening. If I could have no authority of my own, I would disassociate. I guess I never questioned how much of this discomfort was a necessity of my circumstance and simply relied on frying myself out of my own life’s details. My favorite film from my teens was Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, a story about erasing memories that haunt us and leave us incapacitated. I romanticized this pain—it was the only way to understand it. How else to metabolize a mother who can’t show you love, who also finds time and ways to hurt you in the interim of a beating? Some part of you has to harden or detach. I chose the latter—I forgot for my own survival.

*  *  *

My name means “joy” in Arabic. I learned that from my father, who, whenever anyone asked, would exaggerate the ha in Fari-ha and mutter how my name made sense, pointing out that I was such a happy child. When she came home from her first day of preschool, he would gallantly tell anyone who would listen, she had a hundred new best friends. I learned young what my duty was, what my passport was to be in this family; I had to transform into my name for everybody’s sake. I learned that my birth, in some ways, had sedated my mother’s hysteria. As if she was some strange tempestuous, unsolvable mystery, and I somehow the missing jigsaw piece. So, I became a subdued court jester. Always happy, always bright. I really did want to befriend everyone, and I did. I was a cute kid, too, cuter than most kids. I knew this because I was always adored for certain things: my eyelashes, my hair, the cuteness of my face. My father’s favorite story of me is on a bus at three, when I turned to a bunch of white grandmas who were staring at me, looked them dead in the face, and asked, “Are you staring at me because I’m beautiful?” The story ends there, usually punctured by my dad’s slight chuckle. I’ve heard that story so many times throughout my life, the way parents always recycle stories to an audience, but whenever he’d say it in front of me, I’d sit, dumbfounded. What happened to that young girl? Where did she disappear to?

You learn to accept the black holes in your psyche, don’t you? You accept them as a glitch, a fault of your own brain, mercilessly antagonizing your own ability to recount your life. My internal negging was rooted in a desire to reflect my parents’ impatience with me, so much so that even in private I mimicked them. If I were to count the number of times I’ve rolled my eyes at myself, it would probably give you a clear indication of how I still sometimes feel about myself. Are we so indiscriminate with other people’s feelings because we are so callous with our own? Then again, it’s not like I wanted to remember my younger life; I regarded my past like a curse I had outlived.

When darkness resurfaced in me from time to time, I turned to art. Listening to Radiohead, Sufjan Stevens, Jeff Buckley—I found an outlet for my emotions. I believed I was sad because, despite having many friends, I was a loner. I felt inherently, psychically, alone. I felt that nobody understood my depth of feeling, and because I had no parent to safeguard me or my emotions, I was deeply lost and abandoned. Darkness made sense to me. So much of my outward persona was the happy parts of me that in private I gave myself permission to ponder life, be abstract, and nurture my sadness, which everyone else read as a threat to their happiness. My life has forever been used as a filler for other people’s needs—this bred a different kind of loneliness, one that zero autonomy gives you. So, I read voraciously, and it became a phenomenal mirror to my experience. Everything from Jane Eyre to White Oleander developed into a receptacle of, and to, higher learning. I saw my mother in the pages—she was both Bertha Mason and Ingrid Magnussen. When you’re used to violence, nothing surprises you, but others like you become a certain kind of kin.

My first real memory of my life is my mother tying herself to a train track. I am three. I don’t remember where we are exactly, but I do remember that my mother is screaming that she’s going to kill herself: aami morhte chai, aami morthe jethe chai (I want to die, I want to die in Bangla), she repeats again and again like a chant. My father is begging her not to, he’s telling her to remember her children. I don’t know where I am, but I know that I am her child. I know my sister is nearby as well, I’m trying to find her hand, I’m trying to find someone to hold on to.

I don’t really remember ages three and a half to seven. By eight my memory is clear, but that’s also around the time I started engaging with my body with a hate so punishing that I would spend afternoons pinching it in disgust. I was always trying to harm myself. I enjoyed falling over—scrapes and cuts were gratifying—but I was absolutely petrified by my mother’s physical touch, which generally involved her hitting me with some external instrument. Or even just her hands, which she used so precisely to get the slaps or hits that burned the skin long after.

The constant rupture of a mentally ill parent feels like a missing heartbeat, a jump in your chest. It is to live in fear at all times, to expect alarm, to presume the worst. So, what happens is you begin to hide, you make yourself shrink in the corner, far beneath the covers so she can’t find you. The thing is, I ran so far, I forgot where to find me again. It took me a long time to understand why loud noises trigger me; her screams, shrieks, banging pots and pans, or even the quake of dancing limbs running, hiding, from a hit, from a wielded knife have all made my nerves raw. Instead, by her depiction, we were made out to be lazy, impossibly entitled children, even after denying all our own needs and doing nothing but accommodate hers. I had figured out a formula to keep her the least activated, but her happiness was a mirage; she would taunt you with the possibility of it, but nothing was ever worthy of her good mood. She would often castigate herself like a martyr, normalizing acts of cruelty and disgust as if children need not be shielded from violence. It’s as if she loathed us.

Without a mother’s armor I was quite vulnerable to the world, but mostly to her. If you’ve never known peace, how can you expect it? We were always trying to survive the day. So much of my early life was trying not to jump out of the window, trying not to die, but I was secretly more like Amelié at my own funeral, wanting to watch my mother cry, finally aware of what a good child I was. I wanted her to validate me. I wanted her to see me. So much of who I am comes back to exactly this.

Quarrels in the household happened often and usually resulted in a steep acceleration of my mother’s fury. She escalated fast, like an overwhelming rapturous wind, and was swift in her demolishing. A distinct memory I have is in my early adolescence. I was underneath a mango tree in our backyard. It was the nicest house we’d had yet, with an unused pool and a big, luscious mango creature with roots regal like a banyan tree. The home carried a different kind of eeriness, as homes often did back then, always with a slight off-feeling like it could be heralded by ghosts at any moment. I can’t remember what I was doing moments before I heard a scream from my mother, then another that belonged to my sister. My sister is seven years older than me, and she was beginning to rebel in her own ways, fighting back if my mother hit or struck her. When my mother hit me, I took it, I cowered, always. By my teens I psychically would make my skin like steel so the sharpness of her hit would reverberate like a metallic jolt. I never fought back, I learned how to cry silently, I bore my sins. But my sister, now going to university, was learning she didn’t have to take it. Though it was at the cost of our collective sanity, it was the first attempt at a family coup.

Though I would blur my surroundings if I heard even the faintest shrill edge of my mother’s voice, there was something different about the scream that day; it was escalating, it was penetrating. Soon thereafter, I began to hear the pounce of bodies. That’s what made me crawl out of my delirium; I knew I would have to intervene. As I began walking toward the door, something sounded very bad. My sister was screaming louder than I’d ever heard her scream, and it sounded like she was screaming for her life. When I came in through the back door to the suburban Australian bungalow-style dining room, my mother had a kitchen knife in her hand, and she was running around the table trying to stab my sister. It took me a while to figure out this wasn’t some kind of lewd prank, and by the time I realized that my mother was trying to hurt her, she had made eye contact with me. I could see a void in her eyes.

It all happened so fast, I don’t remember if my body lurched to protect my sister or if I just felt the urgency to run for my life, but all of a sudden I was also moving around the dining table, distracting her/running from her. At a certain point, I was surprised to hear my father’s voice; he rarely got involved in these fights. Both my sister and I have asked him over the years as to why; his explanation is that he thought it would de-escalate things faster. I think for most of my life, I believed that as well. These days, I wonder if things could have been prevented. It’s hard not to mourn childhood safety. What if my mother had stabbed me? After that incident, I had fantasized about that as well. Of sending her to jail. I didn’t sleep by myself again until I moved to New York at almost twenty. I was scared my mother might kill me in my sleep.

*  *  *

Instead of trying to fix the unfixable with my mother, I began focusing on myself, on perfecting who I was. I found myself too selfish, too unkind, so I focused diligently on being selfless and kind. Everything could be (and was) fixable, I figured, so my primary focus was becoming the best person I could be. Throughout my life, perfection has been my goal. I am in constant evolution, thinking of myself as a video game player hell-bent on winning. I’m not sure what the prize is, but it doesn’t matter; I’ve always found the pursuit of ascension a most honorable quality. But it was never enough, and I never felt satisfied on any level. I was my own panopticon, always sniffing for reasons to self-critique.

This, I have since understood, is a trauma response. By learning how to elevate myself, I had convinced myself that the real issue was me. One of the major reasons violence for a child (coupled with a lack of affection or care) is so dangerous is because on some level you begin to believe it is your fault, no matter what rational understanding you might have, or awareness of the complexity. I believed anything was amenable by my own acquiescence, by my own sacrifice. I had convinced myself that was the role I played in all interpersonal relationships. To have any value, I had to give more.

Words like grooming never entered my lexicon as a child or teenager. I didn’t realize it wasn’t normal to be berated or made to feel small and useless by a parent, and that this was an act of conditioning. I grew accustomed to her verbal tirades, and I tried with all my might to make her happy. For years, I assumed I must have been a bad person because my mother managed to tell me that so often. My self-esteem was dwindling, nonexistent.

The ubiquity of sexual, physical, and even mental abuse and violence in South Asian communities makes it easy to dismiss it as “just the way things are.” For most of my life, I accepted this excuse. To make matters more complicated, I found myself genuinely unattractive, and was socialized to feel this correlated with the way my mother treated me, my body a constant source of critique, so I bore it just to maintain the peace. I gave more, worked harder, just to get the bare minimum. Looking at my father, I began to understand that this is an immigrant tautology: become impenetrable as praxis, work hard forever as praxis. I don’t think my parents have ever felt wanted. By their families, by their (adopted or home) countries, by each other. So, I picked up on the unwantedness, and I wore it, too. The introjection of their feelings (mixed with my own) of unworthiness and insecurity runs deep, and it transformed into a lighthouse. My pursuit of perfection against this resurrected me. It gave me purpose.

My parents both survived a civil war. In 1971, Bangladesh, then East Pakistan, faced a revolution, which resulted in genocide. The Pakistani military junta launched Operation Searchlight on March 25, 1971; nine months later, by December 16, a reported three million people were dead and four hundred thousand women were raped as a genocidal war tactic. In “What’s Killing America’s Black Infants?” Zoë Carpenter writes, “Health experts now think that stress throughout the span of a woman’s life can prompt biological changes that affect the health of her future children. Stress can disrupt immune, vascular, metabolic, and endocrine systems, and cause cells to age more quickly.”^[1] These biological changes no doubt impact fathers as well, and Carpenter’s analysis of the epigenetic effects on Black children descended from enslaved peoples is echoed in the trauma of oppressed people the world over, including my parents. Though it happened just fifty years ago, and even though both my parents had survived it, no history book I ever read as a child mentioned my familial or cultural history. I was left oblivious to my parents’ upbringing and the terrors they witnessed, never fully grasping their pain or the brutality of their early existence. I did not grow up with the understanding that my father saw dead body parts outside his bedroom window when he was sixteen; I did not know my mother’s father was almost assassinated before the war. I did not comprehend the ghosts that haunted my ancestors, my parents, and thus me, until much, much later.

In My Grandmother’s Hands, trauma therapist Resmaa Menakem writes, “As years and decades pass, reflexive traumatic responses can lose context. When this same strategy gets internalized and passed down over generations within a particular group, it can start to look like culture. Therapists call this traumatic retention.”^[2] Along with traumatic retention, Menakem mentions another useful term that I was also struck by: unmetabolized trauma. Both phrases have a visceral feeling to them. Retention reminds me of bloating, when you are puffy with water or food; the feeling of immovability, the stuckness of unmetabolized trauma. But how, I began to ask myself, can we expect the body to metabolize toxicity at this level? This would be a grueling question I would only begin to fully comprehend while writing this book.

*  *  *

By twenty-five, I had hit a wall. I couldn’t keep going. I hated fighting for myself, for my own existence. My mind was beginning to turn against me, I could feel it growing weak, I could feel myself slipping into a steady, mercurial darkness. Something had to change. I don’t know what exactly triggered me, but suddenly I was sitting in the bathtub ready to slit my wrists open. I’d been edging on suicide, playing with it, for a long time, with the idea of death, as it seemed like a better horizon.

Around the same time, I started reading about epigenetics and was beginning to understand how trauma was passed down from one generation to the next. I was sitting with the reality that I had never felt safe, and I didn’t see a way out of this loneliness. It was through this feeling—of carrying the weight of white supremacy, Islamophobia, other people’s projections of me and my experience, but also the immense ghost of a childhood and family trauma that I was trying to escape—that I had my first major adult breakdown. But something happened to me in that bathtub; I realized I didn’t want to die and that there had to be another way. It was an acknowledgment that I had to find a better way to live. In the foreword to her book Civil Wars, June Jordan writes, “I resolved not to run on hatred but, instead, to use what I loved, words, for the sake of the people I loved.”^[3] When I realized nobody owed me anything, something began to shift. It was an acknowledgment that I had to find a way to look at myself truthfully, holistically. I realized I needed to take accountability for myself. I realized I could liberate myself from this pain by, at the very least, facing it.

When I was finally able to afford therapy in 2019, at twenty-nine years old, I was apprehensive, unsure if a therapist could offer me anything I didn’t already know. I was hyper-conscious of my flaws and honest about them with myself. It’s telling that what I hadn’t considered was the opposite. In explaining my life to my trauma therapist, what was revealed was what I had always known but had no recourse to accept. My childhood had traumatized me, it had devastated me, and I was being asked to inquire why. I’d never allowed myself to feel the hurt of my early life and, yet, it festered, entering into every fabric of my porous being like mold spreading on an unventilated bathroom ceiling. The impact could be found in so many parts of my physical and emotional self, as if I was rotting from the inside out.

My mother’s own abuse had always been coded, but as the years went by, I began to piece together an explanation of why she had become the person she was, a necessary step in my healing. The past is important. But, when you’re non-white, your lineages are harder to grasp. With mass migration, colonization, and the emphasis of assimilation for diaspora folks as well as the disinterest in facing the insidious ramifications of globalism, neoliberalism, and settlership, it’s harder to track your ancestry.

As a young Muslim South Asian growing up in the suburbs of Sydney, I felt alone and abandoned. I understood injustice, and I wanted to highlight it because I cared. In retrospect, I realize focusing on injustice was a way to work toward seeking goodness on a macro level, as, in a way, I was also fighting for myself, my own injustice. I didn’t know how to talk about how much I hated myself, because I couldn’t understand why. Where did all this self-loathing come from? It wasn’t all mine. This much I knew. In Australia, I was surrounded by white people, white supremacy, a domineering Australian-ness that relied on a “laid-back” and “no worries” attitude that was only ever afforded to whiteness. Everyone else I knew, the children of immigrants or refugees, experienced some form of isolation, of fear: of racism, of death, of rape. And though it was a pronounced sense of dissonance, whiteness was also the litmus test to success—as it has been for many of us. But if adjacency to whiteness was through literal physicality or money, I was failing.

The closer I got to this cavern of sadness that existed inside of me, between who I said I was and who I actually was, the closer I came to the truth. I began to understand that all these years what I had been feeling as a sense of worthlessness was a variant of shame. In The Undying: A Meditation on Modern Illness, Anne Boyer writes, “You think, when you feel bad, that you will never long for it, but in truth you do, since it provides such clear instruction for existing.”^[4] I thought I had been surviving, and yet, what I was really doing was hanging by a string, loosely holding myself from collapsing. I was always on the verge, and I could feel that friction in my soul. It wasn’t enough anymore. I needed to channel this struggle into something bigger than me.

But it started with me, by acknowledging my tiny hypocrisies, and really questioning what self-care, what wellness, was for me. This eventually led me to ask: What was it for everyone else? If it was for someone like me, pilfered from my very own culture, then why couldn’t I afford it? Was part of my anger and frustration a result of the fact that I have always found it quite difficult to be “well”? And, if so, how many of us have felt that way, experiencing life at a severe disadvantage? This, then, became a bigger, more existential question: Was I the only one who was owed a good life? When I started to understand how deeply disadvantaged anyone who wasn’t white or wealthy or able-bodied was in realms of wellness, I started to think more and more beyond just my own experience.

*  *  *

This book is an exploration of a few things, namely my own personal experience of needing wellness, while simultaneously examining the wellness industrial complex^* and its failures. It deeply concerns me that whiteness and capitalism have co-opted wellness, relegating caring for oneself as a privilege when wellness should be for all. Instead, the accoutrements, gadgets, and clothes (primarily created by white people for other white people, while completely stealing other people’s culture) have sustained inequality for the masses. Do we think of the wellness of the laborer to make these products? Do we think of what it means when an American university patents turmeric when it belongs to the cultures of the global South?^* Do we think of the impact greenhouse emissions have in the countries that serve the West’s blatant greed by making everything that we use and buy? Who speaks for their wellness? How can we be individually well if we aren’t well collectively? This book contends with the current paradox that exists by interrogating wellness through this lens of critical discourse. I’m asking us to question all the things we think we are, and to go deeper into who we can be. To make a commitment toward the collective good, I’m asking all of us to participate on a global level.

I see the wellness industrial complex as a modern arm of imperialism, and that’s how violent it is. The urge for white people to commodify, to steal through a decontextualization of where certain practices come from—assuming that everything can be owned—is transparent to those who are actively decolonizing. The virulence of these actions shows how international organizations such as the WTO and IMF are false regulatory bodies that further enforce inequality by protecting only the West’s interests. An obsession with intellectual property, while never considering who has the right to patent culture, is a farce that is becoming more evident.

This book is a call to action, but it’s also an educational tool for all. Starting with an inquiry into my own wellness inevitably meant that I had to expand to think of other people’s, too. In a society that colludes so righteously with capitalism, we have to ask bigger questions, but we also must act. Fast. In the age of climate apocalypse, this investigation is necessary because we are running out of time. The pandemic has shown us how we are at the behest of the natural world, no matter how much we believe we are superior. The more we lie about who we are, shielding ourselves from real, beneficial societal change, the more we pause our collective evolution and run faster toward our own demise. This inevitably means the more we deny our connection to the Earth, the more she quakes, hissing to make us listen. It’s time we look at who we are in the shadows, and change.

In Braiding Sweetgrass, Potawatomi elder Robin Wall Kimmerer writes, quoting Native scholar Greg Cajete, “We understand a thing only when we understand it with all four aspects of our being: mind, body, emotion, and spirit.”^[5] So, accordingly, I’ve organized this book into four parts to structure our investigation of what wellness is and who it’s for. In the mind section, I speak to the commodification of meditation, questioning who we are serving when we divorce it from its spiritual roots. In the body section, I speak to my IBS and chronic illness as a way to better understand what our own physical ailments can teach us. With self-care, in lieu of emotion, I write about tattoos and self-harm, and finding peace with a body that was never mine. And in the justice section, instead of spirit, I challenge the status quo, positioning the degrowth movement as a means toward a collective future that safeguards everyone’s wellness, especially Indigenous peoples of all nations, whose information, culture, spirituality, and lifestyles we’ve stolen for gross profit. If you are a white-owned company that has propagated inequality by taking what is not yours, this book is especially for you.

Our society deeply lacks morality through the suppression, annihilation, and genocide of half the world’s population for the gain of the white, West, and wealthy. We have to begin to understand that the future asks more of you. This planet, and the emerging apocalypse, requires your vigilance. The Anthropocene, this epoch we currently exist in, was created by the assault and domination of whiteness. A belief in superiority, when we exist with other beings, other species, is a simplistic and ethically corrupt way of being. We have to challenge why we’ve accepted such gruesome and unequal norms.

Ever since I was a child, I’ve questioned the bromides that govern us as a people. I always found it incredibly boring that we’d much rather accept our failures than change. The lack of genuine concern that so many have for others is a trauma response. The belief that we are owed a good life, and the only way to get it is to steal, is a mythology that capitalism continues to spew. But I’m uninterested in continuing to participate in such pathetic structures that presume power is only gained by force. Thousands of years of being ruled by masculinity, by patriarchal invention, have obstructed the necessity of spirit, of intuition, of love. War-mongering can only get you so far, and apparently ecocide is the limitation. But I’m interested in paving a new way, for myself and others who understand what a privilege it is to share this Earth. How immensely beautiful that we are all here together, now. I believe in us, as humans. My own life, and how I’ve healed, refusing to use violence as a tactic toward others who have hurt me, has proven to me that it’s possible. I am my own litmus test for evolving in real time.

I hope through this book we can understand each other a bit better, and we can see the benefit of all of us committing to healing the things that ail us, together. Wellness could be a powerful tool to liberate society, and this is my life’s mission. To educate others and show that there are other ways of being.

Kimmerer writes, “Restoring land without restoring relationship is an empty exercise.”^[6] We have to do this holistically now, which means getting to the bottom of things, but it also means a collective effort. There is no other way. This is my attempt to look at things more clearly for myself, but I hope for you, too. We can change, and I’m asking you to move toward that, toward your own wholeness, by caring for others as well as yourself, with an equal amount of effort on both fronts. That’s what I believe true wellness means.

Footnotes

* The “wellness industrial complex” is the braiding of what we know as “wellness” and the exploitative market of capitalism.

* The Indian government successfully challenged the US patenting of turmeric in 1996, leading to the cancellation of the patent.