Healing as radical care
Tracing roots, shoots, and pathways toward collective liberation by questioning colonial approaches to the modern wellness industry.
Missives to a future, 2022, by Malavika Rajnarayan
At a time of deep collective loss through genocides and ecocides alike, collective healing is a radical act. A holistic approach to pain must address its root causes. In our systems and politics, this means confronting the origins of collective suffering, much of which is disproportionally affects BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour) communities. Despite the highly-individualist approaches to healing within the modern-day wellness industry, war, colonisation, oppression, and land theft are all deep psychological pains felt by the collective, and so in turn, must be healed by the collective.
For some, such as myself (being of Algerian and Irish heritage), colonisation is an inter-generational trauma woven into our DNA and the very fibress of our existence; for others right now it's a more direct and ongoing experience of war, famine, displacement, disenfranchisement and land-theft. It is the loss, too, of lives, culture, heritage, stories, histories and cosmologies.
Raj Patel, co-author of Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice, says, "There needs to be an invitation of respectful engagement and trust-building. It takes time, but it’s the antidote to colonisation. It’s an active process of asking for permission and engagement.”
“The healthcare system remains colonised because it treats Indigenous wisdom as artifacts. But medicine is a process - the plant itself is the medicine. The embodied wisdom of the web of life, interacting with community, knowledge, and the decentering of the self, is not a pill to be swallowed.”
“The borders of our bodies are convenient fictions. Our bodies are living ecosystems teeming with bacteria, microbes, and life forces, just like the forests and rivers around us. This idea that we need to purify ourselves, often the focus of modern wellness, is wild.”
Healing, Patel argues, is both a collective and spatially wide process. “Yoga, for example, does not stop at the studio door. Yoga’s roots are about being in the world consciously – being aware of how your body is moving in relation to others. When bodies come together in this way, they create something powerful.”
While yoga in the West is often seen as internal and passive, its origins are in fact radical. The ancient yogic text The Bhagavad Gita unfolds as a dialogue in the midst of a battlefield. The principle of ahimsa, nonviolence, is not about avoiding harm passively but about actively pursuing peace. Gandhi’s philosophy of satyagraha or "truth-force," born from this principle, became a driving force behind India’s liberation from British rule.
For Patel, much of healing finds its roots in the vagus nerve, whose name means “wanderer” in Latin. It travels through the body, linking the neck, heart, lungs, and abdomen to the brain. A deeply healing act for the vagus nerve and the whole system, Raj notes, is collective singing, such as chanting in yoga, which resonates throughout the body politic.
“The significance of collective singing has been central to every major political movement. On Turtle Island, spirituals were part of the resistance to colonisation and enslavement. In South Africa, political funerals were filled with speeches and songs, rousing the community to continue the struggle for freedom,” Patel adds.
This idea of collective singing reminds me of Alexis Pauline Gumbs analogy of ‘echo-locating’ with one another. Gumbs, author of Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals (Emergent Strategy Series), spoke in a recent interview on the Green Dreamer podcast, about how we might move, dance, and echo-locate with one another in an act of deep listening, much like marine animals. She said, “I believe there is an energetic connection, a teaching, a mentorship, a blending of species consciousnesses that precedes colonialism. There’s a shared survival of the colonial project that also brings us together.”
Deep-listening, as explored in our last issue of Resurgence & Ecologist, is also explored in adrienne maree brown’s[3] [SC4] book Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds, inspired by Octavia Butler’s explorations of humanity’s relationship with change. Brown writes, “I am listening now with all of my senses, as if the whole universe might exist just to teach me more about love.
“I listen to strangers, I listen to random invitations, I listen to criticisms, I listen to my body, I listen to my creativity and to the artists who inspire me, I listen to elders, I listen to my dreams and the books I am reading. I notice that the more I pay attention, the more I see order, clear messages, patterns, and invitations in the small or seemingly random things that happen in my life. In all these ways, I meditate on love.” A key part of this philosophy is what brown calls fractal responsibility, which refers to the way we move in alignment with our vision so that our actions ripple outward.
The concept of decolonising healing, and redefining wellness beyond yoga studios, wellness apps, and bodily optimisation, means becoming fractally responsible, and having honest conversations in intentional spaces; it means bringing back rituals, tending to grief and trauma, it means coming together over our differences, to bring the wholeness back into healing, the united yoke back into yoga.
