I was born and raised in the US Virgin Islands. When I started on my healing journey in 2012, I remember feeling so lost and disconnected from my culture.

It bothered me because I knew that different cultures had some distinct ways of maintaining their health and wellness. I wanted to learn about other cultures but I didn’t want to appropriate. South Asians have yoga and tantra. Buddhists have zen meditation. Indigenous Americans have pow wows and other community oriented ceremonies. West Africans have drumming and dance and physical releasing.

But what did I have? I remember feeling like Afro-Caribbean people were mutts. We kidnapped and put on stolen land to work and forced to adopt new languages and cultures that had nothing to do with our ancestors. I felt robbed.

Upon deeper searching, I realized my heritage had little to do with traditions and dialects tied to colonization. The very way of my people is to be resilient, to endure, to show love and be graceful through it all.

From my family, I am reminded my culture is to be resilient. Resilience is healing.

Afro-Caribbean people have created a culture of wellness and endurance.

We continue to heal ourselves by remaining close to the land and showing her respect. We create herbal remedies, incorporating ‘bush medicine’ into our lives. My grandmothers’ and their mothers are our healers: their gardens hold the medicine of our ancestors. Papaya, pineapple, mango, noni, hot peppers, cactus, soursop, lemongrass and many more… We give thanks to the Earth and we nourish our bodies.


Afro Caribbean people heal through DANCE! Our African roots remain strong and show up in the sway of our hips, the quick moves of our feet, the loud drums in our music… It is so beautiful how the love for music and physical expression remains in our very DNA.

Soon, I began to see how beautiful my ‘mutt’ culture was.

Even the Rastafari principles my father instilled are rooted in other cultures. Rastas smoke cannabis due to the influence of South India’s Hindu immigrants to the Caribbean in the 1800s. There is a long history of cannabis in Hinduism but the main things Rastas adopted was smoking to meditate and receive wisdom from Jah (God). Rastas used the Christianity forced onto them and re-appropriated it, creating a black God whose goal was to liberate their societies from the chains of racism, poverty and corruption. They see Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie as the Black Messiah. Christianity mixed with pan-African principles, Hindu philosophies, and general mysticism to create a culture built on resistance.

And then I realized, resilience is healing. Healing is love.

I was immediately transported back to my last year of high school when I would obsessively write “God is love” all over my notes. Before I truly even could begin to know what embracing myself really meant, I was beginning to see that love was the highest power in the universe. If you could understand the world for what it was- no pretenses- you’d see a lot of pain, anger, exploitation, and struggle. People hurt each other and they hurt themselves and they pass around bad moods, pain, and violence from unresolved traumas of their own.

It can be so easy to fall into repeating cycles of pain when many people, like myself, weren’t taught anything differently. In many cultures, especially cultures of black and brown people, the way we are taught to resolve pain is by ‘getting over it’. Like J. Cole says in FRIENDS off his latest album KOD, “Theres all sorts of trauma from drama that children see, type of shit that normally would call for therapy. But you know just how it go in our community, keep that shit inside it don’t matter how hard it be.”

When these communities [people of color, specifically black and indigenous folks] also experience trauma at rates higher than their mainstream population counterparts while also having less access to mental health resources, “keeping shit inside” leads to toxic and potentially fatal ways of coping.

So when I say “God is love”, this wasn’t because I was religious, but because I somehow knew that was the answer. When I began to study how Afro-Caribbean folks heal, I was speechless. Healing was the key to unlocking everything I wanted to know about my heritage.

Then I had a dream, prophetic vision that brought this to life.. This dream showed me something different than I’d known: with healing in the picture, I saw bonds of devotion and empathy standing alongside the pain and struggle. I saw forgiveness embracing anger in a warm hug. I saw my foremothers crying as they released centuries of bottled trauma. I saw images of them dancing together and I saw healing truly beginning. Joy became the essence of our lineage. Resilience is healing. Healing is love.

This the very dream that lead me to travel to SouthEast Asia to learn about healing. This is the very dream that encouraged me to dive into Afro-Caribbean herbalism with my grandmothers. This is the dream that made space for me to create the Déja Chaniah method, which blends Afro-Caribbean healing practices of my ancestors with Southeast Asian philosophies to create a totally unique healing method.

I’m curious, how do you connect to healing? Please leave your thoughts below! I’d love to hear from you 💚

Hoping the rest of your week is as sweet as you are.