This blog post has been burning me up and I finally got all my thoughts out. 

Wellness trends are just modern day colonialism. 

This is something I’ve witnessed in the past near decade in the health and wellness industry. It feels jarring to me because growing up in the Virgin Islands, wellness experts were our elders. We sought out wisdom from people who grew their bush (herbs), food (ground provision), shared oral history, and lived natural lifestyles. 

As I’ve grown, I realize that the industry looks incredibly different. 

The western faces of holistic wellness and spirituality are largely white — Europeans and their descendants. Yet, by and large, the things they teach and sell come from cultures across the Caribbean, Africa, Asia, and Latin America. 

🌿How ironic is it for a foreigner to be deemed an expert in another’s traditions?

🌿How insidious is it for them to create a living on sanitizing and white washing our ancestors’ wellness rituals? 

🌿How heartbreaking is it that many of us were told our traditions were “simple,” “pagan,” “demonic,” “primitive,” or backward until a white face comes along and “discovers” it?

With all due respect, I think the fuck not. 

Each time I ponder this, I have complicated feelings. 

I have two cats living inside of me:

  1. The first says live and let live. Everyone deserves to live well and be healthy. We need to share culture and exchange knowledge to create higher consciousness on Earth. Who am I to judge? I myself have traveled the world, learning under various indigenous teachers.  
  2. The other side says fuck em. The problem isn’t that people are “yearning” for healing and culture. It’s that the wellness and spirituality industry are colonized by people who go “discover” other cultures only to sell and re-package it. It’s that these people feel entitled to profit from that which isn’t theirs, driven by an ancestral need to commoditize and extract every drop of value from anything they touch. Neocolonialism. 

I have some empathy, I’m not a complete heartless bitch. I understand that Europe first colonized itself before turning its gaze to the rest of the world. Tribes and communities across the continent systematically destroyed their own indigenous traditions, killing medicine people, eradicating ancient wisdom, and christianizing itself. 

As a result, it created a spiritual hunger in people that Christianity and Catholicism sought to satiate. 

It hasn’t really worked… People who are devoid of culture will seek anything to fill that hole. 

So, as a sensitive soul, I feel for those who are in this path. 

And yet… 

I don’t care how much anyone claims to need culture and healing when they’re actively pillaging the same culture. 

It’s extra frustrating for me to witness because healing in and of itself is the most decolonial thing you can do. 

Returning your mind, body, spirit to a state of wellness, ease, and alignment actively contradicts current imperial western systems of extraction, productivity, and labor. 

Healing calls us to return to natural order and alignment. Natural order means deeply respecting culture, lineage, and process. Natural order means living in harmony with ourselves and the Earth. Natural order reminds us that indigenous traditions are the root of wellbeing and we all need to return to this. 

🚫Natural order does not place a blonde white woman named Cat as an Indian yoga expert. 

🚫Natural order does not place a bearded man named Chad from Colorado as a shaman specializing in Andean healing. 

🚫Natural order does not place a Russian woman named Oksana as a twerking and feminine energy goddess movement expert when the same behavior is deemed as “ghetto” or “wild” when a Black Woman does it. 

🚫Natural order does not place Josh from California as a traditional Chinese medicine expert. 

🚫Natural order does not crown a perky brunette named Ashley in Minnesota as a Caribbean sea moss expert. 

I rebuke this in the name of Mother Earth. 

Or, as we say in the Virgin Islands, “Nuttin ‘tall a go so!”

🌿Natural order means getting quiet and listening to your intuition. 

🌿Natural order means connecting to your ancestors — start with Celtic or Norse or Iberian mythology as stepping stones to reviving indigenous European culture. 

🌿Natural order means interacting with other cultures respectfully, not only with the mindset of what you can get or monetize. 

🌿Natural order means respecting and supporting and paying the real wisdom keepers if you truly mean to learn from another lineage. 

For years, I’ve sat in my own lane, doing my work and hoping it will just right itself. 

The basis of my work is in Caribbean bush medicine. When I do share information from other lineages, I make it known the source, highlight my teachers, and emphasize that I am not an expert. It’s not perfect, yet it’s honest. 

Unfortunately, I’ve expected people incapable of acting with integrity to do the same. 

When I brought this discrepancy up, I was told I was “living in scarcity,” or “gate keeping,” or “judging.” 

Yet with new movements like “New Age to Jesus,” where people who made livings off global indigenous culture turn around to denounce it for Christianity… I can’t be quiet any longer.

Thus, as an eldest daughter, I now have to take charge and be an example. Heavy is the head who wears the crown. This is modern day colonialism in the health, wellness, and spirituality space. 

I’ll be damned if I sit by and just watch. Some people need to be fucking judged into acting right. 

Everyone is deserving of healing but not everyone is deserving of access to spaces and cultures they disrespect. 

Our cultures are not spaces for you to “discover” our traditions, monetize, then discard when you’re tired. 

We are done. Come correct or don’t fucking come at all. 

If you have read this far, good. You have an attention span that’s more engaged than many modern humans. 

If you feel called out by this, good. Reflect on why you feel you must rape and pillage someone else’s culture to seem “conscious.” Dream up ways to reconnect to your own ancestral medicine. 

And if you feel the need to disagree, do so respectfully in the comments. I may or may not engage because frankly, I’ve said my piece here. 

If you’re lowkey obsessed with my unfiltered rant and want more, we have the waitlist open for my upcoming mastermind named Coronation. Comment “QUEEN” to learn more. 

That’s it for now. 

With love and rage and the fire of my ancestors,

Déja