Decolonising Wellness

Woman picking tea leaves. Photo by Asantha Abeysooriya @asanthapdn003

Words by Kalpana Mohanty, edited by Evar Hussayni

Wellness has been and is continuing to have a moment in popular culture. There have been a variety of articles condemning celebrities like Gwyneth Paltrow (patron saint of wellness culture) for her unscientific methods of promoting health among the public—specifically women. Wellness has been derided as a pastime of the wealthy, the white, and the female for a variety of ailments that are supposedly imagined. At its most cynical, it is a new way to market products that aren’t necessary to vulnerable women on the backs of cultures that don’t get credited. At its most charitable, it is the result of misguided women spewing the wisdom they’ve learned from other quacks for the betterment of other women. 

What we miss in this conversation however is that the entire industry hinges on traditional and spiritual practices of the non-western world that have been weaponised and monetised for value in the west. Gwyneth and her peers serve up a bastardised version of traditional ayurvedic beliefs (traditional Hindu system of medicine), North and South American indigenous practices and Chinese medicine in a way that takes money away from the marginalised people who originated the practices. It’s time to decolonise wellness. 

As I’ve read multiple articles decrying the hoax of wellness culture, one thing has become clear, as people rightfully question the motives of women like Paltrow and others who work in the wellness sphere, they are also casting suspicion on the practices themselves. Practices that originate and continue to be used in the non-western world. For example, Harvard’s medical and health specialist Karin Michels gave a talk in Germany in 2018 on the health benefits of coconut oil and concluded that it is “pure poison” and “one of the worst foods you can eat”. There are racial components to this assertion. Coconut oil is traditionally used to cook food primarily by Indians, Sri Lankans, and Philipino’s as well as others. But when the coconut oil craze hit the western world, there were claims that it would do everything from improve oral hygiene to prevent Alzheimer’s. What are the implications of a white scientist at a western institution like Harvard debasing a food that has been used in the diets of many countries in the non-western world for hundreds of years? Is there not something perverse about the western world getting to adjudicate on the benefits or drawbacks to a food that is not culturally theirs to judge? 

Similarly, I’ve experienced a lot of eye rolls about turmeric lattes (or golden lattes as they’re called) as well as about supplements like ashwagandha (a plant derived from India used in medicinal practices) and practices like acupuncture. This happens particularly among those who consider themselves to be too educated and scientific to fall for something with such illegitimate medical evidence. But to dismiss these as woo woo or new age is to say that what South Asians and East Asians have been doing for years is without merit. Must we wait till western allopathic medicine has decided that something is worthy in their eyes for it to be used? 

Spice market. Photo by Andrea Leon @reskual

What’s missing from this analysis of wellness is that there has been a historical precedent reason that women have turned to their own methods for dealing with a variety of ailments, from mental health concerns to pain. The reason is that women’s pain is not taken seriously, and is systematically delegitimised. Hysteria is a term that was applied almost exclusively to women that continued from Ancient Egypt to the 20thcentury as a way of discounting women’s pain. It was therefore an act of resistance and rebellion for women to rely on one another to provide antidotes for their symptoms and a way of passing around information without having to rely on the male dominated system of western medicine. Despite current discourse about the perils of wellness, there is inherent value in the wellness industry. This lack of belief in women’s pain continues today, particularly in the realm of chronic illness. But how to we responsibly engage in wellness culture in a way that doesn’t throw the non-western world under the bus? 

There is also a spectacular lack of diversity on wellness platforms like Goop, Well and Good and popular wellness podcasts like That’s so Retrograde and Almost 30. The absence of people of colour in these places means that this historically necessary network of women helping women with physical and mental health does not apply to women of colour. It also means that women of colour with business ventures in wellness do not get to profit off of ideas that originated from their communities. There are so many phenomenal women of colour in the wellness space that deserve to be celebrated and championed and most of all, to be paid. 

The lack of inclusion of women of colour into wellness spaces also involves the uncanny resemblance wellness culture at its worst sometimes has to diet culture. Words like “wellness” and “strength” can often be convenient marketing fillers for what is actually a push for women’s bodies to be more and more disciplined. This applies especially to the bodies of women of colour, particularly black women whose bodies are viewed as even more unruly and even less worthy of taking up space, both metaphorically and physically in the world. Sabrina String’s book Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobialooks into how intrinsically racist the cult of bodily discipline and the value we place on thinness is. 

Another aspect of wellness is its ties to self-care. Audre Lorde famously wrote that “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence. It is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare," in A Burst of Light and Other Essays. For women of colour, particularly black women, women with chronic illness and women with disabilities, self-care IS a radical act of defiance against a system that does not value their lives let alone their happiness or their pleasure. The Center for American progress reports that women of colour “suffer disproportionately from the kinds of adverse life experiences that can lead to depression, anxiety disorders, and toxic levels of chronic stress. New mothers of colour, notably, have a rate of postpartum depression that is about two to three times higher than the rate for all new mothers”. Small acts of kindness towards the self are a method of survival and ultimately political. 

So the next time you listen to a podcast on wellness, go to a yoga class, or make a turmeric latte think about whose culture you’re borrowing from, think about your own place in the racial, class based, ableist, gender hierarchy, and think deeply about who gets to participate in the wellness practices you rely on and who gets excluded. Wellness at its best can be a force for good, even radical in its scope but like so many things that exist in our world, for us to get there, wellness is in urgent need of decolonisation. 

Kalpana Mohanty is currently pursuing her PhD at Harvard in history with a focus on colonialism, gender and disability in South Asia. You can reach her at @kalepanamohanty on Instagram