Do you ever stop to think about whether or not you can afford organic food—and then consider that many people don’t have such an option? Is Goop’s $295 incense holder a sign of feminine empowerment or merely another Gwneth Paltrow grift? Will that $32 spin class that features an endless litany of positive affirmations make you more likely to slip $5 to the homeless person camped outside of the studio—or does it increase your happiness or contentment levels at all, once the endorphins wear off?These are just some of the questions posed by CTZNWELL founder, Kerri Kelly, in her new book, American Detox: The Myth of Wellness and How We Can Truly Heal. Beginning with her own transformational moment after 9/11, Kerri has long asked difficult questions of both herself and the industry she’s spent decades immersed in. In fact, while Derek and Julian were co-founding the Conspirituality pre-cursor, YogaBrains, over a decade ago, Kerri was an integral member of yoga-activist organization, Off the Mat, Into the World. She joins us this week as co-host to discuss her own origin myth and to tell us exactly how she’s detoxing from America these days.Show NotesAmerican Detox: The Myth of Wellness and How We Can Truly Heal
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Oh, I thought this was your little dialogue moment.
Okay, hi!
You're a co-host.
No, you're a guest co-host, so you get the honors of saying your name in the beginning, but we will get to that interview shortly.
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And you can also access our Monday bonus episodes.
And if anyone has not been keeping track, it's been a lot of episodes so far in the Swan Song series, which is an early access Patreon series that Matthew and I have been putting together.
It's inspired by the Teal Swan breakthrough into public consciousness, but we've been digging deep and we just finished this past Monday our last episode looking at Michelle Remembers, which is really the seminal pseudo-psychological text of the Satanic Panic.
And this coming Monday we are collectively spending the time with our family as it is a holiday here in the United States.
So I'm actually going to run an old interview with Michael Gazzaniga who is one of the most important neuroscientists of our time that I did for the Earthrise podcast years ago.
I think it will interest many of our listeners and you'll get to hear that this coming Monday.
Can't wait for that.
Conspirituality 118, Detoxing from Wellness with Carrie Kelly.
but Do you ever stop to think about whether or not you can afford organic food and then consider that many people don't have such an option?
Is Goop's $295 incense holder a sign of feminine empowerment or merely another Gwyneth Paltrow grift?
Will that $32 spin class that features an endless litany of positive affirmations make you more likely to slip $5 to the homeless person camped outside of the studio?
Or does it increase your happiness or contentment levels at all once the endorphins wear off?
These are just some of the types of questions posed by Citizen Well founder Keri Kelly in her new book, American Detox, The Myth of Wellness and How We Can Truly Heal.
Beginning with her own transformational moment after 9-11, Carrie has long asked difficult questions of both herself and the industry she spent decades immersed in.
In fact, while Derek and I were co-founding the conspirituality precursor called Yoga Brains over a decade ago, Carrie was an integral member of yoga activist organization Off The Mat Into The World.
She joins us this week as co-host to discuss her own origin myth and to tell us exactly how she's detoxing from America these days.
Welcome, Keri.
Thank you so much.
I think I'm in good company with folks who ask really hard questions of wellness.
Yeah, well, we have developed a little bit of a reputation for that of late.
Yeah, but I think you may have gone one better.
Thanks so much for joining us today.
You know, we've met a couple times.
Our paths really did intersect, as I said, around your work on Off The Mat and our shared relationships with Sean Corn and Hala Khouri, both of whom have been on the podcast, and Suzanne Sterling, who's one of my favorite people in the world.
It's wonderful to have you on.
Congratulations on the book.
I've been enjoying reading it.
I want to start by asking you this.
So my sense is that your central thesis goes something like this.
Even though the wellness space in America markets itself as being an arena for transformational healing and growth, it still fundamentally perpetuates or even enables the largely white privileged denial of political and economic realities which have to be faced and addressed before any meaningful material relief and wholeness can be possible.
And this is true both personally and collectively because our destinies are inextricably bound together.
Is that about right?
Yeah, that's a great articulation.
And you know, I want to say that I set out to write a book about wellness, but I actually think I ended up writing a book about culture.
Right, because this book really challenged me to investigate, you know, all of the ways in which what seems to be our like pure wellness, you know, culture of transcendence and relief and escape and all of the false promises that we know about from the dominant wellness culture.
It's just really a reenactment.
Of the larger culture that it is a part of, right?
Which is why it's no surprise that we're seeing so much systemic delusion, right?
Playing out in the wellness space, right?
Despite what it promises us, right?
Despite what it proposes to all of us and the ways in which I think many of us have been hooked and called in, right?
To wanting to be a part of it and to experience what it has to offer.
We're going to touch upon a lot of the topics in our forthcoming questions, but I want to go back to a sort of origin myth when you mentioned 9-11 as your entry point into activism.
We're actually just completing, we had a call this morning with our publishers, our book that's coming out next year, and 9-11 plays kind of a pivotal role for us because I was in the building an hour before it happened, and Matthew was in a cult at the time, and Julian had his own experiences, so this is obviously a transformational moment in our culture in so many ways.
Well, and Derek, even more than that, the cult Matthew was in went and proselytized outside Ground Zero afterwards to sort of tell people, hey, this is the sign that the material world is an illusion, right?
Well, they proselytized in Washington Square Park, which is a park I spent a lot of time in.
So Matthew speculates that we might have crossed paths in a very different manner back at that time.
But good point.
Kerry, what did you experience that day and in the following months that made you want to pursue the path that eventually led to why you're here today?
I mean, my story, you know, in the book starts on 9-11, but it really begins, you know, well before that, because the life that I was leading up to 9-11, and 9-11 happened when I was 25 years old, so I was a pretty, like, fully formed, if you will, somewhat adult, adult-ish, you know, by that time.
I look forward to becoming an adult.
Adult-ish.
Will we forever be adult-ishing?
Like, that's how I feel at 47 now.
But yeah, you know, I want to just say that, like, leading up to that moment, I had been really invested in sort of living out the all-American dream, climbing the corporate ladder, being like an over-everything, over-achiever, you know, over-athlete, over-corporate executive, and, you know, doing what I Thought I was supposed to do, right?
What I had been conditioned to do in my life.
And on 9-11, I was in New York.
I was working at an ad sales company at that time.
And when it happened, I was in the office and I actually didn't even know what was happening.
And I called my mom and was like, what is happening?
And I thought that I was going to have the inside scoop from my stepdad, who I didn't think was working that day.
And that's when I found out that he was working.
He worked in a ladder company that was in South Street Seaport, so it was one of the first companies to respond to the attacks.
And like so many first responders, he ran in and up when so many people were running out, only to make it up to the floor of Impact right before the second tower came down.
And so, you know, that moment, as it was for so many people, right, was A massive disruption in my life, really challenging everything that I had learned up until that point, everything I thought I knew, right, about what it meant to be safe and what it meant to be well and what it meant to be successful and what it meant to, you know, Be here, you know, in the way that I had learned growing up.
And so all of that sort of came down with the towers.
And it was in that moment that I really started to question everything, you know?
Like, why am I here?
How did we get here?
How is it possible that this could have happened to our great city, right?
Our great, invincible, superhuman, symbolic city.
And what does this mean about how I move forward?
And so that was sort of a I don't know, like a rupture, if you will, in my life and in my consciousness.
And that was sort of when I started to really seek everything.
Seek truth.
Seek answers.
Seek relief.
Seek feeling better, feeling good, feeling anything other than the grief and the pain and the confusion and the chaos, right?
That came from that sort of unimaginable moment.
And that's when I found wellness.
Wellness had all of the answers to my questions, right?
It offered me an escape from the pain.
It offered me a really positive outlook on a really shitty situation, right?
It offered me mantras and myths and stories that really allowed me to unhook myself from what I was feeling.
And just like buy into something entirely different and that sort of that was like the impetus for me getting like hooked completely.
Like I went all into that culture.
I wanted to like feel good.
You know, I wanted to feel hopeful.
I wanted to feel enlightened.
I wanted to feel like I was a part of something bigger than myself.
I wanted to know something right other than what I had learned and and wellness promised me all of that.
Yeah, you know, I want to really compliment you on the opening few chapters of the book because you do this really artful job of weaving together a very beautifully written, evocative, moving telling of the story that you were just summarizing a little bit in terms of what happened around 9-11 and in the sort of weeks and months following.
You have an interesting moment in one of those sections where, so you weave that together then with your sort of developing political consciousness really, right?
And you have an interesting moment in the midst of all of that in which you reference another less famous September 11 in 1609.
And I went looking for this.
I found there's actually a famous painting depicting this moment.
There's several.
It's like a popular subject of art, right?
To depict, what's his name?
Henry Hudson.
Henry Hudson, yeah.
Arriving in the New York Harbor with like either one Native American brave kind of looking over a rock or a family looking from like hiding behind trees.
They're like, oh, this is the dawning of this incredible, you know, change that is about to be.
You know, genocidal and about colonization and occupation.
You also reference the number of deaths at the height of the pandemic as being the equivalent of a new 9-11 every single day.
Every day.
At its worst.
I mean, I participate in a memorial of 9-11 every year, right, to commemorate my stepdad and You know, my stepdad was one of many so-called heroes that are celebrated that day, you know, and centered, quite frankly.
And the part of 9-11 that we don't talk about, right, is the millions of lives not just lost, but murdered in the wake of 9-11, right, because of the so-called War on Terror, because of our need to retaliate, because of The military-industrial complex and our greed and desire to, you know, go into other countries and decide what is best.
Yeah, not only to retaliate, but to not retaliate against our ally who actually is more culpable, but against some other like completely poor and, you know, really struggling country.
So that was like a really big teaching for me.
And it took many years, as you know, in the book for me to really like put those pieces together.
But when I think about what happened on 9-11 and where, like where that came from, where that began, it was fascinating for me to learn that, you know, one of the first colonizers to enter the harbor of New York City, of Manhattan, of, you know, the home of the Lenape people, of Manhattan, of, you know, the home of the Lenape people, the people that stewarded the land for many thousands of And that was none other than Henry Hudson, who arrived on September 11th, 1609, right?
That was like a real creepy coincidence.
And then to like fast forward to the legacy of colonization, right?
That has manifested in, you know, our foreign policy and imperialism in the war on terror.
And so the cost of 9-11, you know, is massive and much larger than the story that we tell about 9-11, much greater than the people that we center and choose to remember, you know?
And then there are those who we choose to forget.
Yeah.
That are also tied to that event.
You put it really succinctly when you say, uh, I can't mourn those who were lost in the towers without also mourning the indigenous genocide.
And I can't mourn first responders, which is a very powerful thing for you to say, without mourning all the people in the Middle East who have suffered and died as a result.
Yeah.
And I can't help but wonder, you know, if, you know, and I don't, I don't want to like, you know, assume I know what my, my stepfather believes from the grave, but like, You know, I'm not sure that it would sit well with him and with so many that there have been so much war and violence and greed waged in his name and in so many others' names.
And anyway, so like that, you know, that was like a huge wake-up call for me.
It took me a minute to get there.
I mean, in some ways, all of the seeking All of the obsession and relentless reaching for healing and for being well sort of actually came to fruition when I made that connection.
That was the irony of my journey, was that no amount of green juice or yoga fads or ritual or mantra was actually going to give me the thing that I was seeking.
What I needed was actually to tell the truth and to reconcile the whole story of who we were and who we are on 9-11.
And that was, I feel like, a huge leap in my journey of healing.
And that's not at all what wellness had to offer me.
Let's fast forward a few years because we met during the time when you were involved with Off the Mat and Into the World, as we said earlier.
So picture around, we'll say 2011, that's when I moved to Los Angeles, but it could be a few years before that, whenever you got involved.
What did you think at that time about activism in the yoga and wellness spaces?
I was really specifically, for lack of a better word, called.
I mean, I was like, you know, in the midst of like my seeking in my yoga journey, I ended up in a very large sweaty yoga class with this curly haired White woman with a really deep Jersey accent, who reminded me a lot of home.
And in the middle of the longest pigeon pose of all time, she said something along the lines of, you know, what if our pain and our suffering and our wound was the place from which we serve?
Was the place of purpose?
Was the place of power?
And that invitation shifted everything for me.
And that's when I was like, Oh, this is what wellness means to me.
This is actually why I had been called to the mat, why I have felt drawn to this practice.
And it just like illuminated a lot for me with regards to my I think my motivation for actually being there, and that's when I started to really, you know, work at the intersection of the personal transformational journey on the mat and the sort of like more collective work of community service and humanitarian projects and eventually politics, although I want to say that that wasn't where I went first.
Right?
Like, I went to sort of, like, the more, like, tangible, localized, simple solutions to these, like, deep systemic problems that we were trying to solve for.
And that was a fascinating journey.
I mean, it really shaped my orientation around wellness.
It helped me develop a critique of a lot of what I was, of a lot of, like, the dissonance I think I was feeling around, like, hyper-individualized wellness culture.
And having said all that, we were one of the first people I feel like kind of talking about the relationship between like social change and yoga, at least in like the dominant space.
And we got a lot of things wrong.
You know what I mean?
Like we were just sort of like blazing the trail and trying to do the right thing and trying to take action and call the yoga community into a higher level of practice.
And we were learning in public.
We were learning along the way.
And so that was that in and of itself, I feel like was like a deep reveal.
It's a great feeling of, like, what are the relationships, right, between these two worlds, right?
And what does it look like to actually show up in, like, right relationship and right contribution to what is needed in this moment?
Journalism has wiped away a lot of my Jersey accent because I had to slow down my speaking.
But last summer when I was hanging out with Sean, my wife got to experience what happens when I'm with a local.
And for about 45 minutes, she just stood there trying to make sense of this foreign dialect that we were speaking.
That's great.
So, before you came to a lot of the realizations you're talking about, in the book you give this really glowing and relatable account of that first bliss, right, when you're discovering your yoga practice.
I think anyone who's been on that path could totally relate to what you say.
You're discovering a space to open up, to process, to be in community, to feel good, to find a sense of spiritual meaning.
But then later, as you discover this more critical consciousness, You described this as being something of a yoga stupor, which I thought was a very pointed turn of phrase.
I want to quote back to you from this same page where you talk about the yoga stupor as you begin to riff on what's wrong with the wellness space.
After you've dipped into the historical origins of, at one time, this very unfamiliar concept of wellness, right?
It sort of has a history.
So here's what you say about contemporary wellness.
Wellness is hip hop yoga.
It's a rose quartz face roller.
It's vegan and paleo and macrobiotic.
Wellness is yoga mats at Walmart and clean beauty at Target.
It's collagen supplements, vitamin B shots and elixirs.
It's beyond burgers at Burger King.
It's skin glow gummies and mushroom adaptogens.
It's hot springs, silent retreats, essential oils.
Wellness is manifesting mantras and charging one's chakras.
It's juice fasts, gluten-free and oat milk.
Wellness is in school, at work, on vacation, in the airport.
Wellness is everywhere.
So this is also the beginning of you realizing that wellness is a commodity, that it's a product, right?
And I know for me, and I still, sometimes I still like have moments with friends and family where I'm like, are they ready for me to tell them this?
It's almost like the red pill, right?
It's like, Even though I'd reject spiritual bypass, even though I had a lot of issues with New Age magical thinking, it was still a bit of a shock to me when I realized that so many of the ideas and beliefs and almost religious convictions of wellness Could really be analyzed as marketing slogans crafted to appeal to someone with my kind of self-image, right?
In my demographic, like we are the people who this marketing campaign worked on and we bought into it as like a quote-unquote lifestyle.
So I'm curious what your version of sort of that awakening moment is in relation to what I was just quoting back to you.
I mean, yeah.
I mean, you heard me say that, like, wellness kind of promised me everything that I was looking for, right?
And I'm sure they had, like, a very substantial focus group of, like, you know, it's like a $4.4 trillion global industry.
I don't know how many millions of people.
This might be a number that y'all know.
How many millions of people are enthusiastic or engaged in yoga, but you know, I would imagine it's upwards of a hundred million in the United States at least.
And so you have this like massive, you know, movement in the direction of seeking something alternative and other, right, than what we have inherited.
And I also, I want to like, I just want to acknowledge just because I get really ashamed of myself for falling for the hook often.
And yet, when I look back now, and especially after all of the research that I've done and all of the people that I listen to, it's really no wonder people are seeking this sort of refuge, right?
Because so many of the systems that we are a part of aren't designed for most of us.
Right?
And our healthcare system in particular, but our housing system, like many of the systems, even for those of us with proximity to power and privilege.
And so, it's no wonder, right, that there's this sort of relentless seeking, this relentless reaching for something other, something alternative, something, some new hack, right, some solution, right, to the suffering and the yearning, I think, that all of us have.
And I was definitely pulled to that, especially in the wake of, like, the vulnerability of 9-11.
When the rug gets ripped out from under you, and I'm sure, you know, everyone's sort of had that moment in their life, and you're faced with the unimaginable and an uncertain and chaotic future.
And I say it very specifically like that because I think this moment in time is really analogous.
In many ways to that.
We're staring down accelerating simultaneous crises that are going to determine our collective survival or not.
So I was pulled into that, not to defend myself, but because it was also like a cheap and very, I think, convenient escape from the pain that I was feeling.
And I also just didn't know any other way.
The waking up for me was really gradual, but I tell this one story in the book of how I was going to a yoga studio south of Market in San Francisco on 4th and Folsom Street.
And it was in kind of like a less posh neighborhood of San Francisco at the time.
And perched literally in the opening to the yoga studio was a group of homeless youth who like literally lived there.
They hung out there.
And we would enter and leave the studio every day and pass by them every day.
We'd go in probably distraught and we'd come out blissed out, sweaty with our green juice.
And I want to just name that I spent many months not seeing, not noticing, not caring.
I was just like conditioned.
I was like in that stupor, right?
I was in that sort of like bubble of, you know, like don't look, you know?
And I think that's one of the things that wellness tells us to do.
It says, don't look, don't look over there.
Where you don't understand and it's a systemic disaster.
Look over here where there are simple solutions and life hacks, right?
And hyper individualized promises.
And so, you know, there were many of us that did that every day and for whatever reason, and I actually think this was because of the actual essence of the embodied practice, right?
That it became inevitable for me to not see after a while.
And at first I would, you know, I would look and I'd be like, Ooh, like what, what's happening there?
And then eventually I stopped.
Right.
And then I was like, what the fuck?
I could no longer reconcile why I got to be well, why I got to have this enlightened bliss out experience when people were struggling to survive, much less be well.
And, And that was a huge turning point for me.
And I just want to say like, you know, while this is like the paradox, I think, of wellness, right?
While wellness sort of tried to like, lure me away from the truth and the reality of our existence, the embodied practice actually prepared me to be ready to see, you know, when I did.
And that's how I understand what this practice may have to offer us in this particular moment now, right?
It helps us actually build a capacity to feel the discomfort, to hold the uncertainty, and to navigate the messiness of our kind of current existence.
It's so interesting because to add to the caveats that you were giving that I feel like are sort of non-judging and compassionate, you know, it's like, You were devastated.
You found yoga.
Yoga made you feel better in yourself.
There's a point in that process where one can turn and say, okay, I'm feeling resilient enough in myself to now look at the suffering of others.
And there's a fork in the road there where you can buy into what I think a lot of the yoga and wellness space sells, which is no, no, no, just keep turning within, keep looking at yourself, keep your side of the street clean.
Yeah, yeah, and don't focus on any of that because you're just projecting anyway and just come back to manifesting your own best life and the universe will take care of the rest.
So, part of what I hear is, okay, take advantage of whatever methodologies help you to feel better and to be more resilient.
How do we build into the way that we teach and share and think about and talk about these kinds of practices, this understanding that like, oh, there's another piece here where that compassion starts to extend into a really fearless, you know, look at the reality that we are, you know, intertwined with.
Well, and I would add that I think it was an extension of compassion and empathy for me, but I also think it was an increased capacity for me to be uncomfortable.
Like, I actually think that was the turning point for me.
Because, you know, I was, like, compassionate all day long, you know what I mean?
Like, there's a lot of compassionate people in yoga who have no acuity or tolerance, right, for discomfort.
Yeah.
Or for the ways in which we're implicated, many of us, in systems of injustice and inequality, right?
Like, we almost can't handle or hold, right?
So what happens in those moments of, like, we can't We can't handle, we can't tolerate the feelings of discomfort or the feelings of fear or the feelings of uncertainty.
Where do we go?
And I think you're right.
So much of the gaslighting that we hear from the wellness community is like, go drink a green juice or, you know, go read this book, right?
Or go buy into this conspiracy theory.
Right, which offers people a convenient moment of relief, but doesn't do anything, in fact, to solve for the really big systemic issues that we're facing.
Speaking of conspiracy theories, I think we're pretty aligned in some of the shock, speaking for myself, but broader for the podcast, that the conspiritualists turn, since especially the beginning of the pandemic, So, given that we were all in some capacity involved in politics and activism in these spaces leading up, some of this was expectable, but did anything catch you off guard once COVID hit?
I mean, what I want to say, and I know y'all can resonate with this, is that I've spent many years trying to politicize the wellness community, and it was more often not received very well.
Or it fell on deaf ears and or it was just like refused like many people just sort of like didn't want me in their space because they they were uncomfortable with bridging what was happening outside of their yoga studio with what was happening inside of their yoga studio.
And so like I knew intimately the resistance that the wellness community had to a political analysis to a power analysis to taking any real responsibility for The privilege of wellness and the ways in which many of us are implicated in these systems.
And so, in some ways that didn't surprise me.
I will say that I feel like I got curious and I learned a lot about where the body, and I'm thinking about like the biology of safety and trauma, like where the body goes in intense fear.
The extreme nature to which people turned away from reality and towards, right, false promises, towards life hacks, towards ridiculous, absurd protocols and so-called treatments.
For what was an undeniable, contagious pandemic.
The level to which people were desperate enough to go there, I think, did shock me.
And I think it's actually been like a really good teaching, right?
Because now we're seeing the global pandemic is not the only crisis we're facing, right?
And so I think actually it's information for us as we prepare for, like, how do we meet a future, right, where there's going to be simultaneous and accelerating crises, right?
And how are our bodies and our minds adapting to responding to these crises or avoiding these crises or desperately trying to escape these crises?
I feel like we're learning a lot about the ways in which we can build, and this is, you know, back to what you were saying, Julian, about, like, what is the role of wellness in this?
Build an actual capacity.
Build, like, the courage and capacity to face the truth.
To take responsibility for the ways in which we're implicated.
And also to navigate, like, many of the, I feel like, the contradictions that are alive in our world right now.
One of which you named, which is that, like, everything has been commodified and yet we're engaging in it.
And many of us are benefiting from it.
One area, you know, talking about the pandemic and the work we've been doing here, that's been really interesting for us over the last sort of two and a half years is really trying to carefully pick apart the strands of what has made the yoga and wellness community so susceptible to like anti-vaccine beliefs, COVID denialism, of course, then far-right conspiracy theories.
That have been sort of remixed with New Age concepts like Fifth Dimensional Awakening, as prophesied on Instagram by mostly pretty young, thin, white women who claim to be channeling aliens somehow, right?
One strand of this is a kind of unexamined health libertarianism, which you've touched on, and then the New Age entrepreneurial bootstrapping that goes with that, and you skewer that really beautifully in your text, especially around like Spiritual Bypassing, Perpetuating Privilege and Ableism and Victim Blaming.
Another strand that we've traced is how yoga and wellness has always tended toward using conspiracy theories anyway to explain why so many prized metaphysical beliefs and products and services that are for sale End up failing when they're tested scientifically, even when those tests are enacted by practitioners sympathetic to those beliefs.
So often the default is like, well, there's a conspiracy that the mainstream wants to keep this down.
A third strand, and you've touched on this already, is acknowledging that women and marginalized minorities have historically been so horrifically treated.
By what we could call, in line with your text, a kind of colonial-minded medical science, right?
Most evidence, of course, by things like the Tuskegee atrocity.
But yet today, during the pandemic, following quarantine guidelines and getting vaccinated has been crucial to saving lives, to saving lives of people of color and getting COVID under control.
So, I'm just curious, and this is an area where we might have some interesting sort of divergence, which is cool.
I want to ask how you thread that needle because I hear in your book a pretty strong advocating for intuitive, holistic, kind of pre-colonial perspectives on healing.
As well as a pretty strong critique of today's medical science.
But I know at the same time you don't truck with the conspiritualists we cover, you know, the people who've demonized Fauci and see vaccines and masks as like a horrible imposition on their freedom.
So how do you sort of frame all of this?
I mean, I think that's just another one of the contradictions that we have to hold.
There's an amazing book by Eli Clare called Brilliant in Perfection, and I write a lot about what I learned about disability in Chapter 2.
And I learned a lot of it from Eli and others who are really leading in disability justice work.
And he speaks about the contradiction of cure, this idea of cure, which I feel like wellness plays into brilliantly, as something that has been weaponized to blame and to demonize people who lived outside of the so-called norm.
Cure also as a thing of real tangible relief for people who are suffering from real tangible sickness and disability.
And so that was helpful for me as I sort of like held these two truths, right?
That there is inherent contradiction, like it's a mindfuck, right?
How we walk this sort of narrow path between the the wisdom that came before And the ways in which that can be useful to us, and I want to say that there's nuance around that, right?
Because especially given how much of that wisdom has shaped and informed Western wellness, and how much of it has been colonized, you know, stolen, appropriated, and divorced from its origins, not to mention being commoditized and capitalized upon.
And I just say this because I know that you all appreciate critique, but I actually don't think there's a tolerance for critique in dominant culture.
Or there's, like, an over-critique, right?
When we can't tolerate complexity and contradiction.
And so I'm just, like, that's sort of the way in which I held the questions that I tried to write about in the book, was with both a critical lens, but also, like, a curious lens of, like, what do I not know?
I want to really acknowledge that too, throughout the text you refer to people who you consider to be experts or people you've been learning from and you give them shoutouts and you have little asterisks and then underneath you say, hey go check out this book, here's a great resource on this, I don't know as much about this as this person who I'm actually quoting here and that's beautiful.
You know, when I was writing this book, you know, there's a part in each chapter where I talk about and I explore recovery as more of a like, what about this, you know, as more of like a thing that I'm practicing, you know, and exploring and trying to live into and what I've learned along the way.
But I tried not to like replicate.
The sort of like dominant pattern of like white writers who are like, and here's the answer to all your questions, or here are the seven ways that you can detox.
You know what I mean?
I was like, oh, I'm not going to do that, right?
Because that's actually just more of the same.
I'm just going to like lean into and live into some of what I've learned.
You know, and I feel like at the end of the book, I had like more questions than answers, unfortunately for me.
But I think that was the point.
I think it's healthy to be able to have critiques and discussions along that spectrum if you're talking about whether somebody's gender expression lines up with who they think they are as compared to trying to talk to someone who demands that God says women shouldn't have abortions.
So that both sides, and that is part of the challenge I think of being on the left, is that it is a much broader spectrum of ideology and ethnicity than we're seeing on the right at the moment.
But in terms of your book, you know, there have been several bestsellers in the last few years, especially since George Floyd, that are trying to raise consciousness above white people.
We have to also look at the criticisms we get and the people that we cover in order to at least try to understand their critiques.
I think that's healthy to not just write them off.
So one criticism of this is the trend that might perpetuate what you're already critiquing, which is framing sociopolitical transformation as a process of inner work and further enabling privileged white authors to get rich selling books and DEI courses to guilty white people who are already mostly politically progressive.
So how would you address that sort of concern?
It's so funny that that's your takeaway from this book, because I feel like this entire book is basically about like, get the fuck over yourself and get political.
It wasn't just from the book, though.
When I said that, I said the criticisms we're looking at from the spaces we cover.
Oh, I got you.
And I want to bring that into the conversation.
I feel like I'm going to fall into the trap of both and for the rest of this fucking conversation.
But I feel like this is another one of those places, right?
Because people make up systems.
And systems shape people.
And so, we can't just operate outside of the inner work and expect that things will shift and transform, right?
In the same way that we can't just operate in the inner realm and expect that systems and culture and the collective will transform.
And I think that's the binary we've been operating in, right?
And I feel like that's sort of the crux of what you're naming, is that people are like, is it inner or is it outer?
And I feel like it's actually always both.
And one of the things I loved to really dig into in this book is understanding how culture functions.
And one of my favorite quotes that I mention in the book is a quote by this guy, by this spoken word poet named Guante, who writes, white supremacy is not the shark, it's the water.
It's the air that we breathe.
And so if we understand toxic culture as the air that we're breathing, then we also understand that we are internalizing that toxic air.
We are internalizing those ideas, those patterns, those ideologies, those behaviors.
And then we're expressing those back out in the world, right?
Through patterns, through interactions, through work, through impact.
And so anyway, so to me, like, understanding that framework is helpful to understand that we actually do need both.
You know, I've said this before, but one of the One of the great pleasures I have from this podcast is not the end result that everyone is hearing in their headphones right now, it's the long strings of debates on voice texts and in Slack that Julian Matthew and I have.
Because we talk about these topics and we constantly challenge one another in terms of the ways that we think and how to best articulate our thoughts in ways that we think will actually do service to what we're trying to cover.
So I think that articulation is equally important.
So, there's one more I'm going to ask you about here that's going to be along those lines, but it's now we're moving into economics.
And I know you're not an economic theorist, but I think when the ways that capitalism is invoked, it should be explored because I think it can be one of those throwaway words sometimes that replaces things that people like, for example, Joseph Stieglitz who writes a very progressive capitalist take on what can be done with the bones of what we have, or of course we have Frederick Hayek who
I think brilliantly pointed out the problems with centralized control and what Marxism and socialism could lead to and has historically done so.
So at the part of the book near the end where you write about that...
Capitalism, along with whiteness and individualism, which I think we've covered pretty well here, capitalism taught you to be a certain way, and I'm paraphrasing.
But what did you mean by capitalism specifically teaching you to be a certain way, and what would you advocate for a better structure coming out of that?
I think I'm thinking about the ways in which I've internalized scarcity mindset from capitalism, the ways in which I've learned extraction, like that I've had a right to extract or take from capitalism, how I've learned that there's not enough to go around.
Like, I mean, I just think there's like a ton of, there's like a laundry list of really toxic beliefs and orientations that I want to be clear, like, aren't just ideas floating around in my head.
They've literally shaped my behavior.
They've shaped my fears and my desires.
To this day, right?
So we're all operating inside of the system, even as we critique the expression of capitalism that has been extractive and that has exploited people and that has always put profit first, right?
In front of people and planet.
And that's why so much of this book, you know, I know that I'm not like an expert on most of the things that I write about, which was why I did put so much of the focus on my own lived experience.
One of the, I think, most enlightening aspects of what capitalism has done is in the 90s, when Forbes started publishing their billionaires list, there was a theory at that time that that would actually help.
Because at the time, it was something like CEOs made 40 to 1 compared to the lowest paid employees.
So the idea was, oh, Forbes is going to publish this list, that's going to make everyone see how crazy this system is, and it's going to reform it.
And the opposite happened.
We had a reality star precursor to reality television where people were like, they can make that much?
Well, then they started making 300 times more and people accepted it as part of a culture.
You brought up scarcity, which is an important cognitive bias when thinking of capitalism.
We have zero-sum bias, the idea that I can only win when you lose, which is very much rampant in capitalism.
So from those bones, though, do you see anything that you've learned actually progressively with the economic system that we could take from it and apply to it?
I don't know.
I mean, I feel like some of what I see emerging that feels really hopeful and exciting is folks who are engaging in more cooperative structures.
I think like the union movement has been really exciting that people realizing that like we actually do need to build collective worker power if we want to stand up to extreme corporate interest and power.
We could talk about share economies and all of those illusions or delusions, but we know a lot of that has actually been really backed by really wealthy people wanting to get more wealthy.
And so I think that's another place of critique.
But I, but I feel like, you know, some of what, you know, some of what we're seeing especially come out of communities of color are like real cooperative economic structures that understand that they're a part of something bigger than themselves, right?
That aren't all about like building institutional isolated power, but actually like making a contribution to a whole ecosystem.
I also think that universal basic income and some of the more shared safety net systems that are emerging from the progressive left is really exciting as a way to actually level the economy so that more people can thrive.
There have been a tremendous uptick in cooperatives over the last two decades and I wish that got more coverage because I think they work very well.
I think that's one of the best models that exist.
I feel like with all of the chicanery and trickery that happens around crypto, which is unfortunate because there are decentralized structures within that that speak to a cooperative model that is actually very sustainable, but we have to get over our biases around the current system that we're in.
I was just gonna say, like, I think when we, like, back to, like, bringing critique to, like, everything, right, even, like, the good stuff that's emerging and the stuff that we've been conditioned to see as bad, I think bringing a power analysis to, like, who's in charge, who's benefiting, who's, you know, who's making decisions about all those things often tells us a lot about whether or not those are, like, progressive and innovative ideas or whether they're just reenactments of Old systems and old ways.
And so, and I think we're seeing a lot of that with crypto, right?
Where it was like, well, who's deciding and who's in charge and who has power?
And yet, to your point, like there were a lot of nuts and bolts, right?
About like the decentralized nature of crypto that held a lot of possibility.
And that probably still does.
Oh, it does.
That's what I do with my days is work in that industry.
So yeah, it does.
I love it.
You know, Kara, I just want to shout out your repeated kind of withering use of the term hacks.
I love that you're like, yeah, there's no like shortcut thing that can be summed up in a single sentence that will change this really difficult aspect of human experience or society, right?
I feel like I'm talking to myself, you know, because I have, you know, I want like a simple solution, right?
I want a convenient and a quick way to solve for my own, whether they're like everyday problems or really big, you know, life challenges, but that's just not like what we're up against and that's just not what's working.
And I feel like, you know, that's one of the biggest myths, not just that is unique to wellness, but that's unique to a lot of the systems and culture that we're a part of is that we can solve deeply complex, often historical systemic problems with really simplified individual solutions, right?
And that's just not working.
Yeah, yeah.
And to go back a couple questions to the whole question about authors who are writing books that are trying to raise consciousness amongst white people and...
I think that was sort of part of what we were thinking through in asking you that question.
It's like, okay, so how do you position yourself differently than that trend, right?
Which is very often just a form of neoliberalism where it's like, I'm going to write this book and sell it to a bunch of white people about how to do the inside job.
I actually think it's a really great question and I just want to say that I grappled with that.
The question of what is mine to write and what is my responsibility and how do I do the least amount of harm when writing this book but also play my part was a question I asked every day.
And what I'll share is that at first what I wanted to write was a dissertation.
I just wanted to write a research paper on wellness.
My editor was a trans man, my researcher was a neurodivergent disabled woman, and they were like, you can't do that.
You actually can't present an objective analysis because you're a biased Human, right?
And so, you actually need to tell the story from your lived experience, from your perspective.
That is the only thing you can do.
I mean, I want to say I was really challenged by that because I really wanted to de-center myself.
Like, that was, like, all I wanted to do, right?
In, like, my commitment to de-centering whiteness, I wanted to literally, like, remove myself from the story and just do sort of, like, an objective analysis about how wellness is fucking everybody up, you know, as our dominant systems and culture.
So yeah, I've heard a lot of that criticism too, and I think some of it is worthy, right?
I think white people should be constantly interrogating themselves and their role in this work, right?
And the contribution that they're making, because it's inevitable that white people are going to fuck shit up and make mistakes, right?
And repeat past harms.
Tough.
Here we are, bound up in it together, right?
You give great examples throughout the book, like, for example, how the increased American health food store demand for superfoods like quinoa leads to shortages in countries where it's a staple of their diet.
How dentrification of poor and minority neighborhoods can always be tracked by the popping up of yoga studios and vegan restaurants and spas.
You talk about statistics that define the well-being gap, which I want to ask you about.
And you consistently reference the need to dismantle systems of power that reinforce oppression.
So two parts here, but fairly simple in terms of the structure.
Would you define the well-being gap and tell us about it a little bit?
And then, in closing, can you give our listeners your top example of a system of power currently reinforcing oppression in the US and how they can be part of dismantling it?
Yeah, I mean, what I'll say about the well-being gap is I define it as the gap that determines who gets to be well and who doesn't, right?
The conditions that enable some people to thrive and other people to struggle, quite frankly.
And I think so much of what I was trying to do with the way that I talked about wellness and well-being in this book was to expand how we think about wellness.
Because I think, and I write a lot about this, but the ways in which often wellness is described or the aesthetic of wellness is understood is as A yoga class or pastel colors or, you know, crystals and green juice or kale or all of those kind of like really typical tokens of wellness.
And you know, where I got to in my own journey was that wellness was living wage.
Wellness is racial equity.
Wellness is clean food and air, right?
Wellness is economic equality, right?
And that actually our practice of wellness was one that had to actually include and take into consideration those systems and also reflect a practice of action.
Around creating change in a lot of the political issues that I write about.
So I was trying to get people to think about wellness as more than a personal endeavor, as a political endeavor.
So anyway, so much of my reframe was to actually start to think of wellness in a completely different way so that people can see their practice as more than the 10 minutes they spend on their cushion or the 90 minutes they spend on their yoga mat.
Terry, it's been great talking to you today.
I feel like your book is a wonderful antidote to a lot of what has been happening that we track every week in the yoga and wellness space.
There's been a real trend toward the right, there's been a real trend toward libertarian attitudes about
