Waking Up to Whiteness: An open letter to white-bodied healing practitioners
"Love and Justice are not two. Without inner change, there can be no outer change. Without collective change, no change matters."
~Rev. angel Kyodo Williams
“If you have come here to help me you are wasting your time, but if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together”
~Lilla Watson
White-bodied healing practitioners, energy healers, somatic workers, yogis, therapists, and coaches:
Let’s get to work. On ourselves.
We know that vibration, the language of energy, has tremendous potential. That’s why we practice, each in our own way and through various modalities. And yet, who we are as humans in this lifetime, the bodies that we are living within, necessarily affect how we are able to carry out healing work, and how we interact with the people in front of us on the table, in our offices, and in our studios. Part of this work requires waking up to whiteness and the received cultural legacy of white-body supremacy.
As the late Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison stated, white-bodied people in the United States have a very serious race problem. In her interview with Charlie Rose, she asks white-bodied people to not only examine our investment in whiteness, but to ask, “what are you without racism?” To reframe in healing language, we can ask, “who are you without this massive collective pain body?”
In Ta-Nehisi Coates’ National Book Award winner Between the World and Me (which I encourage you to read and purchase through a black-owned bookstore), he makes the bold assertion that there are no white people. There are only people who believe themselves to be white. What he means by this is that whiteness is a form of historical amnesia. It is a fairytale told to white-bodied people in order to maintain an “us” and a “them”; it’s an ego powerplay that keeps humanity in false separation. Whiteness is a cultural logic. It is a misuse of power. And it is a disease of mind, body, and spirit.
Among other intersecting social identities (language rooted in the work of Black Feminist legal scholar Kimberle Crenshaw), I am a white-bodied person. This is one of the defining embodied perspectives that informs my worldview and experiences in this life expression. Living in the majority white state of Vermont on stolen Abenaki land, this feels like an important moment to interrupt a “colorblind” mentality that white-bodied practitioners may unconsciously bring with us to healing work. This post deliberately focuses on whiteness in order to name it for what it is and examine how it works in order to interrupt how it sneakily infiltrates healing spaces that strive to be racially inclusive & nondiscriminatory. Black Lives Matter. Period. Black Lives Matter in healing work, too.
The Construct of Whiteness as a Collective Pain Body
White body supremacy is a cultural construct. It is a cultural construct that infests the heart, the mind, and the soul. When white-bodied people in this country willingly begin to reckon with the history of ourselves, our families, and the state sanctioned terror that our bodies have enabled--through a history of stealing the land of First Nations peoples through settler colonialism, the labor of the enslaved, the Jim Crow South, Japanese internment camps, the continued legalized murders and imprisonment of Black and Brown bodies, ICE raids and detention centers, the list goes on and on--we begin to release energetic blockages in our bodies, and consequently, in the collective.
In My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies, Resmaa Menakem states that for the US to release this collective pain body, it is necessary for white-bodied people to imagine ourselves in Black bodies and to try on what Black Americans have had to endure, along with trying on the lives of white ancestors. Always, he suggests, the question must be asked, what will the consequences be to our children and grandchildren if we do not address our ancient historical trauma?
So this is my ask: Instead of spiritually bypassing and pretending that generations of trauma can be ignored (we know as healing practitioners that inherited traumas are alive and well in our energy fields) or evened out with that much overused phrase “love and light,” let us--please--acknowledge how the collective histories attached to our bodies are central to the work we do in energy work. Until we do so we will not be able to fully activate our potential to facilitate healing, for ourselves or for others.
White supremacy is based upon systemic and institutional racism. White supremacy is not just about racial slurs. It’s not just about what we collectively identify as overt racism. White supremacy is based upon a learned internalized superiority of white-bodied people, which necessitates a learned internalized inferiority of everyone thereby coded “not white”--or BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) peoples in our current linguistic configuration in the United States. This cultural grooming is sadly not confined to white-bodied people. Internalized white supremacy is widely spread throughout the collective unconscious, regardless of the racial identities assigned to the bodies we occupy. It is our collective inheritance at this cultural moment.
Specifically, white supremacy is rooted in anti-blackness, something that Henry Louis Gates explores at length in his series Black in Latin America. White supremacy is not just upheld by people individually, it is upheld through the institutions we engage with on a daily basis, including the education system, the healthcare system, our economic system, the criminal justice system, as well as access to employment, housing, and healthy food. Each of these systems bestows or denies rights to people based upon our individual embodied proximity to “whiteness.” It’s what French social theorist Michele Foucault calls “biopolitics,” which is the idea that some people in society are granted unearned privileges and advantages on the backs of others whose bodies are thereby deemed expendable and lesser than.
What Does Whiteness Have to Do With Healing Work?
As healing practitioners, energy workers, coaches, therapists, somatic workers, and yogis, one of our primary goals is to facilitate relief of our client’s suffering. To clear up energetic blockages so that they can begin to enjoy more joy and laughter in their daily life.
One of the fundamental needs to end suffering of any kind is safety over one’s body; the ability to do seemingly normal daily activities without your body being threatened, and/or without your body being perceived as a threat. This is really what “white privilege,” or any kind of social privilege is at its most basic level: the ability to walk down the street, to openly live and to love, without fearing for your life based upon the conscious and unconscious fears that others place upon your body.
Healing work, whatever the modality, is incredibly intimate. Whether it’s conducted in person or virtually, there is a deep relationship established between the practitioner and the person who we are providing a service to. In fact, it’s one of the main reasons that I came to this work.
In my previous life as an activist academic, I received a Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities focused on transnational feminism and solidarity movements--an education that taught me what fierce love and accountability looks like at the macro level of the collective social contract. I also spent 15 years as a professor teaching anti-racist curriculum and social justice focused classes at predominantly white colleges and universities. Ultimately, I woke up to the reality that meaningful anti-racist work cannot happen through only educating one’s mind. Why? Because ultimately our cultural inheritance of white-body supremacy is energetic.
As a white-bodied person, I came to realize that healing the energetic legacy of white body supremacy needed to start with me, and my own energy field. That ultimately, I cannot control what is happening on the collective scale. I only have control over how I participate—or intentionally do not participate—in the systems that continue to harm the bodies and lives of BIPOC people whom I love.
I identify as “anti-racist” and not “non-racist” because there is no arrival point in this work. I recognize that part of healing whiteness in myself is acknowledging that I will continue to harbor unconscious biases and belief systems in my energy field no matter how much work I do. That is the reality of how deeply white-body supremacy is sedimented into the collective unconscious. As a white-bodied person in a white supremacist country I will also always benefit from structural racism whether I want to or not. Healing, for me, means releasing the denial and defensiveness that can accompany waking up to this reality.
Healing begins inner and it flows outer. That’s why we do this work.
For me, personally, energy work is a form of activism. It is a form of activism that I have come to after doing continuous work on myself to remove the seeds of internalized white supremacy that have been passed down to me through my lineage, and are alive and well in my mind, in my body, in my soul--in my energetic field.
As a practitioner, I recognize the threat that my white body can pose to BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) clients who are making themselves vulnerable to me. While I know and trust that when I open myself to Source, it is not “me” who facilitates the session, this does not mean that I transcend myself. It does not mean that my earthly identities do not matter. This is why one of our jobs as healing practitioners is to continue to heal ourselves. To work on ourselves. To locate all energetic blockages in our bodies. To identify seeds of hate and prejudice and learned behavior that prevent us from becoming more fully human.
I invite us all as white-bodied healing practitioners to ask ourselves honestly who we are and how our bodies affect the treatments we are giving—how we are engaging with the people in front of us. Let us ask ourselves, honestly, if we feel qualified to hold sacred space for BIPOC clients. One of the most basic questions to ask ourselves is: Are we able to set a healing container that does not place BIPOC clients in a position to take on extra emotional labor in a session they are receiving from us?
As a white-bodied queer person, I have felt the stark energetic differences between services that are provided for me in spite of my queerness, compared to healing services that honor my full existence. In those instances where I have become aware of the discomfort my body is causing to the person providing a service to me, I have deeply wished that the practitioner would have been more honest with me—and themselves—in recognizing that I should not be their client, rather than accepting my money to provide me a service that I have not wholly benefited from.
White-bodied practitioners, I invite us to ask ourselves what healing cooperations with BIPOC clients might look and feel like when we do not take a reductive “add & stir” perspective to our services. BIPOC clients deserve much more than a so-called “color-blind” approach, or to be perceived as a deviation from an assumed white, straight, cisgender norm who in turn need to be “accommodated.” BIPOC clients also deserve to not be reduced to their racial identity, but to be recognized for all of who they are. BIPOC clients may be queer and trans. BIPOC clients certainly come from a range of social, cultural, familial, religious, class, political, and geographical backgrounds. Please let us not reduce the complex person in front of us to monolithic cultural tropes based on the limiting belief structures we were groomed within.
Certainly, “fit” is not rigidly defined by shared identity. Soul fam knows no bounds. Simultaneously, any ethical contractual and/or cooperative exchanges between white-bodied practitioners and BIPOC clients, monetary-based and otherwise, must be attuned to, and mindful of, the power dynamics involved in the exchange—especially how the histories that accompany our bodies inform the spaces we co-create.
Any authentic space of co-creation necessitates an honest reckoning with ourselves. From that place of radical vulnerability an opportunity is birthed to create shared sacred space. Let us ask ourselves:
What internal work do I need to do to engage in deliberate compassion, empathy, and patience with BIPOC clients in mind and spirit?
What would it look like to curate—and co-curate—spiritual work and sacred space with BIPOC clients in mind from the outset?
What do I need to read to become more knowledgeable on how to provide quality services to BIPOC clients?
What histories do I need to verse myself in? What are the histories attached to my ancestral lineage?
What difficult dialogues do I need to have with other white-bodied practitioners on this issue? What networks do I need to seek out to have these dialogues?
What difficult emotions and belief systems do I need to acknowledge in myself? Am I being honest with myself about what comes up?
How do I radically de-center socially dominant identities and norms from the healing spaces I strive to create in order to honor and hold space for a multiplicity of bodies, identities, and life paths?
How do I ensure I am continuing to check myself and that my work is coming from spirit (collective healing) and not ego (individual recognition)?
How do I continue to expand my growth edge while actively engaging in and interrogating the discomfort that accompanies it?
White-bodied practitioners: I encourage us to ask ourselves these questions daily, with each class, each session, each client—and to be brave enough to be honest with ourselves in our answers. It’s okay to recognize that we are not yet in a place to hold generative healing space for BIPOC clients. Surely it’s nothing to celebrate, but it’s also not something to navel-gaze in shame over. It just means that there is still inner healing work to do. Cultivating an honest awareness of where we are operating from is a key step in deciding to grow.
White Body Supremacy as a Collective Trauma that Requires Collective Healing
In Brazilian social theorist Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, he says quite clearly that oppression does not only hurt the oppressed, it hurts the oppressor as well, in that every act of oppression ultimately harms the collective, and therefore cuts the oppressor off from their own humanity. Imagine how much prana, how much energy, it takes to look away--to stay in denial and illusion--about the amount of harm that has been inflicted through the systemic upholding of white-body supremacy.
With my coaching clients, one of the foundational concepts we work with is coming to “neutral mind” about a situation. No, not neutral in terms of claiming a false—and impossible—neutrality on social issues, but neutral in terms of recognizing the full complexity of a situation, moving away from positive or negative mind, overly simplistic “right” and “wrong,” “good” and “bad,” and being brave enough to look at the situation straight on for the full “what is.” In other words, a good old reality check. When we can do this work, we begin to step out of ego illusion and begin to come home to ourselves by taking full responsibility for ourselves, our life, and the unhelpful patterns of behavior that prevent us from realizing the full truth of who we are. What prevents this is what we call the “shadow self” in yogic philosophy, or all of those pieces we have stuffed deep down and are afraid to look at because they fall outside of the realm of our I-concept and desire to be a good person. It’s hard, and necessary, work for those who are committed to our healing.
This work also needs to happen on the collective scale of human consciousness. Many argue that we are in a collective dark night of the soul, and that what we are seeing in this moment is the shadow self of the nation. For white-bodied people—especially white liberals who are connected to being “good white people” and who are attitudinally against racism, but who have not yet begun the excavation process of identifying the lineages and cultural grooming of hate and prejudice and entitlement that we have inherited—this is a profound time for introspection and self-healing. Taking a good long look at what our inherited cultural landscape is, how we got here, and how we fit into the equation is part of the work that white-bodied people need to do at this moment to wake up to the reality of how histories of trauma and oppression are playing out in our present. Waking up to whiteness looks like taking responsibility for our part of the equation, and asking how it is that we have allowed centuries of this to continue. It requires stepping out of the ego illusion, and into a much more complex, and scary, Truth.
When we look around to see the school to prison pipeline, the prison industrial complex, ICE detention centers, institutionalized racist policies in education, the legal system, housing, and healthcare, let us ask ourselves: how can people who love themselves, and claim to love others, allow these realities to be brought into existence, and to continue? The answer is that it is not possible. Whiteness has effectively closed us off from our own hearts, our own humanity. People who love themselves do not allow these systems to continue. Why? Because when you truly love yourself, you naturally want that sense of peace, joy, ease, safety, and love for everyone else around you.
Feel it. Allow it to wash over you. Don’t deny it. Don’t look away. Sit with it. Feel the sadness. Feel the loss. Wherever you find yourself, in whatever body, in whatever your relationship is to white supremacy. We all lose in white-body supremacy.
Many white-bodied people go into fight or flight when doing this work because of how deeply we have merged with this collective pain body. There is a fear of having nothing left, or of experiencing an uncomfortable hollowness when realizing that whiteness is a trauma, not an authentic part of our being. This pain of perceived loss is real and valid. It’s okay to sit with it and acknowledge it. Recognizing that you are not who you thought you were, that you are not your trauma, is disorienting and scary. But it is nowhere near as scary as being a BIPOC person in this country in this cultural moment. What lives on the other side of this fear of loss is a more authentic, honest, heart-based mode of living.
It is possible to be a white-bodied person who takes pride in, and understands, their ancestral and ethnic lineage outside of whiteness. It is possible. This is part of the work that Indigenous activist Lyla June has been calling upon white bodied people to do. Lyla June finds ancestral inheritance at the crossroads of First Nations and European roots and has been working to heal her relationship with her Indigenous European ancestors alongside of the years of genocide, colonialism, and betrayal that these ancestors have actively perpetrated against the bodies of her First Nations ancestors, which she also carries within her. If Lyla June can do this work, then white bodied people living in the United States can certainly do this work.
It is a project for every single one of us in the collective. We need all hands on deck. None of us can do it alone.
A Healing Perspective: A Shared Goal, Not Shared Identities
Imagine the potential in energy work when each of us are brave enough to acknowledge all of the prejudices we carry within our fields. All of the lies we’ve been told about who we are. All of the grief we feel over releasing ego stories and social scripts. Imagine the beauty of waking up to the truth of who we really are after this deep energetic purge. Imagine embodying pure, divine, infinite Love.
So yes, it is true that we are Love. That ultimately, we are holding space in/for Love. But we cannot do that fully until we clear all of the inherited hate, all of the violence, all of the personal and collective abuse, all of the blockages, all of the collective pain bodies, all of the historical legacies that are weighing us down and that we are carrying in our fields.
It does not serve anyone to spiritually bypass these energetic realities. As healing practitioners, whatever our modality, our job is to energetically excavate--all of the heaviness, everything that is in the way of our ability to experience our original blueprint of Love.
Let us take our role very seriously. To see it as a form of sacred activism rooted at the nexus of the higher and lower realms. Let us understand the potential we have to heal and work across the spectrums of race, ethnicity, dogma, geopolitical location precisely because of our own social identities in this life expression.
Let us mobilize them. Let us recognize that as we heal ourselves we are working to clear the collective pain bodies attached to our social locations. As we continue to clear our own inherited collective pain bodies, we enable the potential to begin clearing the energetic connections between ancient collective pain bodies, between social identities and groups. We work to clear our lineage.
We are not free of identity and history in healing work. And we are not meant to be. We are meant to face the pain of our ancestors, to face the pain of what they have done and what has been done to them, in order to transmute and clear it. We are asked to bear witness to the trauma and pain of our clients who seek our services. Both of these pieces are absolutely necessary to potentiate the ability for us all to live more peaceful, safe, quiet lives.
As we continue to heal ourselves, we work to heal the collective.
Self-healing is the path to self-sovereignty. Self-sovereignty is the path to collective liberation. Collective liberation is the goal. Until all of us are free, none of us are free.
Health & Healing, always,
Trish
Suggested Further Reading on Social Justice as a Spiritual Path:
Radical Dharma: Talking Race, Love, and Liberation, Eds. Rev. angel Kyodo williams, Lama Rod Owens, with Jasmine Syedullah
Love and Rage: The Path of Liberation Through Anger, Lama Rod Owens
Sacred Instructions: Indigenous Wisdom for Spirit-Based Change, Sherri Mitchell
Mindful of Race: Transforming Racism from the Inside Out, Ruth King
The Way of Tenderness: Awakening Through Race, Sexuality, and Gender, Zenju Earthlyn Manuel
Me and White Supremacy: Combat Racism, Change the World, and Become a Good Ancestor, Layla Saad
My Grandmother's Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies, Resmaa Menakem
Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds, Adrienne Maree Brown
Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants, Robin Wall Kimmerer
Skill in Action: Radicalizing Your Yoga Practice for a Just World, Michelle Cassandra Johnson
Turn This World Inside Out: The Emergence of Nurturance Culture, Nora Samaran
