GLOSSARY/
WHAT I MEAN WHEN I SAY… Ahimsa: Ahimsa is an ethical principle of Yoga as outlined in the Yamas(moral disciplines of yoga). It is the Sanskrit term for “Non-Harm” or “Non-Violence”. Sanskrit is the ancient, vibrational language in which original yogic texts and teachings known as the Vedas were written. It is the language in which ancient Hindu mantras are chanted. Anti-Vax: Those opposed to vaccination. Pro-Vax: Those who support vaccination. Vaccine Hesitant: Those with a delay in acceptance of vaccines due to misinformation and skepticism or uncertainty about vaccine efficacy, the science behind vaccines, and acceptance of some vaccines but refusal of others. “Wait and See”: Those who are uncertain about the potential side effects and have been misinformed about the scientific timeline of the relatively “new,” mRNA vaccines. Yoga Asana: The physical practice of yoga. Yogic Philosophy: The philosophical study and practice of Yoga and all of its eight limbs. Yoga Ethics: Ethical practices of yoga as outlined in the Yamas, Niyamas, and Sutras. Wellness: Practice of healthy habits to attain better physical and mental health outcomes. New Age Spirituality: a buzzword made popular in the 60’s, 70’s, and 80’s referring to spiritual beliefs and practices that have existed for centuries (like Tarot, Reiki, Meditation, Pagan and Eastern religions etc.) but have been co-opted for the convenience of those who wish to create their own false reality. Holistic Health: an approach to life that considers multidimensional aspects of wellness. It encourages individuals to recognize the whole person: physical, mental, emotional, social, intellectual, and spiritual. Alternative Lifestyles: a diverse lifestyle in defiance of the “mainstream.” A lifestyle generally perceived to be outside the cultural norm. Pseudoscience: a collection of beliefs or practices mistakenly regarded as being based on scientific method. Misinformation: false or inaccurate information, especially that which is deliberately intended to deceive. Disinformation: false information which is intended to mislead, especially propaganda issued by a government organization to a rival power or the media. Disinformation Dozen: According to the CCDH, the twelve anti-vaxxers responsible for nearly ⅔ of mis and disinformation regarding COVID vaccines. They are as follows: Joseph Mercola Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Ty and Charlene Bollinger Sherri Tenpenny Rizza Islam Rashid Buttar Erin Elizabeth Sayer Ji Kelly Brogan Christiane Northrup Ben Tapper Kevin Jenkins “Sovereignty”: The original meaning of the word Sovereignty is: supreme power or authority. Many New Age and Holistic practitioners have warped this term into fitting the anti-science narrative, using phrases like “my body my choice,”(a profound and necessary rallying cry for the human rights of reproductive autonomy against oppressive anti-abortion laws and legislators) as a tool of defiance against vaccination, “oppressive” government control, masking mandates, and anything that inconveniences their personal opinions and preferences. White Supremacy: the belief that white people constitute a superior race and should therefore dominate society, typically to the exclusion or detriment of other racial and ethnic groups, in particular Black, Brown, Indigenous, Muslim, and Jewish people. Qanon: a far-right conspiracy theory and movement centered on false claims made by an anonymous individual or individuals, known by the name "Q", that a cabal of Satanic, cannibalistic pedophiles operate a global child sex trafficking ring and conspired against former president Donald Trump during his term in office. QAnon has been described as a cult with roots in antisemitism and Nazism. Alt-Right: a right-wing ideological movement characterized by a rejection of mainstream politics and by the use of online media to disseminate provocative content, often expressing opposition to racial, religious, or gender equality. Pastel Q: is a collection of techniques and strategies of using feminine-coded aesthetics to indoctrinate predominantly women into the QAnon conspiracy theory, mainly on social media sites like Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, Telegram, YouTube and TikTok.It co-opts the aesthetics (including a pastel colour palette, which is where it gets its name) and language of communities and activities popular with women and uses gateway messaging to frame the conspiracies as reasonable concerns. The trend was identified by Marc-André Argentino, a researcher at Concordia University, Canada. BIPOC: Black, Indigenous, People of Color. Cultural Appropriation:the unacknowledged or inappropriate adoption of the customs, practices, ideas, etc. of one people or society by members of another and typically more dominant people or society. White Guru: Guru is the Sanskrit term for “mentor,” or “guide,” in Hindu religion and spirituality. Many White, New Age spiritual moguls have adopted the term “guru,” as a way to describe their appropriated mentorship in cultural practices outside of their own ancestry and culture. Cisgender: denoting or relating to a person whose sense of personal identity and gender corresponds with their birth sex. Conspirituality: The term was coined for the 2011 study "The Emergence of Conspirituality" by sociologists Charlotte Ward and David Voas published in the Journal of Contemporary Religion. They characterize the movement as follows: "It offers a broad politico-spiritual philosophy based on two core convictions, the first traditional to conspiracy theory, the second rooted in the New Age: 1) a secret group covertly controls, or is trying to control, the political and social order, and 2) humanity is undergoing a 'paradigm shift' in consciousness. Proponents believe that the best strategy for dealing with the threat of a totalitarian 'new world order' is to act in accordance with an awakened 'new paradigm' worldview." Science Deniers: Those who reject basic facts and concepts that are undisputed, well-supported parts of the scientific consensus on a subject, in favor of radical and controversial ideas. “Divine Feminine”: the original term refers to a face of the divine spirit that is connected with the body, with nature, and with the cycles of creation and transformation. Female New Age leaders have adopted the Divine Feminine as a tool of indoctrination into their alternative medical, spiritual, and lifestyle practices. Indoctrination: the process of teaching a person or group to accept a set of beliefs uncritically. INTRODUCTION “The Wellness Industry is sick. It's sick with radicalized ideologies that levitate around pieces of cryptic misinformation labeled as “Sovereignty.” The harm—the Ahimsa—is not in the fact that cult-like mentality within this industry exists, it’s in the fact that others who observe the harm being done and are able to link it to a spiraling movement of White Supremacist colonization and oligarchy refuse to confront and counter what is happening before their very eyes. Sovereignty is not about doing whatever the fuck you want regardless of millions of deaths worldwide. Sovereignty is about trusting the will of the collective to do what is right and necessary for the Wellness of all beings, everywhere.” I wrote the above caption mere days after publishing an essay for Yoga Journal: “Getting Vaxxed Was My Act Of Ahimsa,” which went viral the second YJ posted a teaser excerpt on Instagram. Alex Auder coined the term “Sovereign Mob,” in relationship to those whose Anti-Vax, purity culture lifestyles intersect with the wellness and yoga communities, and their harsh, obscene, and very much predictable reaction to the scientific facts and historical research outlined in said article. I was prepared for the backlash from the Pastel Q and white guru groups brainwashed to believe that new age yoga, wellness, and spirituality revolves around individual “freedom,” cultivated by spiritual bypassing and indoctrination. These groups have built an effective business model convincing the masses of white people who seek alternative lifestyles rooted in White Supremacist capitalism that consumerism is community. For decades they have placed wealth before true wellness, profit before people, and caused serious harm to the collective that they so righteously aim to “protect” with pseudoscientific “facts” and misinformation. What I was not prepared for was the amount of people who rallied not only in support of vaccination against COVID-19, but now viewed me as a leader in a movement I never intended to create. In the chaotic aftermath of my essay’s release, people from all walks of life, all over the globe: the crew at Conspirituality Podcast and all of their listeners; other journalists, authors, yoga practitioners, wellness leaders; even Doctors, scientific, and medical science experts, were messaging me, emailing me, calling my editors and trying to get in touch with me. I was ushered into conversations, given the label of “controversial,” applauded, asked to be a guest on dozens of podcasts, etc. I had never banked on any of that. Truthfully, my sole purpose of writing that article was to reach those who identify as “vaccine hesitant,” or “on the fence,” about the importance of getting vaccinated. People like my youngest sister who were decidedly part of the “wait and see,” group. People like my mom, whose friends in rural Maine have been swallowed up by Alt-right ideologies (read: fans of Tucker Carlson and Fox News). People like my former yoga students who had been sucked into alternative health and spirituality practices as a way to bypass their conditioning--using whitewashed indigenous practices as methods of “healing,” while forgoing things like therapy, seeing a doctor about worsening physical health conditions, and, yes, getting vaccinated or even wearing masks. I wanted for people within the yoga and wellness world who were hesitant to get their shot to understand not only the importance of vaccination under “normal,” circumstances, but to also recognize the absolute necessity of mass vaccination as a way to prevent further suffering and death by COVID. Judging by the comments section of the infamous Instagram post made by Yoga Journal, I was not wrong in my guesswork of knowing that many people within the yoga and wellness sphere were hesitant due to pseudoscience, misinformation, and disinformation created, propagated, and spread throughout the industry with help from people like Christiane Northrup and Kelly Brogan, who draw white women into “New Age Spirituality,” and “Holistic Healing,” with alternative medical advice; touting sovereignty and praising the “Divine Feminine,” and all of the tropes of purity culture repackaged into GOOP trends, wearing the shimmering garb of neo-feminism, and intersecting with the same warped conspiratorial rhetoric as Qanon. While I may have been aware of the glaring polarization within wellness and yoga--especially as it pertains to yogic philosophy and ethics--many other White, pro-vax yogis were at a loss for the division they were seeing within their own wellness/yoga communities and their broader online affiliations. Suddenly, I found myself answering messages of both pro-vax individuals who had been ostracized from their yoga shalas, families, women’s circles, and long-time spiritual communities simply because they got vaxxed, as well as fielding questions and concerns of vaccine hesitant individuals who were confused and afraid of getting vaccinated against COVID due to the rampant fear-mongering of their “enlightened” peers. What some “woke,” white women like to label this as “infiltration,” of the yoga and wellness community, I have long seen as an industry standard. What some like to call Westernization of yoga, I understand as the bloodthirsty cash-cow imprinted in the foundation of colonization. As a white woman within wellness and yoga spaces, I was admittedly intrigued by and drawn to the instant gratification of white-centric, new-age spirituality and the culturally appropriative practices stolen and disfigured within Westernized yoga. For nearly two years I allowed myself to be gobbled up by the industry. It was all enticing, magical, and falsely empowering. The deceptiveness of the Wellness industry is nothing but Puritanistic Indoctrination repackaged to fit the cravings and yearnings of the alternative seeker--a bandaid for processing the collective grief, trauma, and conditioning inflicted upon all people who are not cisgendered, heterosexual, white males. I swallowed the well-calculated lies of alternative health, I sought the Divine through ancient cultural practices that were not of my own ancestry, and celebrated trendy celebrity yogis whose names were all over festivals, workshops, trainings, books, and articles profiting their brand of fucked-up kool-aid which they shamelessly peddled to the masses. What’s more? I strove to be like them. I chanted in Sanskrit and read all of the books and philosophy, not to understand, but to sell to my own students. I practiced diligently, not for mind-body-breath connection, but to sell my bendy body for likes on Instagram. I did not understand that this was not wellness, that what I was practicing was not yoga, and that I was causing blatant harm to myself and others. I allowed a franchised studio to control my life, my health, my relationships, and my success as a yoga teacher, because I had been trained to believe that one must put work before all else--sacrificing the Self for the benefit of someone else’s bank account. I went from cleaning toilets at a flagship studio to hiring new teachers for franchisees in a matter of months. I was likable. I led a well-structured and creatively sequenced yoga class, and I had a beautiful singing-voice. I could sell memberships instantaneously, with the flash of a smile and a hint of mystery which led the consumer craving more; more spirituality, more exotic philosophy, more flexibility, more “community”. I did this for years. I did this even after having my dream job of studio manager ripped away from me after I miscarried my first planned pregnancy, citing my “failure to perform at adequate levels” as a “threat to the success of the business owner and the safety and security of her family.” I did this after being shunted off the top rung of the ladder, anxiously clinging to somewhere in the middle for coveted class times and styles while 20 weeks pregnant with my first-born. I did this after being asked not to talk about the Parkland High Shootings and encouraging my students to vote for gun control in the upcoming elections because it is our sacred yogic duty to protect our community from harm. I did this while balancing motherhood and leading YTT groups through fast-paced 8 week certification programs. I did it even after I woke up to the fact that I spent years of my life suffocating myself and propagating harm to benefit the large monster of this spandex-clad industry. I started to get more abrasive. I stopped chanting OM and saying Namaste, but I knew that wasn’t enough. I snagged my own centerfold advice column in Yoga Journal in October of 2019 with a plan to quit teaching yoga asana altogether by the end of 2020. The pandemic hit and I quit in a one-sentence email to the owner of the studio--whom I had stood by for half a decade, regardless of their abysmal treatment of me--after being forced to choose between teaching in-person at the beginning of a pandemic or keeping my job. My writing became more of a gut-punch to my readers than a soothing balm in times of turmoil. I became even more vocal, blunt, and honest than I had ever been before. My editors at Yoga Journal softened the hard edges where they could, and often questioned if I should even be writing the things I was writing because I was a white woman. Their preference was to seek out BIPOC voices for these topics--something which I wholeheartedly agreed with. The problem which inevitably unfolds from this, however is that white women within wellness and yoga communities tend to gravitate to teachers and writers who look like them--writers like me. They are often the types who fall silent and dismissive of uncomfortable truths due to their conditioning, and for that reason avoid listening to and learning from BIPOC. They will seek alternative facts that feel “nicer,” regardless of who is holding the mic--even if that person looks like them--but if enough people who look like them are talking about these hard topics and issues, they might start to shift their perspectives and choose differently than before. My column was reformatted, and I continued to confront the problematic practices of the white-wellness industry. I saw the response from angry white “yogis” who refused to wear a mask and opposed COVID-19 vaccines even before they went into active trials. I wrote about yoga and politics, and I mapped a Venn-diagram between Q-anon, White Wellness, and the intersectional group that stormed the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021. I lost friends, family members, and *GASP* followers on social media. So you see, the essay I wrote about vaccination was not my first time confronting the cognitive dissonance within the wellness and yoga industry. It was my main topic of conversation and a lifelong practice of learning, re-learning, and unlearning with my teachers, readers, students, friends, and family members. After months of researching the history of pandemics and life-threatening diseases--from the plague to smallpox, influenza to polio--and learning about the phenomenon of vaccination, the brand director of YJ finally agreed to publish my findings through the lens of yogic philosophy. I was already used to people not liking what I had to say, and I was very used to holding myself accountable for missteps I experienced first-hand. I only hoped to be relatable, to inspire other white people who had been sucked into conspirituality, yoga, and “wellness,” to consider that they had been misled into believing that science was somehow the opposite of sovereignty. I didn’t want to have to be doing this work, at first. I believed that someone else with a larger platform, more expertise, and broader likeability deserved this stage far more than myself. I didn’t seek to lead, and I still don’t. So, I began reaching out to science communication stars on social media--people like Dr. Stacy De-lin, Dr. Jamie Rutland, Dr. Anita Patel, Dr. Jen Gunter, Dr. Annicka Evans and many more--in order to help my new friends and “followers” on Instagram access experts via Live conversations about the science behind the vaccines, debunking misinformation and falsities surrounding vaccination and COVID, and humanizing the so-called “experiment,” of getting vaccinated in the middle of a global pandemic and mass death. This work led to even more conversations with vaccine hesitant people, which led to even more vaccination, mask-wearing, and following of public health protocol within wellness communities. And the continuation of this work has evolved into a book. A book full of facts over fiction. A book to serve the collective and to hopefully help counter, dispel, and untangle the harmful ideologies prominent in White Wellness. A book to help you as a reader connect the dots as to what went wrong along the path of self-discovery within Westernized Wellness and Yoga and how to reconcile with the harm caused. A book to bridge the gap between science and spirituality, to uncover deep truths which have gone overlooked and purposely ignored for far too long, and to truly create wellness and oneness for all. |