For fifteen years, I have wound through various practices of yoga, meditation, and self-improvement. With these practices, I have massaged my muscles with breath. I have soothed, and also stirred, my anxieties with movement. I have learned to listen to the subtle goings-on in my body. It is with this corporeal softness that I have come to know our world, like a warbler that knows the changing of seasons. At some point, these practices grew commercially and became an industry, collectively known as “Wellness.” I have worked a lot in this industry. It has had a unique allure: a promise towards some abstract, greater goodness. It’s been hugely profitable, and tragically well-intentioned. But I don’t believe in Wellness anymore. One of many turning points happened in jail. I wasn’t serving time—rather, I was teaching yoga to those who were. Someone in the dorm let out that yoga was for white people. I looked at myself. I saw that they were right. Not only white, but Wellness is straight, stolen, and outrageously expensive. This is because it has been built in the west upon an eat-pray-love model, one that relies on existing systems of privilege, power, and endless consumer cycles to exist. It has come to look like influential brands and teachers hawking juices, workshops, and apparel as marketable, disembodied accessories. It has come to alienate the other, rather than model a more equitable future. What I want is actualized well-being for myself and others, and I’m afraid I might be playing in the wrong field. I recently held a workshop on queering Wellness spaces. Kerri Kelly, founder of CTZNWELL, is soon hosting a Wellness Beyond Whiteness training. There are many people acting to make the tools that happened to change my life more readily accessible. I love these efforts, because I believe our liberation is intimately connected. Mine, yours, and everyone else’s. But while I myself choose to stretch out, and meditate in the mornings, there are many social workers that start their day with a simple bowl of cereal before marching to work. There are ecologists, and grade school teachers who will never do a downward dog. And there are poets who will never have an Instagram. There are many ways to heal. Many ways to express humanity. Many ways to be aligned. It is not intellectual conviction, but rather knowing bones that tell me truth is deeper. Deeper, broader, more ancient, and more radical. Somewhere deeper than talking is listening. Somewhere deeper than knowing is not-knowing. Somewhere deeper than the palatable happy-wellness is a fierce, collective wholeness. The truth is that love is work, and so we will. In all of this uncertainty, there are a few things I am sure of: I know that below any forest is a network of interwoven roots. I know that in the deep seas live the secrets of stillness. I know whole galaxies sprung forth from a simple exhale. I know that you, and me, and the galaxies are siblings. I know that we know this. I just want us to remember it. I am eager for a collective language and leadership of well-being that is something altogether different, and more diverse. Aligned has never been about dogma, or getting anything right. Still, I am eager to gather our words—our garden tools—and dig. Yours in truth,Ryan & the Aligned team
