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(Psst…notice anything different? WELLREAD is still providing you with the need to know (NTK) news, calls to actions and resources for how to stay engaged and resourced along the way. But now, we’ve added an option to “upgrade to paid” to help sustain our work. While we will never put our content behind a pay wall, we depend on the support of our community to keep us going 💛
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Gov. Ron DeSantis and the Florida Department of Education are the latest in the campaign to ban books and erase Black Americans from history and deny their crucial voices and perspectives. And while it is easy to point the finger at the “other” side, we must also reckon with our own complicity. I’ve been reflecting on how long I spent willfully ignorant; how I, like so many, chose to follow the rules and go alone to get along. Even as we resist the efforts to erase the truth and bury our history, we must also interrogate what we’ve been made to forget.
Vanessa Machado De Oliveira calls it “constitutive denials: what we need to (be made to) forget in order to believe what modernity/coloniality wants us to believe in, and to desire what modernity and coloniality wants us to desire” (Hospicing Modernity).
How we confront/wrestle/challenge these denials is essential to recovering our ability to heal, relate and imagine better. According to the dictionary, the opposite of denial is acknowledgement, confession. That last word feels especially needed…and our willingness to “pay our debt” for the deeply unjust and unequal history that we are a part of. Perhaps then, we will be able to move towards the freedom that we all deserve.
Kerri (she/her)
NTK
Racism denial is a political strategy. They attempt to convince people racism is no longer an issue or is not a big enough one to require attention. How racism deniers obscure the reality of racism, minimizing its significance.
Police killed environmental activist Manuel Esteban Páez Terán last week. The Frontline reminds us that police violence is an environmental issue.
Chinese Astrology looks at the sequence of time to gain insight about our place in the orchestration of life. The year of the rabbit is an invitation to recalibrate with the natural rhythms of life.
How has resilience discourse been used to let ‘power structures off the hook’, putting the onus on the person to endure and accept hardship and ‘to fix things that should be a priority of the state…’? Check out this powerful piece on reframing resilience.
Online engagement doesn’t always amount to material change. This Is How I Use Social Media to Make a Difference
SOLIDARITY
The gun debate is telling us a lot about who we are and what we value. We live in a country that considers m&m’s, African American studies, trans folks, uteruses and masks as more threatening than guns. The US has most civilian owned guns in the world (more guns than people with a ratio of about 120 guns per 100 residents. We also have the most mass shootings (accounting for 73% of global mass shootings). And that pace is has been on the rise since 2020. This year alone, we’ve seen 39 mass shootings in only 26 days (correction: it’s now 40). Guns kill people, for sure. But so does systemic oppression and the culture of policing. We need confront injustice on all fronts if we want a safer world. Here are some things to keep in mind:
Gun Control works. A 2015 study linked the nation’s high rate of mass shootings to its high rate of gun ownership. Gun control legislation is not everything, but it works. Reinstitute the assault weapons ban immediately.
Addressing oppression and unresolved collective trauma is essential. We must also address the root causes of violence which more often than not are attributed to poverty, systemic oppression and/or unresolved trauma. In addition to trauma informed practices and protocols, we need to ensure people have what they need to heal. Check out the work of Lumos Transforms which specializes in trauma informed interventions and strategies and the individual, group and systemic level.
Cops do not keep communities safe. Communities need resources and well-coordinated social, emotional, and mental health supports and services, particularly in critical times of crisis and high need.
WHAT WE ❤️
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To detox is not to deprive oneself of what we need or desire. Rather, it is to confront how we’ve been shaped by a culture of perfectionism, scarcity, individualism and supremacy so that we can recover the parts of us that have been lost to the project of productivity and progress and move towards collective healing and liberation.
The week of January 30 - February 3rd, we're gathering in shared inquiry and practice to explore what's in the way of our collective wellbeing and how we can truly heal. We will be lead by these AMAZING guides (authors, activists, healers) who are disrupting the status quo and showing us another way forward - one that is rooted in love, justice and hope for a future that we all deserve:
Pixie Lighthorse, author of Goldmining the Shadows and Boundaries & Protection
Nitika Chopra, host of Thriving Together podcast
Thenmozhi Soundararajan, author of The Trauma of Caste, A Dalit Feminist Meditation on Survivorship, Healing and Abolition
Tina Strawn, author of Are We Free Yet? A Black Queer Guide to Divorcing America
Natalia Petrzela, author of Fit Nation, The Gains & Pains of America's Exercise Obsession
Kerri Kelly, author of American Detox: The Myth of Wellness & How We Can Truly Heal
Each day, you'll receive a morning practice to support your journey of unlearning and healing. And each afternoon we will meet up at 2PST/5EST on Zoom for courageous conversation and shared learning. Join us Jan 30- Feb 3rd for a (FREE) radical inquiry into whats in the way of personal and collective thriving in 2023 and beyond.
WE-NESS
This may be one of our favorite quotes of all time. There is no wellness without WE.
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We are kicking off the new year with a radical kind of detox. We'll be joined by special guests to help us unpack and unlearn the stories that are holding us back from new possibilities. Register for this FREE event!
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