Week 29:"Who is Wellness For?" & Chococonut Chip Cookie

Why this book? When I am in bookstores I will typically look at my good reads to see what I have on my to-reading list or sometimes I just go in and browse to see what catches my eye. This book came to me through browsing & looking at new non-fiction. The title jumped out to me & it made me think YES I WANT TO KNOW MORE!

This book is a cross between an autobiography about Fariha's childhood and the complexities around healing her body and spirit. She shares very painful experiences of a mother who abused her mentally, physically and sexually. Warning to those that this book may be hard and it may be triggering.

It is broken into 4 parts: The journey to the mind, to the body, self-care & introduction to justice. She has a whole chapter on white people co-opting yoga which was really interesting providing history & context.

Here are a few quotes that stood out to me:

We could look at the binaries of science and wellness like this, where science is seen as more rational and intellectual, which is coded as masculine, while wellness is seen as intuitive, irrational, and therefore castigated as feminine. I hadn't thought of wellness and science like this before but I can definitely see the correlation. Why is that?

What if depression, in the Americas at least could be traced to histories of colonialism, genocide, slavery and isolation that haunt all of our lives, rather than to be biochemical imbalances? This idea that it is on the individual and not the collective experience.

Healing ourselves must happen in tandem with healing the earth. We really are connected and once we stop trying to separate us as individuals maybe we can begin to heal.

This is the first book I have read from the author and won't be the last. I will definitely read her other two: Like a Bird and How to Cure a Ghost.

There are 23 weeks left in the year and if you would like to do a book review I would love it. Please reach out to me - send me an email at info@stephanieredivo.com