Indoctrination + Me: My True Story, My Crisis of Faith

A few weeks ago, I mentioned that eventually I’d write more about what I was calling the “wellness to white supremacy pipeline.” I think you could also call it the “wellness to fascism pipeline.”

I’m going to try and do this topic justice because…it’s complicated. And personal. I feel like I need to out myself a bit and say that I have been woo; I have been about wellness; I have been vax hesitant; I have been that white spiritual girlie; I have been a yoga teacher; I have eaten, slept, and breathed spirituality and personal growth and there’s literally no way in hell I could ever remember all the trainings, workshops, and sessions I’ve been a part of. I have had dreadlocks and taken a spiritual name.

I have eaten organic and seen a chiropractor who told me I was allergic to gluten and I have been paleo. I have been cult adjacent and conspiracy adjacent and bought in and I was basically that girl…I know you can picture her.

I have been…indoctrinated.

And I have had a massive, life-changing crisis of faith that brought it all crashing down in very necessary ways.

My point in sharing all of this is that I am not immune, I am not perfect, and as I poke holes in what was once my way of life, I want you to know that I understand it from the inside. I’m not criticizing from someplace above it. 

I was very very very much in the muck.

Today I’m going to share the story of my crisis of faith, my big change, and what that all has to do with this wellness to white supremacy pipeline. Because now more than ever, I think it’s important we see examples of how people wake up out of indoctrination.

Once upon a time when I was on retreat with my spiritual teacher doing sweat lodges, I was bit by a tick and infected with Lyme Disease and two other illnesses. It was 3 years of misery, treatment, and being mostly housebound before I was well again. I think during this time, I doubled down on the whole wellness thing thinking it would get me better. I found out that a lot of my community wasn’t there for me.

After about a year and a half of being well again, covid hit. I got it immediately, the same week as the first quarantine orders in the US and this was the variant that was killing droves of people. My covid story is harrowing and involves being sick and struggling to breathe for a year and a half, hospitals, and, yep, a crisis of faith.

I was in a new town at the time and it turns out the hippies I was friends with (the type of people I’d always been friends with) decided to be anti-mask, anti-social-distancing, and later, anti-vax. No community care whatsoever.

When I was falling asleep at night, I would start to pass out and go unconscious. I knew that because unlike falling asleep, I would stop breathing altogether and wake myself up heaving breaths, dizzy and disoriented. I lived alone and was scared of dying in my sleep, so I’d drive myself to the hospital for monitoring when it’d get really bad.

My hippy friends told me they couldn’t be around my fear because it was toxic. Half the time they told me that I was probably still ill because of my beliefs…I must be creating it. Or the other half of the time they told me I wasn’t actually sick because I didn’t look sick. And many months later, when I was well enough to sit outside again and talk, they refused to wear a mask to help protect me.

During this time, because often I was too sick to talk outside of work, because I was in a new town, because my friends were being shit, and because of the social isolation of the time, I was out of groupthink for the first time in my adult life and I was forced to sit and think for myself. Critically.

A L O N E

My green juice hadn’t saved me. My lack of gluten, dairy, sugar, coffee, or processed foods hadn’t saved me. My daily yoga for 20 years hadn’t saved me. Daily meditation, prayer, journaling? Didn’t save me.

My obsession with purity and health hadn’t saved me.

And wasn’t that the point? Didn’t I do all of that in the first place in order to avoid sickness? And here I was anyway.

This was the beginning of the end for me. Alone and sick in my home, I started thinking about how the obsession with purity in the wellness industry is no different than the obsession with purity you see in mainstream (and often right-wing) Christianity. I started thinking about how the culture of hyper personal responsibility in mostly white wellness circles was the perfect breeding ground for (often right-wing) beliefs that were anti-community care like how people wouldn’t mask, wouldn’t socially distance, wouldn’t get vaccinated. I started thinking about how the wellness world as I knew it was selfish; unwelcoming to anyone who wasn’t thin, white, well, and wealthy; and how it was so often creating it’s own “science.” I was thinking about how much this sounded like the political right, how much it sounded like eugenics.

There had been enough of a crack in my worldview to consider getting the covid vaccine. But I was scared because I was still so unwell and I didn’t want it to make anything worse so I waited while I worked up to the bravery of it.

I was shaking as I parked my car and walked in to get the first dose. But then, to my shock and amazement, just days after the first dose I felt 80% better. After the second, I felt 100% better. The covid vaccine cured my long covid and thereby setting me on a path of seriously breaking down the rest of my beliefs.

I spent the following years researching. And then doing more research. I taught my mind to work in different ways. I examined my beliefs, I studied social justice more than I ever had before, and much of what I learned through this process resulted in me creating SomaField. Why? Because so much of the indoctrination, cultic patterns, appropriation, misinformation, and grift I discovered in my research was perpetuated by spiritual teachers, coaches, and therapists and I believed (still do) that the industry is in need of a revolution.

I learned that wellness practices and beliefs have loooong been a part of fascist movements, of right-wing extremism. Not to say throw it all out, but, you know, think critically. In my process, I found it extremely helpful to try and get to the bottom of ideas. The intenet helped. Where did this first show up and what was the agenda of those people? That little question right there exploded much of what I wholeheartedly believed before.

I share this because, as I said earlier, I want to talk about all the stories about how people wake up from indoctrination. But also, I share it because with SomaField, I really try to find an integrous path through all this noise. I believe as practitioners our work can be so important and meaningful in the lives of our clients and in this way, we can impact the greater culture. I want that impact to be a good one, free of indoctrination, and where clients are supported to find their own ground and explore what they think and feel.

These days, I hold my beliefs and ideas far more lightly and that’s part of how I hold Integrity as a practitioner.

Please forward this to anyone that comes to mind if you think they’d enjoy it. :)