Consciousness, spirituality, teachers and decolonisation

Photo by Dhivakaran S from Pexels

If you can do without the story part, scroll down to the listicle portion where I enumerate desirable characteristics of a teacher/facilitator and what to ask them when you are seeking to work with them.

Now, let’s get on with the story bit.

My story is simple and the story of many. I was raised to aspire to be white. I was raised to never want to learn the language of my Indigenous ancestors and to master the language of the coloniser. I was raised to be uninterested in Indigenous dances, teachings and music.

I was raised to become a copycat of the oppressor, to exert the same disdain to the oppressed despite the colour of my skin or the features of my body and face.

So what better way to eradicate the Indigenous than to pursue a career in science, to move abroad, not to the land of the coloniser of my country but the land of The Coloniser par excellence, the small piece of land whose people managed to subdue most of the world and impose the core language of oppression: English.

In the process of further disenfranchising myself of my Indigenous birthright, I nearly lost myself and lost my life.

I nearly forced myself to cross over but a voice kept holding me back, begging me to wait and keep looking for alternatives. The wait was worth it. I found people who could hear that scream of despair. People who for a while were able to help me hold that nameless budding thing that kept me alive and moving forward.

I found OM (orgasmic meditation) and I loved it, though I was very reluctant to buy into what was around it. However, I eventually did. I said yes little by little until I said yes to all of it with all my heart. Very shortly after finding my devotion, I realised I had outgrown the very system that had propelled me thus far, though it wasn’t an obvious thing to see because I didn’t yet have what I have seen others “successful” elopers take off with: a money-making program, external accolades or a book deal.

All I had was that I knew I couldn’t grow any further there. Maybe nobody else knew, but I knew. I knew a thing swirled in my insides and refused to comply, to abide by an artificial sophistication and dispose of the solitary ethnic bag hidden in the closet or the non-sexy dress that felt so good, so right, so powerful.

The lack of curiosity from the environment I was in wasn’t my lack of curiosity. That I also knew.

What got me out of suicidal ideation, got me out of that environment without any plan or parachute. I jumped to visit another country and with that action, I declared my allegiance to the energy driving me forwards, straight to the unknown.

Stepping out of that nest I thought would be my forever home brought me down to my knees in the sense that I moved from working non-stop to having no energy whatsoever. Zero. Nada. Still, I had to live, breathe, eat and have shelter though I could hardly think straight.

I began the long journey to discover and recover my power.

Now I understand that the structures that had fostered me in the early stages of my awakening were awesome but also insufficient to hold someone like me, someone whose core was and is determined to disrupt from the root. A radical who wants to go deeper and find the most efficient and pleasurable way to shake things up. Someone determined to learn not to pay lip service or pledge allegiance to things that are not deliberately in service to life.

The power that kept me active and alert for 12 hours every day for years was partially artificial. First of all, it wasn’t mine but it belonged to a collective. More importantly, a good chunk of that power came from a very flimsy field, a field that banked on my assimilation and on elements of the dominant culture related to money, wealth, race and power over that were rooted in addiction to privilege. Deep down, it was all about creating a shell that would gain acceptance by the higher echelons.

The power source I was connected to was disruptive but not as disruptive as I originally believed. That I didn’t know until relatively recently.

If I had been white or conventionally attractive, maybe I would have never felt the deep discomfort that prevented me from moving forward within the same collective. A discomfort that started as a whisper saying “don’t do that”, “don’t sell anything to that person” until it became a roar screaming to my ear “NO, I will do what I want, I don’t care what you make of it”.

I went to Georgia (the country) to listen more closely to that voice and the Big Collapse of my body-mind began shortly after.

Having no energy and no money was (and still is to a point) excruciating but it was also freeing as it removed the option of seeking paid help to guide me out of the mess I was in. I had no choice but to increase my receptivity, take advantage of any free teaching that came my way and become my main teacher (and shout at her when she was a tosser or spoke to me unkindly or didn’t have the answers and couldn’t gather the courage to admit it).

I had one great advantage. I had a privileged education in consciousness. One thing that became noticeable for me from the very beginning, is how much I struggled to find people to sustainably draw inspiration outside of the realm of OM and their former attacheés. OneTaste, whatever you make of it, really touched spaces very few did for me and provided me with a deeply rooted sense of sustainable practice based on simplicity and pragmatism.

But even that didn’t last long. My scarce money somehow became sufficiently abundant when there were ceremonies (mostly held by Indigenous folk) that I was invited to attend, sometimes at the very last minute. That brought new awareness and a growing sense that a lot of the coaches and teachers in my sphere had no clue of what they were talking about.

I started feeling the BS in their words and feeling like a mean asshat because all I wanted to do was to curse and declare how fake they were whilst simultaneously feeling hesitant and ashamed of how I felt. I doubted myself. I thought I might have been imagining all of those gaps in awareness that looked blatantly obvious to me. I particularly chastised myself for not being “supportive” of other women.

I was a daft lil froggy because it took me a long ass time to accept those feelings were onto something. In due course, I realised that what I was seeing had a very obvious pattern.

White.

Tee hee.

Or sometimes aspirational white, like I was raised.

In short, privileged.

Privileged and so full of shit. Shit so obvious to my now marginalised ass that made me wanna holler every time I saw a post with some “wisdom” that simply didn’t work in my deprived location. Now I am able to articulate what I saw and felt, back then it was just constantly feeling “fuck, no!” when on social media.

I am a scientist, a toltecayolt, so as I gained awareness I researched what I was perceiving and tested numerous hypotheses. I was present for the reactions and the answers because I had to know. I had to find words for what I was experiencing. I had to understand why nobody else seemed to be aware of what I was seeing.

I just had to. Voluntad inquebrantable, indomitable will, Huitzilopochtli.

In one of my experiments, I told a male coach (who offered me to join a several month program where he taught women how to create from the feminine) that he should pay me to be in his classes and that he had nothing to teach me. Mind you, I was poor as fuck, jobless and frequently bedridden. Still, I fucking knew he had nothing to offer to me. I had a strong sense that all he was doing was getting women to pay him for milking their energy in exchange for reassurance from an oppressor and a few tidbits of info that these women were likely to already know (but they lacked the capacity to acknowledge their inner wisdom and power unless a dude said things first).

The outcome of that exchange was to eventually be done with most of the wisdom coming from men, especially when trying to teach women about the feminine, and the eventual discovery of Diné Indigenous woman Pat McCabe. She introduced me to her journey of rediscovery of the feminine and the masculine, from a decolonised standpoint. She is the first person I heard admitting that we only know masculine and feminine, male and female and many related concepts from how they operate in a culture of (consentless) domination. Her words opened me up and I admitted that I have no clue what those things mean when oppression isn’t rearing its ugly head and I had but a vague idea of how those elements truly operate within the dominant culture, mostly what I had learnt about energetics in OT.

Another thread I followed was the need to renegotiate my relationships in general. I tested some stuff with great success in my last community house. I came to notice all the places where I was holding others to the point of granting them having artificial gravity and awareness; that is all thanks to my (unacknowledged) gravity and awareness and my constant reinforcement of presence.

I also went from periods of no contact with some friends, just to see where it led, where was the energy of connection and nourishment located.

Additionally, completely out of the blue, I connected with some women and made them offers to work with me (that was rad and such a big aversion practice) to understand more the threads of awareness I was wasting away without recognising and identifying how, unconsciously, these women were launching veiled requests for help but they were not willing to acknowledge them or even less pay for them. I noticed I had a compulsion to fulfil those requests in an unpaid fashion. Later, it became clearer what the whisper I followed was trying to tell me when I noticed all the women I contacted were white (or white-passing) and privileged. Still, I hadn’t formed a full picture of what I was working on.

Around that time I set boundaries (in a very unskilled manner, I admit) with men who I felt had been ransacking my energy for the benefit of their partners or other women in their life. Women who were not acknowledging my input or even less compensating my being accordingly.

None of this experimentation was easy but it helped me create internal structures that allowed me to analyse interactions better and expand my understanding of flows of energy between men and women.

The deeper I went the clearer it was to me that what I had inside of me was precious but very few people were able or willing to acknowledge it. In horror, I noticed how somehow some people expected it for free and/or took it for granted. However, I had no evidence of its value other than my internal knowing and the intense pushback that my demands for acknowledgement got.

In that period of self-discovery, I also cemented my fellowship work, especially with AA, the money fellowships and SLAA. It was at an SLAA meeting for people of colour where I was able to admit a racist situation I experienced in Germany that was originally met with strong disbelief. I was very supported there but it was very confronting, so I only returned a couple more times, despite the immense nourishment I got. I wasn’t ready for more, I now know.

That same racist situation brought one the biggest chunks of awareness regarding my identity. One of my white European friends told me, after I described the situation, that she had always perceived me as white.

Friends. I ain’t white. I have never been white. The thought of me being white is abhorrent because that is not what I am. Yet, clap clap clap, I got what all the whitexicans of my home country strive for, a white European person perceiving me as white.

That’s when the “I don’t see colour” BS started to rattle me.

Who am I? What am I? Why does the Indigenous get me forward every time though I know I wasn’t raised Indigenous?

I increased my attention and as I unfollowed more and more people belonging to the Welllnessphere that surrounded my initial awakening, I found space to receive further Indigenous elders and teachings from my home country and the Americas. I threaded a network of scrumptious darkness around me that stroked out all the extras and got me back to the simplicity of the wind, the air, the land and the fire, simplicity that encodes the most complex life equations. I got clear in that I am mestizo and my ancestors abandoned their Indigenous wisdom to survive but that doesn’t mean I cannot recover some of what was left behind. It became clear that I have value as I am and I do not need to compete with Indigenous folk nor do I want to overtake them or appropriate their knowledge. I understood I want to get closer and be of service. I got that my journey and the knowledge I have gathered is important and useful.

As my allegiance to wisdom designed for people with way more privilege than me fell, I came across white European folk who weren’t trying to enthrall me; teachers who nurtured the call my homeland was making whilst they connected to their own homeland.

Just to name some examples, I met a couple who devoted their lives to make sure people didn’t forget a cemetery of nameless paupers and prostitutes. I met women who embodied sisterhood and were determined to find the last healers of lineage in their country. They were unsuccessful but they didn’t relent, they went to the inquisition papers to restore chastised knowledge even if in order to do that they had to read the horrendous torture the healers of the past were subjected to. I met a woman who openly said psychotherapy was a crappy fruitless endeavour until she discovered psychedelics. She explained to me how archetypal play at the level of a nation could be done through with their aid if someone felt driven by that depth of work. Though she was punished and sent to prison for holding psycholytic therapy sessions, I heard her say with a smile, “yeah I had to go to the jungle to take ayahuasca and recover from being in prison but it was worth it, now my research is on legal paperwork and that means I was able to publish a book so now everyone knows my protocol and how it’s done”. I met people who burnt money (and I became one of them).

Incidentally, the first thing that Melusine, a European symbol of abundance, showed me before I even completed my first money burn was how power looked like when it was extracted forcefully and from captivity. She showed me how that kind of power dehumanises its holder as much as the holder dehumanises others in the process of extraction. She unveiled for me how people benefitting from the byproducts of the extraction also get dehumanised and objectified and how unaware we all are of how fragile and inefficient that (consentless) power over is. She made it clear it was a joyless affair for everyone taking part in that equation. Everyone. Not even the main holders are enjoying this lifestyle.

It was a tad too much for me to comprehend in one go there and then, but everything started making sense when a few months later when I left England and the void unfolded.

That thing of being in a subservient position to WW (not wonder women but white women) who consume the presence and gravity of my brown self without any acknowledgement and get offended when I point out to them what they are doing; that is the exact thing I came to face when I left England for continental Europe.

I had there an experience where I had to dissolve my identity and begin to dissolve the compulsion to hand over power to WW to get external safety. Through that process, I gained awareness of the dynamics at play and the veiled threat WW carry under their breath when I don’t oblige. I gained more ability to set boundaries and remove ancient bindings. I gained a deep connection to other foreign lands who illuminated my situation. In the last motion, the land helped me as much as possible to undo the bind whilst also caring for her child, the woman in her homeland. That land helped me become aware of how I contributed to the creation of the particular bind I had formed with that woman and also grow my capacity so I could later notice how that woman used the gravity she got from to magnetise the husband she had been aching for.

That identity dissolution left me raw but ready to come back to my own land and start the long process of growing the roots that had been gnawed in my childhood.

Shortly after arriving in my homeland and since money, wealth and I had already begun a conversation, I was led to take a year-long class on wealth. From this point is where the real meat of this article can be found.

I said that lack of money limited the teachers I could get access to. Hence, I got used to watching short videos or reading scattered material and getting more than enough to rewire myself continuously. That “limitation” made me very proficient at discerning where to place my attention.

So, when a free webinar about wealth I randomly signed in knocked me unconscious a few minutes in, I knew there was something in it. It took me a few attempts to watch the entire thing without getting knocked down, but I did it. Since I had no money to pay for it I thought that was it. I shared the video with one friend whom I thought might be interested in some of the nuggets and I forgot about it.

Well, my friend replied thanking me and generously offering me an awarded year-long freebie in that class. My friend had registered a couple of weeks before I sent that email and I had no clue until that moment.

I was happy and erm, confronted. The class wasn’t only about wealth but hermeticism, tarot and astrology and by then I had some grasp that the knowledge those disciplines could offer me was far too recent considering the amount of time humanity had been on this planet.

I said yes to the class and I meditated on what I would be doing about the confronting material. I came up with an Alan Watts kind of solution, I decided to dive deep so I could understand well and identify and dissolve the aspects in myself that related to that abject behemoth I experienced but I was yet to name as the dominant culture.

Regarding wealth, I was like, yeah if I got the dosh that would be grand, but that wasn’t the main point of being there because I also had a strong hunch that whatever was on offer wouldn’t be able to get me to that financial situation I craved. Still, I decided to go for it, all of it, because, you know what if it was only my resistance blocking me from living like royalty.

I am grateful for that class, I grew tons because of it. I hardly ever missed a live session. I did as many of the exercises and practices as my energy permitted. I reviewed most of the material. I took it all in, to the heart, as much as I could.

And like earlier endeavours I had been part of, led by privileged WW and disconnected from any sense of challenging the existing dominant culture, as the year came to an end I began to outgrow that pond.

Early on I started to notice how most of the teachers were cis white folk. It gritted me that most of the study material came from cis white men; some of them very questionable in their actions and writings but whose shortcomings were accounted as petty nuances to set aside. I noticed how there was a level of gravity and a vision mostly touched by non-binary or BIPOC guest teachers. I noticed the growing NO in my body regarding certain practices, readings and beliefs. I eventually concluded that the notion of wealth presented in that class and how to attain it wasn’t working for me at all. I mean it all looked “OK” and was in alignment with what many teachers I still cherished said but it didn’t feel good. It felt tangibly off for me. In the last month or so, I came to realise that all I wanted was to be free to be who I am without constantly compromising or contorting myself to fit in the joyless hamster wheel. I recognised that all the tools given to me thus far lacked the depth I needed to get what I wanted, even if I wasn’t exactly sure where I could find them.

I just knew that class wouldn’t get me where I wanted to go and when the year-long experience ended, I was fully done and ready to tap out. I openly expressed my gratitude in the forum and left.

A few days after that year-long cycle ended, the main holder of that wealth class, Carolyn Elliot, announced to the world she was indigenous and she did that whilst holidaying in Mexico.

That did it. That exact moment is what I have been digesting and moving, harbouring for nearly nine months. Digesting that piece of bullshit.

As soon as I read her post I had to go and redirect her emails so I didn’t read anymore about that. I felt brutalised and I didn’t fully understand my reaction so I opted for redirection rather than a full removal and blocking.

My body felt the impact. I started bleeding a super heavy period that required me to change my cup every hour or so. I felt feverish and weak for several days. I cried non-stop without explanation. I knew it was her post, I just didn’t know what it meant for me, why my entire body was howling.

I couldn’t think, it was beyond me. I had done my research before I joined her class and I knew she was prone to consumption but never did I imagine this level of fuckery.

I kept myself mostly detached from the conversation that arose around that post. Still, the grapevine came knocking on my door with news of it; and as someone shared they had witnessed other women from the former OM community Carolyn and I used to belong getting involved in the conversation, I (correctly) guessed that Perri Chase (who was also in Mexico at the time) was one of the people violently defending Carolyn.

It was all so bloody predictable. Perri had briefly been a teacher of mine after I left OT and she had given me very good insights. Further down the line, she was one of the folks I distanced myself from when I noticed traits in her posts that were dissonant to where I was heading. Those exact traits were exactly what got me to guess she wouldn’t be the friend who would remind Carolyn that her little girl actions bring grown-ass woman consequences. She wouldn’t be the friend urging her to restore integrity and take responsibility for what she started. She would be the friend fighting a battle that she didn’t initiate and it’s not hers to take.

When I felt more able to let info in, I learnt that Carolyn had planned a panel to discuss her post and the other panellists were Perri and a black woman called Namaste Moore.

I guffawed.

I had heard about Namaste for a very long time but wasn’t familiar with her material. I even liked her page to learn about her but I never saw her posts or videos until about a week before Carolyn’s post when I got a notification for a Facebook live she did with her husband. In it, she asked a good question to the audience: who are the people you’d love to be like? She then proceeded to describe the people she wanted to be like when she started her journey. These people were in essence wealthy and privileged. She then proceeded to describe how she lied to these people and pretended she could afford to meet in very expensive places as if it was nothing to her when she actually was poor. I thought to myself “fuck that! I want to express myself freely to people. I want them to know where I am and adjust accordingly if my presence is important to them. I no longer want to contort so they avoid feeling discomfort”. She then admitted that now that she already was privileged she wanted even more privilege and that she couldn’t get enough of it. I was like, hell no, I don’t want to be like you.

I forgot all about that Facebook live until I saw she was one of the people expressing support towards Carolyn.

I mean, Perri, Carolyn and I share a lot of acquaintances and I know for certain that amongst those people we share connection there are very qualified people who could have given to them quality external reflection over this situation. However, to me, Namaste was chosen to be the token black person who, for whatever reason, has overtly pledged allegiance to the dominant culture and is very likely not to challenge shit and validate a very ignorant standpoint with her presence.

More shit hit the fan and I chose to detach from that as what I was feeling took precedence over what to me was a pointless conversation incompetent people were having about something they had no clue. I unfollowed her on Instagram, removed myself from her mailing list and made sure to delete my account in her wealth group.

Though I was done giving attention to her, I still had to work on what I had felt so I knew it wasn’t the end of it. I was lucky to be part of a variety of communities focused on decolonisation and who were effortlessly schooling my white assimilated part whilst simultaneously acknowledging and holding my brown Mexican self.

For weeks, every time I thought about it I cried. I thought I would never stop. I haven’t done so for months but just now as I wrote this I cried a bit. The reason I am writing this is so that process is complete and all that emotion can see the completion of its alchemical process.

Speaking of alchemy, Carolyn words confirmed to me then that all that hermeticism and astrology and whatnot in that shape she was supporting would never serve me or people like me. Shortly after that, I was made aware of a serious consciousness gap I had. Basically, hermeticism is a European rehash of appropriated technology originally from Africa, but as far as I had been treated (and not only by her) the African origins were taken as a peculiarity not as the core element of that technology. My interest in deconstructing it evaporated because there is no need, there is a strong root, not a flimsy one. I am OK with being familiar with it and if I want to understand something better I shall seek African sources or people who study those sources and have the capacity to embody that knowledge.

This several month experience digesting a post also returned something for me straight from the Demo Intensive.

I was nicknamed there “Hardcore”. Back then, I didn’t think I was that hardcore but now I see that I am. I feel now more comfortable expressing my intensity and giving way to my drive to be radical. I want to get to the root of things and then find what else can be done, what else we haven’t tried, what we can integrate from what we have tried.

As the months passed and my body-mind reaction gave way to clarity, I noticed more and more how most WW lack inner power and how they persistently seek to extract power from marginalised folk, particularly BIPOC. I became even more aware of how they are constantly wielding people around them and using their privilege to get what they want without facing the impact of their actions. I noticed how this is a consequence of being rootless, ungrounded, disconnected with the land, the water and any other elements that begotten them. Many WW will, like vampires, smell and hunt grounded and connected folk to suck their life force and consume and appropriate their gravity and connection. Many will pass on that disconnection and addictive drive for consumption to their offspring. Many will back up homogenisation efforts and cultural genocide on behalf of a system that keeps them at the top of “femininity”. Those who do that are the oppressor in waiting, bidding to dethrone white men for their benefit.

I got clear on many of the experiences I had over the last years, especially regarding women and some from as far back as the moment I began to work on my consciousness and my spirituality.

I saw the line after years of just trusting myself and I also came to realise that what I saw isn’t something new. This is something that BIPOC and gender non-conforming folk have been saying for quite a while. I simply didn’t have the receptivity before to recognise what they were saying. I only managed to have a small grasp of that and verbalise it shortly before this several month process started, though I had tons of personal evidence to back that small nugget of awareness.

As the alchemical work on the post progressed and more began to make sense for me, I became better at detecting the moments where I needed to set boundaries. I also became better at finding women who committed to not pulling that kind of shitty behaviour.

I was raised to be aspirational white and I accepted to become a citizen of one of the lands this type of trauma-based cosmovision was formed. So I am very aware I have been (thanks the lordy for AA stepwork and making amends!) and I can potentially be back to an all that consuming and performative persona in the future unless I keep myself constantly checked; unless I empower all that is diverse and connected to my Indigenous ancestral lineage, to land and water.

Luckily, I am Mexican and I am now back in Mexico.

A few months after the post, my land responded to my prompt actions because I quickly sought to surround myself with more and more BIPOC folk, non-binary peeps and people heavily invested in decolonising themselves so I could draw inspiration from and who wouldn’t hesitate in calling me out if I pulled any BS. My land opened a portal where I could pump all that wisdom and discernment I had been gathering for years and where I could nourish myself with the language and the dances of my ancestors from the Americas. My land opened a portal for me so vast that I struggle to see myself outgrowing it. Every time I investigate something in it, the fractal zooms in and a new infinity appears and says hi to me.

Not a single day goes by without something so magical that leaves me speechless. Not a single day goes by without me seeing the threads of the world being undone and re-knitted in front of my eyes. Not a single day.

This doesn’t mean I am done, that I have nothing to decolonise. Au contraire. These words are part of the acceptance of a lifelong endeavour of deconstruction and integration of all the archetypes serving the dominant culture for the benefit of all beings. That means living in overt defiance to the white supremacist, ableist, cis-hetero patriarchal, settler colonialist, imperialist, capitalist and anthropocentric culture.

So now let’s move to the LISTICLE section encompassing desirable characteristics of teachers and communities and questions to ask them, but before that should you feel called to give me feedback or a reflection on what I wrote here please use the EE format, that is, express yourself using any or as many of the following: sensations, feelings, gratitudes, desires, fears or admissions.

I haven’t gone through that many communities, teachers or schools of thought. However, I have been to enough and experienced enough to gather valuable information about selecting a teacher or guide but all according to my experience and my needs. You may have different needs, so bin what doesn’t resonate with you.

Things to consider when selecting a coach/therapist/spiritual teacher/community/etc:

• First of all, if you belong to the global majority and you are also further marginalised, let it be known that privileged people have nothing to teach you and much to serve you. Play with this, ask them how they’d like to serve you when they offer you stuff.
• Also, people privileged by what the dominant culture reinforces are unlikely sources of wisdom in the long run in the arenas where their privilege gives them dominance. For example, conventionally attractive folk aren’t generally suited to teach about feeling powerful and beautiful. Similarly, people born financially privileged may not have anything to teach you about wealth and money except how those operate under the dominant culture and how to keep them operating that way. This is particularly true if they fail to acknowledge the role of oppression in that equation. Similarly, “self-made” wealthy people who ignore oppression may (at best) be able to teach you the variant they have contorted into within the dominant culture to source power and exert oppression onto others (consciously or unconsciously). Use them early in your journey just to gain basic awareness in the subjects and then ditch them for more capable people who don’t come from unaware privileged standpoints.
• The more you decolonise yourself and dissolve elements in yourself that are supported by the dominant culture, the harder it will be for you to find mainstream teachers capable of holding you. For me, they all feel very “samey”.
• I love fellowships and I suggest you be mindful when working with them. Seek diverse meetings, especially the ones that serve any marginalised group you belong to. Be extra careful with the fellowships strongly abiding by the dominant field and mainstream views that disregard the role of oppression (like most of the money fellowships). They are amazing starting points as they bring initial awareness to the topic and, in the long run, their concepts entrap you in a dynamic of becoming another cog in the machine.
• In the world of wellness, notice any kind of appropriation and usage without permission especially in heavily appropriate practices like yoga or sacred medicines like cacao. Notice the usage of sacred words like “orenda” or sacred songs. People not being born in an Indigenous lineage and failing to display who they trained under are possibly useful for beginner’s journeys but unlikely to have the chops to hold you in the long run. If they claim to belong to a lineage, check if they have permission to administer medicine or teach. In addition, check if they are making drastic efforts and contributions to the preservation of that lineage by locals instead of outsiders. For example, ask if they subsidised the training of local people whilst they were training themselves. If that’s not the case, it’s plausible they are operating under a consumption mindset. Ideally, challenge people who are appropriating and profiting without the right permissions.
• Also in the world of wellness, if the teachings don’t come from an Indigenous lineage, check that the sources are constantly credited and inform yourself about possibly plagiarised material or techniques. Don’t take things at face value, hardly anyone in that world came up with all the stuff they teach on their own.
• Ask what are the practices to give feedback to others as well as teachers/facilitators and how people and teachers/facilitators restore integrity. If there are none set, step away unless you want to practice boundary sparring. Ask how frequently those practices are used. If the protocols are stated on codes of conduct but are never used, they are useless. Ask if public amends or restoration of integrity by teachers/facilitators has taken place.
• In the wellness and therapy world ask facilitators/therapists how they are contributing towards becoming obsolete. That is, ask how they are planning to contribute towards restoring back to people the wisdom they now hold and that originally belonged to the common folk.
• Ask what decolonising and marginalisation awareness training the teachers/facilitators/staff have undertaken. If the answer is none and you are marginalised in any way, shape or form, enter under your own responsibility. It’s likely that they are incompetent at holding you. Check also if the training they took was performative or it actually involved an entire overhaul. Be especially mindful when you come across teachers who claim to do “the deep work”, “shadow work” or have a “bodhisattva vow” or something like that but they remain adamant about keeping their privilege and unwilling to educate themselves regarding oppression.
• Be mindful of communities led by one or a handful of privileged people, especially if the power distribution takes the shape of an everlasting pyramid, even if it is a rather flat one. Living in the dominant culture (which is essentially a cult) trains you to feel drawn to cult-like settings like the aforementioned pyramid one.
• If the program you are attending is an online one where they expect to attract people from all over the globe and folk from the global majority are non-existent or a minority, the program is likely to run on a strand of preserving privilege. That is unless the program is expected to educate the global minority on decolonisation or they have specially designed programs for the global majority so they feel safer and more comfortable expressing themselves. The same happens with online teachers/therapists/facilitators/etc showcasing testimonials of cis white people only. The absence of people from the global majority simply lets you know that the scope of the program is fairly limited and that if you are marginalised they may not know how to hold you. Ask how deeply marginalised people are considered in the design of the program. Ask if reparations are taking place.
• Ask the teacher/facilitator about their areas of privilege and how they are working to dissolve it.
• Ask the teacher/facilitator about their sources of external reflection and their practices to keep themselves grounded and oriented.
• Ask the teacher/facilitator about their areas of incompetence or ignorance. Ask if they know of experts in those areas and what kind of referral program they have. Again, be mindful in your involvement with them if they are unaware of the gaps in their knowledge or unwilling to talk about them.
• If the teacher/facilitator comes from the global north and operates in the global south request to see evidence of service to the hosting land and considerable efforts set in place to prevent colonialist attitudes and actions.

If you pay attention, the pattern is obvious, teachers or communities banking on assimilation and failing to acknowledge the role of oppression can be useful for initial work but that work may stay shallow or mediocre. Keeping them close demands, in the long run, investing a lot of energy and holding a huge amount of personal responsibility. That’s a totally valid endeavour that can render a lot of nourishment and, not what I want to be doing right now. I find it more effective and pleasurable to have a teacher or be part of a community that has awareness of marginalisation and is working on dissolving oppression.

Now, this is not all about demanding stuff from our teachers or holders but also demanding from ourselves because I cannot demand from others what I don’t demand from myself (and give to others). So the suggestions are that you:

• Educate yourself about appropriation and don’t appropriate.
• Ask for permission to learn and/or use and respect a decision if your request is denied.
• Give credit for the work of others.
• Educate yourself on oppression, marginalisation and work on your own decolonisation.
• Learn to identify what practices keep you grounded and oriented.
• Learn to give feedback and receive it.
• Learn to restore integrity and practice it.
• Have agreements with people so they spelunk you from time to time. That is, ask them to agree to support you, tell you the truth and remind you of your intentions when you progress in your undertakings.
• Become aware of your privilege and understand that having it means that every now and then you are going to be requested to pay attention and stay silent or asked to step aside or demanded to make an extra effort. Commit to learning to navigate those situations.
• Identify your gaps in awareness and have a sense of your capacity. Learn to be ok with saying “I am ignorant in that regard” or “that is beyond my capacity”.
• Identify your hard NOs and be open when they change.
• If you go abroad to heal, thank the land you visit for receiving you, seek Her permission to do the work you plan to do and ask Her to let you know how you could best serve Her. Increase your attention. Notice what the land is trying to tell you. Act on the information you get.

You don’t have to do all these things at once. These are just pointers for self-discovery that you can take in at your own pace.