How Wellness Got Whitewashed (And What You Could Have Instead)
You've been consuming fragments when whole traditions exist. The teachers are still here. The depth is available. You've just been taught not to look.
Everything you're learning about seasonal rhythms, herbal wisdom, menstrual awareness, and body knowledge came from somewhere. The wellness industry extracted these practices from Indigenous, African, Asian, and Latin American cultures—stripped them of context, credit, and depth—then sold them back as discoveries. The intact knowledge still exists. You've just been taught not to look toward the people who hold it.
the extraction
Herbal remedies. Seasonal eating. Moon rituals. Breathwork. Body-based intuition. Cycle syncing.
None of this is new. None of it was discovered by the white women selling it to you on Instagram.
These practices have existed for thousands of years in cultures across the global majority. They were systematically dismissed as primitive, suppressed through colonization, pathologized by Western medicine, and then—once the wellness industry realized they worked—extracted, repackaged, and sold without acknowledgment.
The same practices that got ancestors labeled as witches, savages, or backwards are now $40 workshops taught by people who learned them last year.
what was taken
The knowledge of how to live in a cyclical body. How to eat with seasons. How to use plants for healing. How to mark transitions with ritual. How to understand the body as intelligent rather than mechanical. How to live in relationship with the earth.
This knowledge was never lost. It was taken from some people and suppressed in others.
Indigenous communities worldwide maintained it despite active attempts to destroy it. African cultures preserved it through colonization and diaspora. Asian traditions carried it through generations. Latin American curanderas kept it alive in practice.
Then wellness culture arrived, took what worked, and taught you to see it as innovation rather than inheritance.
who got erased
When you learn about cycle syncing, who teaches you? When you search for herbal wisdom, whose face appears? When you buy the books, attend the workshops, follow the accounts—who profits?
The wellness industry is overwhelmingly white. The practices it sells are overwhelmingly not.
This matters beyond fairness. It matters because extraction without understanding creates hollow practice. The woman selling you ceremonial cacao may not know that Mayan women have been doing cacao ceremonies centuries. She may not know why, beyond the mechanism. She took the what without the why, the how without the history.
You end up with fragments. Techniques without cosmology. Practices without roots.
what's still intact
The knowledge didn't disappear. It went underground, got carried in bodies and communities, survived despite everything designed to destroy it.
Southern African cultures still hold intact understanding of seasonal rhythms and body-cycle wisdom. Indigenous communities across the Americas maintain plant wisdom that Western herbalism borrowed from. Traditional Chinese Medicine has documented body-season relationships for thousands of years. Ayurveda has mapped menstrual and seasonal patterns for millennia. Curanderas in Latin America still practice what wellness influencers recently "discovered."
The teachers exist. The lineages are alive. The depth is available.
You've just been conditioned to look past them. To see the global majority as recipients of knowledge rather than holders of it. To assume the cleaned-up, English-speaking, aesthetically-palatable version is the real one.
what this means for you
This isn't about guilt. Guilt changes nothing and helps no one.
This is about understanding that the wellness industry gave you fragments when whole traditions exist. That you've been consuming techniques stripped from cosmology, practices pulled from their roots.
You're not discovering anything. You're remembering what humans always knew—and some humans never forgot. The teachers are still here. The depth is available. You've just been conditioned to look past it.
the deeper issue
The wellness industry's extraction problem isn't separate from its emptiness problem. They're connected.
Practices stripped from their context become techniques. Wisdom separated from its roots becomes content. You can follow all the wellness advice and still feel hollow because you're consuming fragments, not inheriting knowledge.
The global majority didn't just preserve practices. They preserved worldviews. Cosmologies. Understandings of what bodies are, what life is for, how humans relate to earth and each other. That's what gets lost in extraction. That's what you're starving for.
The intact wisdom is more ethical. And more true. More whole. More alive.
what you could have instead
Start with acknowledgment. When something resonates—seasonal eating, herbal wisdom, cycle awareness—recognize it came from somewhere. Not as a trend. As inherited knowledge that survived despite everything.
Then, choice. Who you learn from matters.
Some teachers hold wisdom directly. Their lineage, their inheritance, their living connection to ancestral tradition. They carry it. They may be building something new, but the roots are theirs.
Other teachers learned it. For them, look at practice: Whose books do they recommend? Whose work do they amplify? Where does their money go? Who do they send you toward? You can see integrity in action. You can also see extraction in action.
Both can teach something real. But you should know which you're learning from.
This matters more now, not less. The current backlash against "diversity" is convenient cover for people who never wanted to credit their sources anyway. Naming where wisdom comes from isn't politics. It's honesty. Choosing who to learn from isn't a checklist. It's discernment.
Find teachers who know what they carry and where it came from. Who are the source, or who honor it. Who point you toward roots.
You're entering a stream of knowledge that's been flowing for thousands of years. How you enter matters.
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