What is colonialism?
Colonialism is when one power takes control of another people's land, resources and lives. It replaces the cultures it rules: their languages, their spiritual practices, their medicine and their ways of understanding the world.
Most countries are no longer formally colonies, but we are still living inside a colonial paradigm. The ways of thinking and the hierarchies colonialism created still decide whose knowledge counts as "real," whose lives are valued, and what a "normal" body or a "healthy" life looks like.
The disconnection we inherited
Colonialism gets into the minds of the people it rules, teaching them to see their own culture, language and bodies as lesser. The trauma of racism and colonialism lives in our nervous systems and our breath.
Many of us have been separated from our ancestral homelands and practices, through war and displacement. We lost the languages our grandparents prayed in, the songs that held grief, the plants that healed, the rituals that marked birth and death.
What does colonialism have to do with pain?
More than you might think.
The body was split from the mind. Modern Western medicine grew out of a view of the body as a machine, separate from the mind, the emotions and the world around it. This view spread with colonial power and became the standard almost everywhere. It's a big reason chronic pain is so often treated as a broken part to fix, when the nervous system, stress and life experience play such a large role.
Other ways of healing were pushed aside. Many traditional healing practices, like breath, movement, music, plants, ritual and community care, were banned, dismissed or called superstition. A lot of wisdom about the body was lost along the way.
Injustice lives in the body. Ongoing stress from discrimination, poverty, displacement and violence affects the nervous system and creates pain.
Healing became a product. Under capitalism, healing is often sold as a luxury: expensive, individual, and only for those who can afford it. This leaves the people carrying the most stress, and often the most pain, with the least access to care.
What a decolonial approach looks like in practice
- We look at your whole life, not just your symptoms: what was happening when the pain began, what you are carrying, and what support you have.
- Trauma is not individual. Much of what we carry comes from what our people survived. We make room for all of it, without treating it as your individual problem to fix.
- We name power. In any healing space, the practitioner holds power. I try to be honest about mine, so it isn't used over you, even unintentionally.
- Consent comes first. You decide what we explore, how deep we go, and when we stop. You can say no to anything, at any time.
- We use more than one kind of knowledge. Pain science sits alongside breath, somatic awareness and both of our lineages of medicine.
- You are the authority on your body. Doctors and tests matter, but you know things about your body no scan can show. My goal is to help you trust that knowing, until you no longer need me.
- The world is allowed in the room. If you are grieving Palestine, exhausted from organizing, or tired of being dismissed by doctors, that belongs here too.
- Care should be accessible. I try to make as much free content as possible and use a sliding scale payment system because healing shouldn't depend on what you can afford.
My understanding of this work has been shaped by my teacher and mentor Hannah Kendaru and community at Inspire Breathwork.
With love,
Leyla
