Colonisation and the loss of our own wisdom

My heritage is Indian — yogic, rooted in a civilisation that developed Ayurveda with eight distinct lines of enquiry, including bhoota vidya: the study of what obstructs a human being's psychological wellbeing. This was holistic medicine before the phrase existed. It understood the person in their environment, their relationships, their inner life - all the ecosystems they intersected with, impacted and were impacted by.

And yet, when I became ill in my thirties, neither my family nor the systems around me had the language and ancient cultural wisdom to hold what was happening. The wisdom was there — it was in our cultural DNA – our root — but colonisation had fractured the inheritance. We had learned to distrust it, or forgotten it entirely.

I see this pattern in many of my clients across gender and geographies from South Asian, African, Caribbean, and other colonised backgrounds. We arrive at therapy — a predominantly Euro-Western, system of Whiteness-originated institution — carrying ancient wisdom and complex intersectional traditions that predate it by millennia, and we are asked to translate ourselves into its often binary and simplistic frameworks.

Part of what I try to offer is a space where that translation is not required. Where your spiritual framework, your ancestral knowledge, your cultural way of making sense of suffering — these are not obstacles to the work. They are the knowing. The transforming and transformative pieces. They are the work.