Part one of my book focuses on whiteness not as a skin colour, but as a worldview. And this week, I was confronted with two brilliant examples of this.

First was when my daughters started watching The Summer I Turned Pretty. The youngest one has been reading the book and was shocked to discover that Belly is Asian. Because of course, she had imagined her as white.

And secondly was when I scrolled through Instagram, landing on that clip of Toni Morrison being interviewed by Jana Wendt on Australian 60 Minutes.

Both of these things highlight how white is the norm and how whiteness is at the centre of everything. White is considered baseline, with white perspectives treated as universal. I know this. I have thought about it (a lot); I have written 37 pages on it, and still, as I went through a round of editing on my book this morning, I was struck by how much I was STILL centring whiteness.

It was subtle - phrases like “I am critical of systems, not people. I believe that people only behave in ways that have been reinforced to them, as acceptable,” and pages dedicated to the description of Empire (ok maybe that one wasn’t so subtle).

But I realised that you, the woman of the global majority who has been in these rooms, who has lived within the systems of Empire her whole life, who has had micro-aggressions thrown at her, who has been downed in white tears, who has had to do so much apologising and managing of white feelings and justifying of her very exsistance, who has had to sit and listen to how tough other white women have had it (as if this is the suffering olymics and we’re being measured for our gold medals) and has done enough emotional labour to last several lifetimes, you do not need me to explain.

You deserve better. You deserve for me to be brave enough to say out loud exactly what you have swallowed your whole life.

Because you, like me, have lived it. You feel it. On a deep, energetic level. In your bones, in your body.

I am just giving you the language.

So today I edited my book. Hard.

Paragraphs. Gone. Apologising, softening. History.

The book is sharp.

It is the most uncompromising and unapologetic I have ever been.

And I thought, if I, someone who actively studies this and seeks it out, can still unconsciously centre whiteness, then it is going to be fucking hard for anyone to do this alone.

This is my gift. This is what I am good at.

I have done so much editing in my work and my own life; I understand all the ways whiteness weasels its way in. I know all the places it is hiding.

If you are white and reading this, understand that you are witnessing, not being addressed. Your comfort is not my concern here.

Women of the Global Majority, I am speaking to you. If you do not decentre whiteness, then you are doomed to reinforce it. Empire made the rules; the unseen architecture, a program that you unconsciously run.

Stop protecting it. Create new structure, new rules, new architecture.

I have two ways to help you.

1. Outside in - Build Your Temple
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   A foundational session - the first of 4 to identify the core subluxation/belief that is driving you right now.
   

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This email is 100% Leandra, from my heart and my head. No AI. Although Substack does have a transcript feature that I used.

By the third “Mum, I’m hungry!” I finally dragged myself away from binge-watching Bridgerton and entered the kitchen. 15 minutes later, I placed a feast of snacks on the table.

“How do you always do that?” my husband exclaimed, “You’re always able to whip something out of nothing.”

As an immigrant child of a single mother, my early childhood was not abundant in material things. We made do with what we had. Creative styling of op-shop finds (before it was cool), spices and fresh herbs to liven up cheap cuts of meat and discounted vegetables - taking crumbs and making them beautiful. It became a skill and an art form. More than just survival, it remains a talent I am proud of.

I am not the only one. I hear the same sentiment from the women I serve, the majority of whom are like me - educated women of the global majority, all in service.

“It’s kind of a double-edged sword, isn’t it?” one of them said to me in a session the other day, “I can do it, I’m proud of it, but would it kill people, God, The Universe, to give me more? I’m tired of making something out of nothing. I’m ready to be deeply resourced, but I don’t want to not be the person who can make crumbs delicious, you know?”

I do know.

Her words named something I’ve felt my whole life but struggled to articulate: the paradox of wanting to be both unshakeable in scarcity and abundant in resources. A refusal to choose, to settle.

Yes, I want to be totally fine if I have nothing. And yes, I want to be deeply, abundantly resourced. These aren’t contradictions but the full spectrum of who I am. I want to be both light and dark, all colours of the rainbow.

But the dominant culture, the conditions of Empire, makes no space for paradox. It demands we choose. It insists on sameness, on the middle ground. A bland shade of millennial grey /“cloud dancer” or however they have rebranded bland beige for this season.

As women of the diaspora, we feel this pressure acutely. We’re told to tone it down, to smooth our edges. Soft voices. Pleasing smiles. Bland opinions and mild ambitions. We’re rewarded for being good girls who play by White Empire’s rules - for living our lives in the narrow middle, with limited bandwidth and carefully constricted energy. As if being less volatile means being more valuable.

We are not built for the mediocre middle. Our wild and expansive nature cannot be domesticated. Clarissa Pinkola Estés reminds us in Women Who Run With the Wolves that by our very nature, we women contain both creation and destruction. We are cyclical creatures. Our power comes from embracing our full, untamed versions—not the nice, watered-down, flattened versions Empire rewards.

But when we tame our width, our wildness, our capacity to hold paradox? We burn ourselves out from the inside: like two sides of Velcro rubbing against each other, creating friction, heat, rage and inflammation in our bodies.

You’ve felt it too, as have I. The rage that rises when it is just assumed we’ll “figure it out” with whatever scraps we’re given, the unexplained symptoms dismissed as ‘just autoimmune’, the bone-deep exhaustion from carrying it all while making it look easy.

So what do we do? Pop psychology, spiritual gurus on TikTok (read: Empire) say shed it! Declutter! Let it go! Start fresh.

And yet, we’ve never really been good at letting anything go. We immigrants, have never been good at ‘shedding’ and ‘decluttering’ (tell me you don’t keep that box because it’s a really good box). It’s more than a quirk. It’s an echo of an elder’s voice. A practice of preservation. A sign of love.

Because my mother keeps everything (she still has my year 8 art books), I used to think discarding things was a sign of wealth and sophistication, white Empire positioning itself, as always, as the opposite of what brown people naturally do, but now I understand: it’s about preservation, about honoring where we have come from, about remembering the gifts of struggle and what they taught us.

Empire is all about discarding. People, clothes, electronics, and everything is available for upgrades when everything serves the god of capitalism. But for women of the global majority who keep ice cream containers to store everything from hair ties to leftovers? We know better.

It’s okay if you can’t get on board with the ‘out with the old, you in with the new you’ marketing.

It’s not about discarding the parts of us that know how to survive, the parts that can turn scraps into miracles. I’m not interested in shedding my resourcefulness so I can replace it with a more Empire-friendly consumer version of myself; that’s not growth. That’s assimilation.

And it’s definitely not about finding some safe middle ground, mixing black and white until they become a forgettable grey.

The answer is expansion, not elimination.

We need to grow so big that the Velcro pieces of ourselves have space. Room enough that they can exist without rubbing raw against each other. So the light and the dark, the scarcity and the abundance, the making-do and the being-deeply-resourced can coexist: not blended as watered-down grey but held separately, distinctly, like all the colours of the rainbow existing in the same sky without bleeding into each other.

So we can be the woman who makes something beautiful from nothing AND the woman who refuses to always have to.

The woman who survived AND the woman who gets to thrive.

The woman who honours where she came from AND the woman who claims what she deserves.

This isn’t a new idea. This paradox that exists within all of us has been written about in many texts. My favourite is The Thunder, Perfect Mind. This ancient poem captures exactly what it feels like to be a woman of the global majority living under the conditions of Empire: the honoured one and the scorned one, the wife and the virgin, the solace of my labour pains. Simultaneously lost and at home

This is what we explore in Listening for Thunder, my three-part workshop series: how to expand our energetic capacity, how to hold paradox, how to live without minimising ourselves or apologising for our fullness.

This is what we do in Listening for Thunder, my three-part workshop series: we practice embodiment work to identify where in our bodies we’re shrinking, we connect with our Intuitive Body Intelligence (because you are your own oracle), and we imagine a future where we’re full and unapologetic, alongside other women who get it. It’s responsive, flowing, and led by what the group needs with a spiritual book club vibes. But most importantly? You’ll finally hear other women say ‘me too’ and know you’re not carrying this paradox alone.

Claim your spot now

Because you’re not meant to be grey, muted, safe. You are a rainbow. And rainbows don’t apologise for taking up the whole sky.

I named our black cat Purr-sepohone after the goddess. The one who is both the goddess of the underworld and the goddess of spring. Of life and death. Let her be the inspiration.

“That feeling when you are completely overwhelmed in the laundry detergent aisle”, a man’s voice crooned from the screen. So slick and yet ridiculous in its confidence of knowing me better than I knew myself.

I turned to my husband, perplexed, “I have never once in my life been completely overwhelmed by laundry detergent”, I said. “I’m sure they are just telling us what to feel so they can sell us stuff”. My husband rolled his eyes at me, “Of course they are, Leandra, that’s what they do”

And it landed in my body like a slap, I felt the bottom fall out of my stomach and the heat rise in my chest: they sell us everything they want us to buy. And I mean, Everything. Not just laundry detergent or cars, they sell us wanting itself. I know you’ve experienced it too, that low hum of not enoughness that lives like a backing track to every purchase you make. This supplement, or sheet set, or workout bra is the solution to all my problems.

If Maslow said we climb toward fulfilment, Empire said, “Climb faster and make it pretty”.

The fantasy of “The Dream Life” - you know the one, white picket fence, 2.3 perfect children, suburbia, Stepford, pastel colour palette. They colonised your imagination and told you it was purpose. From houses to careers to detergent: your “dream life” was someone else’s idea.

The Illusion of Success: Performing the Life That Empire Told Me to Want

I spent my entire adult life trying to find a way to live and work inside capitalism without losing myself. And I tried every version of it. The good immigrant version, the Girlboss version, the spiritual-ascension version, the build-something-beautiful-inside-the-system version. I mastered all of them. I played every role Empire handed me. And every time, something inside me went hollow.

On paper, everything looked perfect: private schools, dream car, big house, a successful practice in the whitest place in Australia, married to a white doctor - the kind of life my mother once dreamed of for me because it meant we finally colour matched. This was the version of safety, security and success that whiteness taught us. You would think this would feel like peace at last, but instead it felt dirty, like wearing someone else’s old socks

And I don’t dismiss that. My mother internalised the rules of the empire and instilled them in me because she had to. bell hooks writes that oppressed people adopt the values of their oppressors to survive. That was my mother. “We are no different from them,” she taught me. “We can beat them at their own game.”

And I did.

I clocked the game.

I never stopped striving and achieving.

I didn’t need rest because I was laser-focused on my goals. And once I had all my material needs sorted: house, husband, career, private school… then maybe, finally, enlightenment, fulfilment, bliss and a great big nap awaited me.

Maslow-as-empire had taught me: rest is a reward, not a right. So I kept climbing. And I did it for years and years.

And I was so good at it. But as I lay in bed at night, staring at my ceiling while my perfect husband and children slept in our big, beautiful house on French Linen sheets, I couldn’t help but wonder, “Why do I feel so…empty?”

It was whiteness, not as a colour but as a worldview, shrouding my body. I wore it like a cloak, the armour of whiteness offered me innocence, safety, comfort and belonging. But it demanded I forget my roots and lineage in return.

But as James Baldwin wrote, “It is the innocence that constitutes the crime.” By playing innocent, I was keeping the very systems that harmed me and others just like me intact. I thought I was becoming successful. Really, I was becoming obedient.

The Apprenticeship: Learning to Survive Inside a Colonial System

I was 23 when we moved to Dublin for my first Chiropractic job. Fresh out of university, bright as a button, I carried that naïve, glittering hope that I was entering a profession rooted in care, curiosity, and integrity. The man who hired my husband and me sold us a dream: evidence-based practice, time to hone our adjusting skills, and a community grounded in spirituality and service - the Holy Trinity of Chiropractic: Science, Art and Philosophy.

I genuinely believed I was going to change the world.

And I thought I had finally found a mentor who embodied what bell hooks calls “education as the practice of freedom”: learning as liberation, the unity of body, mind, and spirit, and shared humanity.

But what we walked into was something else entirely.

My “mentor” was the perfect disciple of the old colonial pedagogy, the old hierarchy of teacher as authority and student as subordinate. He hoarded knowledge (and currency), keeping us late into the night listening to endless monologues about his own greatness, and rarely let us touch patients or bring our own ideas to the table. Instead, we were told to hustle harder to earn our right to a fulfilling career and rent money. I remember walking home to a cold, damp apartment with a plastic shopping bag filled with plastic containers of M&S ready meals, having not seen the sun in days and thinking, “This cannot be the dream”.

It broke my heart (and my bank account ) to leave. But we had to. We returned to Australia, and I quit Chiropractic for the first time. But there was absolutely no time to rest when we had already wasted the better part of a year in Dublin, I told myself there would be plenty of time for that once I had worked hard enough to climb to the level where everyone loved me.

My Dublin mentor was the first, but not the last.

Over the years, I kept finding versions of him in other mentors and coaches. They saw the armour of white innocence I thought I had to wear, the agreeable, palatable, eager-to-please brown girl, and mistook it for my whole self. They either tried to shape me into their ideal student or punish me for not fitting it. Empire might call it mentorship, but I call it conditioning. Because each time, I thought that I was the problem. If I could just perform better, adjust myself, swallow my ideas a little bit more, hold my tongue, I would finally belong.

And I know that you have been in rooms like this before, ones where you minimised your brilliance with people who rewarded your silence.

Let me be clear in saying that none of these mentors were bad people, like me; they were simply playing the role Empire had given them. All of us, dancing to the same drummer. The system itself.

Modern healthcare is built on the same architecture as white supremacy: hierarchy, separation, authority, and extraction. To succeed within it, especially as a brown woman, you are expected to undergo what Frantz Fanon describes as “the colonisation of the mind”. You learn to distrust your own knowing. You fracture yourself from your lineage. You mute anything that marks you as “other.” You try to become whatever the system rewards: obedient, grateful and endlessly amenable.

That apprenticeship was where I first learned the performance of white innocence.

Not whiteness as skin, but whiteness as behaviour. I found the safety I so craved in softness and belonging through erasure.

I softened my accent and my gestures, the head wobbles and wrist flicks, gone.

I even stopped cooking Sri Lankan food and stopped eating with my hands, terrified that my boss and clients would smell curry on my skin. I prioritised being seen as a “professional” over being myself. I was determined to make it work, to be the model apprentice the system wanted. But the armour was heavy. And the more I wore it, the further it dragged me away from myself.

I thought all of this was creating the conditions to be a good practitioner.

But it was actually my first lesson in how white innocence is learned, rehearsed, and required in the healthcare empire.

And that is what I carried into everything that came next.

The Performance: When White Innocence Became a Brand

If my apprenticeship taught me how to wear white innocence, my entrepreneurial years taught me how to sell it.

I grew up on Spice Girl Feminism, I knew every step to “Stop” by heart. Back then, being a girl felt powerful, sparkly, and possible. You could shout “Girl Power!” and wear a cute outfit, and that alone was liberation. So of course, when we moved back to Australia in 2010 and started our first business, The Chiropractic Place, I slipped easily into the era’s favourite costume: the hashtag girlboss.

I told myself I was going to do business differently. I’d “embrace my feminine,” be soft, approachable, quirky, never threatening. But really, I was refining the performance of white innocence that the system had already taught me. Instagram arrived, and it made the performance not only possible but profitable. My strategy became simple: be palatable. Be inspiring. Be safe.

I created The Cosmopolitan Hippy, a curated, optimised, commodifiable version of myself. I wrote a book, and then another. I ran programs, toured Australia, and built a following. And all the while, I told myself that just being a woman in business was the rebellion. That winning at capitalism was empowerment and that the hustle was revolutionary.

What I didn’t realise was that I had simply become capitalism’s most enthusiastic employee.

Every corner of my life became an opportunity. Every conversation, leverage. Every outing, strategy. I lived in a state of total optimisation, which was the same logic healthcare had trained into me, but now, it was dressed up in Cue workwear and called empowerment. Empire doesn’t care whether you work for a corporation or yourself; it just needs you to monetise your life. And with so little time, so little community, so much pressure, I fell for every trap: the overwhelmed mother, the business babe, the clean-wine-at-5 feminist.

Cosmo Hippy looked “alternative,” but the message was identical to the girlbosses of the era: Women can have it all.

I never even stopped to ask, “But what is ‘it all’?”

The truth, ‘it all’ was the life capitalism marketed to us in the first place. A dream life we did not dream ourselves, but were sold.

And again, I kept telling myself: I’ll rest once the structures and systems are sorted. Once the nest egg is bigger, the practice is busier, the brand is sleeker. Maslow’s hierarchy had colonised my nervous system. I believed rest came after survival; it definitely was not something that would help me survive - for that, I had 85 supplements I could buy to bio-hack my way to productivity.

I remember a story from Chiropractic school about a man who carried a model spine everywhere, because it was an easy way to turn every interaction into a sale. This was the type of “marketing advice” we were given at Chiropractic school, not even your weekly grocery shop was safe from optimisation, so this became my internal script: overlay your humanity with strategy. Never leave money on the table. I may not have carried a spine, but I carried the same indoctrination. This is what happens when Empire lives in your body: even your joy becomes billable hours

It hurts me to say it (because I really loved the pink shoes), but the girlboss was never a rebel; she was capitalism’s pink mascot, crowned for her ability to sell the system back to itself.

When we won our Telstra Business Award in 2012, I wrote a cracking script, bold, witty, but still humble. However, I didn’t even read it. The armour of white innocence I wore had become so convincing, even I fell for it. I palmed the speach off to my husband, and on the night, when I did open my mouth, I giggled behind my hand like some whimsical sidekick. The first time I watched the YouTube clip of us, I thought, “Who the hell is that?” The woman on that stage was white innocence personified, and I had got so good at playing her that I hardly recognised myself.

I had become a brand. And in branding, nothing is off-limits. A good smoothie? Instagram post. A decent dinner? Make it a course: “One Chicken, Five Meals.” A birthday cake? Launch a paleo cake business. With two pregnancies, all-day sickness, two babies who never slept, a six-figure practice, two books, and a business award, I was a machine.

By the time we sold The Chiropractic Place and moved to Ballarat, I was done. Completely burnt out. Depleted. Burnout wasn’t a failure: it was my body staging a coup against the hierarchy.

I told myself that with my second daughter, I’d slow down and regroup.

But white innocence doesn’t disappear with exhaustion.

It just finds a new outfit.

I traded the pink high heels for linen maxi dresses and entered my next era of Spiritual Escapism.

But that is a story for another time…

Maslow didn’t build a pyramid.

Capitalism did.

And Empire trained us to climb it.

If you’ve been climbing too: toward a life that looks beautiful but feels hollow, toward success that exhausts you, toward a dream that doesn’t feel like yours, know that I see you.

And I know that pain.

But here’s what I know now, in my bones: we can come back to our Intutive Body Intelligence. We can return to the place beneath the performance. We can remember the lives we were meant to live. Before Empire told us who and what to be.

Empire lives in us all, and it is only through connection and community that we can uncover and unlearn it.

If somewhere inside you, a voice is saying, “This cannot be the dream,” then maybe, finally, it is time to reclaim your imagination and create the conditions for a dream life that is truly your own.

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This year on my birthday, I am holding a pay-what-you-can Masterclass: Where Empire Lives in Your Body. Over 3 hours, we will go through my 5-step Condition Cure process, specifically designed for practitioners from all walks of life to see where Empire has embedded itself in their values, work and body. Empire is crumbling; we must create the conditions to build a new future, one that is not built on the old rules in new spiritual clothes.

If you want this, but don’t know where to start, start here.

I am not ashamed to admit that I love a little bit of tea. What I didn’t realise is that this “tea” is one of the oldest spiritual traditions, one that is deeply embodied in my bones, far more radical and transformative than anything I have been taught by institutions.

However, it has always been a “guilty pleasure”, something seen as low-vibe, petty and shameful. As a “spiritual girly”, we don’t gossip; instead, we rise above, take the high road, “let them” and bring good vibes only to the party. This shows everyone how classy we are, demure and tight-lipped, floating on a cloud of patchouli and our own superiority.

While contemporary culture flattens gossip into a petty or immoral act, historically, its ancestral, sociological, and spiritual roles were far more complex and meaningful.

Gossip is a collective practice, a way communities once shared knowledge, protected one another, and preserved culture. But capitalism, with its worship of hyper-individualism, has taught us to distrust the collective and glorify the self. In breaking down communal knowledge systems, it severed one of the oldest spiritual technologies women held.

Gossip is not petty; it is a site of safety, culture, and truth-telling. Patriarchy and whiteness knew this, which is why they worked so hard to dismantle it. And today’s spiritual obsession with “staying in your own lane” or “protecting your peace” isn’t enlightenment, it’s the aftershock of that same erasure.

When capitalism isolates us, spirituality collapses into performance, and when women stop speaking, harm multiplies.

The word “gossip” comes from Old English godsibb — meaning “god-sibling,” originally referring to a godparent. The word evolved to mean “close female friend” or “birthing partner”. A “gossip” was pretty much your bestie. You would go down to wash clothes with them, mend things around the fire, prepare food and look after children. They would be with you through times of birth, death, ritual, celebration and daily life. During these times, information, stories, ideas and knowledge would be exchanged in safe spaces. You were always safe with your gossip.

In the 1500s, gossip was so powerful that, according to Feminist Scholar Silvia Federici, “in Italy, in the fourteenth century, [women] could still go independently to court to denounce a man if he assaulted or molested them.” And she probably took along her bestie, who encouraged.

So what happened?

Patriarchy, colonisation, the church, the rise and rise (and rise) of white male centralised power, it’s a tale as old as time. From the late 1500s onwards, the white men in power quickly realised that women sharing information equalled women gaining power, and they could not have that. Women freely speaking amongst themselves put the church’s monopoly on the truth in jeopardy.

So they outlawed it, labelling gossip as immoral and sinful.

The church preached that a woman’s place was in the home, her duty only to her husband and children and that talking to other women was frivolous, idle chitchat. If you were caught gossiping, you would be punished, maybe with a Scold’s bridle, maybe with a bonfire around your feet. This is where we learnt to keep our mouths shut, lest they be shut for us.

The white patriarchal powers made friendship with women dangerous and illegal. No longer were we safe, held and empowered by our sisters because those relationships could get you killed. It may have started in Europe, but colonisation exported this moral code across the world.

That legacy lives on today, in our DNA, for all women, so much so that we police each other (think social media shaming and labels of ‘low vibe’ and ‘toxic’), but doubly so for women of the global majority.

Gossip and The Global Majority

I sit in my auntie’s kitchen, I’m 4 years old, dressed in my favourite cotton sun dress, the yellow one with the frills, I swing my legs as I absent-mindedly pick at the gota kola leaves.

“I saw her at the shops the other day, her hair was a mess and she looked terrible”, my nana says to my mum.

“Hmmm…” my mum and my aunties all murmur together.

“Yes, I hear her sister is sick back in Sri Lanka, she is sending money for medicine, but it’s not enough, they’re struggling too, you know.” My auntie chimes in.

“She’s too proud to say anything na?”

A few more murmurs and “what to do, men?” and within two minutes, the women of my family have decided who will drop food when and how much money they can each spare to send back to Sri Lanka.

“It’s not much, but it’s something”, my mum says.

This is how my people gossip. Not a petty commentary but a communal triage. This is women’s informal governance; it is how, in the face of no formal support or trust in institutions, this is how my people managed crisis and distributed resources.

For us of the global majority, gossip is a survival adaptation in diaspora. It serves three distinct purposes: authenticity, knowledge and warning.

Authenticity

“One reason women have traditionally gossiped more than men is because gossip has been a social interaction wherein women have felt comfortable stating what they really think and feel. … Later, they gossip, stating at that moment their true thoughts. … This division between a false self … and a more authentic self … need not exist when we cultivate positive self-esteem.”

— Bell Hooks, All About Love: New Visions

Hooks speaks of gossip as an act of truth-telling. In a safe space, with our most trusted, we can say exactly what we are thinking, no filter. We can admit we’re struggling, we can ask for help, we can share our worries and troubles. As the proverb goes, “A problem shared is a problem halved”, and shared suffering builds community.

This is what happened in my auntie’s kitchen.

Knowledge

“discredited … information … dismissed as ‘lore’ or ‘gossip’ or ‘magic’ or ‘sentiment.’ … If my work is to faithfully reflect the aesthetic tradition of Afro-American culture … it must centralize and animate information discredited by the West …”

— Toni Morrison, “Memory, Creation, and Writing”

I stared at the elegant, tall blond woman in front of me, my eyes wide, my mind whirling, “Had she really just asked me what she asked me?”

On the surface, the question: “Where did you learn Pranyama?” was innocent enough, but how do you explain lineage, cell memory, tradition and lived experience? How could I explain to her, a white woman who had already told me how superior the Ayurvedic colleges in Germany are to those in South Asia, that some things do not need to be taught by Western Institutions when you grow up within the lineage of such traditions?

I didn’t know it at the time, but what happened here was a result of epistemicide: the destruction of Indigenous knowledge systems.

When Europeans colonised places like the Global South, they didn’t just take land and strip natural resources; they also set about erasing the culture of where they had colonised. This meant outlawing certain words and practices, as well as rituals and gatherings, while demonising and discrediting others, giving them different names, like magic or gossip. Over time, this meant that many traditions and lore from people of the global majority were lost to their people. This is what Morrison is speaking of; this is epistemicide.

To make things worse, the white colonisers trivialised and fetishised our sacred practices, the very ones we were punished for practising and then stole them. To add insult to injury, they then appropriated these practices, repackaged them and sold them back to us through white washed universities in European capital cities and have the gall to tell us over cups of golden milk that they are superior. And yes, it really is that deep.

The coloniser sought to destroy our methods of oral knowledge transfer, labelling it as trivial gossip when it is, in fact, a source of truth, memory, and heritage.

Warning

“I think about how women can build power, help one another, and work toward justice. But it is less common for us to examine the ways we might wield the power we already have. Among the most potent of these powers is the knowledge of our own experiences.”

- Moira Donegan

In 2017, Moira Doegan published a public spreadsheet titled “Shitty men in media”. The list was a sort of modern-day whisper network where women could share their experiences with, well, shitty men in media. This idea of naming and shaming is not new; in 1936, the Negro Motorist Green-Book was published so that black families travelling through the United States would know which businesses were safe for them to frequent during the time of segregation.

In this way, gossip kept us safe.

However, while traditional whisper networks protected white women, often at the expense of women of colour, Doegan’s anonymised spreadsheet gave everyone a seat at the table.

But before books and spreadsheets, women would speak to each other about who the harmful people were in the community, and they would call out bad behaviour. They would also caution against dangerous plants and remedies. It was about safety.

The Renaissance of Gossip

Gossip needs a rebrand. What once functioned as one of the oldest technologies of women’s survival has been squashed into a Mean Girls plotline. The truth is simple: most of what we condemn as “gossip” today is not gossip at all; it is slander, projection, cruelty, or plain misinformation. Let’s call that what it is. But real gossip, sacred gossip, is something entirely different. It is truth-telling. It is accountability. It is women gathering with women to pass on knowledge, story, memory, warning, and wisdom.

And this difference matters because modern spiritual culture has collapsed the categories in a politically convenient way.

This isn’t an accident. Colonisation has always targeted communal communication systems, like kitchen-table stories, lineage knowledge, and auntie chit chat, because isolating women was the easiest way to control communities, suppress resistance, and sever culture from itself.

Today we see the same logic recycled through pastel-washed spiritual slogans:

“She protects her peace.”
“She stays in her own lane.”
“She takes the high road.”
“We don’t gossip because we’re all one.”

But who does that silence protect?

Who gets to stay “peaceful”?

And who pays the price for your private serenity?

Because let me be clear: when you refuse to speak about harm, you are not protecting your peace, you are protecting perpetrators. You are turning harm into private secrets instead of collective information, and you are making accountability virtually impossible. The addiction to “good vibes only” is nothing more than a spiritual gag order. It is the church’s old command of “women must be silent”, just repackaged for Instagram.

And this silence always harms women of the global majority first. Our cultures depended on gossip as a community-wide intelligence network, a warning system, and a method of distributing care. But white spiritual culture wants the practices without the people, the rituals without the responsibilities, the golden milk without the aunties.

They steal our traditions and mock the communication systems that kept those traditions alive.

They spiritualise silence and pathologise our speech.

They call it “oneness,” but what they really mean is sameness, whiteness, a sea of beige.

“We are all one”, but only if no one disturbs the hierarchy or the cash flow.

So let me offer this instead: Gossip is one of the oldest spiritual protection technologies we have.

It is how women kept each other safe when institutions never would.

It is how we tracked danger, shared resources, and passed knowledge down through generations. Long before HR departments pretended to care, we had gossip.

It is how our families survived.

And yes, our gossip still feeds families, while their “gossip” sells tabloids.

We have all been harmed by patriarchy and capitalism. But women of colour have been harmed again and again by colonialism’s demand that we be silent, discreet, polite, and grateful. Keep it buttoned up, stay classy.

It’s time to remember where our power actually sits. It is in our voices, in our stories, in our whispers and in our warnings.

If “high vibration” means not warning other women, then patriarchy has truly won.

If spirituality tells you to stay silent, it’s not spirituality, it’s control.

A community that listens to its women survives while a community that silences them repeats history.

So gossip, real gossip, is not low-vibe, petty, or shameful.

It is ancestral.
It is communal.
It is political.
It is holy.

And reclaiming it may be one of the most radical acts of sovereignty we have left.

Is it sacred gossip, or are you just being a bitch?
The checklist.

✔️ SACRED GOSSIP

(Truth-telling as protection, connection, community care)

1. Is this information true?
   Sacred gossip is grounded in lived experience, not assumptions or fantasies.

2. Is the purpose protection or care?

   You’re sharing because someone needs to know and not because it makes you feel superior.

3. Would you say this to a close friend to keep them safe?
   If yes, that’s community intelligence, not cruelty.

4. Does this conversation redistribute resources, support, or awareness?

   Sacred gossip leads to action: food drops, warnings, help, comfort, planning and/or boundaries.

5. Are you speaking from your body, intuition, or lineage memory?

   Sacred gossip is a spiritual technology; it comes from deep knowing, and you will physically feel in alignment when you speak.

6. Are you sharing in a trusted container?

   Auntie-kitchen energy, not public humiliation energy.

7. Are you naming harm so it cannot continue?

   Sacred gossip interrupts cycles of abuse.

8. Would your grandmother or aunties approve?

   If the elders would call it “necessary,” it probably is.

9. Is this conversation expanding truth, not shrinking someone’s humanity?

   Sacred gossip makes the world bigger, safer, clearer.

10. Does it align with your values, not your insecurities?

    This is the core test. Sacred gossip feels solid and aligned in the body.

OR ARE YOU JUST BEING A BITCH?

(Projection, petty cruelty, ego games, violence in disguise)

1. Are you inventing details to make the story more dramatic?

   That’s not gossip. That’s slander with glitter.

2. Are you sharing this because you’re threatened or jealous?

   If the motive is insecurity, it’s not sacred, it’s petty.

3. Would you die of shame if the person walked into the room?

   That’s your sign. If you’re not comfortable saying to their face, it’s not in right relationship.

4. Are you using “truth” as an excuse to punch down?

   Honesty without compassion is cruelty dressed in rose quartz.

5. Are you trying to bond through meanness?

   This is how white girl cliques built empires of exclusion. Don’t replicate it.

6. Are you tearing someone apart for entertainment?

   If laughter is the goal instead of safety, that’s not gossip, that’s blood sport.

7. Are you sharing someone’s vulnerability without consent?

   Huge red flag. That’s betrayal, not bonding.

8. Are you generalising or stereotyping?

   If your “gossip” relies on racism, colourism, classism, misogyny, or internalised bias, it’s harm, full stop.

9. Are you framing abuse as “drama”?

   This usually means you don’t want to take responsibility for ending the harm.

10. Does your body feel tight, twisted, or performative while you say it?

    Sacred gossip feels like truth. Being a bitch feels like contraction.

    ---

If you felt this in your bones, if something ancient stirred, if your grandmother’s grandmother leaned in while you were reading, then this conversation isn’t finished.

These ideas live as vibration in the body. They rise to a crescendo in the nervous system. They echo in the places you’ve been taught to be quiet.

If you’re feeling the pull to go deeper into your own lineage of truth-telling, boundary-breaking, and shadow-clearing…

If you’re ready to unlearn the colonial conditioning around “silence,” “niceness,” and “being above it”…

Then book a 1:1 Intuitive Body Intelligence session with me.

Together, we’ll explore where your voice was domesticated, where your intuition was dimmed, and where your power has been waiting, very patiently, for you to stop apologising and start listening.

If you can feel the ancestors tapping your shoulder, whispering, then this is the work…

The phrase that has been embroidered on throw pillows, etched into water bottles and has over 23.4 million hashtags on Instagram, but, my dearest white women, this phrase was never meant for you. At least…not like that.

I get it. When I started my career as a Chiropractor in 2010, I used this phrase like everyone else: a simple way to convey to burnt-out, people-pleasing, type A women that it was ok to take a little time out to rest. It was revolutionary, and back then, that message mattered.

But now, corporate money-making machines have hijacked the term to sell you shit you don’t need, and media outlets use it to convince you it’s in your best interest to look the other way when global powers commit genocide and defund public health programs. Because that stuff is “so low vibe” and “I’m protecting my peace hashtag selfcare”.

In 2025, the term self-care has become code for “it’s ok not to care about anyone else to protect your privileged peace” and a justification for our rampant overconsumption, because “you’re worth it”.

Photo by CRYSTALWEED cannabis on Unsplash

Self-care has become a lifestyle brand: colonial capitalism in a cashmere robe.

But self-care was never about bubble baths and ‘little treats’; the history of self-care is about resistance.

It is about survival, and it is deeply rooted in black activism.

A Short but Real History of Self-Care

Self-care did not start with bubble baths. It has always been about addressing the failings of the systems that should be in place to protect us and keep us healthy.

The term “self-care” emerged in 1950s America as a response to a 240% rise in admissions to state mental health facilities1. Most of these people were poor and/or chronically ill, with little to no ability to care for themselves.

These institutions were charged with caring for the most vulnerable in the community, but instead, they chewed them up and spat them out. Here, “self-care” was brushing your hair or taking a walk, simple tasks to claw back a scrap of humanity in dehumanising conditions. When most of these institutions closed in the 60s, the majority of these people were on their own, abandoned by the government and their communities2.

Most governments have never been great at taking care of people. Especially not the most vulnerable. Funding cuts, broken systems, and political lip service are practically a global tradition at this point.

The Black Panthers saw this clearly. They watched their communities being starved, evicted, criminalised, and left to die, and they didn’t wait around for the state to grow a conscience.

They took matters into their own hands.

The Panthers had the radical idea that health for all requires justice for all. That you can’t have health and wellness without equality.

In 1965, they started opening community health centres across the United States of America. They screened people for sickle cell anemia, ran ambulance services, offered first aid, taught economics and self-defence, and handed out groceries and clothing.

At their peak, they had thirteen free clinics providing medical care, housing support, and legal aid, addressing the actual roots of sickness: poverty, oppression, and systemic neglect.

Huey Newton said it plain in 1970:

“in order to change it, there must be a total transformation. But until we can achieve that total transformation, we must exist. In order to exist, we must survive; therefore, we need a survival kit… Where there is courage, where there is self‐respect and dignity, there is a possibility that we can change the conditions and win.”

For the Panthers, self-care wasn’t a spa day.

It was having a secure roof over your head, food in your belly, and the education to fight back.

It was survival through service and community care3.

Their free breakfast program fed over 20,000 children every morning so kids could go to school full, focused, and hopeful. Because how do you lead a revolution on an empty stomach?

By 1972, they amended their Ten-Point Program to make it official:

WE WANT COMPLETELY FREE HEALTH CARE FOR ALL BLACK AND OPPRESSED PEOPLE

We believe that the government must provide, free of charge, for the people, health facilities which will not only treat our illnesses, most of which have come about as a result of our oppression, but which will also develop preventive medical programs to guarantee our future survival.4

That was self-care. Not a jade roller or a scented candle or a bubble bath, but survival through service to the community.

The Audre Lorde Effect.

Then came Audre Lorde. A black, queer, poet, writer, activist and mother who, while dying of liver cancer, wrote:

“Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”

A quote that has been used to sell a lot of bubble bombs. But the part about “political warfare” somehow did not make it onto the candle label. Lorde was talking about surviving her cancer long enough to see systemic change; her words were a call to arms, to fight a system that did not care if she lived or died, a system that was designed to destroy her.

She wrote:

“Racism. Cancer. In both cases, to win the aggressor must conquer, but the resisters need only survive.”

For Lorde and the Black Panthers, self-care was not about self-obsession, but how we care for ourselves so we can be helpful, caring members of a community, create systems and conditions that we can thrive in and serve the whole.

Why we need self-care now

Fast forward 70 years, and those same systems that made self-care necessary in the first place still exist, and they are still keeping us sick.

Only now, health and wellness have become a commodity. The wellness industry is worth $11 billion and has somehow convinced us that rebellion comes in rose gold packaging.

As comedian Phoebe Robinson put it, we’ve turned it into:

“an around-the-clock gig… an addiction that’s aided by technology and fueled by monetization.”

We’ve turned survival into a shopping spree.

And dearest White Women, you know I love you, but you helped. Capitalism took a radical act born from Black survival and turned it into a lifestyle brand, and you bought it, one bergamot-scented candle at a time.

And the real kicker is, the people who really need self-care, the poor, the oppressed, the marginalised, the very people who Lorde and the Panthers sought to protect, are left out of this modern-day self-care conversation, that is, unless they have a spare €700 to spend on the latest vagus nerve stimulator.

So, my dearest White Women, let me hold your hand as I say this: your weekly rose essential oil bath is not revolutionary. No bubble bath will wash away systemic oppression. No face mask will fix late-stage capitalism. And no amount of palo santo will cleanse the guilt of co-opting what was once sacred.

Self-care was never meant to make you more comfortable in your privilege. It was meant to fortify you, to survive long enough to dismantle the systems that keep you sick. Because that niggling feeling that something is very wrong is your humanity begging you not to look away from a world that is on fire.

Your peace means nothing if it comes at the expense of someone else’s survival.

So sure, take your bubble bath, make sure you rest and get enough sunlight and water, but only if you then get up and do the work. Use your privilege and your Instagram profile for good. Write letters, share posts, sign petitions, educate yourself, check on your neighbours, anything that will make your community a better place.

No more soothing yourself out of awareness, babe. Fuel yourself for change.

If you’re ready to trade comfort for consciousness, to turn your healing into holy disruption, then come work with me.

Of course, modern spirituality would have you believing that this is all terribly “low vibe” of me and that I should just “Let Them”. After being called judgmental more than once, I thought, “Leandra, maybe this anger is misplaced”.

So I clicked on a few link-in-bios to see who’s behind these sponsored posts of White Women with hands on their hearts, crystals around their necks, claiming to be healers, transformational coaches and starseeds. And you know what, I found exactly what I thought I would. Chat GPT captions of fluff, absolutely no qualifications other than “after my own awakening,” and endless lists of traditional wisdom that have been commoditised and appropriated for mass consumption, with absolutely no respect paid to the origins of these practices. Oh, and various courses on how to make yourself feel better because you deserve it, babes.

And it makes me livid.

As a brown woman whose grandmother was an ayurvedic healer and whose great-grandfather was an apothecary, I hold 2 Bachelor’s Degrees and a Master’s in Health Science and Complimentary Medicine, plus several certificates in intuition, natural and energetic healing as well as 16 years working in the industry, winning a business award and writing three books and instead of being able to rest in this wealth of knowledge, I’m competing with 26 year old Becky on TikTok who just got off the plane from 4 days in Bali and has decided to become an Kundalini Shakti Feminine Emodiment Body Worker Sound Womb Healer.

Becky and I are not the same.

But Becky has better branding. She looks better in a bikini, and her soft-focus reels of women screaming/releasing their feminine trauma and writhing on yoga mats garner 1000 likes in 12 hours. Becky makes promises like “awaken your divine feminine power” and “regulate your nervous system in just 3 days”, despite knowing nothing about the Central Nervous System past the words ‘nervous system’.

I cannot compete with the Beckys of the world.

And quite frankly, I don’t want to. I have spoken on this before, mainly in intimate in-person spaces, and podcasts that have never seen the light of day. Each time, well-meaning white women have defended their culturally appropriating gurus, telling me how wonderful their kitchari recipe is and that I should be practising more tolerance, vibrating with love and light, because there is room for us all. And afterall, “we’re all one”.

Meanwhile, I slowly pick up the pieces, helping clients who have been hurt by these untrained, unregulated “healers”, undoing the damage of dangerous diet advice and energy practices with no knowledge of nervous system function or safety; shit that is just done for likes and performance.

I have silenced myself. Convincing myself that no one will listen to the angry, middle-aged, chubby brown woman who is obviously “just jealous”. I have twisted myself in knots trying to be ok with the way things are, telling myself that if I stay true, focus on myself and my work, my people will find me. I have tried to rise above it all, vibrate higher, and just “Let Them”, but all it has done is create the conditions where these things continue. And people get hurt, their wallets get lighter, and my rage continues.

Rage that I have ignored for far too long. What I have come to realise is that this is not petty jealousy, but sacred rage. The type that crumbles empires. It is time that the $6.3 TRILLION wellness empire became dust.

I cannot just sit back while the world burns and pretend that nothing is happening. I cannot just allow the systems that keep churning out “Beckys” to keep thriving.

A system that fetishises the practices of the global majority, stripping them of meaning and commercialising sacred wisdom, while shunning and villainising the cultures that own them.

A system that only focuses on individual personalised growth while ignoring systemic racism and inequality.

A system that applauds ignoring real-world problems by prioritising “inner peace” over action.

A system that I cannot and will not be a part of any more.

I will not play the spiritual TikTok game, performing spirituality for the wealthy white women in linen.

In my darkest moments, I have wanted to quit. I’ve already run away to a foreign land, desperate to find something else, a new way of existing and creating value to provide for my family. I have even applied for several jobs, thinking I am not cut out for this fight (newsflash, I am unemployable). But this calling, this mission, it won’t leave me alone.

This sacred rage is a blessed messenger, showing me what I really care about and where my gifts and knowledge can truly make a difference.

So I am doing 2 things.

1. I am writing a book - working title “I Don’t See Colour: The weaponisation of the all is one law in modern spirituality.”

2. I am distilling my 16 years in Chiropractic into a modality. I don’t know what it is called (although I’m leaning towards Intuitive Body Intelligence - an homage to the institute and the woman who informed so much of the modalities theory), and I have no idea if the world wants it. But I know that my soul will die if I don’t do this.
   My notes app looks like this.

This is my life’s work. A decolonisation of health and wellness. A system of healing that flips our healing paradigm upside down. A return to what my great-grandfather and grandmother knew to be true. That our individual healing is inevitable if the collective conditions are good.

But right now, the conditions are pretty shit.

If you believe the social commentary on TikTok, the world as we know it is already in collapse, and we have at best 5 years left of business as usual. The thought of sitting around my living room constantly focusing on my own anxiety or digestive issues is like, to quote Gary Renard, “moving furniture around a burning building”.

I am by no means diminishing individual pain, but has it ever occurred to you that all your issues and symptoms keep coming back, even after you’ve done every single breathwork and mindfulness and body work class, because the systems you live in do not create the conditions for your healing? It’s telling a goldfish it just needs more somatic healing sessions when it lives in a fetid, putrid swamp of a tank.

Are you with me?

* If you want to know more about the upcoming training, send me a message. The waitlist will open soon.

** It’s not like I don’t use ChatGPT, I do. I just have a problem with it being used to “hack” anything, like outsourcing your intuition.

*** BIWPOC Commentators like dinah.akua, divyabala, sihapw and nikyyoga have really inspired me to step up and write things like this so I acknowlege all the work they haveput into this space.

**** I do not know anyone named Becky.