Kerri Kelly Transcript

Kerri Kelly  0:00  
One of the most horrific lies I think that wellness tells us that we can prescribe personal solutions to deeply systemic, cultural and collective wounds.

Omkari Williams  0:29  
Hello, and welcome to Stepping Into Truth, the podcast where we have conversations on social justice and how we all get free. I'm your host Omkari Williams, and I'm really happy that you're here with me today. Over my years coaching people who want to make the world a better place, one of the things I've noticed is that a lot of people feel like activism might just be for people who are famous. But I'm here to tell you that that is not the case. Especially now we need all hands on deck. We need the contribution that you can make. And I hope that these podcast episodes inspire you to step out and find your way of making a difference in the world. 

Omkari Williams  1:09  
Before we get to today's conversation, I want to tell you about a new podcast that I really think is important. InCopNegro: Black and Blue follows host Dominic Moore Dunson, a Black father on his journey of learning how to talk to his son about police. Featuring interviews with Black police officers, local government and community leaders, Dominic takes listeners on the journey of asking what is safety? Now we live in a time where we're having deep discussions about policing in our country. And after the death of George Floyd, that conversation entered the lives of families across the globe. If you're a parent, a teacher, a coach or anyone who engages with young people, I really encourage you to listen to this important new podcast. 

Omkari Williams  1:56  
Now, onto today's conversation. My guest today, Kerri Kelly, is the founder of CTZNWell, a movement that is democratizing wellbeing for all. A descendant of generations of firemen and first responders Kerri has dedicated her life to kicking down doors and fighting for justice. She has been teaching yoga for over 20 years. She is a community organizer, wellness activist, and author of American Detox: The Myth of Wellness and How We Can Truly Heal. Kerri is also recognized across communities for her inspired work to bridge transformational practice with social justice. Her leadership has inspired a movement that is actively organizing around issues of racial and economic justice, healthcare as a human right, civic engagement and more. Kerri is a powerful facilitator, TED speaker, and is the host of the prominent podcast citizen, that is spelled CTZN. You can learn more about her work at KerriKelly.co. And at Ctznwell.org. And that information will be in the episode notes for you. And it is my great pleasure to welcome Kerri to the podcast. 

Omkari Williams  3:11  
Hi, Kerri, how are you today?

Kerri Kelly  3:14  
I'm great. Omkari Thank you so much for having me.

Omkari Williams  3:16  
Oh, I'm so happy that you're here. I completely devoured your book. Devoured it. So I'm going to just jump right in because there's so much I want to talk about. And we could probably spend hours and we don't have all that time. And where I want to start is this. And you say this very early on in your book, you say, and I'm quoting, this book is not a rejection of wellness, but a reclaiming of it. Because we can't talk about wellness until we talk about the violence of white supremacy. We can't talk about wellness until we talk about the myth of normalcy. We can't talk about wellness until we talk about the addiction to perfectionism. We can't talk about wellness until we talk about the exploitation of labor and the degradation of our planet. We can't talk about wellness until we talk about the very real well being gap that determines who gets to be well. And who doesn't close quotes. I know that's a lot. But it feels so important to start there. Because to me, that's the context for your whole book. And that is your contention is that wellness is a much broader and more complex subject than we generally recognize. And until we start engaging with the complexities, we're never actually going to get to where we want to go. So let's start there. Tell me what you mean when you write those words.

Kerri Kelly  4:41  
Well, it's funny, I saw a meme the other day. That said something like, "let's normalize critique", which I loved, right? 

Omkari Williams  4:50  
I like that .

Kerri Kelly  4:50  
I think often, especially in dominant culture, we avoid critique and conflict, we consider it bad. And, and I'll be honest, a lot of what I grappled with in writing this book was how to be critical of the dominant culture of wellness, or the industry of wellness, if you will, rightfully so, because it's, it's toxic, and it's riddled with issues. And also how to appreciate the fact that I was changed by a lot of the practices, right? That brought me to wellness, right. I was transformed, I was healed in many ways. And so I just want to name that because that was a contradiction that I had to navigate as I was writing this book. 

Kerri Kelly  5:30  
And I think that first sentence, this is not a rejection, but a reclaiming sort of speaks to the yearning that called me to this question, right, which was, you know, wellness isn't making us well in its current iteration. And yet, we all deserve to be well, and so what does it look like? Right? Like what is the way in which we can reclaim wellness? Or reimagine wellness is actually the word I got to at the end of the book, that creates the conditions for everyone to thrive. And what that calls us to do if we're really asking and honoring that question, is to confront everything that's in the way of our collective wellness, not just our personal wellness, the wellness in our bubble, or on our mat or on our cushion. But a wellness that understands that our well being is bound, that our liberation is bound, that our future, our collective survival, is bound up with one another. 

Kerri Kelly  6:18  
And so as I got on this path, and I tell a lot of stories throughout the book that kind of demonstrates what I would call like my unraveling, it's sort of like I discover wellness, and I'm like, Oh, my God, you know, and then I start to fall apart and unravel and try to pick up the pieces along the way. But much of sort of my unbecoming my unlearning my unraveling in the pursuit of true wellness, of the actual truth was to come up against the ways in which white supremacy is deeply situated within the dominant culture of wellness within the industries of wellness within the spaces, the leadership of wellness. How capitalism, colonialism and cultural appropriation, individualism, right, all of these, all of these ideologies and systems that have shaped our reality in America are very much alive and well, within the wellness world, despite what wellness is selling us, which is often a false promise that we can rise above these things. We can't. So much of what I tried to write about, were to expose the ways in which in fact, the wellness industry as we know it as this sort of $4.3 trillion industry globally, is in fact, deeply shaped by these very toxic cultures.

Omkari Williams  7:36  
It's interesting that you say that, because I think that when people hear the word wellness, they have such a narrow definition of it. And that is largely because we are told that it's about our personal wellness, when you go to the doctor, and the doctor says, how are you? And they're asking about you. They're not asking about your family, they're not asking about your community, they're not asking about you, and the context, often of your work. So it's always this very specific, very narrow perspective, rather than looking at the whole person and the whole community and the whole entity. So I think that that's a very important context to hold, in general. But certainly, as you and I have this conversation, Kerri. 

Omkari Williams  8:25  
I want to go back for people to understand a little bit about your story, because your story, your journey to wellness began on September 11. And that was a truly traumatic event that hit you in a particularly personal way. And there was so much fear that day, particularly for those of us who were in New York, but that day just amplified something that lives at the center of our lives. And what I think that is is fear, and the way it impacts our everyday lives and helps maintain our inequitable systems, both small and large, really intersects with wellness, and you came up against that on September 11. And in the months after, would you just talk a little bit about that?

Kerri Kelly  9:11  
Yeah, and I know, I'm talking to a fellow New Yorker, so and you know, the world was impacted by this day. And that was also when I think the most powerful things about 9/11. And what 9/11 means to a lot of us because we all shared an experience, perhaps in different ways, but we were all changed by that day. And my story was really obviously shaped by what happened that day. And then many days and years after, which is sort of the course of this book. 

Kerri Kelly  9:36  
What I'll share to start is that, you know, 9/11 happened when I was 25 years old. And the first 25 years of my life I spent sort of like, I want to say, living in a stupor, right? Like living in an illusion that I was safe, and that there was security and that there was this way of being in the world and I had to just follow the rules and climb the ladder. And that was what I was here to do. And that was how I was trained and socialized. It was what my family my community encouraged me to do. It was just how I saw the world, right? It was how the world was reflected back to me. So 9/11 was a massive disruption of that sort of picture, perfect American dream life that I had been striving for for 25 years. And on that day, it's funny, because you're right, it's about fear. And I don't even know if I would use that word to describe what I felt on that day. Because I think what I felt on that day, was deeply vulnerable. It was like, we were exposed. Like, no longer were we the like, invincible big city, where if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere. And if you know New Yorkers, you know, that they're like, tough as nails. You know, I mean,

Omkari Williams  10:51  
Yes, we are. 

Kerri Kelly  10:51  
Yes, we are. And we're and we're often fearless. Like, we move through the world, like, you know, with intention and purpose, and gusto. And I'm making a broad, by the way, sweeping generalization, but there is a spirit of New York that's fierce. And that day, didn't feel fierce, right, we didn't feel fierce, we felt exposed, we felt vulnerable. And I think we felt really human, like holy shit. We, too, are vulnerable, right? We too, can be impacted and attacked, we too can crumble right into the earth. And that's exactly what we saw, literally, and symbolically, I think happen. 

Kerri Kelly  11:26  
And I say that, because I think what emerged out of our vulnerability was fear, especially in the way in which we reacted after 9/11. And we retaliated, right, and I'm just thinking about the impact the aftermath of 9/11, on the lives of Muslim people and Sikh people, the aftermath from a military standpoint, and the ways in which, you know, we we went out to "get the people who did this to us", I'm using air quotes for people who can't see me. And the way that fear has driven our policies for 21 years. But one of the statistics I write about in the book is how terrorism remains one of the top issues for Americans, even though there hasn't been a foreign based terrorist attack significantly since then, and that there are far more right, home grown, white nationalist attacks, mass shootings in our country, right? The bigger threat is actually here. And yet we have this manufactured fear that we inherited from that experience. And that was manufactured, quite frankly, from the military industrial complex, and from the media, against those people over there who are out to get us. So yes to exactly what you're saying. I think once we got vulnerable, and we let fear come in, fear started to drive the car, and has driven the car ever since. And unless we understand how fear operates in the body, I think it will be hard to stop the car and to get out of the driver's seat.

Omkari Williams  12:57  
Yes, someone I know, recently described it as the car's going 90 miles an hour in reverse, but the driver isn't looking out the rearview mirror. And that's sort of I feel like where we are right now.

Kerri Kelly  13:10  
That's deep,

Omkari Williams  13:11  
We're in this very precarious position. I mean, part of your story is that your stepfather was killed in the tower.

Kerri Kelly  13:18  
Right? Did I forget to say that part?

Omkari Williams  13:19  
You did. But that really propelled you into shifting because it was such a personal loss. It was such a personal trauma. And throughout the book, and one of the things I really appreciate about the book is that you look at the problems with wellness culture, both in the macro, and in the micro. So there's the larger view of our whole society. And then you can also look at it from the the micro view of I had this personal experience of loss on September 11. And here's how it's not only informed me but here's how it's opened my eyes to see things that I was kind of blithely happy to ignore. That's a for this awakening. And you talk very candidly about your own place in this dynamic and one thing you said was that you had to confront the colonizer within yourself, and the myth of separation that allows the colonizer virus to continue. And I was really struck by that. Would you talk more about that and what you mean by the colonizer virus?

Kerri Kelly  14:25  
Well, I think one of the questions that stuck for me after 9/11 is why did this happen? And how did we get here, which is like the question of all questions, I actually think in this book. And it led me sort of on a relentless pursuit of the truth to really unpack how we how I, we New Yorkers, and we America got to this place where there's so much fear to your point, so much suffering and so much inequality by design, and unpacking the event of 9/11. Right, that comes from a legacy of imperialism, that comes from a history of colonization that founded this country was a really big unlock for me in my own process. And I wasn't separate from it. It wasn't like reading about history conceptually. 

Kerri Kelly  15:10  
While I was doing that I was retracing my lineage, because I wanted to know how my people intersected with that history and what I carried in my body, right, like, what is the history I carry in my body to this day? And what are the ways in which I have benefited from that history. And so I did a deep digging. It's what Reverend Angel Kyodo Williams called "go back and get yourself right". I had to go back and get myself. Understand more clearly who are the people I come from, what is the land that I come from, what is the culture that I come from? And in doing that, I discovered that one of, just to make it even more complex, one of my ancestors came over in 1629, a white man from Manchester, England, and came over as an indentured servant. 

Kerri Kelly  15:55  
So came over under a contract of labor, probably to pay for his passage to the US probably seeking a better life. And I don't know much about the life that they were fleeing from. But it was bad enough where they were like, I'm going to sell myself to labor so that I can get across the pond, and then won his freedom. It was like 1639, about 10 years later, was a registered Freeman, which is around the time of John Punch, right, which if you know the story of John Punch, that is one of the first instances of when we start to see the idea of white, the construct of white being invented, and being implemented right through the courts. And through the law. I just named that because it's not even like a simple story of my ancestor came over and colonized. And it's actually a very messy story. And I don't know all the details, but how I understand it is he came over as an indentured servant. And because he was white, he won his freedom at a time where whiteness started to become rewarded. Right? 

Omkari Williams  16:59  
Yes. 

Kerri Kelly  17:00  
And so he became white literally in that moment. And because of that, he went on to own land to vote, I believe he held some political or elected positions and some of the towns that he lived in, had a family, you know, his family had power and owned land. And so I say that because I have inherited that legacy. I benefit from that legacy to this day, right. And in not just my like, racial standing, but in my economic standing and the schools that I go to in the town that I live in. And also, I want to just say psychologically, the way I move in the world, you know, when I started to unpack the colonizer virus, that, by the way, is a term in this amazing book by Edgar Villanueva called I think it's Decolonizing Philanthropy.

Omkari Williams  17:45  
I'll check and I'll put it in the episode notes for people.

Kerri Kelly  17:49  
Awesome. Such an amazing book, and really helped in the interrogation about this part of my history and part of my internalization. But it's not just like inherited the privileges, but we've internalized the idea that we can take up space as colonizers. That we can colonize space, that we can take people's culture, and call it our own, and that we can control bodies that we can steal, land and steal culture. And it felt really important to reckon with that as a white yoga teacher, when the history of Western wellness was very much stolen, and appropriated, right, from indigenous cultures. And so I just wanted to name that link, because that was a part of my reckoning, was like, what does it mean to be a white yoga teacher, when in fact, Yoga has really helped and healed me. And yet the legacy of this sort of Western modality is very much fraught with colonization.

Omkari Williams  18:44  
I recently had a conversation with a group of yoga teacher trainees, and we were discussing yoga and ethics. And it was a fascinating conversation, because we were having them grapple with how do you teach yoga in an ethical way, when it has been taken from its original culture, and really, in some ways, bastardized by our culture here. And I think it's something whether we're talking about yoga, or even something as simple as food that we should be more aware of, and just have an appreciation for the fact that not everything is ours, just because we think it's ours.

Kerri Kelly  19:28  
Yeah. And I'll just add, you know, some of my practice has also been to listen and learn from the people who come from those cultures who come from that medicine who come from those lineages. Suzanna Barataki is a friend and a teacher. Melissa Shaw, there's a great podcast called Yoga Is Dead by some amazing, you know, leaders. And so there's actual sources and people who are like, I'll help you understand this. And so some of it is for me, it was grappling but it was also being like, I don't know what I don't know. So how do I learn from the people who know? And how do I also ask them the question, what does it look like to be a white woman in wellness and to honor the lineage to appreciate the culture, right and to also do the repair work that's needed so that we can actually preserve and not just preserve the origins, but preserve the integrity of these practices.

Omkari Williams  20:19  
I think what you just said there is important in the context of so much of where I think we get into trouble is when we lack curiosity, and we're not willing to ask questions. And if we can just ask questions, it doesn't mean we're always going to get an answer, it doesn't mean we're necessarily going to like the answer that we might get. But just the fact of inquiry means that we are taking apart that system that has been just what we swim in, and looking at it in a different way. And I think that that's super important, especially right now. 

Kerri Kelly  20:55  
I love that. 

Omkari Williams  20:56  
Thank you. 

Kerri Kelly  20:58  
Yeah, I was just gonna say, I love that you said that. And imagination, I really got to explore in this book, and the idea that we've inherited someone else's imagination, right? In the structures that exist, in the systems that we're forced to move in, even in the dominant culture, right, that we are a part of. And in many ways, we don't know what's possible. And isn't that part of the beauty, right? And so if we can live into the question, instead of, instead of assuming that we know, sourcing from the limitations of our mind the limitations of what has been familiar and what is default, then actually, that opens up an entire world. And one of my mentors, Taj James, who I write about a lot in this book, says that in this very precarious moment where we're literally facing down collective extinction, he says, it's not as important to have the right answer, but to ask if we're asking the right questions. And I just really appreciate that. And I tried to do that. There's lots of questions in this book. In fact, I want to say that I completed this book, and I was left with more questions when I started. I hope that's a good thing. You know,

Omkari Williams  22:00  
I'm pretty sure it's a really good thing. And it means that there's another book to come. So that's excellent. And when I was reading your book, because the questions that you pose are plentiful and profound, it made me think about my own childhood and young adulthood and how I was both privileged and marginalized. I had the preferred body type, I am non disabled, an educated I'm middle class. And at the same time, I am a black, queer, female, holding both of those things was always this peculiar tension for me, and it made me think about the complexity of healing, because I like many of us, am both the wounded and the one who has wounded. And I wonder how you think we go about healing, when we are both the ones who have been harmed and the ones who have done harm?

Kerri Kelly  22:56  
I mean, I think that's the question of the question many ways, because we're not one thing. None of us are a monolith, even within like a social membership, or an identity an embodied identity, right? We're all not the same, we're all not having the same experience, or we don't have the same orientation. So I think it just brings me back to what you were saying about curiosity, and how we have to be willing and have the capacity to hold the complexity of our many, many lived experiences, and the many points of privilege and oppression that each of us embody in different ways and what that means about our experience in the world, and how we relate to one another what our right role and responsibility is. 

Kerri Kelly  23:39  
And one of the tools that's been really helpful for me and I talked about this in the book is this tool called social location, or locating oneself, which is sort of like an intersectional tool that allows us to grapple with the many identities that we embody, right? So it's not weaponizing one identity versus another, which I think often we see in our culture, right, which often wants us to lean more towards binary, but actually grapple with our wholeness, right, and how complex and messy and nuanced each one of us is right, based on our lived experiences based on our social group memberships, based on our shaping and socialization and based on the whole of who we are, right. And what that's helped me do is be in like an every moment practice of locating myself wherever I am, in proximity to power and privilege, right, so that I can more skillfully show up in relationship. You know, what you were saying? It's tricky to grapple with those things on an individual level, it's much trickier to be in relationship and be grappling with those things, right? 

Kerri Kelly  24:45  
And I'm even thinking about the relationship between you and I, and how different that is, even as we hold this sort of shared analysis, and we're talking about this content. It's where we come from really different places, and where we have had really different experiences even while we might share some philosophy and ideas. And so what does that mean about how you and I relate and how we work together and how we connect and how we build trust, and also how we take our place, in the movement, right in activism in unique and skillful ways. And I know you, you write a lot about this and in the work that you do about activism, and you know, in the work, you know, in the in the speaking about how do we show up in activism, I think that this kind of radical self awareness is really necessary for us to do that in a way that reduces harm, and allows us to more skillfully work across lines of difference.

Omkari Williams  25:33  
And it goes back to something that you said right at the beginning, which is, it requires a great deal of vulnerability. And that is something we are not actually really encouraged to be in this society. So we're kind of pushing against a whole bunch of different constructs. Because we are told that the highest virtue is to be this independent person in the society. And in fact, to do the work of healing to do the work of repair, both for ourselves, but also for the collective requires relationship and requires vulnerability and relationship. And that actually brings me to something that you talk about a lot in the book, which is the collective body. And when you talk about the collective body, what do you mean by that? And what are the implications of that collective body for our healing? 

Kerri Kelly  26:31  
Hmm, well, I think when I talk about the collective body, I'm often disrupting an orientation. And you've named this a number of times now toward the individual body as a thing that is separate and isolated from anything else. It is a part of, right. So to me, the collective body is an affirmation of our interdependence that we are not just interconnected, we are part of each other, right, we are a part of nature, we are a part of the earth. And I think it's important to recognize that because I think so much of our suffering actually comes from this myth, this lie of separation, and wellness feeds into that when it promises us that we can heal by ourselves, or that we can heal by reaching outside of ourselves and drinking a particular kind of juice, and so on and so forth. 

Kerri Kelly  27:13  
So I want to hold some complexity as I talk about this, because the collective body isn't meant to flatten our experiences, or assume that any one person is having the same experience as someone else. I think within the collective body, just like within an ecology or an ecosystem, there's so much biodiversity, and there's so much variation and difference. And that's actually often how the collective body thrives, right? It's also how the ecosystem thrives. And so the collective body can hold the diversity of our many experiences. And actually, that diversity and differences really is necessary, right? Because we, we all need different things, right? And we need different medicine, we're healing in different ways, we're being impacted in very different and disproportionate ways. And the collective body also affirms our interdependence, and that, in fact, our well being is bound. And that healing happens in community, even if it happens in different ways, and requires different medicines, depending on where we're located. 

Kerri Kelly  28:13  
And the last thing I'll just say about the collective body is that I think it points us also to our collective history, and the collective wounds, right, that have imprinted themselves on us in inside of us in really different ways. And how if we want to heal, not just from the things, the events or the individual things that happen in our, our personal lives, but if we want to heal from the big stuff, which is really the question I'm asking in this book, right? We actually have to understand that that history is shared. 

Kerri Kelly  28:43  
And, therefore, so is the responsibility. And not all in the same way. Right. And so, and the last thing I'll just say, is that because wellness, and you spoke to this before, and I appreciate it, wellness sells us, I mean, this is one of the most horrific lies, I think that wellness tells us that we can prescribe personal solutions to deeply systemic, cultural and collective wounds. And so I think it speaks to that piece too, right? In the same way that like when we want to heal our bodies, we don't just heal our arm and ignore the rest of the body. That in fact, we all have to be attune not just to our own individual needs for healing, and for growth and for evolution, but we have to be attuned to the needs of everyone else. Because unless the collective body is healing, none of us are healing.

Omkari Williams  29:30  
I think that people have a really hard time understanding that in some ways, because it does really fly in the face of what we're told, and we feel like well, you know, my neighbor may be sick, but I'm fine. And we are not educated to look at the way if your neighbor is sick, what are the implications for your whole community of that, you know, where our restore versus being drained? Or where is that neighbor perhaps not getting the resources that they need? Where are they not able then to make the contribution to the community that they would make if they were? Well, I think that because we do live these very individualistic lives right now that our understanding of community has really broken down over. I'm going to even just say, honestly, the last century, because when people lived more locally, when people didn't move as much as we move in this society, they had a much different sense of community in a much different sense of the ways in which they were bound together. And I feel like this is one of the things we're trying to navigate is that we now live in this incredibly mobile world. But that doesn't speak to or have anything to do with who we are as human animals. And so how do we engage with both the world that we live in, and the necessity for living a more collective existence, which does not mean you have to live in a house with 40 people? But it does mean that you have to expand your understanding of what community actually is.

Kerri Kelly  31:20  
I mean, it's funny, because it's not funny, actually, it's, it's terrifying, because when I think about the challenges that we are facing, it is undeniable that they are interdependent. The pandemic of the pandemic climate change, you know, even gross inequality. These are collective issues. No one is immune in these issues. And the pandemic was interesting, right? Because it became the nature of virus right kind of proved that we're all vulnerable to this disease in different ways, right, based on our location, and our proximity, and so on and so forth. And yet, there was, to your point, a very fierce and rigid orientation, to individualism, to freedom, right to choice to choosing to not be vaccinated, or to choosing to not wear a mask or to choosing to live freely and frolic around right, despite the fact that I think we just reached a million deaths in the US. 

Omkari Williams  32:17  
Yeah.

Kerri Kelly  32:18  
Enormous milestone, unprecedented in that, basically the history of most things in the US, right, and America. And so I just say that, because there's dissonance there for me, right of like, can you not see, right, and, and we're also seeing now the acceleration of climate change, that has impacted frontline communities for a really long time, because they are always the first to feel the impact. But it's starting to actually show its face to everyone. 

Omkari Williams  32:45  
Yes. 

Kerri Kelly  32:45  
And so I named that as context. Because it's amazing to me, quite frankly, that people can insist on individualism and isolation, given what we're staring down like that is like that is mind blowing to me. And yet, to your point, the indoctrination, the desperation, and probably the fear that you're talking about, right, this sort of like unconscious fear of survival, is really driving folks to deny that truth, right to deny what's what's right in front of our eyes, to turn away from community and collective care, right to write policies that are rolling back, right and rewinding, advances in bodily autonomy and freedom and civil rights. And so, so there's like a tug of war happening between, I think, to your point, what feels natural and undeniable with what Mother Nature feels like, is communicating to us in louder, more powerful, more extreme ways? And the culture that we've inherited, the illusion, the delusion, I would say that we're immune, or that we're exceptional, or that we're special, and that delusion is gonna get us all killed.

Omkari Williams  33:57  
Yes, yes, it is. During the height of the pandemic, I was having a conversation with a friend of mine, and she said something that really struck me because she lives in an area that's sort of suburban rural ish. And she said, the thing is that for a lot of people who live outside of cities, they didn't experience the pandemic in the same way that people who lived in cities did. They didn't hear the sirens all day and all night, they didn't see ambulances pulling up to hospitals. They are physically more separate from people. So they were insulated from a lot of the worst of the pandemic. And so they could more readily believe that this wasn't the big deal that it actually was. And the lack of trust in our institutions supported that belief. And I hadn't really thought about it in those terms, but it is so true. 

Omkari Williams  34:59  
And it occurred to me as I was reading, actually, what is one of my favorite chapters in your book, which is titled The Privilege of Wellness, you talk about how, in our pull yourself up by your bootstraps culture, we tend to blame people for being unwell. And you say that that is misguided and in itself indicative of privilege with which I totally agree. And you say, and I'm going to quote you here you say, "privilege must be realized, so that we can work with it and not around it". And what I particularly love about that statement, in the context of the pandemic, and climate change is that people have an opportunity to step into a higher elevation of ourselves, for lack of a better way to say it, we have an opportunity to be a better version of ourselves. 

Omkari Williams  35:55  
And yet, we are in this push pull, because so much of what we're told is just look after yourself, you don't have to worry about other people. And you also say that privilege is not only about what we know, but what we owe. And I would love for you to speak more about that. Because I feel like this is where we're at right now. It's like we have a lot of knowledge, but we're not paying enough attention to what that knowledge requires of us.

Kerri Kelly  36:25  
Well, I'll speak to the first point first, and I'll share that many years ago, I read an essay by a woman named Linda Tirado, it was an essay that went viral about her experience in poverty. And she was speaking to the people who blame poor people for being poor, like, you just need to get a job, you just need to eat healthier, which is like a narrative that slips right into wellness in the most brilliant kind of way, you just need to meditate away your negative thoughts, you can see the parallel there. And her essay was so moving to me when I read it, because it was a very intimate, detailed, specific account was like a day in the life where she was like, here's what it is to live in my shoes. And she was kind of responding to all of the criticisms that she would hear from people who were judging people living in poverty, and assuming that it's their fault. And it speaks to what you were talking about around how not only do we prescribe personal solutions to systemic problems, but we then weaponize that, and we say, actually, it's your fault. You're poor, because you're lazy or right, which are like horrific tropes, by the way. 

Kerri Kelly  37:30  
And once I started to wake up to that, I started to see that narrative, like all over wellness, as if wellness was giving people a pass, or a bypass, from what was really happening, and almost saying, like, don't look, don't look, don't look at how just don't look like meditate your way into bliss. But don't look at how fucked up and toxic the system is. It also says you can be perfect, you can be pure, you can detox yourself, of all those negative thought patterns and all that, you know, and I'm saying that that's there's not truth in some of that, to some extent, you know, I meditate, it's really helpful to me, I benefit from it. But it is not a prescription, it is not an antidote to some of these more horrific systemic issues that we're facing. That's a lot of what I write about in that chapter. And then of course, I reckon with my place in that in my proximity to all of the wellness things, my proximity to yoga, not just in the fact that I can afford to walk in there, but that when I walk into a yoga studio, I see a body very much like mine reflected back at me from the front of the room. That's real. And I come and go as I please. And I always feel like I belong in those spaces, right, because of how whitewashed wellness has become. And so wellness is very much riddled with all of these not just gaps and inequalities, but like deep shaping, you know, deep toxic shaping from some of the most horrific influences in our dominant culture and in our systems. 

Kerri Kelly  39:02  
And then what you were saying about debt, I've read this amazing bit in the New York Times by a person named Eula Biss, who says that the German word for guilt is debt. And so as I was unpacking privilege and trying to figure out what to do with it, right, a lot of people say give away privilege, by the way, also, I don't think most people want privilege. Privilege on a material level might give you proximity and access to different things advantages, right? Privilege is just another word for advantage. But spiritually, it's pretty empty, you know what I mean, like we're not spiritually growing because of privilege. And so I sometimes I struggle with it. That idea that sensationalizes privilege as this great thing, because most people I know who are less privileged are like, I don't want what you got. I just want the conditions to thrive on my terms. And so I just want to disrupt that. Like, I don't think it's as simple as what should I do with my privilege, you know, to redistribute it. I think it's more of a reckoning and when I read that caption and about guilt. I was like so now when I think about privilege and my points of privilege, my particular points of privilege, I think about what do I owe? 

Kerri Kelly  40:08  
I think about what do I owe? And how do I be a part of the redistribution of power and resources and access and time and money and wellness? How do I be a part of that actively. And some of that is repair reparative and reparations. And some of that is just like structuring my life in such a way where I'm making some kind of contribution. That's not just like, give money to people, right, which I think sometimes just replicates white saviorism, and it maintains the position of power. But what does it look like for me to step back from leadership? To step back from decision making? To step back from holding power, especially related to wellness and culture that impacts other people and other people's lives? And so anyways, so that's some of the grappling, I'm doing around privilege. And it's very much a work in progress, as you can hear, but I'm trying to hold the question of what does it look like to live into the work of undoing? Right, the conditions that created privilege in the first place, as opposed to upholding privilege by just doing something with it? I think that's the thing I'm trying to say.

Omkari Williams  41:10  
That's a really interesting distinction. Because I think often, that's not how people engage with it. They feel like okay, well, then I have this privilege, let me use it in a good way. Which is definitely better than I have this privilege. Let me just run with it. And you know, step on everyone as I go along. But it's still doesn't address the underlying inequities that we're trying to deconstruct here. 

Kerri Kelly  41:37  
100 percent.

Omkari Williams  41:37  
And is just so complicated. And I think that part of our challenge is that we like simplicity in this country, we, you know, we like yes, no answers, we like binaries, we don't really like to have to grapple with the messy middle. And that's what's required right now is really grappling with mess. And one of the things that you talk about in the book carry is, and it feels important in this race at this point in our conversation, as you talk about how we are wired for social connection, yet we're steeped in this culture that sells us the myth of the individual, perfect, exceptional self. And when you talk about social connection, you are not talking about social media. 

Kerri Kelly  42:26  
I am not.

Omkari Williams  42:27  
Let's just be abundantly clear about that. So what are you actually talking about?

Kerri Kelly  42:33  
Well, one of the things I'll share about this chapter in particular, that was fascinating to me is that when I, when I was researching the history of individualism, I saw a very undeniable connection to the history of America. And how America on the US came up in the time of the Enlightenment, which is when we started to play around with ideas of the glorification of the self, the self made man, manifest destiny, all the things that we attribute to the founding DNA of America is very much steeped in individualism. And so I say that just to illustrate how entrenched that idea is in the bedrock of our country, the roots of our country, which is why it's not enough for us to just change our mind and go have a party or something, we have to dig deep to kind of untangle some of those roots and remember, our interdependence with one another. I write about social media in this book. And I also just want to say I want to growl about social media, because it irks me on every level, and it's so flippin toxic. 

Omkari Williams  43:46  
Yes, it is. 

Kerri Kelly  43:47  
And addictive and manipulative, and it's literally rewiring people's minds are so much, you know, and we saw the whistleblower at Facebook, talk about how platforms know this. And they're actually weaponizing social media against us. So I'm not talking about that. And I also just want to admit the contradiction of like to be on social media and also raging against it. So I try to hold the messy middle, as you say, of that. You know, I think Robert Putnam wrote a really great book many decades ago called Bowling Alone, that spoke about the dismantling and the deconstructing the disintegration of our many social structures, whether it be civic churches, or civic organizations, or bowling teams, or really like all of the ways in which we would actually connect with one another beyond the nuclear family. 

Kerri Kelly  44:33  
And obviously, a lot of those things have gone away for many reasons. And so there's a part of me that's like, I almost think we have to like relearn what it is to be in relationship, right, on the most acute and fractal level, it's how do we be in relationship with one another, see one another across disagreement be with one another work with one another across different so I think that's part of it. And then on a broader level, what does it mean to be in community? I write what does it mean to build culture together? What does it mean to heal together and to repair together? 

Kerri Kelly  45:06  
And I don't have a prescription for what that looks like. And I also want to say that I don't think I should be the one to say what that is, quite frankly, given all of the ways in which I've been shaped and socialized in like dominant identities. But I do think it's a question that I think we all need to hold. And I think it inspires us right? To get creative, to be subversive, right? To resist the temptation to isolate and to pull away and to stay in what I called, like our gated communities of wellness, right, our bubbles, to get outside of our bubble so that we can see the world more clearly. And to ask, what do we want to build together? Right? What are our shared beliefs? What are our shared values? Dr. King talked about how we need a radical revolution of values, right? 

Kerri Kelly  45:51  
Like, what do we believe about who we are, and what's possible? And so I think some of that, those types of questions and conversations might be the DNA that allows us to build new structures of relationship and new structures of community. But I don't know, because I'm also in this toxic culture, trying to find my way to a different understanding of belonging that goes beyond whiteness. So that goes beyond what I've been taught by society and dominant culture. And so I'm very much holding those questions and living into those questions with people that I love and people that I'm in relationship with.

Omkari Williams  46:29  
I think it's interesting that you have framed this in that way. Because I, I think that this is always the challenge for us is, as we said, at the beginning, the questions, you know, what are the questions and being willing to let go of the idea that we can find an answer really quickly? Or that there is an answer, rather than iterations of an answer and different answers for different people, depending on the circumstances, they find themselves in different communities. And it is such a challenging thing, to live in the complexity of something and not have simple answers. And yet, I feel like this is what we're up against. Right now, this is exactly where we are as a society in the United States, but also as a global community. 

Omkari Williams  47:23  
I mean, we are looking down the barrel of the end of life on Earth as we know it because of climate change. And yet, we pretend it's not a crisis, and that we can just sort of push it off till tomorrow, and then tomorrow, and then tomorrow. And I find it very interesting, as I was reading your book, to just notice all the places that capitalism and patriarchy and whiteness tell us to avert our gaze from what's right in front of us. And they do it so well, that we often don't even realize we've been told to do that. And I think that wellness is one of those ways in which they have told us to avert our gaze from the actual real challenges that we are confronting. 

Omkari Williams  48:13  
You referenced Dr. King just a moment ago, and you have a quote of his in your book, that is one of my particular favorites. And it's that "Philanthropy is commendable, but it must not cause the philanthropist to overlook the circumstances of economic injustice, which make philanthropy necessary". And I always, whenever I come across that, or I'm reading a book on philanthropy, I always think about that, because I hold it as the both and kind of thing. It's like, yes, we need to do what we can do. And we need to look at the impacts of what we're doing and how they can potentially be upholding the system we're actually trying to disrupt. And in your chapter wellness beyond whiteness, where you reference that quote, You talk a lot about some of the ways in which philanthropy perpetuates white supremacy and perpetuates these systems, but also just the ways in which we get distracted. So would you speak a bit about why that part of the book is important to you?

Kerri Kelly  49:24  
Yeah, I want to point people to two books as I do this, because they were really helpful in my own analysis. So one is the book I mentioned before, which I remember the name of now, which is Decolonizing Wealth by Edgar Villanueva. And the other is a book called Winner Takes All by Anand Giridharadas, The Elite Charade to Change the World. And in it he writes about the ways in which the elite or I even want to say do gooders or people with good intentions or philanthropists or white wellness people who go to the global south to help other people. You know, Christian missionaries, right, there's a long history of this kind of work is often a manifestation of power over it. So I'm going to help you. And in doing that, I'm going to maintain my position of power, right. So I'm going to do nothing to your point to deconstruct the conditions that created this imbalance in the first place. And worse, I'm going to make my ego feel good. And I'm probably going to tell you what you need without even asking your permission. So it's just riddled with toxicity. 

Kerri Kelly  50:30  
And that chapter for me, you know, what felt important about unpacking this within myself was to have an analysis of power and how power works, and how I'm situated and by power I don't mean like, personal power. I'm not talking about the power within us that cannot be given or taken away. I'm talking about social and institutional power, and the power that's wielded over, right. The power that holds people down. The power that is manufactured. The power that is hoarded by people in power, that has sort of been the origins of many of our systems of oppression and histories and collective wounds. And so understanding that, and I'll just speak from it for a second, like understanding where I am, as a white bodied, cis, hetero, you know, able bodied woman in proximity to social and institutional power, helps check me when I'm trying to do "good", I'm saying good in quotes in the world. And one of the things that Anand Giridharadas says in his book is that it would be much better for us to do less harm than to do more good, which was like, you know, like just a mind blowing, wake up call for me. 

Kerri Kelly  51:37  
And so that's become my orientation, right after check myself, locate myself in proximity to social and institutional power. So that when I'm helping, so to speak, I'm not holding that over other people. Or I'm not deciding for other people what helping is, right. Or I'm not making assumptions or assuming I know better, right, or taking up their space or going in without their permission, a lot of do gooders actually go into spaces and assume they're wanted there when they're not no one asked them to be there. And so anyway, so that's helped me interrogate quite frankly, the ways in which I make an offering, I do less harm, I try to redistribute power and resources, donate, I mean, even in the ways in which I try show up in relationship to my organization, into my organizing work and my activism work in the world. That's a question I have to ask every second of every moment that I engage, or else, I'm only going to replicate the systems that got us here in the first place, especially given my proximity to power and privilege. And so it's a really, really important check. I really appreciated that book, because it was really critical. It was like this is not going to get us free, y'all. This is only going to hold the systems in place. And so what does it look like for us to imagine something different?

Omkari Williams  52:56  
We're almost out of time, which is just bumming me out.

Kerri Kelly  52:59  
We need a part two,

Omkari Williams  53:00  
I know. But I want to ask you a couple more things that I refuse to get out of this conversation without addressing. I'm not going to do it. So the first one is this, you referenced something that Grace Lee Boggs said, that, I think is very important, because what you were just speaking to dovetails with that so well. And she said that, we begin by creating images and stories of the future that help us imagine and create alternatives to the existing system. And I think that the challenging piece for all of us is not defaulting to the existing system. And so I just want to reference that and say, Thank you for reminding us that we need to keep interrogating and make sure that we're not just going back to our default setting. Because our default setting is how we got here and how we maintain here.

Kerri Kelly  53:55  
I think even assuming that you're gonna go back to your default setting is a really good place to begin, like, you're gonna default, right? That's where you're oriented to. So anticipate that you're going to default and have a practice of disrupting that.

Omkari Williams  54:07  

That is excellent advice. I'm gonna hang on to that. Because my tendency when I default is like, dammit. Yeah, you know, rather than dammit, it'd be like, Oh, look, you just defaulted. Keep moving kid, there I go again, you know, like, okay, let's not do that next time. Or let's just catch it sooner or next time. So that's really good. All right. Before I get to the things that we can do, I want to just say that in the final chapter of your book you wrote, quote, "We must reach outside ourselves across divides beyond borders and toward one another, not to just ensure our collective survival. But to realize our full potential" close quotes. What is that full potential that you envision for us?

Kerri Kelly  54:56  
I don't know. I just know that what I believe is that. And you just sort of spoke to this, that when we default to the limitations of our mind the limitations of the stories that we've been told the limitations of the imagination that we've inherited, it's just a very small sight, if you will, a small perspective on what's possible and, and that too, I think needs to be really challenged. So that's sort of what you know, that's, I think, part of the interrogation that you just spoke about, which is what can I not see? Right, what's possible beyond what I already know. And that's where I think relationship actually is really powerful, because we're also limited by our individual experiences. But actually, when we work together across different lived experiences, different stories, different medicines, different histories, different imaginations, right, then collectively, we get to work with so much more.

Omkari Williams  55:52  
I really like that. That's great. And it's helpful and hopeful. And we need both of those things. So I'm going to ask you, as I ask all of my guests, for people who are interested in doing something, and don't know what to do, what are three simple actions that they can take to move us along the path to actual healing and wellness?

Kerri Kelly  56:20  
Yeah, I think there's three things that I'm in practice around all the time that I share with folks. The first is to interrogate yourself. Be curious, to use your word, be relentlessly curious about what you've been taught how you've been shaped and indoctrinated by dominant stories and dominant narratives and cultures, and how that's holding you back from your own wholeness. So be curious about that. And how that's a part of a larger system, right, how you're a part of a larger system. 

Kerri Kelly  56:52  
And then the second thing I would say, and I've said this a bunch in this conversation is to then locate yourself inside that system. What is your place, and proximity? Because I believe you said this, we're all in some way, shape or form, the wounded and the wounder. We're all impacted and implicated in different ways. And I want to just say different and disproportionate, I feel like I have to say that as a white bodied woman with so much privilege. So it's really important for us to both take responsibility for our part in this mess. And also see ourselves as part of the solution, right? So it's like, locate yourself so that you can step into your right role and responsibility. 

Kerri Kelly  57:31  
And the last thing I would say is engage in collective action, get political, work with other people, line up in solidarity with organizations who are on the frontlines of the many issues that we are navigating right now. Because personal solutions are not going to solve the many problems, the many systemic and collective problems that we're facing. And so it's really important for folks to see their practice beyond the cushion, and to see wellness as a radical political act, as we work to create the conditions where everybody can be well.

Omkari Williams  58:01  
I love that. Thank you so much. I am so happy that we had this time to talk and explore your book. And I can't wait until it comes out so everybody can get it and read it. And this has been so helpful, and especially in this moment that we're in hopeful as well. And we need that because it's grim right now. And we need to find hope where we can, because that helps us keep going. So thank you so much, Kerri.

Kerri Kelly  58:32  
I'm so grateful for this conversation. And I just want to share that being in conversation with folks like you about this stuff, is also helping move me forward. And so I'm excited to like be on this path with you and to keep going.

Omkari Williams  58:45  
Me too. Thank you so much. 

Omkari Williams  58:48  
For decades now we've been sold the myth of wellness as being an individual pursuit. And now we find ourselves at a point, both as a country and as members of the global community, where it is clear that wellness is something we have to find together and there is no time to waste. I encourage you to read Kerri's book and use it as a guide to finding your way to wellness, both as an individual and as a member of the global community. You can find out how to connect with Kerri in the episode notes. 

Omkari Williams  59:19  
I am so grateful that Kerri is a member of this community because her wisdom and her voice are so badly needed. We will get free and heal when we work together. And I am honored to be doing this work alongside each of you. Thank you so much for listening, and I'll be back with another episode of Stepping Into Truth very soon.

Episode Notes:

Resources mentioned in this episode:
American Detox: The Myth of Wellness and How We Can Truly Heal by Kerri Kelly
Decolonizing Wealth: indigenous wisdom to heal divides and restore balance
by Edgar Villanueva
Winner Takes All by Anand Giridharadas