We make the choice to do things differently and to take a stand as health and wellness professionals.
If you’re alive you have been impacted by the health and wellness industry. (Or as racial justice activist Rachel Ricketts (she/her) calls it: the wealth and hellness industry) The impact is pervasive, and it has been detrimental to all of us. (5)
The true magnitude is multi-faceted and interlaced with issues of access, manipulative marketing tactics, half-truth information, and the capitalization of human insecurities.
Health and wellness professionals and businesses so often rely on our natural desire to want to be healthy and live longer. They prey on our insecurities, and before we can realize the illusion we are up to our eyeballs in corporate-fitness memberships, smoothie bowls, ‘natural’ groceries, culturally appropriated mantras, and lululemon.
In 2017, the health and wellness market was a 4.2 trillion dollar industry. (5)
Seeing wellness becoming more integrated into our lives is exciting, though. The evolution and increase of conscientious consumers is important.
The industry becomes dangerous when wellness is served as a status symbol, self-care is commodified, and we continue to be shamed into trying to become ‘better.’
We are committed to asking more questions:
“Who is this wellness for?”
“Is this really for my health?”
“What are the facts?”
“How can we make our health and wellness yoga studio business accessible, honest, and intentionally disruptive of diet culture?”
One thing we already do at Shakti:
we never promise you anything about your body.
This has always been non-negotiable. Shakti was founded on the belief that yoga, movement, and investing in yourself should never be about needing to lose weight or fix ‘flaws.’
We don’t do core work to have abs, and we don’t sweat to lose weight.
We believe your body deserves to be cared for.
We think it’s more important to take care of yourself by modifying and making a pose work for you than what a pose looks like.
We believe in full-self integration, which means our bodies are not separate from our minds, hearts, emotions or spirit.
We believe that your intuition is your superpower.
Bodies deserve to be celebrated.
Your body belongs to you, and we aren’t going to tell you what you should do with it.
(But we do recommend that you thank and celebrate it.)
Within our team we talk often about our ‘lies.’ Our lies are the things we tell ourselves that aren’t true but we believe by default.
Most of our lies can be summed up simply:
I am not enough.
The health and wellness and fitness industries offer us empty promises at the cost of a big buck to ‘fix’ our collective lie.
At Shakti we know that transforming our lies is a practice and it starts on the inside.
You don’t need us (or anyone) in order to transform your lie, but we are here to see you and support you along the way.
In fact a practice we like is as simple as something you tell yourself.
It goes like this…