Who Is Wellness For? Quotes

“It took me a long time to accept that a person can only ever meet you how deeply they meet themselves.”
― Fariha Roisin, Who Is Wellness For?: An Examination of Wellness Culture and Who It Leaves Behind

“I have a lot of grief over being robbed of my early life and so I have a lot of anger towards people who have had good childhoods, it’s a privilege. I’m not sure why we don’t understand this. Especially when the difference between having a good childhood and not has dangerous long term side effects.

Infants whose caregivers were too stressed for whatever reason to give them the necessary attunement contact will grow up with a chronic tendency to feel alone with their emotions. To have a sense rightly or wrongly that no one can share how they feel, that no one can understand.

Despite the odds against us, children of neglect are forced to live normal lives. We are expected to get on with it. If we speak about our pain we become burdens or worse victims who won’t shut up.”
― Fariha Roisin, Who Is Wellness For?: An Examination of Wellness Culture and Who It Leaves Behind

“I think her precocious intellectual development is what happens to bright and sensitive kids when the emotional environment isn't able to hold them. They develop this very powerful intellect that holds them instead.”
― Fariha Roisin, Who Is Wellness For?: An Examination of Wellness Culture and Who It Leaves Behind

“Sometimes you give so many parts away, however, that you’re no longer accessible to your own self.”
― Fariha Roisin, Who Is Wellness For?: An Examination of Wellness Culture and Who It Leaves Behind

“Whiteness is a catch-all because it convinced you that if you participate in it then you, too, can have a good life, aka a white one.”
― Fariha Roisin, Who Is Wellness For?: An Examination of Wellness Culture and Who It Leaves Behind

“True healing means that, at some point, you’re willing to die, cyclically, only to be resurrected as your truest self; it’s an understanding that the journey doesn’t end, you don’t just one day find enlightenment, much like how you don’t just arrive at happiness. It’s not a destination as much as it is a state of being that needs consistency as well as a desire to adapt. To become again and again and again, this state of unraveling is the nexus point for change.”
― Fariha Róisín, Who Is Wellness For?: An Examination of Wellness Culture and Who It Leaves Behind

“The way yoga has been stolen is not a unique example of the way money and capital blind us from our social responsibility, but it's one of the most glaringly obvious cases. .... As if yoga was for white women only. This claim that whiteness has enforced, the claim all white people always seem to have to the other, always centring themselves in every narrative, is a very bid problem that needs to be addressed and unlearned. This has to be included in the necessary evolution of yoga. If white people spent more time humanising themselves, maybe they could see non-white people with more depth and complexity a well. This means not treating us like we're the other, unconsciously objectifying our difference, only to expect sympathy of the very definitions that were created by white people. All black, indigenous, and other people of colour deserve your respect and humanity, not your sympathy. If you're a white person who profits off of yoga, what we need now is your action, your commitment, find trusted organisations and give at least a quarter of what you make on work in India.”
― Fariha Róisín, Who Is Wellness For?: An Examination of Wellness Culture and Who It Leaves Behind

“becoming alert by oneself, for oneself. Letting die what must die.”
― Fariha Roisin, Who Is Wellness For?: An Examination of Wellness Culture and Who It Leaves Behind