American Detox Quotes

“For me, disability wasn't in the chronic pain I experience to this day, nor the inability to sit or stand or walk for long periods of time, nor in being unable to carry bags while shopping or traveling, nor losing feeling and function in my right arm. It existed in all the places I couldn't go, all of the activities I couldn't engage in. And it existed in my isolation.”
― Kerri Kelly, American Detox: The Myth of Wellness and How We Can Truly Heal

“It wasn’t until I discovered what yoga isn’t that I truly understood what it really is. Yoga is not an escape from the harsh realities of our world. It is not a blissed-out bright-siding of the truth of who we are and where we come from.* And it is not the exclusion of any part of our experience or history. Yoga means “to yoke,” to unite all the disparate parts of ourselves without exception. It invites us to confront the personal and collective obstacles that are in the way of our liberation.”
― Kerri Kelly, American Detox: The Myth of Wellness and How We Can Truly Heal

“The privilege that I'd experienced for most of my life had not only oriented me to see access and convenience as normal, but it completely invisibilized the experience that one in five Americans have when they're confronted by a system that is designed to ignore and exclude them. Disability is not located in the individual's body and mind but in the world. It is a construct: a product of a toxic culture that defines normal in the form of beauty, performance, productivity and obedience.”
― Kerri Kelly, American Detox: The Myth of Wellness and How We Can Truly Heal

“Capitalism does not care about people; it cares about productivity and profits, and anything that gets in the way of that is a problem to be dealt with, cured, or disposed of.”
― Kerri Kelly, American Detox: The Myth of Wellness and How We Can Truly Heal

“But there is no such thing as purity in a world polluted by separation, scarcity, and supremacy.”
― Kerri Kelly, American Detox: The Myth of Wellness and How We Can Truly Heal

“Here are some resources on trauma that I’ve found helpful: The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk, Peace from Anxiety by Hala Khouri, The Politics of Trauma by Staci Haines, and Restorative Yoga for Ethnic and Race-Based Stress and Trauma by Gail Parker.”
― Kerri Kelly, American Detox: The Myth of Wellness and How We Can Truly Heal

“Psychologists have long pointed to self-actualization as the pinnacle of Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs. However, Maslow discovered later in his life that he was wrong.29 There was, in fact, a deeper motivation, which he called transcendence—a commitment to the greater good. “The fully developed (and very fortunate) human being, working under the best conditions tends to be motivated by values which transcend his self.”30 This theory went beyond the ego self to encompass our relationship to one another and the bigger world that we are a part of. Of course that is not the version we hear most often in the field of psychology. Nor do we hear that much of Maslow’s work was influenced by the wisdom of the Siksika Nation (a part of the Blackfoot confederacy in Canada), who understood one’s needs not as hierarchical but as circular and contextual at the levels of self, community, and culture equally.31”
― Kerri Kelly, American Detox: The Myth of Wellness and How We Can Truly Heal