Queer people of color deserve access to wellness.
A slightly harder truth however, is there are few health spaces that honor the intricacies of our unique identities and experiences enough to provide such quality. After working in health and wellness spaces for 13 years, I have come to understand that “wellness” is a term that has often meant predominantly white and almost exclusively straight. This word often carries with it ideas that are devoid of the color and necessary artistic flair that our experiences as queer folx bring to the table.
Due to such a warped definition of wellness, as an artist and healer, I often found my passions at odds with one another. For so long I went through life seeing my art and my desire to become a healthcare practitioner to be mutually exclusive events, paths I would one day have to choose between. Never sure how to combine my love of artistic expression with my passion for wellness, I began to seek out a way to bridge the gap between the seemingly different worlds that I existed in simultaneously.
As I continued in search for answers I realized that the beauty of art and creativity is that they exist in everything around us. Found in even the most mundane task, creativity is the way in which we innovate ideas and forge new paths to continued development. As queer folx, and especially as queer folx of color, transforming the mundane into beauty is what we do everyday, simply by existing. I now understand that even behind the seemingly unrelated happenings of health and wellness, creativity thrives and queerness lives.
It is in this spirit that these “Wellness Wednesday” posts were conceptualized as an effort to bridge the worlds between creativity and wellness as experienced through an unapologetically queer lens. By using, sharing, and gathering holistic resources and inviting in artistic and creative expression, my desire is to play my part as guide along the journey toward collective healing and sustained wellness. Focusing primarily on useful self care tips, this space will also suggest activities, natural remedies, recipes, and gentle movements that can all be helpful resources to add to our personal queer wellness toolboxes.
While I do believe there can be a time and place for outside interventions, I believe first and foremost in the power of our innate ability to heal and self regulate if given the time, space, and tools of understanding how. It is my goal to use this blog to document, share, and address the HOW of sustaining personal wellness as a measure of preventative care. While everyone is welcome to receive the medicine of the shared resources, this space will uplift the needs and experiences of those of us who are typically written out of health and wellness stories. This blog segment will allow us to take back our voices and rewrite our own narratives. It will allow us to speak our own truths.
I hope the contents of these pages are just as healing, inspiring, and fun for all who join the journey as they are for me. Thank you for your presence here. I look forward to enjoying this journey with you!
ABOUT LA’TASHA KIONGOZI
EXHALE Social welcomes our newest contributor La’Tasha Kiongozi curator of our Wellness Wednesday series. La’Tasha Kiongozi is a poet, educator, healer, and sacred artist committed to mindfully savoring the joys of life. They advocate for self expression and honor creativity as medicine. Through their writing and healing remedies, they hope to inform, encourage, and inspire all they cross paths with to flow in holistic wellness and abundance. When they are not brewing herbal medicines or showcasing their work at conferences and workshops, La’Tasha can be found playfully exploring the world, gazing up at the stars, or immersed in a good book. Connect with La’Tasha and explore their work and offerings.
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