Decolonizing Healing: Your Body Is Not A Project
So much of mainstream wellness talks about your body like it’s a home renovation show: here’s what’s “wrong,” here’s the fix, and here’s your big reveal if you just work hard enough. Diet culture, productivity culture, and even some therapy spaces quietly repeat the same message: your body is a problem to be managed, upgraded, or optimized. Decolonial and body liberation approaches call this out as a deeply colonial script that treats bodies—especially intentionally made vulnerable bodies—as objects to control rather than living beings with inherent wisdom and sovereignty.
Decolonizing healing means questioning who taught us to relate to the body this way and whose values those teachings serve. Colonial and white supremacist systems have long defined which bodies are “acceptable,” “disciplined,” or “healthy,” while dismissing Indigenous, ancestral, and community-based ways of understanding wellness. Instead of centering control, decolonial frameworks center relationship—seeing the body as a site of memory, culture, land, and resistance, not as a faulty machine that needs constant fixing.
At Soma Roots Therapy, “your body is not a project” is more than a cute tagline; it’s a core value that shapes how therapy happens. The work is less “let’s fix you” and more “let’s listen to you”—to your nervous system, your identities, your lived experiences, and your communities. Sessions might focus on how colonial, capitalist, fatphobic, ableist, and cisnormative messages have burrowed into your body story, and how to gently replace those with narratives rooted in dignity, body trust, and liberation. This includes honoring neurodivergent, queer, trans, fat, disabled, immigrant, and BIPOC bodies as full of knowledge, not problems to be solved.
Practically, this can look like slowing down to notice sensation without judgment, reconnecting to cultural or ancestral practices of care, or experimenting with boundaries that protect your energy instead of punishing your body. It might mean grieving the years spent treating your body like an endless improvement project and learning to relate to it more like a companion, an elder, or a home. There is room for anger at the systems that taught you otherwise, and also for the relief that comes from realizing you were never actually “behind”—you were just living in a world that profits from your self-doubt.
If you’re tired of wellness that feels like another performance review, Soma Roots Therapy offers a space to remember that you are not a project; you are a person in process, already worthy, already whole. Decolonizing healing does not mean rejecting all tools or practices; it means reclaiming your right to define what healing looks and feels like on your own terms, in your own body, in connection with the people and places that make you feel most alive. That’s the work here: less renovation, more reclamation.
