Defining Liberation and Decolonized Wellness

“Liberation is a praxis: the action and reflection of men and women upon their world in order to transform it.”
- Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed

When I first began thinking about liberation in relation to wellness, I did not picture a political idea. I pictured quiet mornings, the taste of clean water, and the ability to breathe without the weight of constant vigilance. Over time I have come to see that the capacity to breathe freely, whether physically, mentally, or spiritually, is political. Wellness is never isolated from the structures that define which bodies and communities are allowed rest. I once believed that wellness was an individual pursuit, something earned through discipline or hard work. Liberation has taught me that it emerges through remembering what has been denied and through returning to a sense of collective worth.

The wellness industry encourages personal optimization, as though wholeness can be purchased through products and routines. It teaches control rather than communion. Liberation, by contrast, turns wellness toward relationship and toward the ancestral, communal, and ecological connections that capitalism has strained or erased. Wellness that ignores those relationships becomes another expression of domination, another demand that the body perform value for systems that harm it. Liberation begins when we stop performing wellness and begin embodying freedom

Liberation as Remembering

For many of us, colonization entered our lives through expectations about who we must be to belong. In my own life, growing up in spaces that seldom reflected my heritage or voice, I internalized the lesson that wellness meant assimilation. I thought healing meant becoming acceptable. It took years to understand that wellness shaped by domination always demands silence. Freire described liberation as the union of action and reflection, and I recognize now that reflection without action confines, while action without reflection repeats harm. The two together, awareness and transformation, create the conditions for genuine well-being.

Colonialism fractured the world’s sense of wellness long before the term became fashionable. Indigenous knowledge systems once framed health as balance between the physical, emotional, spiritual, and communal. European expansion reduced these relationships to resources and commodities. Land became property, bodies became labor, and healing became the domain of an expert class. The very idea of “modern medicine” grew within this hierarchy, naming itself universal while dismissing the wisdom of those it displaced. The same hierarchy persists whenever wellness is defined through profit, measurement, and productivity rather than connection, reciprocity, and dignity.

The legacy of this disruption reaches into the most intimate parts of our lives. Colonialism replaced cyclical time with linear progress, teaching us that worth is proven through perpetual advancement. It replaced community care with competition, convincing us that success can be separated from the collective. It even redefined rest as laziness, a sin against efficiency. I still notice these lessons in my own body. I feel the instinct to keep moving, to measure each day by output, to feel guilt when I pause. Liberation begins when I refuse those metrics and let my body exist without justification.

Māori scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith reminds us that colonial systems sought to control both knowledge and life itself. Her work exposes how health and healing were used to determine who was considered fully human. To live in a decolonized way requires undoing that hierarchy, affirming that life has value beyond utility. When I consider wellness through this lens, it becomes inseparable from justice. The freedom to heal cannot exist without the freedom to define health according to one’s culture, history, and lived experience.