6.18.20 Collective Letter to David Elliott from Past Students
If you are a David Elliott (and/or additional teaching team) trained breathwork facilitator and would like to sign this letter in support, please submit your name here.
June 18th, 2020
Dear David,
We write to you with a respectful request and call to action as a diverse group of people who have studied with you, breathed with you, and healed with you. Our request is simple. We are asking for a deeper and sustained commitment to BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, people of color) who invest in your work so that they can work with communities who often are left out of healing spaces. During this time of uprising it is now urgent that you take a stand to support Black lives explicitly, beyond posting a black square on Instagram. All across the country, businesses, healing spaces, and training programs are speaking out and stepping up their commitment to Black people. Many of your students have approached us over the last few months expressing deep concern and have shared experiences of harm and a lack of feeling safe in trainings. We also know that over the years, many of your students have approached you through in person conversations and emails about much of what we share below. We have heard that there hasn’t been much reception. We are inviting you into a practice of taking responsibility for the community you have created and profited enormously from. It’s necessary for teachers to also be students as well, most especially when they are out of their depth and skill.
Every white person working within the wellness industry must choose to either be silent and choose the side of racism and oppression, or to choose to take the side of Black and Indigenous people of color through direct actions. Simply put, the wellness industry has upheld white privilege and white silence in dangerous ways for far too long. In order to do our part to eradicate racism and white supremacy, the breathwork community that you have created must become a more inclusive and safer space for Black and Brown people; we believe that the only way to provide safer spaces of healing for folks is through the urgent necessity to advance the training of Black breathwork healers to become teachers of Level 1 for their own communities.
Here are our recommended steps to take action:
1. Inclusive Trainings: If you consider the lack of diversity in your own trainings and retreats (approximately more than 90% are White), it is clear that you are not creating an inclusive space for healers of color to become breathwork facilitators. Many other wellness spaces are creating offerings to build inclusivity, especially by designing scholarships or discounts to specifically provide more opportunities for people of color. We believe Black communities especially deserve to access this type of breathwork at this time, because, as we all know, it provides profound healing. No one at this time deserves to heal and receive more urgently than Black communities.
2. Safer Space in Trainings: A safer space involves many different considerations: shifting appropriative practices, being trauma-informed, and respecting and valuing the differences in identity and experiences. As we all know, the healing work that happens in breathwork trainings can bring up a lot of past trauma. This re-visiting of trauma can be heightened for attendees of color due to the long history of overt and covert violence that Black and Brown persons have individually and collectively experienced and continue to experience. Some Black and Brown participants are also LGBTQ, which brings in a need for additional skills and training. We know that the breath helps in processing this trauma release, and we also believe that more safety and space for processing is needed. We feel that it is your obligation to do research in multiple directions and do paid consultation work with a Black or Brown educator on anti-racism so that you can ensure that you are providing this safer space for Black and Brown training attendees. We also ask that you and your main teachers sign up for a few trauma-informed trainings. Resmaa Menakem has a powerful one and an incredible book with hands-on exercises for personal reflection. The workshop is currently free however it’s deeply important for White people to make a financial investment in his work through a donation. Offering an ongoing monthly donation is a start. The Breathe Network also has an incredible multi-week workshop called Healing Sexual Trauma: A Professional Training in Trauma-Informed Care that includes many different facilitators including a number of BIPOC and LGBTQ. It is offered a couple times a year. While certainly the breath practice is a powerful tool for working with trauma, there is a complete absence of skilled trauma understanding and education within the trainings. Trauma-informed work can’t be an afterthought, performed intuitively or something some people study further on their own. It needs to be built into the foundation of the program.
3. Cultural Appropriation: Though you have explained the origin and lineage of the breath, what has been offered is very vague. Breathwork is a huge umbrella with specific lineages from all over the world, many of which are much clearer in origin. In different trainings we have attended, you’ve both mentioned that it came to you from Tim and you taught it to Tim in a past life in India but then also have shared that it doesn’t have a direct relationship to pranayama. In addition, you draw upon your relationships with Indigenous community members but you also harvest and sell white sage. There has been growing concerns over how White people using white sage, let alone selling white sage for money is appropriative and unethical. Much of this has been coming directly from Indigenous communities and Tribal Nations. There are many plants that can be used for clearing and cleansing. It would be far more appropriate and respectful to invite your students to build a direct relationship with their own ancestry so that they can use plants and build altars that come from and pay honor to their own lineage, rather than exploiting practices that are sacred to communities that aren’t theirs. As a teacher outside of Indigenous ancestry, it is necessary to find a way to honor the teachings by being in right relationship with them rather than profiting from them.
4. Training Level 1 Breathwork teachers: We are calling you in as a leader of thousands of breathwork practitioners to urgently answer the call to train a minimum of 3 Black healers to become trained in your style to begin offering trainings of Level 1 to their communities. We are asking for this to be done for free as a small form of reparations. Currently, all of your approved teachers are White, and if you do not understand how deeply problematic and exclusive this is, then we ask you to examine the crucial work that must be done to unlearn your white privilege and role in upholding white supremacy in the breathwork / healer community.
5. Exchange: We understand that exchange is a large portion of your breathwork training. We implore you to examine your own financial stability and to consider the generations of white privilege in order to understand that requiring Black healers to pay the same price for training with you is not only unfair, it is unjust. White healers have commodified and profited off of Native American, Indigenous and Black healing practices for far too long, and it is now time to give back. Consider this a form of tithing, if you wish.
6. Code of Ethics and Responsibility: The Global Professional Breathwork Alliance, of which you are not a member of, offers a code of ethics and standards for being in practice and teaching. You can find more on their website. Most teachers and trainings the world over are a part of this network. Having a code of ethics helps create an environment of safety, accountability and responsibility for the students you take on to train and work with. It also helps hold you and the other teachers in more of an ethical relationship to the work.
7. Resources: We believe it is important that you first educate yourself on these topics of white supremacy in the wellness industry. Here is a list of articles, books, podcasts, films, and courses that you can invest in so that you can directly pay Black people for their wisdom, time and labor to better learn how disproportionate the access to healing is and why in Black communities. There are also some resources for working with trauma. Trauma, like everything else, is political and needs acute skill to work with ethically.
Black Educators to learn from and PAY for their work:
○ Dive in Well - Course on Pivoting into an equitable business or make a consider donation to their crowdfunding campaign
○ Rachel Ricketts - Spiritual Activism online webinars
○ Leesa Renee Hall - Writing prompts to explore bias
○ Catrice M. Jackson - books and courses
○ Ibram X. Kendi - book “How to be Anti Racist”
○ Ijeoma Oluo - book “So You Want to Talk about Race”
○ Maryam Ajayi - article “Unblocking White Supremacy and Fragility in the Wellness Industry”
○ Performative Allyship is Deadly (Here’s what to do instead) by Holiday Phillips
○ Ted Talk with Howard C. Stevenson “How to Resolve Racially Stressful Situations”
○ Ted Talk with Nova Reid “Not all superheros wear capes- how you have the power to change the world”
○ Resma Menakem “My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies”
Articles and books by White authors:
○ Article - 75 Things White People Can do to Stop White Supremacy
○ Article - Stopping White Supremacy is a Spiritual Issue the work we can't avoid any longer (on whiteness and spirituality) by Dana Balicki
○ Article - If your Wellness isn’t Intersectional, You’re not “Well”. You’re racist. by Holitiscism
○ Article - Unpacking The Invisible Knapsack by Peggy McIntosh
○ Article - How do I make sure I’m not raising the next Amy Cooper? by Embrace Race
○ Book - Christine Caldwell and Lucia Bennet Leighton: Oppression and the Body: Roots, Resistance, and Resolution
○ Book - Staci K. Haines: The Politics of Trauma
We also have heard from a great number of others who have studied with both you and Erin Telford, with deep concern about not only past experiences they have had when trying to address concerns of racism and appropriation within the community but also concerns about her current way of working and sharing that work, especially on social media. She has amassed a lot of power, resources, and presence but since the beginning of COVID-19, if not before, has been sharing very harmful information on her Instagram pulling from and promoting people like Kelly Brogan, Liv Wheeler, Elizabeth April, and Candace Owens. Additionally many people have approached her through Instagram, email, and in person around her lack of skilled engagement with racism, social justice, and trauma. In these interactions Erin has responded defensively and with a true lack of humility. One would think that when a teacher is approached by those who have felt harmed by her teaching, that it would be something to sit with and respond to with a sense of responsibility, accountability and repair work.
One example of the harmful information being shared is that in one post about headaches and trauma, Erin mentioned “reptilian implants” as something planted inside us by “reptilian extra terrestrials”. This is completely unacceptable and very harmful to survivors of violence and trauma. Erin does not have enough formal training around trauma and to speak of navigating trauma healing in this way is not only wildly misinformed, it’s dangerous.
Erin also lacks the depth of work around social justice and trauma needed for someone working so broadly with the public. In a time where there is so much uncertainty, violence against BIPOC communities, financial insecurity and more, people are already very vulnerable while experiencing active, current personal and collective traumas. When approached about some of the concerns, again there is a lack of humility, as well as arrogance, dismissal, and co-opting of radical language and ideas without doing the actual personal and structural work. Her responses to valid concerns on social media and email are gaslighting and employ respectability and civility as a means of controlling the narrative. Erin has personally and financially benefited from being one of your main teachers; we believe Erin needs more training in order to safely lead diverse groups. As her teacher, we hope that you will hold her accountable.
We see an overarching lack of standards, values, and ethics within your breathwork programming. For far too long, leaders in the wellness / Breathwork community have stayed silent on issues of race and white supremacy, in particular people who are leaders and who have many followers. Black people and people of color in our communities are in pain and are asking why many do not hear the call to take action and step forward. Yes it is scary, and yes, everyone makes mistakes. However white silence is violence. White healers hold a lot of power, and if those with power in the Wellness industry do not start taking action to train Black healers, how are we ever going to make any changes? Do we only want to heal a collective that is only safe for White people?
Please, answer our call to action in solidarity to show us that you believe Black Lives Matter. We need to see actual changes in leadership as well as your trainings. We would like to hear from you within 4 days (by June 22) with a plan for how you will begin setting this into motion. We are open to having one further discussion over Zoom as well. We understand that a larger sustained implementation will take a bit more time and don’t see any of this as a quick fix, though some communication from you in the next few days is needed for us to feel heard. We hope you are open to engaging in ongoing repair work, and see the value in it, with the community you have been creating for many years. There are models for this: many training programs and communities have taken steps to grow, change and evolve in order to serve more safely and with more accountability. The evolution of Generative Somatics, birthed out of a less politicized somatics training, is a great example. (Please see the book The Politics of Trauma for more.)
We love and value this practice of breathwork, see meaningful healing with the people we work with, and are deeply concerned about the current state and future direction of your programming. We are deeply concerned that people, particularly BIPOC, will continue to enter your trainings and experience harm, rather than healing.
Because of the above, a number of us listed below have been distancing ourselves from the community for some time but we’re feeling a call of urgency to invite you into to take responsibility for the harms of the past and current issues within this lineage.
We hope you will commit to the work and we look forward to hearing your action steps.
Signed,
Maryam Ajayi
Susan Ateh
Chauna Bryant
Amy Kuretsky
Molly Rose Hilgenberg
Jennifer Patterson
Additional Community Signing Support (as of letter being sent to David and Erin):
Jordan Catherine Pagán
Victoria Albina
Mikella Millen
Shannon Hanks-Mackey
Yarrow Magdalena
Chanel Durley
Libby Smith
Clara Le Moyne
Sarah Faith Gottesdiener
Eryn Johnson
Kathleen Currie
Miriam Jacobson
Amy Tate
Kristen Gregg
Christine O’Connor
Maya Keane
Anais Dotiu
Elissa Bonk