With all the healing modalities from around the world available to us, it would be ungrateful, and even disrespectful, to reject any of them. Getting good at the different modalities that all the world has to teach us is also part of the healing process, because for White people especially it means entirely accepting that we are actually no different than people we’ve been taught to believe are the People from Planet Wrong who do everything Wrong, and whose spiritual and healing practices, we’ve been assured, are proof of just how Wrong they are. It’s a question of getting to be whole human beings instead of members in any kind of standing of the Tribe of White. Appropriation is tinny. Assimilation resonates.
Short of it is: spirituality cannot be appropriated, cannot be bought, cannot be sold, and cannot be faked, try as anyone might. As Hazrat Inayat Khan said, “This treasure house, which is so great a treasure, is a magic house; a house wherein is every treasure, and yet the thief cannot find it. He will go through the house, he will go all around it, he will not see anything and he will go back with his hands empty.” The true treasure is right there inside us, always, there for the asking.
And, because both things are still true, at the same time that we are discovering our authentic healing selves, we can also refrain from burning all the white sage we can buy or running onto Native land to score some peyote.
Q (Or objection!): I don’t have a racist bone in my body!
A: Of course you don’t—truer words have never been spoken. There is no such thing as a racist bone. Our bones contain whole worlds of wisdom, which is why we so often say, “I feel it in the marrow of my bones” or “I know it in my bones.” The intrinsic knowledge that the human race is one is deep in the marrow of our bones. Our bones are not the problem. Our bones are staunchly anti-racist. The problem is the garbage in our heads, which began to be installed there when we were too small to defend ourselves, and a steady stream of which has been aimed at us ever since. The purpose of spiritual healing is to clear out the garbage and harmonize our heads and hearts—integrate them, to use a certain word—with the wisdom in the marrow of our bones.
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