When entrepreneur and somatic practitioner Melissa Nkomo began consulting for co-working space And-Co in downtown Vancouver, the question of how to lure remote workers back to the office loomed large. “They hired me to talk about integrating wellness in the workplace when people eventually return to work,” she says. “I appreciated the thoughtfulness and intention behind that.” What happened next was a major step for Nkomo, who is the founder of Kunye, a wellness company offering skincare, movement classes and mindful wellness workshops.

“They had a space available [in their co-working building] that was allocated to be just a static gym with treadmills and machines,” she recalls. She called it a missed opportunity. “I said, ‘This shouldn’t be a gym. This should be a space for people to meet and move and be well.’” In 2022, Nkomo opened The Well in that space, making it one of the first Black-owned Pilates studios in Canada. 

With The Well, Nkomo has created an inclusive community where people of colour or those who have been othered at non-diverse studios feel welcome to practise mindful movement and “Slow Wellness,” her personal philosophy. “Slow Wellness came from a fusion of my studies in self-regulation, mindfulness and mindful movement,” she says. As The Well enters year three, her philosophy has fueled its success. Creating an inclusive community like The Well can be lonely work, but Nkomo’s not entirely alone. In the same year The Well opened its doors, Toronto’s first Black-owned Pilates studio, Nice Day Pilates, founded by Jennifer Winter, launched across the country. The work these women are doing is important because it’s part of a wider effort to actively decolonize wellness.

The wellness industry includes yoga, meditation, fitness, supplements, mindfulness, traditional medicines—products and activities that promote holistic health. And it’s a lucrative sector. According to the Global Wellness Institute, a non-profit dedicated to educating public and private sectors about wellness worldwide, wellness was a $128-billion industry in Canada in 2022, ranking eighth out of 218 countries. Physical activity was a roughly $22-billion piece of the pie; traditional and complementary medicine accounts for $9.9 billion. Many of these wellness practices are rooted in non-white cultures and traditions, but these businesses are overwhelmingly run by white people. So, decolonizing the wellness industry means thinking about where these practices and philosophies came from versus who is profiting financially, who is leading the way, and who has access to it. 

That’s why two wellness spaces founded and run by women of colour in two different major cities in Canada is something to celebrate. The Well’s existence and success in Vancouver, an area with one of the smallest Black populations of cities in the country, is admirable. While specific statistics about how many owners, founders, practitioners or instructors are racialized people are difficult to find, the notion that wellness lacks diversity isn’t new. In 2018, Self magazine published the editorial “Wellness has a race problem,” where the then-editor-in-chief vowed to boost people of colour in wellness content to counterbalance the homogeneity of the industry overall.

The combination of the words “wellness” and “industry” is a problem for Tareyn Johnson, director of Indigenous Affairs at the University of Ottawa. In 2019, she completed her 200-hour yoga teacher training, during which she encountered a white instructor who said they learned from an Algonquin medicine man how to “smudge” the space using what they called a “medicine bundle.” “I know what a medicine bundle is,” Johnson recalls, “this was a very new age medicine, with a lot of crystals.” Feeling unsettled, she left the session but completed her training. 

As an Anishinnabe woman and member of Georgina Island First Nation, wellness has a deeper meaning for Johnson. “The idea of mindfulness or wellness as being a separate activity is really a Western Victorian kind of paradigm,” she says. “The Anishinaabe language is 90 per cent verb-based; everything is about being and what you’re doing. There’s wellness built into our language…So this idea that you can go and pay for 45 minutes of wellness will never work, and that’s why I have a problem with it as an industry. It’s just part of capitalism. You cannot access true wellness if you see it as being separate from yourself.”

Completing her yoga teacher training was an extension of her own connection to the Anishinnabe culture. “It was an exploration of an alternative form of wellness,” she says. “I have my own worldview and beliefs, and I think yoga complements them.”

Curiosity is key when it comes to doing the real work of decolonization in wellness. We should be actively seeking out the truth, which means not only the history of different wellness practices, from yoga to Pilates, but also how they trickled down to you, in what form and by whom. This is something Nkomo faced during her education and training, after noting that all her instructors were white, teaching her about yoga and ancient practices that didn’t originate from their cultures. She had a moment of reckoning and was intent on finding other approaches. 

Figuring out how to learn, educate and grow within the wellness space as a racialized person is hard, ongoing work. Robin Lacambra is the founder of GoodBodyFeel, a Hamilton, Ont.-based collective focused on therapy, movement and education in support of anti-racism, inclusivity and well-being. After success with pop-ups around 2018 and creating an eager, diverse community, they opened a studio offering Pilates and movement in 2019, but closed the physical studio in 2022 due to the challenges of navigating running a small business during the pandemic. 

Today, Lacambra does a variety of work online, including anti-racist corporate education, somatic relational psychotherapy, mindful movement and conflict mediation. “One of the major things that I encountered in wellness spaces where I’ve been harmed is an unwillingness to be wrong, an unwillingness to take accountability,” Lacambra says. “So I think that’s a major part of creating safer spaces for all folks, is for the folks governing the space to be willing to be wrong—and apologising when they are.”

A big part of the work of decolonizing wellness comes down to the right people listening with empathy. These are skills that can and should be worked on. “It’s important to give opportunity for accountability and rupture repair cycles to happen, because oppression happens relationally,” Lacambra says. “Oppression is relational conflict, whether it’s on a systemic level or an individual level. And we’re often not skilled enough to move through it, which then creates a bigger divide between us and them.”

While Nkomo and Lacambra are approaching the decolonization of wellness from different angles, they are both doing work that goes beyond just existing in these spaces by creating space for others to learn. In this way, more people can deconstruct old systems. The Well offers subsidized classes taught by teachers-in-training to allow diverse instructors the opportunity to gain experience; and Lacambra teaches corporate empathy seminars that encourage people to question the homogeneity of the industry.

There’s no wrong way to bridge the cultural divide in the wellness space if you’re open to being vulnerable. “You have to engage with the people who are of that culture and learn what the protocols are so that you’re not appropriating,” Johnson says. “You don’t have to do it alone. Empathy is not supposed to be developed alone. Community is not supposed to be developed alone.”