Creating Safe Spaces

Good morning Sunshines!

If you follow my IG (blackwellnessMD) you know that late last year, I started being more intentional on my IG page. The world feels very dark some days, and I just wanted to bring more meaningful and helpful content. November and December had posts that were super random; I was just trying to wrap my arms around how to create meaningful content that I connected to.  Eventually, I created a year plan for 2026, to give myself some framework.  In January we started with being present on purpose and addressing the elephants in our spaces, those hard conversations, those things we avoid and want to bury and ignore. I feel like that is a lifelong process that requires being very present and honest with oneself. We moved on to focusing on gratitude, finding and creating joy and practicing Shalom. All of these concepts are supportive to the process of acknowledging our elephants and finding the lessons and value they hold. 

This week, for February I started with the thought of creating safe spaces. Safe spaces. What does that mean? Last night I was in a circle of fellow physicians and felt the palpable energy of a safe space. The resounding theme last night was the thought that whatever one person felt or thought or experienced was a singular experience, that they were the only ones that felt that way.  What came to be revealed was that was the furthest thing from the truth. In this vastly different group of multiple genders, ethnicities, specialties, career identities, lifestyle, familial roles and childhood experience, we were more similar than we were different. There was such a soothing safety from that fact. I went to bed pondering that experience. This morning I awoke way too early with that concept of creating safe spaces still heavy on my soul. Before I even knew it, I had changed my IG handle, my Facebook handle, bought a new domain name and was working on a new logo. Why? Because I wanted to make my spaces safer. 

“These are all virtual spaces, how can they be safer?” you might wonder. Well, from a “you perspective”, yoga may be intimidating. Having yoga in the title may be a turn off. You may not hear me because I said yoga. You may have had a bad experience with yoga or feel something negative because of the homogenous presentation of yoga and yoga bodies does not include you. You may feel like you could never do it because you aren’t flexible enough or skinny enough or something else enough, and miss the message that is at the root of my mission. Yoga is a means to an end but it is not the only path. In fact, my push for yoga is more about the meditative and emotionally healing that yoga brings! Yes, there are amazing physical benefits, but my primary reason for emphasizing yoga is the mental health benefit. But if yoga only means contorting your body into shapes that look impossible to you, you would never get to the inside of the tootsie roll; the good part. In fact, the path, the journey, that I want to take you on, with me, the destination isn’t yoga at all! The destination, the endpoint, the place I want to arrive is Wellness. 

So what is wellness? I guess there are a million ways you can define it. It is, after all, a popular buzzword. I actually have a lot of words that encompass Wellness to me. To start, Wellness, to me, is Wholeness. Completeness. Honesty. Transparency. Agency. Confidence. Authenticity. Health. Healing. Aging well. But if I present with yoga, solely, you may not feel that connection. 

And this has been an evolution that was happening right before my eyes without me even realizing it. My posts have naturally themed more towards wellness, less towards yoga specifically. My year plan for my IG page incorporates yoga, but it is more clearly aligned with healing. Wholeness. Authenticity. Emotional awareness and safety. In a word: Wellness. 

And from a “me perspective”, there are a lot of things I am working on from a wellness lens. Some, I’m failing at, but trying to fail forward at least. Some, I feel like I am really making progress and getting this shit done. 

One thing that really came up for me this morning, in my Insomniac Illuminations, I call them, was to create a safe space for my writing. I have always been a writer. I have a couple self published books under a pseudonym and an unpublished novel. I even used to write for an urban magazine.  However, I quit many years ago because that is a space where I lost all confidence. That unpublished novel got a unanimous thumbs down from my trusted circle, not because it wasn’t well written, but because they perceived my emotional transparency and truth to not align with their perception of truth. It was devastating for me because I had presented my authentic self, my very soul to them and had been rejected.  And if my trusted circle rejected me, there was no way I was putting myself out there for the world to reject me. The story I told myself is that my authentic self, who I was at my core, was not good enough and that meant I was not good enough. So I quit writing. 

I am realizing that I allowed that story to seep into many other mental spaces. That concept of not good enough did not stay in my writing space. It drifted like a stench into all of my other spaces. But then, through yoga, I started a slow transformation that I didn’t even realize was happening. And even later, I began to teach and unknowingly, I started trying to share that transformation. If you have ever been to a yoga class that I teach, I am big on gratitude, self love, self affirmation. I want you to focus on reminding yourself that you are enough, reminding yourself that you have agency and are strong and powerful, reminding yourself that you are valuable. I started to see that I had been evolving out of that space of self doubt and trying to bring you with me! I hadn’t acknowledged the shift before. I had shifted. I hadn’t  “arrived” but I had taken steps towards my own wellness. I had stood up to this ugly quiet self doubt weed that overgrew my garden of self confidence in every arena except…writing. 

Today, I decided to create my own safe space for that one place I have allowed to remain buried in self doubt. I have acknowledged this elephant in my room. I am now going to start painting this elephant and discovering its beauty. I am going to create articles, musings, and maybe random thoughts and share them via the website (www.wellnessisforus.com or www.yogaisforus.com) and try to maintain a monthly wellness letter of things that might be helpful or I find interesting. It will probably be loosely aligned to my IG feeds, but with more detail and resources. Initially the timing may seem random, but we will work that out. If you like it, let me know. If you don’t, feel free to unsubscribe! 

And as the great lyricist Erykah Badu says…”now keep in mind that Imma artist and I’m sensitive about my shit.”