Your Wellness is Cultural

Anyone else tired of Raven‑Symoné and her wife? I know I am.

But before I completely wash my hands of her, I want to get something off my chest — something that ties directly into this week’s Rejooovism:

When we are aligned with culture, we are backed by the shoulders of giants.

Culture is the ideas, customs, and social behavior of a particular people. And Raven wants us to believe that the ideas, customs, and social mores that shaped That’s So Raven — the Black cultural imprint that made the show what it was — were just… incidental. Random. Replaceable.

But I’m not here to drag her.

Plenty of folks are already doing that.

What I am interested in is the visceral reaction people had to her subtle sidestep of Black culture — and what that reaction reveals about our own wellness.

Because when someone we believe is part of our culture distances themselves from it, even slightly, it feels strange. It feels off. It feels like a rupture.

And that’s because culture is a part of our identity, we can rely on.

It’s grounding.

It’s stabilizing.

It’s ancestral.

So let me offer you this: If you aligned your wellness more closely with your identity and culture, your practices would feel easier to build — and easier to maintain.

Black culture is rich in wellness practices we rarely name because they’re woven into our everyday lives.

We come from people who healed through:

• Herbal remedies (you never had a hot toddy?)

• Movement — dance, rhythm, embodied joy

• Music — singing as release, harmony as healing

• Nourishment — food as care, food as memory

• Rest — refusing grind culture, choosing restoration

• Community — sharing the load, uplifting one another, healing together

  
  

We’ve made rest a form of resistance.

We’ve made joy a survival strategy.

We’ve made community a balm.

Your wellness has roots — and tending to those roots makes the whole process feel less like a chore and more like a homecoming.

A wellness practice backed by culture honors your identity. It honors your lineage. It honors the people who taught you how to survive, how to rest, how to heal, and how to keep going.

How Black Wellness Shows Up Culturally

• Ancestral technologies — our practices aren’t trends; they’re continuations of lineage.

• Language — the way we talk about wellness is nuanced, specific, and ours.

• Communal care — Black wellness has never been individualistic; it’s collective by design.

• Cultural grounding — wellness is liberation, rest, resistance, joy, and community care.

• Art — our culture expresses itself through creativity, so use it often.

  
  

When you align your wellness with your culture, you stop trying to build a practice from scratch — and start remembering what your people already knew.

Thanks for reading.

I’ll see you next week.

Love & Light,

- Cina