Decolonising your practice: where most facilitators get stuck
Image source: John Salzarulo
Article Overview:
You are already breathing, and if you hold space for other people's breath too, the word "decolonise" has probably crossed your feed more than once by now. It's everywhere in wellness spaces at the moment. What's rarer is a practice that's actually changed underneath the language. Here's where that gap tends to open up.
Adopting the language without shifting the power
This is the most common place facilitators get stuck, and it's easy to miss from the inside. Performative allyship, in this context, looks like using the vocabulary of decolonisation, naming systems, citing the right thinkers, without ever examining whether the actual power dynamic inside a session has changed. You can talk about dismantling hierarchy while still being the only person in the room who decides what happens, when, and what it means. The language shifts. The structure underneath it doesn't.
Treating it as something you finish
A lot of facilitators approach decolonising their practice the way they'd approach a training module, something you complete once and then carry forward as a credential. It isn't that. It's closer to an ongoing practice of noticing, the way ongoing consent works, or the way a nervous system stays in relationship with safety rather than arriving at it permanently. A facilitator who describes themselves as "decolonised," past tense, has usually stopped looking.
Borrowing technique without honouring origin
Breathwork, like yoga before it, has a long history of being stripped of its spiritual and cultural roots and repackaged as a neutral, universal wellness technique. It's worth asking plainly where the practices you teach actually come from, what lineage they sit inside, and whether you're representing that honestly or quietly letting it disappear because it's more marketable without it. This isn't about guilt. It's about accuracy, and about not letting extraction happen simply because nobody asked the question out loud.
Centring your own journey instead of the person in front of you
A genuinely useful question, borrowed from wellness practitioners further along in this work, is simple: how have I centred myself in this practice? It's easy, especially once you've done real personal work around your own healing, to let a session become about your insight rather than the breather's experience. Decolonial facilitation asks you to keep checking whether you're actually following the person in front of you, or quietly steering them toward the framework that made sense of your own story.
Skipping your own dismantling work
This is the one that stings most, and it's worth sitting with rather than rushing past. Being harmed by a system and unknowingly upholding that same system are not mutually exclusive. It's entirely possible to hold real oppression in your own story and still be propping up the very structures that caused it, through how you've built success, who you've centred, what you've been rewarded for. Decolonising your practice has to start with your own body and your own choices before it can honestly extend to anyone you're holding space for. The dismantling isn't just something you're guiding other people through. It's yours too.
Letting the business model stay untouched
It's worth asking a harder question than most facilitators want to sit with. Does your pricing, your marketing, and your actual client base reflect the values you're teaching, or do they still run on the same extraction logic dressed in softer language? A profit-first structure underneath decolonial language isn't automatically wrong, everyone needs to earn a living, but it's worth being honest about the gap if one exists, rather than letting the language paper over it.
Confusing decolonising with diversity and inclusion
These overlap, but they aren't the same thing, and collapsing them into one conversation tends to let facilitators off the hook too easily. Diversifying who's in the room matters. It doesn't automatically change the underlying framework, the assumptions about safety, neutrality, authority, and progress, that the whole practice is still quietly built on. A more diverse room running on an unexamined colonial framework is still running on that framework.
What actually moves this forward
None of this is a checklist you complete and file away. It's closer to a standing practice: staying curious about where your techniques came from, checking who actually holds power in your sessions, being honest about your own participation in the systems you're critiquing, and letting your business practices answer to the same values as your language does. Humility here isn't a personality trait. It's an ongoing discipline of recognising your own limits and treating the person in front of you as the actual authority on their own experience.
It isn't about arriving somewhere finished
There's no version of this work that ends with you fully decolonised, holding space perfectly, free of every blind spot. That's not the goal, and chasing it usually just produces a more polished performance of the language rather than real change underneath it. What's actually being asked of you is smaller and harder: staying in the discomfort of not being finished, and letting that discomfort keep you honest.
Ready to go deeper into this work?
If you're a practitioner already holding space for others and want real support examining the frameworks you're working from, Decolonise Your Practice is built for exactly this kind of ongoing, honest reflection.
Frequently asked questions
Is decolonising your practice a one-time thing you complete? No. It's an ongoing practice of noticing and adjusting, closer to consent or nervous system regulation than a course you finish once.
Can I be harmed by a system and still be upholding it? Yes, and this is one of the harder truths in this work. Both things can be true in the same person at the same time, and recognising that is part of doing this seriously.
Is decolonising the same as being more diverse or inclusive? They overlap but aren't the same. A more diverse space can still run on an unexamined colonial framework underneath, so diversity alone doesn't complete the work.
What's the simplest way to start? Ask honestly where the techniques you teach actually come from, who holds power in your sessions, and whether your business practices reflect the same values as your language does.
Sources referenced: Refinery29, "What Does It Really Mean To 'Decolonize' Wellness?" refinery29.com/en-ca/2021/06/10516854/what-does-it-mean-to-decolonize-wellness; Neurolaunch, "Decolonizing Therapy: Addressing Oppression and Historical Trauma in Mental Health Practice," neurolaunch.com/decolonizing-therapy.
