After spending a majority of my life trying to free myself from what felt like a never-ending battle with my mental health, I kept finding myself constantly holding the tension between desperately trying to build a more meaningful life and feeling like most “wellness” spaces weren’t built for someone like me. I spent years wading through systems just to be left feeling overwhelmed and confused by all of the advice and "rules" that seemed to keep reinforcing the belief that I was somehow never enough AND too much at the same time. Overtime I realized that what I kept experiencing as my own brokenness was really my internal resistance to how these spaces ask us to shrink, conform, pathologize and shame ourselves; I couldn’t make sense of how spaces designed for “healing” and “wellness” were actually encouraging us to cut off parts of ourselves and deny our realities just to fit into a wellness model that was built on the foundation of oppression, conformity and over-simplification of the human experience.

So, I created Aulak Wellness Collective— because I got tired of being complicit in a system that was harming me, and too many others. This is a space that aims to honour the complexity of being human and the reality of the world we live in—including how it directly shapes our sense of identity, emotions, thoughts & experience. Do we have it all figured out? No, because who does? What we do know is that healing doesn't happen by erasing parts of ourselves to be “good enough” in a world that celebrates disconnection; instead we commit ourselves to an ongoing practice of unlearning colonial models of care (and existence) so we can make change that is meaningful, sustainable, and honours the complexity, messiness and imperfection of being human.