To truly heal in the South Asian communities we need more self love

A jug of magic being poured which contains stars, self-love and tons more. The headline reads ‘To truly heal in the South Asian community we need more self love’. This is followed by the author’s name which is Henna Amin.

By Henna Amin

To truly heal in the South Asian community we need more self love

There’s a lot of talk about self love online nowadays. It’s a mindset and practice that has the potential to really be transformational in our lives. And for marginalised people, it’s often an act of radical resistance to a system that profits and thrives off us hating ourselves. 

Sounds great, I know, but the image of self love we’re presented with in the West is one lacking in substance. They tell us self love is thinking we’re the baddest bitch on the block, to block anyone who doesn’t ‘serve’ us and that as long as we’re serving looks for our followers that’s all we need to feel good about ourselves. Basically, it’s self-serving individualism after you put it through the white capitalist machine. And by starting and ending this notion of self love with the individual, it takes what has the potential to heal marginalised people, and communities, and creates yet another indirect way to continue capitalist cycles of individualism and self-preservation. 

Self love and community love are connected

The West’s version of loving ourselves forgets what we can do with that self love beyond celebrating ourselves. It ignores the interconnectedness of us all, something that communities of colour have embodied for centuries. And it fails to teach us that self love is the key to building community. In the context of the many diasporas that exist around the world, that also means healing our often fragmented and divided communities. 

The South Asian community is one of the most diverse and beautiful in the world. But it’s one that’s also broken and fragmented. With our specific history of violent colonisation and the barbaric splitting up of the Indian subcontinent at the hands of the British Empire, the scars left on our communities in the diaspora run deep. And as a result, there’s a culture of distrust and prejudice across our whole community.

When does healing become a reality?

When we talk about healing in the South Asian communities, I feel like we’ve still got a few hurdles to jump. And this is because a big part of the problem is that we’re all individually still suffering, so how are we supposed to bring healing energy to our communities? Most of that suffering is at the hands of a white supremacist, patriarchal capitalist state that violently colonised our families as little as two generations ago. 

This has fed, and does still feed, the misogyny, homophobia, casteism, colourism and religious bigotry that are so rampant in our communities. Of course these things existed in pre-colonial India, but they were institutionalised and capitalised on by the British, and today are too often described as “just the way things are”. These sources of hate and bigotry are built into the reasons we feel badly towards each other and have such a fragmented community. And then on an individual level, we have the internalised racism and colonialism that informs so much of why we feel badly towards ourselves.

Self love lets us cultivate self compassion

To heal in our communities we need to start with ourselves. Because the way we act towards and treat others is a reflection of how we feel about ourselves. So self love is one of the many keys to healing, on both the individual and community level.

This isn’t to say we have to be 100% in love with ourselves and address every single source of trauma in order to reach healing on a community level. But if we want to be able to extend love and care towards others, we need to at least have started that journey ourselves. 

When we practice self compassion, we can give that to others

Self love allows us to develop self compassion. And when we speak and act with compassion towards ourselves, we’ll have the capacity to do the same for others in a more sustainable, authentic way.

Self compassion allows us to connect to our common humanity, and cultivate healing energy that we can direct towards ourselves and the people around us. We’re all so deeply interconnected that the act of loving yourself sets off a ripple effect that we can harness in community healing too.

It’s not just being kind to yourself, it’s accountability

Self love is also a commitment to growth. It’s putting time and energy into unlearning all of the ways in which we’re violent to ourselves and others. And it’s a fucking tough process. Recognising our privileges and past wrongdoing means taking accountability and moving forward in a constructive way.

When we do that, we can see how much of the belief systems we have are influenced by the world we live in, and see the vice grip that colonial trauma still has us in. And once we can see that in ourselves and hold space for it, we can do the same for others. 

Self love gives us the tools for community healing

We can’t ignore generational trauma and centuries of conditioning to distrust, judge and hate each other and just expect us to get along and support each other as if by magic. Especially when a lot of us don’t even have a good relationship with ourselves and our own identities. We all need to do the work on an individual level to unlearn oppressive and damaging attitudes so that we can bring love, compassion and acceptance to our community. 

With a little more self love, maybe we can start to release colonial trauma, reclaim our strength in community and begin healing. 

Henna is a British Panjabi-Gujurati writer, creative, speaker and activist who uses her platform to explore topics of race, intersectional feminism, self-love and wellness. Through her writing and creative work, she aims to explore her own journey of self love and healing, raise awareness about social issues and inspire others to do the same. 

IG/Twitter: @henna_speaks, blog: www.henna-speaks.com