Episode 6 – Naya Wright: Ontology, Spiritual Activism, and Reimagining Illness
In this episode, Charlie talks with Naya Wright, a PhD student in anthropology and social change at CIIS, about ontology, epistemology, and what multicultural and indigenous frameworks reveal about the limits of Western biomedicine. Naya shares how growing up with asthma from six months old, and tracing that back to environmental exposure across generations, shaped her understanding of how structural neglect and pollution produce chronic illness, disproportionately in Black and brown communities. They discuss spiritual activism, the Ubuntu model, and Naya's framework of illness as a signal from a disrupted planetary system rather than an individual malfunction. The conversation moves through care webs, both/and thinking, and what it looks like to walk between worlds inside academic institutions while holding onto radically different visions of collective futures.
Watch the full episode: https://youtu.be/7punc1dVm2I
Topics we discuss:
Ontology, epistemology, and multicultural frameworks for understanding the body
Chronic illness as a signal from a disrupted planetary system
Environmental exposure and intergenerational illness
The Ubuntu model and African-centered frameworks
Spiritual activism and the fabric of reality
Indigenous healing traditions and biomedical limits
Walking between worlds in Western academic institutions
Care webs, mutual accountability, and receiving help
Binary thinking vs. both/and frameworks
Liberatory disabled futures
Episode 6 Transcript
Charlie: Hey everyone, I'm Charlie Moses, founder of Sick Futures Collective and the host of this podcast, The Future is Sick. Today I'm joined by Naya Wright. I'm going to read her bio because she's got so much good stuff going on and I don't want to slip up on any of it. So, here it is. Naya is a PhD student in the anthropology and social change department at CIIS, the California Institute of Integral Studies, where she researches ontology, epistemology, and how multicultural perspectives can reshape the way we understand illness and the body. She operates from the understanding that everything is spiritual in nature and interconnected, a framework that shapes how she analyzes the relationship between environment, chronic illness, and what we even mean when we talk about the body. She also brings lived experience with chronic illness to this conversation. I'm really excited to have Naya here. She's got a brilliant and beautiful mind and I just cannot wait for this conversation. So, let's get going. Hi Naya, thanks for being here.
Naya: Hey Charlie, thanks for having me.
Charlie: Yeah, I'm so excited that you were down to do this. Naya and I are at CIIS together, both studying anthropology, and just in the thick of it really is how it feels. Could you introduce yourself – your name, your pronouns, where you're based, the work you're doing right now?
Naya: Sure. My name is Naya. I use she/her pronouns. I'm based in DC right now, but I kind of hop around the East Coast because I have family spread out all over the place. In school, I'm working on a little bit of everything. I think Charlie nailed it. And outside of school, I work in green infrastructure. I've been working on stormwater management, rainwater collection, and trying to regen the city so we can have some clean, drinkable water for years and years to come.
Charlie: Oh my god. That's awesome. I don't think I knew that at all.
Naya: It's very new, so it's also interesting to say out loud. The last intensive we had, we ended up watching a movie and that was the whole thing. And it just clicked – I think I could do this right now. I don't even have to wait to finish what I'm working on in class – and that took off.
Charlie: Wow. Oh, that's so great. Yeah, congrats on that. Clean drinking water is of the utmost importance right now, I feel like, above many many things.
Naya: Yeah, and I think it's helpful to kind of zoom in sometimes because we're systems thinkers. We like to figure out how everything plays together. So the big one is, oh, climate change, and let's save the planet – and yes, let's do all of those things, but how? Stormwater was kind of my entry point and I figured out that was at least a thing to focus on in the meantime. There are lots of things to focus on. That's my one piece of advice for any big problem: find the piece that seems cool to you and then do that.
Charlie: Yeah. Oh my god. Majorly. It is the tried and true method – narrow your focus, find that one thing that you are just so invested in, and just keep at it forever.
Naya: Forever and ever and ever, until you feel called to do something else, and then scrap the whole thing and find a new hyperfixation.
Charlie: Yeah, for sure. Every 5 to 10 years or so, it's fine. Well, with that – your research is kind of grounded in the idea that there's this interconnection to everything, that everything is spiritual in its nature. Do you remember how you came upon that framework? Whether you've always operated under it, and maybe how it shaped your work that you're doing right now and work you'd done in the past?
Naya: Yeah. Formally, I think when I started to notice it was probably back in undergraduate studies. I had a really cool mentor in African-centered psychology at Howard University, and he exposed me to the Ubuntu model – which I could drone on and on about for hours, but I won't go too far into detail now. The framework was essentially that before colonization, various communities had it baked into their language and their worldview that everything in existence is of the same core substance. It's just slight differences in how we all manifest these unique qualities of the same core substance. I didn't really understand it at 18, but I was obsessed with it. I was like, that sounds cool. I think I could explore that further. So 10 years later I have all of these words, and apparently that's like questions of epistemology and ontology and what's the nature of being – and all I remember is being 18 saying, yeah, that resonates, let me look a little further into it. But then if you ask my mom, she calls me her earthy crunchy kid, and I always wanted to run around barefoot in the leaves, and it was probably more comfortable pretending I could talk to a bird or a deer than actually socializing. So if you let her tell it, she's not even a little bit surprised that we landed here.
Charlie: Oh my god. Yeah. Okay. You and I have a lot in common then. I was like, if I could just be in nature 100% of the time, covered in birds landing on my shoulders and hands, picking up snakes and climbing trees – I would have been in the most ideal existence in life.
Naya: Oh, for sure. My go-to is the witch's potions. There was this neighbor a couple doors down and she had these huge hedges with berries on them. To this day, don't know what the berries were. They were probably slightly poisonous, actually, because the one thing our parents told us was, "Hey, we know you're in your kitchen. Please don't eat the bright red questionable-looking berries that we can't identify."
Charlie: Oh, yeah. No, that's so funny. Yeah. My cousin and I made potions – that was our thing. We would just go outside and scavenge anything and cram rhododendron in them, which is highly toxic. Foxglove, also highly toxic. We had a bathroom cabinet full of highly toxic potions. The best things. So with bringing in chronic illness and your experience with chronic illness, and understanding the environmental implications and that connection between environmental exposure and chronic illness – when did that start landing with you or hitting home?
Naya: Yeah, that's a really interesting question. I was kind of an oddball kid, so a lot of my answers will be similar, but I think there was some version of me that always knew and could feel it – it just took getting a little bit older to be able to put words to it. I was diagnosed with asthma at 6 months old. So before I was talking, walking – for me, this is core memory, as long as I've been alive. Most of the time I feel completely normal, or at least my version of normal, which according to my doctors my baseline for normal is very skewed from the rest of the population. But again, this has been my whole life. So I'm just like, I don't know, this is the best I can breathe half of the time. There's the normal baseline and I'm pretty active and I can move around and I'm really not giving it much thought – and then I'll walk into a dusty room or I'll go to someone's house with a pet or the temperature skyrockets and all of a sudden I'm hospitalized and gasping for air. So I think there's always been an element of realizing, okay, there are some spaces I can go and be completely fine and there are others where I'm immediately going to struggle to breathe. And then you get older and you go to school and you're learning about environmental pollution and asthma rates clustering in different cities and you're like, oh, so it's not just me. This is quite a large phenomenon happening on a massive scale – to the point that the fact that we have such a polluted environment is probably a big reason why I can even say I was diagnosed with asthma at 6 months old. Both of my parents grew up in cities. My mom grew up in Camden, New Jersey, and there's a huge waste management plant there. We would go up every weekend to visit my grandmother, and we're kids, we don't know any better. So we're on the highway and as we're driving we're like, I know I'm close to grandma's house, I see the big pink smoky building. And you get older and you're like, oh, the big pink smoky building is three blocks away from my grandmother's house and is pumping out who knows what kind of toxic sludge, and it's just been there.
Charlie: Oh yeah. I think it's fascinating in biomedicine how we are so conditioned to be like, oh, it's the individual, it's the individual, or it's family history, family history – and that bringing up environmental pollution or just pollution in general is like, huh, what, when talking to any biomed doctor or the system of it, it's just not necessarily addressed. Until you peel open like half a layer and you're like, oh, there it all is. Like there's an explanation for generations of violence and harm.
Naya: Got it. Yeah. And the explanation's always there. And I think this is something our program does really well – bringing in lived experience. I've really been enjoying sitting at this intersection of saying, oh, here are all of these things that I noticed that were just kind of weird growing up that I never gave any thought to because that's just what it was. And then there's this whole body of literature and several different discourses and different perspectives, and they're like, oh, no. This isn't just happening. This came from somewhere.
Charlie: Yes. Gosh. Yeah. What initially drew you to this department at CIIS, to the anthropology and social change program?
Naya: Yeah, so that's actually a really funny story. I don't know if I was drawn to this program so much as the program chose me. Again, shout out to my wonderful mentor in undergraduate studies. We did these Saturday kind of weekend development labs – they were really casual, just a couple students who wanted to read and discuss ideas – and it went from there. Most of my questions were just like, okay, you're telling me that everything is spiritual, so let's say I believe you – and I was still kind of a skeptic at this point – alright, if that's true, what does that even mean? And if it's everything, then what is everything? Are the trees spiritual? Is that person across from me also spiritual? Is that electronic device sitting across from me some expression of spirituality? What are the limits of this? And he's rooted in San Francisco too, and he's like, "The questions you're asking – I think this is your school. You should go here." And I wrote it down on a post-it note. It got lost in my stack of papers when I was moving out of my senior year apartment in the rush of trying to figure out adulting. I went to a whole other university for my master's because I think I was still in the mind space of like, academia has to look a certain way, and these questions are fun, but this isn't rigorous – you can't really experiment and study spirituality. At the time, I went to a completely different school, and the question would not leave me alone. So I finished my master's degree – it was supposed to lead into a joint PhD – and I just took a gap year. I was like, you know, maybe I need to stop and figure this out. And the post-it note just randomly pops up. Mind you, I've moved three different times. It's in a random Ziploc bag sandwiched in between drawings from my brother when he was a kid and just shows up. I'm like, okay, this is weird, but I want to ask questions about spirituality. Maybe it's a sign. Let me look. And so I humored it a bit. I was debating between our department, anthropology, and the East-West psychology department because I was a psychology major in undergraduate studies. The thing that got me – it was such a minor difference. But after studying all the individual internal psychological well-being side of things, the other thing that I learned – and it was kind of a side note to my undergraduate studies – was that a lot of independent individual mental health is environmentally mediated. There are places you can go that are going to be really good for your mental health. There are things you can do that are good for your mental health and there are things that are not. So it's like, okay, well, most of mental health really isn't something we control by ourselves. Our environment influences it. Maybe I want to work on building a system that encourages really good mental health. That was the kicker. I was like, okay, I won't be a psychologist. What's the big thing where I can work on systems? And I still didn't really have words for any of these things. Like, okay, anthropology seems close enough. I'll figure it out when I get there. And then I did, because we have great supportive faculty and great classmates. But it really was the most chaotic kind of convergence of things. I was like, well, I might as well give it a try.
Charlie: Yeah. Oh my gosh. No, I love it though. I love the post-it note unearthing itself at just the right time, being like, "Remember me?" And you're like, "Oh, yeah. I do. Hi."
Naya: And it was so crazy because I had maybe three days prior been thinking, alright, I'm at the end of my gap year. I've always wanted to be a doctor. I'm still really not sure. I'm definitely not going back to my other program. I don't know. Like, where would I even go? Holy grail post-it note in a random Ziploc bag. Okay, I guess I'm doing this. And granted, this was two weeks before the application deadline on top of everything else. So, I guess we're just doing this now.
Charlie: Yes. Like, quickly.
Naya: We have too much time to think about it.
Charlie: Yeah. Sometimes that's the best way, you know, just shove yourself off the edge and go for it.
Naya: Best choice by far, but I don't know how much of a choice it was in the moment.
Charlie: Yeah. Yeah, I totally get it. My experience going into this program – I was so hesitant about it because I was coming from such a rigorous school prior, but it was such a bad fit. And I remember meeting with Andrej and then meeting with Adrienne Pine, who's this phenomenal critical medical anthropologist, and they were both like, get over here, and I was like, I don't know, and it took me a year, but when I did I was like, god, it was the best idea I've ever had.
Naya: I love that. Andrej got me too. He did my entrance interview, and I was so disillusioned with academia at this point that I made this commitment to myself: I'm not shortchanging anything. I'm telling these people exactly what it is I want to do, and they're either going to love it or hate it, but I want to know now. And I told him, and I was just like, "Listen, I'm a really political academic figure and I want all of these things to shape the world." He's like, "Perfect. You found your people. Come here."
Charlie: Yeah. Exact. Yeah. For anybody listening, if you are unfamiliar with Andrej Grubačić – look him up. He's this incredible world historian, a world systems theorist, anthropologist, activist, and just one of the coolest, smartest people that you could ever be influenced by. Oh gosh. Well, okay. So in thinking about your research – you're engaging questions of ontology and epistemology, which is how we know what we know, and also what we believe exists – which is very big systems thinking. How does your research, how do those questions around these things, connect to how we understand illness and chronic illness and disease and disability?
Naya: Oh, there are so many good questions. I'm organizing them in my brain really quick to figure out which rabbit hole we're going to dive down. The main thread of my research right now is this idea of spiritual activism. Starting with clarifying what we mean by spiritual activism – because typically when that's referenced, what people mean is an internal experience, either religious or non-religious, but it's more of an internalized morality that motivates them to take action in society towards making it a better place. And that's great. But there's also another angle to that. And this is where the multicultural perspectives come up – where spirituality extends beyond just an internal personalized experience that guides your own moral compass. It's the actual fabric of reality. And so we dip into consciousness studies, and – the girlies and the they/thems on TikTok will maybe know it more as manifestation – but I tend to look at these things that end up being broad cultural phenomena and instead of writing them off, I'm like, what is this getting at? What does this mean to people? Because if the idea of manifestation does wind up being real – where in mass we all collectively come up with this idea and that shapes reality as we know it, and then that's what we see as our physical reality – then I think that becomes a different entry point for how to approach activism. So for me, it's kind of reasserting what comes first. Instead of, how do we make changes in the systems based on what we see, it's acknowledging that there are forces operating that we don't see all the time, but they still work in a very tangible, quantifiable way. And if we can understand that, we can get in on a level that is maybe not so fraught with conflict because there's not too many people operating there. My idea is that if it stands up, then it's efficient. And so when we tie it into illness and how we think of the body – I also conceptualize illness maybe a little bit differently than how it's popularly thought of. There's kind of the biomedical model where the body is this collection of parts, and when one of the parts is malfunctioning, you get this collection of symptoms and then we'll label it an illness. And yes, on one level, I think it does function that way. But going back to that interconnected underlying spiritual essence of everything, I've started to conceptualize it as it's mostly just our bodies alerting us to the fact that there's something wrong around us. And then even a step further – if everything's interconnected, then the separation between forms is more of an illusion than a truth on a nonphysical level. And if that's the case, where the idea of separation is an illusion, then what I've been thinking is that illness and chronic illness and different injuries are just a manifestation of a piece of that system as a whole being disrupted. So it's not “this person is sick.” It's – basically the same way that we conceptualize illness as an individual, except I'm thinking of the body as kind of everything in existence. So if we're just part of the earth, it's not Naya's lungs and Naya's body is sick. It's Naya, this aspect of the planet, is sick, and it's making the whole planetary system sick. So what things do we need to fix in the whole system to then mediate this particular expression of illness? And then you get healthy people, but you also get a healthy environment and healthy world systems. It's kind of a double-edged sword where I'm like, okay, localized problems are global problems – so fixing one fixes the other, but if we approach it from the global, we help the local. I think it can go both ways. And that's also why I'm like, okay, if that's true, there's a tool that we're not touching that most people also don't see coming. So we can maybe use it to get some leverage early on, before it ends up being this open conflict battle of the wills of consciousness.
Charlie: Oh my gosh. Incredible. Yeah. As you were speaking, I was thinking about or visualizing everybody and everything connected by a series of threads, and thinking about the thread that runs through all those who experience autoimmune disease, the thread that runs through all those who experience asthma or diabetes or whatever it might be. And the connection that all of those people have to that one experience of illness that the entire world or universe or existence is experiencing collectively and altogether. It's like the coolest, ultra-collective framing – to really envision everything as being just one absolute unified thing, living.
Naya: Yeah. And I like questions of what even is this thing happening – because I think the way we conceptualize a problem shapes how we think of the solution. If I'm thinking of illness as this one thing experienced by one person, the solution is – if it's diabetes, the solution is insulin; if it's asthma, the solution is an inhaler or a nebulizer – and most chronic illnesses have their thing, right? But if it's a collective experience, the solution is not polluting the environment to the point of hurting people's lungs, and supporting the food supply so that there's not as many triggering foods being created and made available, and sometimes the only options. Of course, that doesn't speak to every illness that exists – that's not my specialty. But I am curious what that opens up in terms of how do we address this issue if we're expanding beyond just what this one person can do to manage their symptoms in their space.
Charlie: Yeah. Oh my gosh. Yeah. I just love it. And I feel like I'm a little mindfucked trying to really see it and envision it in that sense – which is wonderful because it is such an expansive and necessary framing to understand the systemic impact of the shape of the earth, the shape of the universe at large. I remember listening to – I'm going to forget her name – but it's the woman the movie Contact, or the book, is based on. She was part of a NASA project to communicate, or attempt to communicate, with extraterrestrial life. But her framing of everything was like, we're not – it's not just humans and insects and mammals or whatever. She was like, it's earthlings. We're all just earthlings, collectively – be it the plants or the rocks or the people or the other animals that exist. And trying to understand that kind of collective mentality, I thought, was just so important and crucial and necessary for our continued existence and survival as living things. To see it as one whole is so necessary. I wanted to ask, what are some of the different cultures or traditions that have influenced you, or maybe the ways that they conceptualize what the body is – and what those frameworks or ideas or feelings reveal about western biomedical lenses?
Naya: Sure. I'll keep it relatively broad because I wouldn't call myself a cultural expert yet. I'm also a bit of a cultural generalist, but I think this has more to do with my own family history. My dad is African-American, and my mother is Puerto Rican American, but her parents lived on the island. There are some ideas floating around our family that at some point there was some indigenous continuity in the bloodline somewhere. But the piece that sticks out to me is that on both sides of my family, there's really not a clear record of who we're connected to, who we come from, what our traditions were. There's just this knowledge that they were something else, and a relatively recent knowledge of, there was something else, we just don't know what the something else is. So I kind of grew up piecing things together through stories my aunts and uncles told, and I think that carries over into my studies now where I'm like, I don't know, I won't claim a group, but there are so many that exist – so what can be learned from everybody? I tend to look for the underlying similarities, and I think it's because of my lack of rootedness in that way. I'm like, okay, I can't point to a specific group, but there are things that resonate with me as just a person of this earth. That being said, there are some areas that I've kind of gravitated towards. Various African indigenous groups – my earliest exposure was the Ubuntu framework, which is from Swahili-Bantu cultures; that's the language group it comes from, so that's a general area to kind of get situated. And then I really enjoy studying various North American indigenous cultures, which again, there are so many and they're definitely not a monolith, so I kind of poke around and get a little taste of what different people are saying and try to paint a picture that way. And then Puerto Rican Taíno indigenous cultures has been my latest area of interest because I think that's the one that resonates most closely with the stories my mother's side of the family has been telling. And then I recently took a course here at CIIS in indigenous lifeways, and I really enjoyed learning about – I might butcher this, I'm really bad at names, so sorry in advance – but the Māori people over in Australia and New Zealand. They have a really rich, fascinating culture. Those are kind of the major geographic regions I've looked into. But I tend to keep it kind of broad. I hop around the continents, and I think as I learn more and get more comfortable naming what I'm interested in, I plan to specialize and make more connections with local indigenous groups. But I had to get here first, because with my family background, there's also some hesitation to be like, "Guys, this resonates – I can't really say I'm part of your community, but I'd really like to learn from you because something feels right here." And in some places that'll be enough and in some it won't, but I had to at least get to a point where I was confident saying, "Well, I have as much as I have. And if you're open to it, I'm open to you. So, we'll see what happens."
Charlie: Yeah. Gosh. I'm also thinking about futurism and bringing in traditions and different cultures, and then trying to produce work or research and do all of that largely within an institution, a system that still operates under a western scientific framework. And granted, CIIS is kind of a different situation, but it's still within it. Are you finding – how are you finding butting up against that and trying to work around it with what it is that you're doing?
Naya: Yeah. I think a lot of that is me constantly reminding myself to try to walk between two worlds. My first experience with this actually wasn't even remotely academic. I was a behavioral technician working with toddlers diagnosed with autism. We were on a team and we would develop behavioral intervention plans. It started with taking an assessment of, okay, where is this learner at right now? What skills do they have that we can build on? What skills are we working towards? And then we'd map out what seems like a realistic goal, what's the lofty goal, but where do we want to get? And then my job was everything in between – how do we get from where we are to where we want to be – and holding both of those truths at the same time. Like, we're not there yet, but we can be, but we have to take really specific steps to get there. And we have to take into account where we're starting, because one thing – especially working with young kids of any neurotype – if you give them a task that's way beyond their ability to grasp, it's going to overwhelm them. Even adults: there are reasonable challenges, and then there's, I'm overwhelmed, I'm shutting down, and I can never do anything ever. You don't want to do that to people. So you have to be able to hold both spaces. After that experience, I try to hold that with me in these academic spaces where I look around and think, okay, this is what our culture and our systems look like right now, these are the tools we have available to us, this is where we want to be. And I think that's actually the bulk of the research I've done so far – basically trying to even define what the where-do-we-want-to-be looks like. I don't think everyone works this way and I don't think everyone needs to, but my brain works really well with having a roadmap, even if the roadmap seems completely unfeasible – I want to make that very clear. I love imagination. I love being crazy. Shoot for the moon and then come up with a very detailed plan of how to get there. So I do a lot of research around what could the alternative look like, and then I draw on my RBT training and say, okay, let's take a very honest audit about what we have going on right now. And informally I kind of score it – here are the strengths of the university, here are its weak points, here's how we can strengthen those weak points, here's how we can use the strengths to do that, here's where we might just want to exploit the weak point a little bit or completely disregard it because no one will notice. And I like to do that in culture, too – culture analysis, systems analysis. All of this exists and it's fine. My own philosophy is I take it as seriously as I need to in order to leverage it as a tool, but I'm really committed to these alternative futures that I'm dreaming up with my classmates and my peers and my cousins and the random theorist on Instagram who has no credentials but is probably one of the wisest people I've ever heard. Because there are a lot of them. There are a lot that aren't – please be discerning. But there are a lot of really wise people just out here saying things, and if you take them seriously, it's as serious as you want to take it. And then it's just figuring out, how do we build this thing and how does it take shape and start to transform, and what are the baby steps to get from one place to another, and what are the non-baby steps? There are some places where we're completely shortchanging ourselves because we think we have to have the whole thing figured out all at once. Most change almost never happens that way. We're taught that it happens that way. It doesn't happen that way – not in people, not in cultures, not in systems, not in ecosystems. There's always a tiny lever to pull that eventually cascades into the really big lever. So I look for really tiny levers to start pulling now, always with the thought of, how does this create a bigger lever?
Charlie: Yes. No, I know. I think the snowballing approach is to me the most motivating when you're like, okay, I'm already getting some stuff done, I'm checking some boxes, and we are making some progress here. And I guess I want to ask – with that approach, with this worldview, with knowing as much as you do about western biomedicine and having been in it since you were 6 months old in a very intimate way – what do you envision or where do you desire the future to go in terms of care and support and well-being?
Naya: Oh, that's such a big question. I love it. I would love to see a future where, first of all, we collectively understand that we share a communal responsibility for caring for one another, and taking that really personally. And I feel like that's already kind of an ambitious thing to say in our current cultural character. We're very individualistic. I think it's shifting a bit after the pandemic, but we're also coming off of a social media movement of, you know, you don't owe anybody anything, detachment is key, and that's how you elevate. Therapy speak kind of manipulated into, let's set boundaries for your own well-being. And I think that's all good advice, but too much of a good thing can always be a bad thing. Because the much trickier thing to say – and honestly, I think because we're in the West, this is why our therapy kind of took the direction it did – as opposed to the alternative, which would have been, no, we're all directly responsible for ensuring the well-being of the person next to us, and your neighbor, and the person across the street, and the person two states over. So I guess that would be the first thing: really developing a deep understanding that it's our responsibility to make sure one another is good, and if someone isn't, it's not a flaw in them – it's pointing to something we're all collectively getting wrong that needs to be tweaked. Because we have a lot of control over our built environment, including what we consider the natural environment. Things that seem completely natural are typically built or at minimum influenced by human activity. And so if we can connect all those dots and understand, I would love to see the future of care take on this multi-level analysis. I wouldn't even write off biomedicine as we practice it, because honestly it's saved my life plenty of times. Breathing – I don't know if you guys knew, but breathing's not really negotiable. When it stops working, you don't have very long to get it back online before it becomes a problem. So shout out to biomedicine, because inhalers after a two-mile run where I thought I really had this and I didn't – great, life-saving. Prednisone, fantastic. She's kept me out of the hospital so many times in the winter. Love her. Let's keep her right where she's at. But also, there are things that we could do that aren't strictly limited to the level of, change your own personal diet, make sure you take this really rigorous medication routine – we can alter the environment. And then – this is completely just me imagining, and part of my research is trying to see if this is even feasible – back through this lens of everything is spiritual. This I mostly get off of my side of the internet, which is why I'm trying to prove it in an academic space just to be sure. But there's also this idea floating around that illnesses are also energetic and spiritual. On the physical level – take asthma, for example – we can say, okay, your lungs aren't working because this piece of your lung is really irritated and it's making it hard for the muscle to work. It's a very physical explanation, right? But a more emotional, spiritual explanation could be, yes, you have a lot of ancestral intergenerational fear responses which are paralyzing that part of your nervous system and making the energy really stuck. Just pulling from different traditions and how they conceptualize the body – that's a whole other thing. And if that is true, maybe medicine the way that we know it is a temporary holdover. It's like, okay, we've diagnosed this thing, we understand this thing is happening, let's audit the environment and see what we can change, let's keep you on this medicine because it'll keep you alive in the meantime, and let's address the underlying spiritual, emotional element. And maybe you might not even have that illness. You might. I don't know. There are going to be scientists, hundreds of years from now, way smarter than me, hopefully building off of the things we do now, who'll have a way more clear answer than what I do. But I think I just like the possibility of saying, there are so many ways to conceptualize the body. And we've been so limited in just one – through this physical, individualized biomedical model – that in the way we even conceptualize illness working, there might be so many other underlying mechanisms that we have no clue how they even work. And they might even give us better solutions – where it'll tell us exactly what we need to change in our lives, our home and family lives, our community lives, our state, culture, society, global. There are so many levels to it. If we just look at it – to go back to the question of if I could imagine what does medicine look like in the future – it's being able to assess illness at all of these different levels and address it at every single level, every single time.
Charlie: Gosh, yeah, it would be so incredible. Are there any places in your life, or in your research or knowledge or awareness, where you're seeing some little glimpses of this taking place now?
Naya: Yeah, I think it's happening in really tiny baby steps, but I kind of see it happening in the margins of academia. Holistic medicine is one where at the least, practitioners are starting to question, okay, we are seeing these illnesses and our first response is medication – did we check mineral imbalances? Did we check if there was an iron deficiency? How is this person eating? What is their sleep like? What is their exercise routine like? I think it's a very early step to take, but it's a bit further than we were a century ago. And so I kind of try to hold on to pieces like that. And then there's kind of indigenous healers that are also crossing over into academia a little bit, who are really connecting to the spiritual emotional aspects of illnesses – they're like, well, this is how I treat illness, because I'm conceptualizing it as a spiritual issue and not a physical issue. I was part of a couple of mental health research labs that worked over in Nigeria for a while. And their approach was working with the community and taking that indigenous healing medicine perspective and trying to mix it with a biomedical model. So yeah, there are glimmers. There's kind of nutritionists and dietitians and people putting pieces together in isolation. I haven't seen anything where it's all being pulled together, and certainly nothing that really scales to a collective systemic level yet. But I see the wheels turning – people thinking, is this really the right way to be talking about this issue? What else is there? So I think we're right on the precipice of a cultural paradigm shift in just how we ask and answer questions. I just don't think it's sticking yet. We haven't quite got all the way there.
Charlie: Yeah. Yeah, I know. And I wonder about that question of scale and scalability, which is always so tricky and can be slippery – like, okay, is it more related to geography and culture and place in terms of how we're approaching these things? What does scale look like? But then it comes back to that idea of everything being so interconnected and being like, oh, but it just is this big, and it is this large. The degradation of the planet is this large and serious, and it's affecting everybody, and our health looks a certain way as a result of it and where we are geographically, where we are generationally, our exposure to certain things, our levels of stress, what's being passed down through our genetics – like it just goes and it goes and it goes. Yeah. I'm left thinking about and wondering, what do we do in the day-to-day? What is the small lever that we get to pull? What is that medium lever that's maybe 10, 15, 20 years out? What's that massive lever that's 500 years from now? What's the big lever that's so many generations from now, that we're working on these things and developing these things so that life gets to exist in this really lush, full, beautiful, glorious way? It's such good doing and thinking and being. I just love your work so much. I'm such a fan.
Naya: I will also say, I feel like the key to the thinking – because you're so right about this whole question of scale versus day-to-day – I get caught in that all the time and I'm still trying to train my brain out of it. But one thing I've been really fortunate to learn in my academic nomadism, traveling through all these worldviews, is that one thing we really like to do here in the United States is to be super binary in our thinking, where everything's oppositional. We all do it – I am so guilty of this. But that's not how everybody in the world thinks, and that's not how all humans have thought throughout all of history. So anytime I catch myself getting stuck in this either-or battle of, is it local, is it scale, is it daily, is it 500 years from now, I'm like, what if it's both? Like, both – and then what? And it doesn't always lead to answers, but it does get me out of the thought loop. And if nothing else, it might give me an idea. I don't know if any of my ideas are accurate or will ever play out, but it feels a lot better than being stuck in this paralytic, I don't know what to do because it doesn't feel big enough – and then there are things right in front of me to get done right now. I'm just going to have to trust that it's both. And so if I do this one thing now, right in front of me – big butterfly effect. Who knows? Maybe this podcast that we're doing right now will end up in an archive. And like the digital future AI, tech babe, academic, whatever the system is 500 years from now – they're going to listen to it and they'll do their analysis the same way we do of the 1800s and 1900s. They're like, this is what all our ancestors were thinking, those old fellas – and they'll make fun of it the same way we do of them. They'll be like, I can't believe you were ever stuck on that question. Isn't that just common sense by now? Who knows? Maybe we'll say one random word and that's going to be the future dissertation on how we create global world peace. No, maybe it won't. This could just be a really massive cope. But I'm happy to welcome you all into my strategy of coping with the world as it exists without getting stuck in it.
Charlie: Oh, yeah. No, I deeply appreciate it because the binary thinking is so ingrained. It's everywhere and all around us constantly. And getting out of it by just being like, and, both – we can do it all, but not in that sense – but like, yeah, it's here. Yeah. And I guess the other way I think of it too is, if we think of our current global systems, the only reason we're even asking the question of scalability is because it's happening, right? But it's happening without very much conscious thought – we're all just living our day-to-day lives. It's just this particular collection of patterns creates this global reality. So it's like, okay, what collections of daily patterns would create a different global reality without me having to think about it? Do we have to think about it to choose what that thing is going to be?
Naya: Probably. But once we normalize that and create a new normal, then just – I just so happen to wake up and have a list of all my neighbors' allergies. That's just a daily thing we do, because I bring all my neighbors cookies at the end of the week, but I make sure it's tailored to their dietary needs. Maybe that creates world peace 600 years from now. But if not, you get some really cool connections with your neighbors and you get cookies. Win-win, right?
Charlie: Oh my gosh. Absolutely. Yeah. I feel like the neighbor connection is such a good starting point for anybody. Just do it. Just talk to people who live around you who maybe you don't know so well, and build a relationship. Form a relationship. Get to know somebody new. Get to know somebody who you might not have a lot in common with, but you live right across the street from them and you're down to chat and wave and say hi and have some kind of peripheral interaction every now and then. I feel like it is really such a good small-lever starting place to springboard off of.
Naya: Oh, definitely. And if we're talking about small levers to springboard off of – I would even say, if that feels intimidating, because it did at one point to me, I would not have talked to a stranger – get really intimate with the people you're already close with. I feel like maybe we're a little bit better at it now that we've popularized talking about mental health, and social media helps with these things. But personal health is kind of still a little bit of a taboo, more or less. Get really, really into your best friend's business, or your sister's, or your cousin's. And it doesn't have to be the nitty-gritty of their health records, right? But check in. The allergy list – I said it jokingly, but I so mean that. I have a little index card in my kitchen of the six or seven people that eat at my house the most often – what are your allergies? And I completely allergy-proof my kitchen every time you come here. And everybody's got something, so get to know your people a little bit more, and be very intentional about taking ownership of caring for them when they're in your space or when you go to their space. It seems really simple, and in some ways we do it organically, but there are a lot of ways we could deepen that. And then you get comfortable doing that with your immediate circle, which in theory should be low stakes – I mean, you already like the people well enough, right? And then all of a sudden the neighbor's not so scary. I have a rolodex of 12 people that I'm clocking in my head at all times that I care for – care as a verb, action word. I am doing the caring as often as I can, taking it from a feeling into action. And when you're doing that, caring as a feeling for your neighbor is a lot lower of a lift at that point.
Charlie: Oh my gosh. Yeah. Just the check-ins. The check-ins are so good. Just popping in to say hi, see how you're doing, how's your day going, how's your week been, how's your body, how's this thing I know has been going on – or not. All of those little wonderful, delicious little morsels of connection are so valuable. And if you're just peppering them through your life, that kind of care web is so special and important. I remember when I was having a major series of health events last year, and I finally was like, I'm just going to make a text message thread with my seven or eight closest people – the ones who are like, are you okay? – and just have it there on speed dial so that when the next health event rolls in, I can be like, hello, back at the hospital, love you all, everything's going to be okay. Kind of stuff. Because it's just nice to have those supports and networks and care systems in place and to build them up little by little. Same with having social media as a place to connect with other people who maybe have similar conditions that you do, or who are going through similar things as you or not, or to just see life and experience life through a different lens. Trying to take the good with all of the other ick that can come with it can be a really solid way to connect as well.
Naya: Yeah. And I think another key too is giving yourself permission to give care and also to receive care, right? A big thing a lot of us do is we express care verbally and we kind of try to share our emotions. The action part can get kind of sticky. And I think it's because we have this culture of niceties and politeness where we're like, I'm thinking about you, I'm sending prayers, let me know if you need anything – because we don't want to impose by forcing it. And then they don't want to impose by requesting the actual help. So it'll probably be uncomfortable the first few times because it's just so countercultural, but it's simple – it's just, I'm doing this, let me know. The only "let me know" is, tell me if there's a specific day that's okay, or completely veto this if you don't want me in your space. But put the burden on someone telling you no, because nine times out of 10, people want to receive care. Like, hey friend, I know you're going through this thing – I'm coming to do your dishes. I'm not asking, you don't even have to think about it – I'm coming to do it. And then on the flip side, if you're not in a position to give care, part of care networks is also receiving it. Because humans like to be reciprocal, and so part of not wanting to burden people is because we feel like they haven't burdened us, even though it doesn't feel like a burden. It's like, oh, that person never needs anything, I don't want to impose on them. So going out of your way to say, actually, it would be really helpful if – and give people a list. And if they say no, fine. You're not entitled to it. If no one does it, it's fine. But you'd probably be surprised how many people are eager to show up if you just put it out there – I could really use support doing this, anybody game? Just throw it out there. I had to start doing this with myself because I'm hyper independent. I want to do all the things. I got it. I got it. And I had people around me even asking, I want to help you, give me a task. And I had to step back and look at myself and just be like, hey, when people ask you if you need help and you say no, when you could have used the help – that's on you. That is you not doing your part of building community. So it definitely goes both ways. But I think that assertive level of, almost like, I'm going to love and care for you whether you like it or not – and most people will like it. But even if you don't, I'm going to do this for you. Like, within reason. We like consent. We like boundaries. Too much of a good thing can become a bad thing in either direction. Please don't go knocking down your friend's doors. But go offer to do their laundry or something. I'm sure it'll be appreciated.
Charlie: Yes. Oh my gosh. Yeah. So relatable because it is just of the human condition. I remember when I had my first of two minor strokes and was like, oh, I literally am bedridden and haven't had to endure this before, aside from surgery recoveries where I know I'm going to be bedridden. Being like, oh my god, I can't even get up and get my mail. I can't clean the cat litter box. I can't water the plants. I can't get up. And I'm living in a place where I don't have any family. So, okay, I guess here I go. And it's like diving into the deep end of being like, hey friend, could you bring my mail in? I'm here, but I can't. Could you come over and help with my dishes because I can't? The basic stuff. And realizing that everybody in my life was like, yeah, when? Now? Like anytime, what do you need? And being like, oh, yeah. Because I would do the same. If one of my dear friends was like, I literally can't move, I would be like, I'll be your live-in helper. What do you need? For as long as you need, whatever you need – because we desire that as humans. We want to care for the people who we love especially. And generally, we really do want to care for each other and humanity and other living things.
Naya: And okay, so this kind of goes back to what we're talking about – where are the tools and things we can use now. We love capitalism. Yay. Sarcasm. Not. But what it did do is make us all feel really deeply that we have to be useful. Use that. Just, instead of being useful to your boss, go be useful to your neighbor who has a mobility limitation and bring up some groceries. And if you struggle with asking for or accepting help – everyone likes to feel useful, innately, as humans. That's one of the great gifts of our current cultural dynamic. We like being useful. Give your friends the gift of being useful today. They'll love it.
Charlie: Oh my god. Absolutely. Well, shoot. We are up on the hour. I wanted to end with a question that I love to ask guests right at the tail end – when you imagine liberatory futures for those who are sick and disabled, or otherwise, what do they look like? What do they feel like? What do they sound like? Smell like? How do you envision these?
Naya: Oh, I'm an earthy crunchy kid from start to finish. So it looks very green and fruitful. It looks like a collaborative ecosystem between humans and everything else on this earth, with everything operating in its deepest capacity to support every other thing. And a world being designed around that. And I think the only way we get there is that everybody can participate and everybody's taken seriously and everybody's needs are taken into consideration, and we all value doing that and make it a priority to do that all the time. And then from there it looks like access and participation and deep intentional care, and very, very green, and less separation between our plant and animal kin and the rest of us – because I feel like we're really, really separated right now.
Charlie: Yeah. Oh my gosh. Yeah. Dang, dude. My heart is like full. I can feel it, brimming and spilling over. On very similar pages – just the most lush, glorious, true ecosystem. Oh, well, thanks again for being on the podcast and hanging out and talking about your work and thoughts and ideas and research. So awesome.
Naya: This has been really fun. Thanks for having me.
Charlie: Yeah, absolutely. Okay, well – I'll see you a little later. Is that tomorrow? Do we see each other tomorrow?
Naya: We do.
Charlie: I'm getting through the reading. We'll get there.
Naya: Yeah, we'll get there. Alright. Have a glorious day.
Charlie: You too. Bye, Naya.
Naya: Bye, Charlie.
Charlie: Okay. Wow. A giant thank you to Naya for that absolutely beautiful and rich and nourishing and nurturing conversation – for her research and experience and wisdom. Just wow. Yeah. I love that we got into how we conceptualize the body, especially through the interconnection of all things. I think it's so valuable, and just having everything to do with how we understand illness and disability and who gets sick and why. And then bringing in the spiritual and multicultural lens to those questions. I think we can really see how much that dominant biomedical framing can take hold and mess some stuff up, while also supplying us with life-saving medicine. It's everything. It's the yes, and.
What an incredible episode. What an incredible person. Thank you all so much for listening. Thank you again to Naya Wright for being here today. This podcast is an experiment in sick time, in storytelling, and in imagining futures together. So if you enjoyed this conversation, please share it. Please follow the show and stay tuned for more conversations with absolutely amazing sick and disabled thinkers, artists, organizers – you name it. Until next time, take care, rest when you need to, and remember – the future is sick.