Decoloniality

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This is a living statement that reflects Helen Vonderheide’s ongoing commitment to learning, listening, accountability, and practice. As her understanding deepens and her work evolves, this statement may continue to change.

 

Her work is rooted in the understanding that healing does not happen in isolation. We exist within families, communities, cultures, histories, ecosystems, and larger social structures that shape our lived experience. The patterns we carry are not solely personal. They are often relational, ancestral, collective, and systemic.

 

As an Akashic Records Teacher, Practitioner, and Somatic Experiencing Practitioner, she recognizes that many helping professions, spiritual traditions, and personal development spaces have been influenced by systems of domination, including colonialism, white supremacy, patriarchy, ableism, heteronormativity, and other forms of exclusion and oppression. These systems impact how knowledge is valued, whose voices are centered, what forms of healing are considered legitimate, and who feels a sense of belonging within learning and healing spaces.

 

Her commitment is not to perfection but to practice.

 

Through a decolonial and embodied lens, she seeks to continually examine her own conditioning, assumptions, privileges, blind spots, biases, and participation in larger systems. She is committed to cultivating greater awareness, humility, and responsibility in the ways she teaches, facilitates, and relates.

 

She believes that wisdom exists across cultures, communities, lineages, identities, and lived experiences. She honors the many traditions, ancestors, teachers, and communities whose contributions have expanded our collective understanding of healing, embodiment, spirituality, and human development.

 

She intends to create learning environments that are welcoming, respectful, accessible, and supportive of diverse identities, backgrounds, experiences, and ways of knowing. She recognizes that despite the best of intentions, harm can still occur. When it does, she is committed to listening, learning, engaging in repair where possible, and allowing feedback to inform her continued growth.

 

She does not view decoloniality as a destination or achievement. Rather, it is an ongoing practice of questioning inherited assumptions, disrupting harmful patterns, honoring complexity, and cultivating relationships rooted in dignity, reciprocity, and mutual respect.

 

The work of healing and transformation is both personal and collective. She hopes that the spaces she facilitates support deeper embodiment, relational integrity, and a greater capacity to participate in creating a more compassionate and life-affirming world.