How Colonization Tames Us All (and how to get free)
Someone asked me the other day, “If you were to succinctly summarize what you do with people, what would you say?” I thought for a moment and replied, “I help them rewild.”
It’s true. When I look back over my coaching work, the EQUUS Experience with the horses, the online courses and classes, there is a single thread running through all of it: creating conditions for people to discover their undomesticated selves. To disrupt the colonized conditioning of their hearts, minds, and bodies—and fling open the cage door so they can live another way. Free. Fully alive. Joyful.
What do I mean by colonized conditioning?
Some time ago, I wrote an essay called Fragile, where I explored the impacts of colonization on humanity. Most of us think of colonization narrowly: the dispossession of Indigenous peoples, the transatlantic slave trade, the building of empires through violence. We may think of race, religion, borders, and power.
What we rarely examine is how colonization has shaped our inner lives—how it has rewired our brains and bodies, and domesticated us away from our true nature. Each of us, without exception, has been conditioned toward compromise, conformity, and sameness.
Colonization works by creating a fundamental split.
That split installs the belief in separation. Separation breeds fear. Fear teaches us to stay “safe.” And so we tame ourselves.
The split is reinforced through simple binaries embedded in language: good and bad, right and wrong, God and not-God, success and failure, us and them. If something is not good, it must be bad. If it is not right, it must be wrong. You know the drill.
A colonized brain struggles with paradox and inclusion—with and / and. Someone can be good and bad. A project can be a failure and a success. A catastrophe can also be a blessing. Heaven might actually be Earth.
Notice what happens in your body as you read that. Does your mind hesitate? Does it stutter or go blank? That’s not accidental. Language—and the values we attach to it—has shaped how your brain processes reality.
In my book Flying Lead Change, I wrote about how many Indigenous languages reflect a radically different relationship to existence. English is noun-based; it abstracts life into static objects. It turns living systems into things that appear separate from one another.
Most Indigenous languages are verb-based. They animate existence. They emphasize relationship, movement, becoming.
Environmental biologist Robin Wall Kimmerer explains that in Potawatomi, a hill is not a thing—it is “to be a hill.” Red is “to be red.” A bay is “to be a bay.” Language itself acknowledges sentience and interrelationship, and shifts time from something fixed to something unfolding.
Colonized thinking dismisses such language as quaint or primitive. Yet no language is primitive. These languages are simply uncolonized—and therefore far more accurate in expressing the living world.
Pause for a moment. Look out a window. Find a tree, a plant, a cloud. Suspend the label. Instead of seeing a “tree,” see something tree-ing. Something being a tree. Notice how that changes your experience—not just of that being, but of yourself.
With our binary language comes the glue that keeps colonization intact: shame.
Once fear is installed through separation, shame keeps us in line. If you are not good, you are bad. If you are not one of us, you are one of them. If you are not right, you are wrong.
Reflect on your childhood. Notice how you were systematically domesticated—colonized—into what was deemed good, acceptable, and successful. Notice how shame was used to correct what was wrong, excessive, or inconvenient.
Shame keeps us caged, like a tiger pacing behind bars. It warns us away from freedom.
“You can’t take that risk—you’ll disappoint people.”
“Who are you to write that book?”
“Don’t say that—you’ll offend someone.”
“Good daughters don’t set boundaries.”
“Guard your heart or you’ll get hurt.”
Shame weaves itself into everything—especially what we feel.
And feelings are the ultimate threat to colonization.
We are taught what to feel, when to feel it, and how much is acceptable. In some cases—particularly for men—feeling at all is discouraged. Emotions are dangerous because they are where we are most alive, most authentic, most free.
Feeling is what makes us human. The full spectrum of emotion—rage, grief, joy, longing, ecstasy—carries intelligence. Colonization cannot tolerate that kind of aliveness. Feeling gives rise to outrage at injustice, grief over loss, joy in authenticity, and an uncompromising yearning for freedom.
To survive, colonization must classify feelings too. Happiness is good. Anger is bad. Grief is inconvenient. Desire is suspect.
Enter what I call the Spiritual New Age Industrial Complex—another arm of colonization. It generates billions of dollars commodifying “peace,” the new good. Disguised as liberation, it numbs us into submission. As long as there is something to fix, heal, or transcend, the machine stays profitable. It requires brokenness to function.
How many billions are made teaching people to transform anger into calm, despair into gratitude? I would argue we need our anger and despair right now. You cannot selectively numb emotions. Quiet the rage and you dim the joy. Suppress grief and you flatten love. Everything begins to flatline.
Flatlining is a symptom of domestication.
True spirituality does not tame the spirit. It radicalizes it—and then calls it into service. Service to the liberation of humanity from conformity, consumerism, fascism, fundamentalism, and oppression in all its forms.
As adrienne maree brown writes in Pleasure Activism, “Tuning into what brings aliveness into our systems allows us to access personal, relational, and communal power. Denying our full selves increases the likelihood that we will be at odds with ourselves and each other.”
In a time of climate collapse, mass shootings, racial injustice, economic precarity, and democratic erosion, we may ask: What can I possibly do?
The answer is deceptively simple.
Decolonize your mind, body, and spirit. Become so free that your very presence is an act of rebellion.
Begin by making room for joy, sensuality, wholeness, and aliveness—and less room for repression, compromise, and unnecessary suffering. Start with your feelings. Feel outrage at injustice. Feel grief without shame. Feel joy without apology. Feel desire. Feel love.
We have to be brave—really brave—to feel again.
And to be a revolutionary is not only to feel deeply, but to support others in doing the same—until we create a common-wealth of an abundantly feeling humanity.
That is rewilding.
Kelly Wendorf is an executive coach, spiritual mentor, facilitator, horse-woman, writer, poet, mother of two astonishing people, and courageous life explorer.To inquire about coaching, spiritual mentoring or private retreats with Kelly, email her.October 25th, 2021