I had just about given up on wellness apps when I stumbled upon Exhale, a wellness app for BIWOC . Like many others, I’d fallen into the cycle of downloading and deleting one app after the next. None of them resonated the way I had hoped. None of them seemed capable of addressing the anxiety and stress that I experience as a Black woman. The wellness apps I’d come across until then existed within a whitewashed vacuum that I could not breathe in.
When I first opened the Exhale app, I was struck by the tenderness portrayed in the photos of a Black woman with tight coils that crowned her head, submerged in a body of water seemingly filled with milk and honey. For the first time in my emotional well-being journey, I saw myself reflected in these images and the narrative they presented of what healing looks like. The app is broken up into five categories: breathe, affirm, meditate, imagine and listen.
I quickly found myself revisiting meditations again and again because they opened something within me that I wanted to keep feeling: peace. I began moving through my days differently, more conscientious of the world around me, its weight, and how I carry that in my body. An alarming number of BIWOC experiencebut many of us are unable to stop and process how we feel and instead must swallow the emotions that may arise.
“White supremacist ideology and systemic racism is not set up to allow us to rest,” McCarty says. “It’s not that Black people don’t want to rest, it’s that systems have been created for us to not have that space.” I think of healing as a journey home to oneself, and Exhale captures that effortlessly. And it helps make one thing clear: Our ability to breathe is not to be taken for granted.
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