A wellness space dedicated to the Black community feels long overdue. From inherited collective trauma to institutional barriers to equitable care, the need for both traditional and alternative forms of therapy remains largely unmet.
Self-care is still an afterthought in the Black community, though. African Americans are less likely than other racial and ethnic groups to seek professional therapy, according to the National Institutes of Health. Alternative forms, like wellness and fitness, aren’t as accessible either. There are tens of thousands of yoga and Pilates studios across the nation and New York City in particular is a metropolitan hub where these centers seem to appear on every other block in neighborhoods with high foot traffic. But for Black wellness? It’s a desert.
This is where Jasmine Bowie’s practice, Versed Wellness, stands out. She instructs individuals and groups through meditation, breath-work and sound bathing sessions for the sole purpose of releasing stress, tension and trauma. Although she doesn’t operate out of a physical studio, she partners with companies and non-profit groups, meeting clients across all five boroughs of NYC.
“I love holding space for folks,” said Bowie, 36. “I wanted to figure out ways to bring healing, community, reflection and storytelling to folks who may not be so comfortable accessing more traditional therapeutic spaces.”
Versed Wellness is a holistic practice, but Bowie still manages to weave in traditional therapy methods, like narrative work and psychodynamics. This is because she is a licensed social worker in New York. Before opening her practice, she worked at the Brownsville Community Justice Center in Brooklyn in 2020. She helped young people, many of whom were predominantly Black and Latino and many of whom had complex trauma from gang involvement.
She also witnessed the role of generational stigma against professional therapy within the Black community. It’s an obstacle that she had to navigate.
Although Bowie has since left the Justice Center, she still operates as a social worker in NYC. Between her various roles, she has managed to identify a link between formal social work and physical wellness when it comes to healing. For her, everything boils down to familial relationships.
“We’re able to clearly see the way generational trauma is playing out through lineage,” said Bowie. “When I was doing the work in Brownsville, a lot of it was rooted in relationships with mothers. Of course, relationships with fathers, community violence and societal expectations played a role. But one of the consistent breakdowns that I would see was in the maternal lineage.”
Now, her focus with Versed Wellness is on making space for vulnerability, where her participants can not only reflect on these parent-child relationships, but also take a moment to look inwards. She encourages this act of self-reflection through somatic healing.
“When you harness your breath and you use your breath intentionally, beautiful things can happen from a physical healing standpoint, but also spiritually,” said Bowie. She explained the breathwork process as the manipulation of air in the lungs. Sound bathing is similar, but is rooted in entrainment. Bowie says to think of it like walking down the street next to someone. We tend to unconsciously sync in step because our bodies seek rhythm. “We’re using different resonant instruments that are attuned to different healing frequencies and support us in taking our brain waves to a very calm and relaxed state,” she added.
The reason why she loves her practice so much is because she can finally give members of the Black community space to sit, breathe and rest. To Bowie, addressing trauma starts with pausing and getting in tune with the body. She invites her participants to unload tension through grand or minimal movement, by vocalizing their stressors or silently saying it to themselves. The experience tends to be very emotional. It looks different in everyone.
“You can tell in the way that folks breathe.” She compared the way participants look before and after a session. “Almost always, people are coming up to me and having conversations. Mostly through tears. I can tell a lot through tears.”
Over the past year, Bowie has been reshaping Versed Wellness as a digital wellness and creative studio. She follows three main pillars to healing: creative media, community building spaces and products. For the third pillar, Bowie recently launched “Healing Con(verse)sations”, a set of wellness-focused questions to spark deeper conversations, explore lineage and heal intergenerational trauma between family members.
“I’m thinking about the intersections between storytelling, somatic embodiment and community building,” said Bowie.