Adar’s Illness Story

At the age of 21 Adar was diagnosed both with cancer and with a degenerative illness. Shortly afterwards, during their healing process, Adar’s mom was diagnosed with a terminal cancer. These formative experience with illness, chronic pain, and death & dying led Adar to spend over a decade studying yoga, functional movement, energy work, trauma resiliency, and other forms of embodiment practices. Currently Adar is working towards a license as a Clinical Mental Health Therapist.

Living with a disability that is sometimes visible, and other times less apparent, and traveling through the world as an immunocompromised person who “looks healthy,” Adar navigates a relationship to disability that is dynamic and complex. She is particularly excited about supporting others exploring the intersections of disability, race, gender, class, and whiteness. Adar also identifies as a person in recovery and is experienced in addressing some of particular complications that come along with addiction, recovery, and chronic illness.

Adar has an M.P.H. in Health Behavior from New Mexico State University, 1000+ hours of training in yoga and, somatics and trauma resiliency, and 10+ years of working with non-profits and human services organizations in the Four Corners region. In May 2024 Adar will graduate from Adam State University’s Clinical Mental Health Counseling program. Through years of offering clients her skills as a certified yoga teacher, Reiki Master, domestic violence advocate, and public health educator, Adar has integrated principles of disability justice, privilege and oppression, trauma studies, and harm reduction into the way that she guides somatic sessions for groups and individuals.

After a decade plus of feeling stuck in the paradigm fed to her through yoga influencers, naturopaths, social media paleo “gurus”, and the like, Adar began to draw on using the systems lens of public health and community organizing to contextualize her personal pain through a broader lens. Society has created a context in which, for many of us, it is impossible to be well. Showing up for collective change rather than obsessing about individual health & wellness, and divesting from so many of the narratives sold to us by others about illness.

They want us to believe that illness represents a personal weakness or failing, and that we need to be “cleansed” or “purified”. If we just re-align our chakras (and buy their product lines, remedies, and coaching sessions of course) then we can rejoin the ranks of the lucky (the privileged) able-bodied folks. Adar refuses to believe that her illness makes her less than. She does not need to “cured” or “healed” in order to be whole.

Do you too find yourself feeling like a bridger of worlds, caught in-between places, and never fully here nor there? Seeking out self-care and wellness support, but turned off and alienated by much of the dominant wellness culture? Maybe you have plenty to say—wisdom gleaned through years of working with your body—but nowhere to say it, or to no one who will understand. Or perhaps you find yourself craving a way to contextualize your illness narrative within the broader cultural & systems level context, moving beyond the oh-so-instagramable paradigm of individual sickness and personal solutions.

Our illnesses have biological underpinnings, yes—but they are also maps we can study to see all that needs to be changed in our ailing world.