Why Are BIPOC Men Often Shut Out of Spiritual Wellness Conversations?

When was the last time you saw a black man leading a wellness retreat? Or a South Asian man guiding a meditation circle? Or a Hispanic or Latino man holding space in a sound bath?  Really think about it for a minute. Not a celebrity, or a guest speaker at someone else’s event, but a man deeply rooted in his own healing and guiding others in theirs.

If you’re drawing a blank, you’re not alone. In most mainstream spiritual and wellness spaces, men of color are invisible. It’s not due to a lack of interest, wisdom, or knowledge. When they do show up in these spaces, especially as leaders, they don’t exactly receive a warm welcome and they are rarely supported in ways they deserve.

The Wellness Visibility Problem

It’s not just about race, it’s about race, gender, and culture. BIPOC men are often left out of the conversations altogether when it comes to spiritual healing and wellness. The few who dare to enter these spaces become tokenized, hyper masculinized, criticized, or expected to play a supporting role while “emotional and intuitive” leadership is cast as feminine.  

The world tells Black and Brown men that strength is stoic, that gentleness and caring are suspicious, and that healing is a luxury or a weakness. Even with BIPOC-centered healing work, men are often left out in the cold. But we all lose when men are excluded from the healing conversations and wellness spaces.

Masculinity, Culture & the Silence Around Pain

Many BIPOC men are taught to protect, provide, and push through, no matter what. They are often taught they aren’t allowed to feel and they shouldn’t show their emotions. They aren’t encouraged to break down, reflect, or surrender. Emotional honesty is treated as a threat to their masculinity, and spiritual seeking outside rigid religious systems is often discouraged or dismissed.

For Black Men, the pressure to “stay strong” is tied to centuries of survival and resistance. For Indigenous men, spiritual roles have been distorted or erased through colonization. For Asian men, cultural norms often discourage emotional expression. For Hispanic and Latino men, spirituality beyond the church is often “taboo”.

Across cultures, the message is the same: Healing is not for you. Healing becomes something “other” and “unreachable”. So the silence grows louder, the healing doesn’t happen or it becomes isolated and the disconnection grows larger.

The Cost of Exclusion

When BIPOC men are excluded from wellness it impacts everyone, not just them. It impacts families, communities, and cultures. It keeps fathers emotionally unavailable, leaves partners unsupported in shared growth, and stifles intergenerational healing and the passing down of wisdom and knowledge. On a collective level, it blocks the emergence of what a culturally grounded model of what masculine spiritual leadership could look like.

Our Call To Action

If we are serious about healing, equity, and transformation, then we must call all BIPOC men into the wellness space, but more importantly, we need to welcome them with open arms and support them when they arrive. That support needs to be real, ongoing and tangible, not just verbal acknowledgements.

How do we do that? Representation must go beyond tokenism, we need to highlight powerful BIPOC men already doing work in the healing space. We must cultivate culturally affirming spaces where traditional masculine roles don’t need to be erased to make room for emotional and spiritual depth. Create healing models and communities that honor lineage, story, struggle and gentleness. Provide accessible tools and resources, financially, emotionally, and spiritually, so men can grow from where they are.

Most importantly, we need communities that hold BIPOC men without judgment and without performance expectations.  We must stop requiring them to choose between societal roles and true wellness and healing paths.

Let’s Redefine the Norm

BIPOC men are not absent from wellness spaces because they don’t care, they’re absent because we refused to let them in. But we can change that. We build differently, we can open the door, make room, hold space, support them and reshape what wellness and healing look like. Let’s not leave another generation of men to figure it out alone.