Wellness Empowered Counselling & Consulting Services

07/28/2025

Did you know?

Our Founder and CEO, -Shayla Sima Dube, is a budding scholar who is fully embracing her voice, using her knowledge, lived expertise, and writing skills to contribute meaningfully to academia. She is gradually building a literature legacy rooted in Sankofa, Ubuntu-centered healing, epistemic freedom, and collective liberation.

1. 📚 To read her 2023 article co- authored with Dr. Sandra Dixon, access the link via our stories.

2. 📖 To purchase her Ndebele affirmations book, visit Amazon and search Shayla Sima Dube – Mabaleka-or click link on the bio.

In 2025 alone, Shayla has co-authored or contributed to the following works:
1. ✍🏾 A culturally responsive chapter on combating loneliness and isolation among racial equity–seeking seniors (submitted in March; currently under editorial review)
2. 🖤 A poem on anti-Black racism (submitted in May; part of a book currently under editorial review)
3. 🚫 A co-authored article on abolishing race as a path to ending racism (submitted July 2025, to be published in August)
4. 🌱 An accepted abstract titled “The HARMONY Framework for Healing with Ubuntu” (full manuscript in progress)
5. 🌍 A collaborative chapter on Ubuntu approaches to youth mental wellness (abstract submitted; feedback expected in October)
6. 🔥 A forthcoming co-authored manuscript on cultural trauma in progress (due March 2026)
7. 📝 Shayla is also serving as a peer reviewer for a Critical Social Work Journal in Ontario and has reviewed one manuscript this year.

Thank you for being in community with us. Shayla is deeply grateful for the continued support from those who are walking alongside her journey of truth-telling, decolonial scholarship, and liberatory healing.

As once said, “the purpose of life is to find your calling and answer it.”

07/28/2025

Did you know that Shayla published an affirmations book in honour of Bl@ck ⚫️ History Month 2023?

Amazwi esiNdebele Ayisiqiniseko
Ndebele Positive Affirmations in Alphabet
By Shayla Sima Dube–Mabaleka
Illustrated by Siza. M. Khumalo

This book remains a powerful gift of epistemic freedom. Organized alphabetically, it features affirming isiNdebele words, with at least two empowering affirmations per letter, each paired with English translations.

It’s a celebration of identity, ancestral pride, cultural pride and healing through language.

Shayla was especially inspired by the late Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, who stopped writing in English and chose his mother tongue, Gikuyu, as a bold act of decolonial positionality and a refusal of , the systemic erasure of Indigenous languages, cultures, and knowledge systems, replaced by colonial hegemony ( de Sousa Santos). His stance affirms what this book also embodies: language is a vessel of liberation.

Shayla also draws from the wisdom of literary giants:
• Toni Morrison, who said, “If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.”
• Chinua Achebe, who reminded us that “we need to tell our own stories,” from the lion’s perspectives, not just the hunters.
• Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, who powerfully warned us about “the danger of a single story.”

This book is Shayla’s offering to disrupt that single story- and reclaim multiple stories of cultural pluralism and epistemic flexibility.

🧠 Language is not just a tool, it is memory, culture, identity, and resistance.

📕 Available on Amazon: Search Shayla Sima Dube – Mabaleka
🔗 Link in bio

07/26/2025

On this International Day for Women and Girls of African Descent,
thank you & for the honour of having me as your guest speaker.

It was a privilege to hold space and facilitate a powerful conversation on mental health, resilience, and the brilliance of our communities.

May we continue to affirm that our healing is communal, our stories are valid, and our resilience is rooted in ancestral strength.

🖤 We are because they were. We rise because we remember.

07/26/2025

July 25 | International Day for Women & Girls of African Descent
🖤🌍✨

This is not just a day of recognition—
It’s a remembrance of what we’ve survived,
what we carry,
and what we continue to build in systems never meant for our full thriving.

As women of African descent,
our strength is not individual—
it is ancestral, communal, and intergenerational.
We are more than tropes.
More than “angry” or “strong.”
We are soft. Sacred. Sovereign.

🗣 Be rhythm like
🔥 Be fire like
✍🏾 Be ink like
📖 Be clarity like
🖋 Be truth like
👑 Be roar like
🦁 Be resistance like
🕊 Be the spirit of
🌱 Be rooted like
🌍 Be earth like
🚪 Be the bridge like
🔥 Be enduring like
🌊 Be return like
🛡 Be defiance like
📚 Be critique like
🖋 Be bold like
🚶🏾‍♀️ Be the guide like
🎭 Be depth like
🗣 Be vision like

Today, I honour us—
The girls told they’re “too much.”
The women told they’re “not enough.”
The elders who carry melodies the world tried to silence.
The daughters of diaspora still seeking belonging.

May we rest without guilt.
Lead without apology.
Be held in wholeness—not just today, but every day.

🖤 We are because they were. We rise because we remember.

07/25/2025

This evening, In collaboration with and
🌿 Still I Rise: A Resilience-Building Workshop with Shayla S. Dube 🌟

“Resilience together is like a braided rope, each strand strengthens the others.
Resilience alone is like a single thread, it can hold for a while, but frays under too much weight.”

Join us for an empowering evening of storytelling, healing, and collective strength rooted in resilience, identity, and community care.

🗓 Date: July 25, 2025
🕔 Time: 5:00 PM – 7:30 PM MST
📍 Location: Room 435, The Orange Hub
10045 156 St NW, Edmonton, AB T5P 2P7

✨ Let’s rise together — grounded in truth, held by community.
🔗 Register: Scan the QR code on the flyer
📧 Email: contact@actschange.org
📞 Phone: +1 (780) 607-2811
🌐 Website: www.actschange.org

07/25/2025

Ngubani? Who are you?

Identity work is healing work.
Because a strong tree is a rooted one.
If you don’t know who you are,
the world will try to name you, shape you, and uproot you.

To know yourself is to reclaim what was stolen.
To remember what was buried.
To return to what was always yours.

This is not just personal work-
it’s ancestral, cultural, and collective restoration.

Because when the roots are deep, the tree does not fear the wind.
But when the roots are weak, even small drops of rain can feel like an earthquake

07/24/2025

In Southern Africa, we were taught to call people of plural ancestry “colored”- a colonial term rooted in measuring humanity against whiteness.
In the West, they say “mixed.” But I ask: mixed with what?

You carry intercultural and ethnic richness, not some diluted blend.
If you are “mixed,” then you are mixed with blood, water, and bones, just like all of us.
Don’t compartmentalize your humanity to fit into colonial boxes.

My niece once shared that people often ask her, “What are you?”
Not who she is, but what.
And the same world that calls her Bl@ck, often erasing the heritage of her mother.

***********
Alt-text (Accessible Image Description):
A rectangular dark green graphic with centered white and orange text. At the top, an orange bolded heading reads:
“As we continue our series on decolonizing identity:”

The main white body text says:
“When we refer to people with intercultural or ethnically plural heritage as ‘mixed,’ we must ask, mixed with what? I have a niece and nephew with dual African heritage and European roots. I’ve never seen them as ‘mixed,’ or people of colour. Just human beings—whole, complex, and rooted in multiple lineages.
Labels like ‘mixed’ often reflect flattened, colonial thinking—implying that purity was ever the norm. But identity isn’t a cocktail. It’s a constellation.”

At the bottom, a horizontal orange line separates the footer which contains:
Left-aligned: www.wellnessempowered.com
Right-aligned: Shayla S. Dube, RCSW (in orange text)

07/24/2025

07/24/2025

As we continue to decolonize ourselves, our knowledge systems, and our ways of being, we hold the conviction that decolonization must include the decolonizing of identity. A colonial identity thrives on disruption, disenfranchisement, destruction, and dismemberment—so we are intentionally disrupting the colonial labels that uphold the coloniality of power.

When we name ethnicity and specify what people are racialized as, we are not pledging allegiance to race. We are naming it for what it is: an epistemic tool of oppression that has operated for centuries—rarely questioned, and often fiercely defended, even by those who claim to dismantle it.

Instead of terms like POC, we use language such as racially minoritized, racially marginalized, or racial equity-seeking- terms that decenter whiteness while making visible the process and power dynamics at play.

Some of the fluid terms we wish to normalize include:
racially privileged, racially dominant, melanin-deficient, and people of European descent or ancestry for those racialized as white;
and Mélanated people, people of African descent, or national identifiers (e.g., Zimbabwean, Jamaican, Somali) for those racialized as Black.

This is an invitation, not a prescription—a practice in epistemic rebellion, not identity policing.

07/24/2025

If anti-racism efforts aren’t liberatory and abolitionist, even the most well-meaning gurus and self-proclaimed experts usually end up subliminally upholding whyt3 suprem@cy.

Race, racialization, and racism are complex- and often confusing, by design.

What confuses people most is this:
While race is a colonial lie, engineered for greed, power, racial capitalism, and domination, racism is very real.
It is both a social determinant of health and a public health crisis.

Race functions as an epistemic tool of violence- one that uses racialization to uphold racism.

All humans are Racialized- just on different ends of the spectrum,
including the very architects of the racial lies that divided our shared humanity as Homo sapiens, therefore we are either all people of colour or there are no people of color.

And when someone says “Racialized people” and only means those who are racially marginalized, they reinforce a counterproductive and dangerous logical fallacy- one that neutralizes and invisibilizes those who are racially dominant and privileged.

To dismantle racism,
we must also stop misusing the language of race.
We must tell the whole truth.

We can’t call something a lie, then in the same breath defend it, use it, and reinforce it.
How can we end something if we remain complicit in its survival.

07/23/2025

As we continue to decolonize everything,
let’s not forget to decolonize our identities too,
because colonialism distorted everything,
including our very sense of self.

There’s a difference between being a minority by numbers
and being strategically minoritized by systems designed to shrink, silence, and control.

Your existence is already enough-
whole, complete, and sacred as it is.
It does not need colonial ribbons or decorations to be valid.

At Wellness Empowered, we are passionate about bearing witness to authentic, autobiographical narratives,
unpacking the colonial stories that bind us,
and centering truths that liberate.

We understand that colonization isn’t about skin tone- it’s about mindset.
It lives in the psyche, in the systems,
and in the stories we’ve been taught to believe and normalize.

Decolonization is not about hating one another.
It’s about dismantling the lies that uphold whytness as the default,
and unlearning the internalized beliefs that keep us all bound.

Because colonialism distorted everyone,
even those who engineered it.

07/23/2025

Just because you’re invited doesn’t mean you’re valued.
Some tables are set with performance, not purpose.

Too often, equity is reduced to optics. Inclusion becomes illusion.
And your presence is sought, not for your wisdom, but for their image.

This is your reminder:
✅You are not a diversity hire.
✅ You are not a quota.
✅ You are not decoration.
✅ You are not here to make systems feel better about their harm.

Pause, Breathe and Ask questions.
Do they want you to lead, or follow their biased agenda?
Do you have autonomy, or are you being managed into silence?

Discern the difference between being seen and being used.
Say yes to spaces that honour your voice, not just your visibility.

We rise, not as tokens, but as torchbearers.