Living Experiences of Indigenous HealthPractice: Belizean Maya communities andBelize Migrants

Belize Maya communities, like many indigenous communities around the world, have long experienced challenges to maintaining health as they interface with an ever-expanding globalized model of development. This essay explores the relationship between traditional ecological practices and health in the context of a holistic understanding of what makes healthy bodies, healthy communities and healthy lives. Using the author’s Embodied Ecological Heritage (EEH) framework and a phenomenological lens, the essay shares how sensory experiences become embodied through everyday practice, promoting health and general wellbeing. This grounded theory, developed in and with Maya communities, helps us understand ways to consider and support health without identifying or isolating particular aspects of health. This holistic approach demonstrates how physical health is not simply connected to mental health and the social aspects of health but that all aspects of health are deeply integrated across individual bodies, communities and ever-changing ecologies.