They Used to Call It Woo-Woo. Now They Call It Wellness.
by Terry Thomas | Black Lion Botanicals
If you have seen Sinners — Ryan Coogler's Oscar-winning film set in the 1932 Mississippi Delta — then you have seen Annie.
Played with quiet authority by Wunmi Mosaku, Annie is Smoke's woman. A Hoodoo woman. An herbalist, a rootworker, a conjurer. She is the one who sees what is coming before anyone else does. The one who makes the mojo bags, who knows the plants, who moves through chaos with her feet on the ground and her hands already working. She is not exotic. She is not mystical in the Hollywood hokum sense of that word. She is practical. She is grounded. She is the moral center of the entire film.
She is also someone I recognized immediately.
Not from a movie. From my own life. My own Annie, but I called her, Nana.
My Nana did not call it anything.
My Nana was also named Annie. Annie Lee Smith. She was a southern woman, born and raised, and she had a garden the way some people have a religion. She knew what grew there and what it was for. When I was sick and congested as a child, she would go out to that garden and come back with what she needed. She made liniment from herbs she grew herself — rubbing it onto my back, my chest, my throat, and of course the soles of my feet. She let the liniment do it's work. But, when something deeper was wrong, when the sickness was in a place that liniment could not reach, she would lay her hands on me...and she would hum.
I did not have language for what happened in those moments. I was a child. But I knew something was moving. Something was exchanged. I would feel it — a warmth, a settling, a release — and I would get better.
Nobody called it energy healing. Nobody called it biofield therapy. Nobody called it anything except what it was: a grandmother taking care of her grandbaby the way her people had always taken care of each other.
That is the thing that never gets acknowledged when wellness trends make the news. This knowledge was never lost. It was just never credited.
It has always been here.
Dr. Katrina Hazzard-Donald, professor of sociology at Rutgers University and author of Mojo Workin': The Old African American Hoodoo System, spent years documenting what she calls "old tradition Black Belt Hoodoo" — the herbal, healing folk tradition of Black Americans. It had been carried from Africa, adapted in the Americas, and practiced quietly in their communities for generations. Her research traces Hoodoo not as superstition or spectacle, but as a sophisticated, living system of health care. She devotes an entire chapter to what she calls "Healin' da Sick, Raisin' da Daid" — Hoodoo as a complete medical tradition, practiced by root doctors, midwives, and healers who treated the whole person when the whole person needed treating.
The dedication of her book is its own testament. She writes of her mother, who treated chest colds, wrapped minor cuts in cobwebs, treated swellings with mullein leaves, and — in Hazzard-Donald's words — "transformed negative energies into positive." That is not a metaphor. That is a description of energy work. That is my Nana. That is Annie in Sinners. That is a lineage of southern, Black women doing what they knew needed to be done.
Ryan Coogler understood this. He brought in Dr. Yvonne Chireau — scholar, author of Black Magic: Religion and the African American Conjuring Tradition, and official Hoodoo consultant for the film — to make sure Annie was rendered with accuracy and respect. Dr. Chireau spent weeks working with Wunmi Mosaku to answer the question: what does a conjure woman actually do? How would she think? How would she pray? How would she move through the world? The answer, as the film makes clear, is with quiet competence. With herbs and protective rituals and mojo bags and an understanding of energy that did not require anyone else's validation to be real.
As Dr. Chireau has said plainly: "Blues is the music of Hoodoo." Music. Energy. Spirit. These things were never separate. They were always one system.
Now they call it science.
Here is where modern medicine attempts to catch up.
A 2025 scoping review published in the Journal of Integrative and Complementary Medicine examined 353 peer-reviewed studies on biofield therapies — the clinical term for practices that work with the body's energy field. Of 71 randomized controlled trials examining Reiki specifically, 61 showed positive or significantly positive results. Not one showed negative effects. Not one. The conditions studied included anxiety, depression, chronic pain, stress, surgical recovery, and cancer care.
A review published in Frontiers in Psychology found that Reiki demonstrated effectiveness over placebo for clinically relevant symptoms of anxiety, depression, stress, and chronic pain. The National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health — a division of the US National Institutes of Health — formally classifies energy healing as a biofield therapy. Hospitals including those associated with Harvard Medical School and Johns Hopkins have integrated Reiki into patient care.
Meanwhile, the 2026 Global Wellness Summit — the industry's most authoritative annual trends report — named nervous system regulation the defining wellness frontier of this moment. They called it neurowellness. They said we are living in a constant state of fight or flight and that regulating the nervous system is now the master key to whole body health.
My Nana called it laying on hands.
What changed is not the practice. What changed is who is paying attention.
The wellness industry has a complicated relationship with the traditions it borrows. Yoga arrived in American studios decades before anyone mentioned its origins. Meditation became a productivity tool before its spiritual roots were acknowledged. Herbal medicine became a supplement industry. Sound healing became a spa amenity.
And now energy work — reiki, biofield healing, the laying on of hands — is being discovered by people who have never heard of Annie. Who have never had a grandmother with a healing garden. Who need a peer-reviewed study to trust what southern, Black women have known in their hands and their bones for centuries.
I do not say this with bitterness. I say it because it matters who holds this knowledge and how it is held. In Mojo Workin', Hazzard-Donald draws a careful distinction between what she calls "old tradition Black Belt Hoodoo" — the living practice, passed through lineage, shaped by local herbs and familial ways — and the commercially marketed versions that outsiders have packaged and sold. The difference is not just cultural. It is energetic. Knowledge held in the body over generations carries something that a weekend certification cannot replicate.
That is not gatekeeping. That is just true.
I am my Nana's granddaughter.
I came to this work the long way around — through acting, through living, through five years in Mérida, Mexico where the women at Lucas de Gálvez market still know which plant you need before you finish your sentence. Through loss and silence and the slow recognition that what I had been doing my whole life — feeling energy, moving energy, knowing when something was off in a body before any test could confirm it — was not imagination. It was training.
The practice I offer now through Black Lion Botanicals — distance reiki, energetic containers, holistic herbal guidance — is grounded in the same understanding my Nana carried. That the body is not just physical. That energy is real and it moves. That healing does not require proximity, only intention and knowledge and the willingness to show up for the work.
The science is catching up. The wellness industry is catching up. Sinners gave millions of people a glimpse of what a real conjure woman looks like — not theatrical, not exotic, not a caricature, but steady and knowing and completely in command of what she understands.
Annie was always here. We were always here.
We just did not need your permission to be.
If this resonated — if something in you recognized what I'm describing — I invite you to explore the work at blacklionbotanicals.com. Distance reiki sessions, private 30-day energetic experiences, herbal guidance, and a healing retreat in Da Nang, Vietnam in January 2027. The knowledge lives. The work continues.
— Terry, Black Lion Botanicals
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