Are You Healing Or Consuming

“Healing Culture is, in its essence, a culture of consumption.

Consumerism is inextricable from the way we think about healing, transformation and personal development.

Hopelessly entranced by the allure of its slick marketing and grandiose promises, the wellness industry delivers endless streams of aspirational content, as we chase our tails signing up for yet another exotic retreat, doing another diet, buying that new supplement that we saw in that swole guy’s Instagram Live, buying into another Keto junk fad pumped-up with sponsored content for Yoga moms in lululemon pants and craving that new fancy treatment that we saw advertised in the stylized pastel fonts of the Goop Lab.

“Doing the work” is the new moral imperative of the awakened consumer-class, who trade in webinars that teach how to be a mindful entrepreneur and conscious capitalist, mixing and remixing word salads that draw from the language of marketing and the jargon of healing to produce new brands of expensive and organic Spiritual Bypass, contributing our bloated share of carbon footprints as we book round trip flights to Tulum and Bali, casually gentrifying and destroying the delicate social fabric of our exotic paradises, turning them into instagrammable pockets of colonial privilege.

Of course, as long as we call it “medicine” and “healing work” we can indulge in all of these excesses without much guilt. And if we stop for a moment and in a flash of lucidity we begin to reconsider what “doing the work” actually means, we run the risk of being shunned and ostracized from our community of committed light workers who might feel personally attacked if we decline their invitation to participate in another conscious full-moon tantric cacao and DMT enneagram-inspired shamanic ceremony. You got to look into that shadow, brother. How are you gonna do that without frog poison or Amazonian vine juice?

And what is integration anyway? What does integration mean in the age of hyper-individualistic alienation and ecological catastrophe? What could integration look like, grounded and in alignment with our individual, social and environmental global predicaments?”
-Reposted from ‘Healing from Healing’

Meme by @mos__jef