America is a deeply spiritual nation. Over 70% of us say that we feel spiritual in some way. But – at the same time – we're getting less religious. So for people who are spiritual-but-not-religious – what's replacing organized religion? What do they believe – and where does that show up in their day-to-day lives? In our new series called Losing My Religion, It's Been a Minute is going to find out. This week, we're getting into wellness. It's a global industry worth 6 trillion dollars that's starting to encompass all kinds of things – including spirituality: from the spirituality of wellness practices like yoga and reiki, to treating wellness itself like a religion. Brittany is joined by Alyssa Bereznak, wellness editor for the LA Times, and Rina Raphael, author of the book The Gospel of Wellness: Gyms, Gurus, Goop, and the False Promise of Self-Care, to get into what people get out of a wellness-based spiritualism.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
Chapter 1: What is the main topic of this episode?
When asked to check a box next to their religious affiliation, 28% of Americans check the box labeled none. The nuns, as they're sometimes called, are now the biggest religious group in the United States. But for people who are spiritual but not religious, what's replacing organized religion? What do they believe? And where does that belief show up in all of our lives?
Well, for the next couple of weeks on our new series called Losing My Religion, we're going to find out. Today, we're getting into wellness. It's a global industry worth $6 trillion that's starting to encompass all kinds of things, including spirituality, from the spirituality of wellness practices like yoga and Reiki to treating wellness itself like a religion.
I want to know, what do people get out of a wellness-based spirituality? And is it a spirituality of the self? To find out, I sat down with Alyssa Bereznack, wellness editor for the LA Times. Thank you so much. And Rina Raphael, author of the book, The Gospel of Wellness, Jim's Guru's Goop and the False Promise of Self-Care.
Glad to be here.
Take a deep breath in and out. And let's get into it. Okay, I want to define some terms first. Wellness. It's a big word. It's a big word. And it describes a huge number of different practices. And it's a term that seems like it's getting broader and broader in definition all the time. So my first question, what even is wellness?
Oh, I mean, it is an increasingly ambiguous term. It really was meant to be everything the pharmaceutical and health industry doesn't touch. And generally things that you could tend to yourself, like fitness, nutrition, relaxation techniques. But increasingly it's starting to mean things like beauty or spirituality. It can kind of mean anything. anything.
And the problem with that is that whenever something starts to mean anything, it can kind of mean nothing. It has since sort of disintegrated into more of a consumerist term than anything these days, which is why now when you say the term wellness, people automatically think of things like CBD leggings and like face masks and bubble baths.
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Chapter 2: How is spirituality linked to wellness?
I'm sorry, who's thinking of CBD leggings? I've never heard of those before. Yeah. Got to get some, Brittany. They're all the rage. I'm not on the right email list service. I tell you what. But I think about like the way that yoga, it's a practice that promotes a spiritual connection through the body.
And, you know, I think about other things like Reiki, which I mean, I mean, myself have done some Reiki from time to time and enjoyed it. But I mean, you know, Reiki is really about, you know, connection to spirit anyway. And I think I've also done breath work. sound baths, but there is definitely a lot of spirituality woven throughout a lot of these practices.
And so I'm wondering, wellness and spirituality, how did these things get connected?
in speaking about this stuff, I often reference a 2023 Pew poll. They found that 22% identified as not religious, but spiritual.
And when they asked sort of follow-up questions to understand like what that even means, they said that like these people believed that you have a soul or a spirit in addition to your body and that there's something spiritual beyond the natural world and that there are some things that science can't explain.
The fact that there are people with these beliefs, but people who are also maybe revolving their lives less around the traditional pillars of religion opens up the space for wellness to sort of fill those cups. These offerings, these wellness offerings are often marketed in a way that speaks to us much more.
I think about my mom who grew up Catholic and who says that she still has internalized the sense of shame and guilt that came with being a practicing Catholic in America. her particular church. And a place like a yoga studio or a breathwork session or a sound bath, it's all about radical acceptance.
So I think in terms of marketing, the more capitalistic wellness offerings can sometimes have an upper hand because they're only appealing to the customer as opposed to telling them they did something wrong. Shaming them into joining.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, so we know that spirituality is integrating into wellness, but I wonder in what ways are some of these wellness practices shaped like organized religion? Like are people worshiping wellness itself? And what do people get out of that?
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Chapter 3: What do people believe about wellness practices?
There is almost a secular salvation of like, I will make myself fit. I will make myself well. I will make sure that I have all these incredible values about tending to myself. Actually, the Peloton founder in 2017, he gave a big conference speech where he talked about the fact that organized religion was on the wane and he had the answer.
He said, You think about in the 70s and 80s, you'd have a cross on your neck or a Star of David. Now you have a SoulCycle tank top. That's your identity. That's your community. That's your religion.
And so, you know, I make the argument that wellness acts like a deconstructed religion. It's like a regulated framework instructing us how to live our lives. You know, it dangles this hope or almost the salvation, this idea that if you work out enough, you eat right, you meditate, you'll feel good and manage whatever feels threatening in our lives, right? It offers this illusion of control.
And the thing is, especially when it comes to sort of gyms, we end up sort of fetishizing our health and I'd say worshiping the self or the body. And the thing is, it's a false certainty because you will age. Bodies are unpredictable, famously unpredictable. Yeah, I think sometimes how we sort of treat health and wellness in an almost kind of religious way has its drawbacks.
Speaking of drawbacks, this is not at all to say that religious institutions are better than more alternative spiritualities. But are there things that organized religions offer that wellness is missing?
I'm not defending necessarily organized religion. I'm not saying everyone should join an organized religion. But there are some drawbacks to a bit of these what I call sometimes self-serving spiritualities. in the sense that they're more inward-facing than outward-facing. And so they don't necessarily have more communal properties.
They don't teach as much about responsibility or community outreach or taking care of each other. They're really much more inward-focused and really about the self. And that's also because Americans are choosing more and more spiritual practices based on their feelings.
Wait, what does that mean? That's interesting. I hadn't heard that phrasing before. Americans are choosing more spiritual practices based on their feelings?
Yes, because a lot of these sort of spiritual alternatives are more about how you feel, about self-soothing, about comforting. Take manifestation. That's a perfect example. This idea that you put good vibes out into the universe and work really hard and you can gather all the abundance that is sort of promised to you, that's really, really comforting to people.
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Chapter 4: Are wellness practices replacing organized religion?
Are businesses doing a good job of filling the void that, say, a church may have filled in the past?
I mean, businesses aren't set up to let people come when they fall in hard times. Organized religion has sort of figured out a way to really help people who have sort of lost their jobs or fallen on hard times. Or even if you think about, let's say, communal rights. If you don't have an organized, let's say, community and you have something like a death in the family,
your gym isn't going to organize the funeral and necessarily be there for you. In some instances, there are rare cases of that, but it's really sort of not the norm. So that's the thing. I think sometimes we need to figure out how to actually replicate what we have given up because we haven't really found that substitute yet.
That's an excellent point. I mean, really what you're saying is that it sounds like wellness just fits more easily into capitalism than perhaps traditional religion.
Absolutely. I think that oftentimes we aren't exposing ourselves to community, to messiness, to this larger group that's focused more on the benefit of the collective than the self.
Coming up, how wellness culture can promote conspirituality, meaning the intersection of conspiracy and spirituality.
The flip side of optimism is gullibility, which is why a lot of people who are very into wellness can sometimes fall for things that just have no evidence behind them.
Stick around.
You've probably seen clips from the Jennifer Hudson show Spirit Tunnel on TikTok or Instagram, the ones where celebrities dance down the hallway to a clever song. These videos can reveal a lot. Do they have rhythm? And how famous are they really? We're breaking down the inescapable internet trend. Listen to the Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast from NPR.
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Chapter 5: What are the drawbacks of wellness compared to organized religion?
can curdle into things like orthorexia or even, you know, conspiracy. I think a lot of us have seen that pop up in the past few years. Some people have discussed like the wellness to QAnon pipelines.
Yeah, I recently attended the Conscious Life Expo, which is this long running convention that is, I would just call it the wooest of the woo. And there's like these more mainstream, I would say, workshops that focus on breath work or sound baths or feng shui or what have you. And then there is something called the rabbit hole, which is like where all the conspiracy theorists go.
That contingent has really grown. I was there a few weekends ago and taking part in something called like a past life regression session. I won't get into that. I was going to say, I don't know what that is. Not worth getting into. Okay. But through the wall, I could hear someone who was like an intense anti-vaxxer and hearing the very like light voices.
sort of meditative voices of the practitioners from Sedona who were trying to get us to like meditate about a past life regression. And then the contrast of like someone who's very angrily sort of ranting about vaccines, to me that embodied the culture of wellness really well.
Yeah. And I think that's what we mean when we say that like belief is such a huge part of of the wellness industry, it's also just so part and parcel of America. Like we happen to be a highly optimistic and consumerist nation. And the flip side of optimism is gullibility, which is why a lot of people who are very into wellness can sometimes fall for things that just have no evidence behind them.
Wow, I'm sorry. That's a phrase for the ages. The flip side of optimism is gullibility. My gosh, my gosh. We've been talking a lot about spirituality of the self, the spirituality of these very market-friendly wellness practices. But let's also talk about the way wellness can show up within religion. I've seen some reporting that
Churches are now trying to offer some wellness practices like yoga and sound baths. Do you think that those kinds of spiritual but not religious activities could integrate into a more traditional spirituality?
I actually wrote a piece for the New York Times about this. So now you have things like Ramadan bootcamp. You have like Catholic meditation apps. And basically because they're seeing that people want to meld their wellness with their spiritual practice. And by the way, I will say that religion is always sort of adapting to people's needs.
So this is just the most current iteration of organized religion saying, okay, this is what people are interested in. How do we give it to them? And there's even sort of religious wellness consultants who will go inside your church or your synagogue and say, okay, this is how we're going to refashion everything to get people in here who want to do fitness, nutrition, meditation.
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Chapter 6: How does capitalism influence wellness practices?
You know, we're talking about the way that, you know, different sects of religion and houses of worship have come to adopt wellness practices as a way of drawing people in. But also, conversely, across the wellness industry, there are all these different kinds of spiritual or spiritual-ish practices that
That came from other places like yoga that are now completely divorced from, in many ways at least, they're presented as completely divorced from the spiritualities and the cultures that they come from.
Yeah, completely. A lot of these things are taken from different practices and oftentimes sort of molded to really serve the self. A really great example is even if you take something like this idea of a digital Sabbath, right? This idea of completely logging off from all your tech. Yeah.
Yes.
People forget the fact that the whole idea of the Sabbath is not just to not do work. It's to be with your community. You're supposed to have meals. You're supposed to go to a synagogue. But instead, we just made it this thing that's don't be on your tech. Go do something else with your day. It's divorced from the idea of being with your community and being with other people and serving others.
That's just one example. But there's so many examples of different ways that we've completely stripped down things to make it really about the self.
Oh my gosh, you all have made me see so many things about the wellness industry very differently, but in a good clarifying way. So I thank you both so much for coming on today. This was great.
This was so much fun. Thanks for having us. Yeah, thank you so much.
That was Alyssa Bereznack, wellness editor for the LA Times and Rina Raphael, author of the book, The Gospel of Wellness, Gyms, Gurus, Goop, and the False Promise of Self-Care. And wow, I am so grateful you made it this far. Yes, you listening right now. It must mean you really like the show, which is awesome because it turns out I really love making it for you.
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