A few weeks ago I was invited to a ceramics class. The invitation came with very intentional wording: a chance to slow down, to focus on myself, to immerse myself in the object I create with my hands. I pictured wet clay, a wheel, and I was hoping to create a cute coffee mug I could enjoy every morning. I said yes immediately.
It took about twenty minutes at the ceramics studio for me to realize this wasn’t just a ceramics class. I’d been invited to a pitch meeting for a wellness center. And twenty minutes after that, I realized it wasn’t just a wellness center, it was a place for spiritual awakening.
During the introduction, the owner explained that she saw each of us as spiritually awakened women and that the ceramics were never really about just ceramics; they were a spiritual practice intended to bring us in contact with Mother Nature. The expansion she was raising money for made room for a tarot reading room and a yoga studio, both offered for an extra fee. Once one-on-one, she mentioned she knew I hiked, did Pilates, was crafty, and prayed, all gathered from my Instagram, so naturally she assumed I’d be drawn to a studio that also did tarot and yoga.
I want to be clear that I don’t think this woman is particularly evil or a con artist. I think she believes every word of it and has the best intentions around it. As I got to work on my coffee mug, I looked around and wondered if anyone else was as uncomfortable as I was. Some people seemed excited about this business venture and shared about similar business concepts they’d seen pop up around the city. I did some research after the event and realized this was bigger than I’d initially thought. Everything this woman presented is part of a worldview and a new form of religion. It’s the near-total merger of wellness and spirituality into a single, undifferentiated category in which pottery, tarot, Pilates, and yoga are all under the same umbrella of spiritual awakening. And it’s intentionally vague, so that it leaves room for the narcissistic project of building your own religion designed on your own terms.
Wellness culture’s attempt to double as religion is not a new invention. It has a well-established philosophical and even commercial lineage: The New Thought and Christian Science “mind-cure” movements of the late 1800s were the first to encourage Americans to dive into the concept that physical health flowed from one’s mental and spiritual state. This suddenly turns health into the center of everything. Then came the human potential movement that grew out of places like Esalen in the 1960s and the New Age boom of the 1980s that first packaged crystals and things like yoga studios for a mass audience, which continues to have commercial success to this day. Each wave promised the same thing: a spirituality without the inconvenience of a Church, assembled from whatever felt useful during your particular season.
It’s intentionally vague, so that it leaves room for the narcissistic project of building your own religion designed on your own terms.
Do this for a few decades and you suddenly end up with what sociologist Robert Bellah described in his 1985 book Habits of the Heart as “Sheilaism.” For this book, he interviewed a young nurse called Sheila, who said that her faith was “just my own little voice,” a personal blend of believing in God, being gentle with herself, and taking care of others with no creed, no congregation, and no one to answer to but herself. Bellah’s point wasn’t that she was uniquely lost. It was that Sheilaism, taken to its logical end, produces the possibility of billions of religions, one for each of us, which is another way of saying no religion at all since a religion that answers only to the person who invented it isn’t binding anyone to anything.
The wellness industry is Sheilaism with a business plan and a candle budget, and it hasn’t solved the underlying problem any better than Sheila did. If anything, the data on this kind of homemade spirituality is worse than you’d expect. A 2013 study in The British Journal of Psychiatry drawing on roughly 7,400 people in England found that those who describe themselves as spiritual but not religious have significantly higher rates of anxiety, phobias, and other neurotic disorders than either the religious or the plainly nonreligious. A later 2018 study in The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease fittingly titled “A Lonely Search?” found the same group at greater risk for depression. This isn’t a diagnosis for everyone practicing Sheilaism, but it should put to rest the idea that a self-designed spirituality is equal to religion without the drawbacks. It isn’t. It’s a lonelier version of the same hunger, minus the structure that historically made the hunger both bearable and fruitful.
It isn’t true that everything spiritual is the same. Sitting in silence before God and sitting in silence before yourself are not two dialects of the same language. One asks you to be still so something outside you, something with its own claim on your life, can reach in. It involves some wrestling and sacrifice, and most of its gifts are fruits of these struggles. Meanwhile, the other asks you to be still so you can hear more clearly the sound of your own voice, and it’s shaped by our own self-soothing. That’s the least harmful version of it. There’s another that asks whatever is out there to fill you in, and that is quite dangerous at a spiritual, physical, and emotional level.
Wellness culture is built almost entirely on the second and third posture. It uses the vocabulary of the first, and it engages in the ritual and the sense of the sacred, but it empties it of the one thing that makes it work: the disposition toward encountering God and being changed by the surrender we experience in his presence. That submission is a stark contrast with the temptation of control that comes with seeking to know the future. And it’s not the same to seek to be the best version of ourselves for the sake of sainthood than for vain reasons.
Connecting with yourself is a real thing, and it can be a genuinely good time. There is nothing wrong with a pottery class that helps you unclench and disconnect for an hour. But in service of what? That’s the question wellness culture rarely asks and even more rarely responds to because the answer is often in service of yourself. That in itself isn’t always a bad thing, because we do have a responsibility to take care of ourselves, but as a form of religion, it never suffices.
And when “more you” is the entire goal with no outside reference point, no tradition, no moral demand, no God to submit oneself to, the practice stops pointing anywhere. It eventually loses value. What was supposed to be self-connection curdles into something closer to self-management and eventually into something closer to control. Because no matter how good your life is and how many blessings surround you, there’s always something to be a god of, always something stubbornly out of your hands. Suddenly there’s no room for surprises or for God’s will, and that does come with a cost. What started as well meaning becomes a very well-decorated form of narcissism, one that is very easy to justify and fall for.
I’ve started to notice a pattern in who this kind of “spirituality” attracts most, and it’s not only the burned-out, the lost, or the genuinely searching. It’s the high achievers. The type A people with real perfectionist streaks who have spent their whole lives optimizing everything else—career, body, calendar—and have now turned those same mechanisms on their inner world. Wellness becomes the next project to master, the next domain to get right, the next area where falling short feels unacceptable. It’s therapy repackaged for people who don’t actually want to be undone by the process, just refined by it. Real transformation asks you to lose control for a while, to grow in humility and let go. But this version lets you keep it and calls it “growth.”
What started as well meaning becomes a very well-decorated form of narcissism, one that is very easy to justify and fall for.
That’s the part that actually unsettled me about that studio, more than the pitch itself. It wasn’t that the owner assumed this was worth my money. It’s that she genuinely couldn’t see the difference between doing Pilates, crafts, or hiking for the sake of pleasure and well-being and doing those things with the expectation of having a spiritual experience. She’d flattened the whole spiritual landscape into one marketable feeling, and she isn’t alone in that. A huge amount of the wellness economy runs on exactly this flattening because seeking one’s well-being has become a matter of seeking false gods. And now you can purchase all of it through a well-marketed and hobby comprehensive membership.
But real spiritual traditions were never built like that. The Church has doctrine, discipline, community, accountability, and, crucially, a claim on your heart that isn’t about you. It demands obedience, not just good intentions or the desire for your own well-being. Prayer isn’t a mood you curate; it’s a conversation with Someone who might ask something of you in return. It’s building a relationship that requires surrender and being changed by God rather than by your own five-year plan. That’s precisely the part wellness culture discards because it’s the part that’s actually uncomfortable. It’s much easier to sell stillness than surrender, and much easier to sell a god who asks nothing of you than the one who tends to ask for everything.
These wellness memberships can and are canceled the moment it stops serving you. It also has no answer for suffering because while wellness can help us cope, it was never built to carry that weight. It treats suffering as something to manage and optimize. It’s all about inflammation to reduce or trauma to process, which is nice until something happens that can’t be juiced or journaled away, and self-compassion can’t forgive you for what you did to someone else, or hold you accountable in your own shame, or reconcile you with God. That wrestling is everything, but the church of wellness softens it into something too comfortable to be worthwhile.
This isn’t just theory, and my experience at the ceramics studio that day is not a fluke. In the last year, two women in exactly this kind of spirituality walked away from it, in public (thank you, Instagram). Shannon Fairweather, a Survivor 49 contestant who ran a New Age wellness community and described herself on national television as “hippie, spiritual, love the energy of the moon,” spent the show praying to the ocean, the moon, and various spirit guides. She’s since announced she’s converting to Catholicism, drawn in by the Eucharist and the Mass, saying, “After years of searching, I can finally say that I am home.” Around the same time, Alex Reads Tarot, a TikTok creator with around a million followers and 58 million likes built entirely on tarot readings, posted a video announcing she was deleting every piece of tarot content she’d ever made because in her words, “Jesus Christ has saved my life, and I can no longer ignore that reality.” She lost roughly thirty thousand followers within days and hasn’t posted since. Neither woman was burned out or chasing a gimmick. Both had already reached the top of the exact economy that the studio owner was trying to recruit me for; and in their honest pursuit for truth, both walked away from it once they came face-to-face with the reality of what it’s like to have an encounter and relationship with Christ.
Wellness can absolutely be important and a good time. It can lower your heart rate, improve your posture, and give you an hour of quiet you badly needed. What it can’t do, no matter how many candles are lit around it, is stand in for the thing it keeps imitating and trying to replace: Christ’s bride, the Church.