When I was 25, I hosted summertime ‘acid parties’ in my old apartment. In preparation for these parties I dimmed the lights, set out vintage porcelain bowls filled with water and rose petals to perfume ourselves, decorated my coffee table with amethysts and other crystals purchased from eBay to marvel at their various geometries and colors.
I stocked my fridge with water and opened the door to the backyard, welcoming the summer breeze. Constructing an inviting atmosphere for the people -- some friends, mostly acquaintances -- who would arrive and trip all night, laughing or crying, daubing rosewater on themselves in their costumes, I laid out hats and junk jewelry I collected from thrift stores.
During one such party, around 10 people showed up. I didn’t know most of them, but I knew Paula, the girl carrying the acid in a little brown glass bottle with a glass dropper. As we sat cross legged in a circle on the floor, she approached each person and rationed a drop or two onto their tongues. She turned on my TV and put on a six hours long Youtube video called “DNA Unlocking Sounds.”
A low, droning hum filled the room, apparently the sound that would encourage our DNA to “unlock.” As the minutes passed and we waited for the acid to kick in, Paula took her place in the circle. Her boyfriend, Coby, laid a full length mirror on the floor in the center between us. He raised his right hand and traced circles over the mirror in the air, slowly and then so fast he was sweating. His long brown hair stuck to his face. I’m opening the portal, he panted, over and over.
Except for the changing colors cast on our faces from the television and a few dim lamps, the room was dark. As Coby chanted and the Youtube video progressed to a deeper tonal hum, one guy rocked back and forth with his knees to his chest. Another girl sobbed. The attendees moaned and gasped.
The portal is opened! he shouted.
Paula’s eyes rolled back in her head. Coby called her name, come back! I had thought we were going to dance and laugh, and felt mildly annoyed that I invited these people over to cast fake spells and freak out in my living room. I stood up and snuck away, escaping into the backyard.
The leaves were a deep, radiant green and moonlight traced rivulets of light down the crooked wooden fence. My dog followed me and as we sat together, the sound of crying drifted from the doorway. One by one, the guests emerged, their faces pale, damp with sweat and tears.
I appreciated the crystals I put out for their radiant or subdued colors, the way they sent light splintering through the room when held up against a flashlight. I held them close to my face and peered inside -- each one seemed to contain an endless labyrinth of fractured crystalline rooms. I enjoyed the cool sensation of the rosewater on my wrists; as a white woman who grew up without religion or spiritual practices, the solemn and serious movements soothed me.
The crystals I used were almost certainly hand-dug out of a mine by a child or severely underpaid worker toiling in a far away country, separated from my life by oceans, cultural and class differences. Sterilized by the eBay ads I perused, each crystal was photographed against a stark white background, all context omitted. If crystals were truly magic conduits of energy, as many claimed, we were in trouble.
At that time in my life, I also realized taking acid with a bunch of other people in their mid 20s who routinely abused hard drugs and alcohol was not therapy. I didn’t want to be in therapy, self-reflect, or do anything that resembled labor to examine my life, addiction, or choices.
In the HBO cult documentary Love Has Won, a woman who calls herself ‘Mother God’ establishes a following as a spiritual ‘healer’ claiming to be God, creator of the universe. Amy Carlson appropriates various indigenous cultures to reify this claim during her livestreams, which she records daily: she is the Native American spirit, White Buffalo Calf Woman, the Hawaiians’ Tepu deity Pele, goddess of volcanoes.
A caricature of the ‘white healer’ stereotype, Amy Carlson registers as a tax-exempt non profit organization, though she is the only one profiting from the sale of products on her website: a ‘Custom Gift From God’ for $111.11 -- comprised of various crystals purchased on Amazon -- hair and skin care kits, and colloids -- platinum, gold, and silver.
Colloidal silver is a chemical ingested as an alternative medicine‘cure all’ -- a magic potion apparently able to cure cancer, strengthen your immune system, and treat a spectrum of ailments from diabetes to skin rashes. Taken over time, colloidal silver causes organ damage, and turns the user’s skin an irreversible blue color, like a downtrodden smurf.
Carlson’s profits fund her consumerist lifestyle: her followers recall her obsession with Amazon, where she shopped for cheap jewelry and costumes. She rents luxury Airbnbs in Oregon, Hawaii, and Colorado, buys a go-kart, and drinks copious amounts of alcohol.
Carlson was part of what’s now referred to as the “wellness industrial complex,” or the business of healing.
The Love Has Won documentary captures Carlson’s final months: her followers spoon-feed her over 20 vials of colloidal silver a day as she succumbs to alcoholism, unable to walk due to organ failure. In moments of weakness or clarity, Carlson admits she is not God and requests medical care. Her followers refuse, insisting that she is. Carlson dies under their care, her skin a deep steely blue.
The documentary ends with clips of each member overlaid with text updating the viewer on their lives after Love Has Won. Faith, Carlson’s closest ‘oracle,’ relocated and continues charging clients to perform energy healing sessions.
According to statistics website Statista.org, the wellness industry was “estimated at over 4.3 trillion dollars in 2020.” In an interview with Variety, Love Has Won director Hannah Olsen said:
“[...]The thing that is especially American about Love Has Won is the way that the lack of our social safety net creates the desire to look for ways online to heal your mind and body for free. Much the way that consumerism and the celebrity worship are part of the Americanness of the cult, so too is the lack of healthcare and the ‘pull yourself up by your bootstraps’ [mentality] — find[ing] a way to heal your mind and body through a feeling, rather than a set of social resources.”
The wellness industry is bootstrap mentality with a tan and a mandala tattoo.
In one Instagram video posted by an account called @whi.texicans, a group of thin, tanned white people stand around a cauldron of boiling soup, softly chanting. A long hair guy sits behind them, his flowy shirt unbuttoned, strumming a guitar. Women make delicate, poetic movements in the air with their thin fingers, as if moved by an unseen spirit. Another image circulated among meme accounts shows shows a woman ‘cleansing’ her iPhone with sage smoke. In another series, a white 20-something blonde guy with a mandala-printed bandana speaks ‘light language’ at the camera; a ‘healing tongue’ he claims to have channeled from a higher power to soothe your spirit, cure anxiety, or encourage financial success -- depending on the video’s theme. In all these videos and images, the practices of various indigenous populations are co-opted and, floating through the void of the internet, stripped of context with vague labels of “spirituality” and “healing.”
Wanting to escape from NYC’s miserable gray winter, I visited Costa Rica for a two-month trip. My desire to experience another culture was sometimes at odds with my desire to be comfortable, so before I drove inland to stay in ungentrified farmland, I chose to spend a week in a touristy beach location.
From the moment I arrived in Nosara, a small beach town on the Guanacaste peninsula, I planned to write about the phenomenon of ‘white healer culture’. Though I wasn’t yet sure what form my writing would take, I scribbled notes in my journal and screenshotted a closeup of Google Maps with a search for “yoga” showing dozens of red dots, each reflecting a different yoga studio on the same two mile strip of land.
In Nosara, I expected an experience similar to other tourist towns I’d been to — a breakfast place that sold cold brew and avocado toast, a restaurant with dim, edison bulb pendant lights that looked like it could be in Brooklyn. I didn’t know anything about Nosara, but from scrolling around the map feature on Airbnb, I noticed the rentals looked sleek and modern, open-concept living rooms with wide doors opening out into the jungle, concrete floors and countertops in the kitchen.
When I arrived, I found a town that seemed almost entirely under construction. Multiple people referred to Nosara as “a portal.”
Over the main road, dust hung in thick beige clouds. On every corner, in every enclave, The sound of power tools ground through the air, condos and hotels in progress. Cafes, restaurants, and telephone poles in Nosara were plastered with posters advertising healing services: sound baths, the sale of medicinal plants, cacao ceremonies, energetic dance, drum circles, classes to ‘unlock your power,’ divine femininity consultations, crystal workshops, voice work, breath work, chanting, and of course, yoga. Small yellow signs pleading for donations to build ‘monkey bridges’ -- tiny wire bridges hanging above the new condos, allowing passage for monkeys crossing what used to be a dense jungle -- were posted on every road.
My first Airbnb in Nosara was a hotel advertised as being an ‘off the beaten track, nature lover’s paradise’ hidden in the jungle. When I arrived, a woman who looked like me -- thin, white, with brown hair and middling tattoos stamped along her arms -- showed me to a noisy room between a construction site and the hotel’s parking lot. As I placed my bag down, she extolled the benefits of a $400 juice cleanse she hoped I’d purchase from her, which promised to help me “detoxify, look and feel my best” while “rapidly losing 5-8 pounds.” Annoyed by the overpriced and self-contradictory sales pitch, and uncomfortable in a bedroom the parking lot looked directly into, I declined, canceled my reservation and booked a last-minute place down the road.
30 minutes later, I arrived at a concrete complex painted Pepto-Bismol pink and topped with barbed wire along its seven foot walls. After an uneventful night, I prepared to check out. As I packed, a tall, thin blonde woman appeared in the doorway with a short, bald man standing behind her, inviting me to the deck outside their room two doors down, to chat while they smoked weed.
Before building the hotel, the host, Sarah, told me, the area was a mangrove of mango trees locals used as a food source. Sarah and her husband -- the short man -- bulldozed it to build the property.
I couldn’t live in the 3D matrix, Sarah told me, and Nosara is a magic portal. When I asked what she meant, she told me she ‘downloaded information from the galaxy’ informing her of Nosara’s special properties as a place of rapid healing, and encouraging her to move there.
“There are so many ways to tell a lie,” Rebecca Solnit writes in her essay collection, Call Them By Their True Names. “You can lie by ignoring whole regions of impact, omitting crucial information, or unhitching cause and effect; by falsifying information by distortion and disproportion, or by using names that are euphemisms for violence or slander for legitimate activities, so that white kids are ‘hanging out’ but the Black kids are ‘loitering’ or ‘lurking’. Language can erase, distort, point in the wrong direction, throw out decoys and distractions. It can bury the bodies or uncover them.”
The wellness industry depends on the fantasy of healing. Fantastical language encourages you to enter a portal to an enlightened realm where you can become your higher self. Pretending there is some manifest destiny commanding gentrifiers to places like Nosara distracts from the colonization required to realize this dream, and ‘buries the bodies’ of those who make these healing tools available with their labor or exclusion, who live in the path of a new yoga studio.
What Solnit observes as falsified information appears in alluring claims “anyone” can access what is actually exclusive. The fantasy of bootstrap self-healing omits crucial information: money and mobility are the bar to entry. Indigenous practices are co-opted, commodified and renamed simply, “healing.”
Sarah told me about Envision, a spiritual and music festival advertised as “a utopian jungle experience” scheduled to happen nearby in the following weeks. She expressed surprise that I had no interest in going. If I didn’t care about the abundance of healing ceremonies and services available to me, her surprise seemed to ask, why was I even there?
Like many others who arrived in Nosara, I wanted to escape the place from which I came, to purchase a sense of peace by walking along a quiet beach that was, in my mind, free of context, like a screensaver. And there we stood, in a complex where Sarah hosted ayahuasca ‘healing retreats.’ She’d learned to conduct them from her own shaman -- another white woman, French instead of Canadian, who spent several years “training” in an unspecified jungle in Brazil.
Ayahuasca, a hallucinogenic tea traditionally used in ceremonies by indigenous populations in the jungles of Brazil, Peru, Colombia, and Ecuador, has exploded in popularity with the ‘healer’ crowd. Each ayahuasca retreat at the pink compound spanned five days and cost between $7,000-$14,000.
Halfway through writing this piece, my editor recommended I reread James Baldwin’s essay, Letter From A Region In My Mind, in which Baldwin recounts his childhood involvement with the church as a youth preacher, and mirrors this formative experience with his recent interactions with the Nation of Islam, specifically during a dinner at leader Elijah Muhammad’s house.
Baldwin observed parallels between the Nation of Islam and Christianity -- and his disillusionment with both. Referring to the reason Baldwin left the church and later refused to join the Nation of Islam, he writes:
“People always seem to band together according to a principle that has nothing to do with love, a principle that releases them from personal responsibility.”
If whiteness is a construct, its scaffolding is denial and delusion -- the wishful belief that I am pasted into the world with no history, free of context and responsibility. I’m free to fill my spiritual void with whatever “resonates” with me -- another term obscuring my ability to select rituals I enjoy like picking a genre of music to listen to. I went through my crystal phase, my alchemy phase, and my yoga phase. In each one, I discovered a mess of details and muddled history I was asked to ignore in order to participate.
When I arrived in Nosara, I found alternate versions of myself -- my inescapable position within systems where I am complicit both as a white person and a person with money, who loves a good massage at a quiet spa, who relishes the serenity of an exclusive beach many people can’t afford. In a world where so much is out of my control, I am often tempted to turn away from the world’s collective and endless suffering, to pretend it doesn’t exist, and focus solely on my own happiness.
Traveling alone, I’m often lauded as ‘brave;’ a word suggesting that as a white woman, my status is as an adventurer and potential victim -- never an aggressor.
Nosara fulfilled many of the same criteria for me that it did for the spiritual colonizer crowd -- safe to travel alone, with abundant nature, warm weather, and removed from our lives and therefore freed from confronting questions about our positions in this world. It was easy to slip into a beach setting and, faced with no opposition, convince ourselves we were meant to remain there, walking barefoot under the sun indefinitely. During my time in Nosara, I enjoyed myself in the ways I arrived to do -- I explored the beach, I had coffee and avocado toast, I looked for tiny creatures in tide pools. In that way, I imagine, we led similar lives.
Six months after my trip to Nosara, I went to Italy to visit a friend. The cab driver who picked me up from the train station in Tuscany was a tall white man with white hair and a neatly combed white beard, like a Wes Anderson character.
Unprompted, he told me he regularly traveled to Brazil to do Ayahuasca, but his ceremonies differed from most since he expected each user to be their own shaman. He used keywords like 3D and 5D, the veil, the portal. A tiny brass Om was glued to his dashboard.
My conversation with the driver had the trappings of conversations I’d had with many older white men — vaguely condescending. When I chose to stay quiet, he asked me a question to revive the conversation, then steamrolled my answer with his own lengthy response.
I admitted I’d never taken ayahuasca.
Mmhmm, I see.
While I agreed that hallucinogens could help change one’s world view or perspective on past experiences, I also saw overuse as an easy path to shirking responsibilities to the people directly around them, shrugging off agency as “an illusion.”
The conversation tapered off. We still had an hour left to drive. Through the window, I watched the rolling Tuscan hills dotted with ancient farmhouses and grazing herds of sheep and cows. This must be one of the most beautiful places on earth, I thought.
I’m very unhappy with the way things are going in this world.
I didn’t respond.
Yep, he sighed, I’m excited for the future, for everything about to happen.
The spiteful part of me took the bait.
What do you mean?
The apocalypse is coming. Something huge will reveal itself, and expose everything wrong with the world, all the evil stuff going on. Our oppressors will be exposed.
The car dipped into a valley, following the gentle curve of the road. Wildflowers sprung from the hillside in spring bloom. Swallows and blackbirds dipped down from the sky.
Our higher purpose will be revealed, he continued. Maybe the world is one big chemical fart. But I don’t think so. I think there is a deeper purpose. What do you think our deeper purpose is? What do you think it all means?
Writing this, I’m again reminded of Letter From A Region In My Mind, where Baldwin reflects on his feelings at dinner with Elijah Muhammad.
“I had the stifling feeling that [he] knew I belonged to them but knew that I did not know it yet, that I remained unready, and that they were simply waiting [...] for me to discover the truth for myself.”
I already accepted that there was no answer I could provide that would satisfy him, so I instead opted to provide an answer that satisfied me.
Twenty years from now, someone might read the essay I write this month. Reading changed my perspective on the world -- I remember the way my favorite books changed my life, the before and after of reading them. Maybe, sitting in their room alone, they’ll feel seen or spoken to by what they read of mine, and it will change something for them. In that way, we’re connected through space and time. Creating those connections is my purpose. That’s a portal to me.
He frowned.
Maybe you need to take more mushrooms, and then you’ll come around. You’ll see.
I love the idea that the desire for ritual and the necessity for a spiritual culture is a side effect of rapid colonialism. Because you’re right, most Americans don’t identify as anything other than white. And there is a void of culture and ritual so we turn towards a means within our commodified lives to
falsely create it.
But here’s a question- if ritual and culture is a necessary part of living- what should we do now? Should we study our lineage and try to go back to reflect on the context of what came before us. Or has ritual and culture always been a farce and this new iteration is just a modern weaker version of it.
What a journey! I think this article was a portal for me