Healing from Healing — why healing wears us out

§0 Fissure — why this piece is written

This piece is written from a fissure. One can spend years trying to heal oneself — cognitive behavioural therapy, EMDR, psychoanalysis, somatic experiencing, IFS, plant medicine retreats, Amazonian dietas, Vipassana, herbalism schools, vast reading of van der Kolk, Maté, Levine — and realise, at a certain point, that one is more tired than when one began. Not healed. More informed. More articulate about one’s wounds. And more spent. It is from that fatigue that this pillar was born. Not from a theory. From an observation: at some point, the quest for healing itself becomes a weight. And it is precisely when we admit it that something else can begin.

The word healing — anatomy of a capture

The word healing, in English as in French (guérison), carries a tangled history. Etymologically, healing comes from the Old English hælan — to make whole — the same root as hale (sound), heal, and hallowed. Original healing is less a repair than a reunion: bringing back to unity what had been fragmented. That grammar stays alive in certain therapeutic traditions (Richard Schwartz's Internal Family Systems, for instance, speaks of unburdening and Self-leadership, not of cure). But over the last fifty years it has been largely absorbed by an economy that turns healing into a product, a command, a social performance.

The global wellness economy is estimated by the Global Wellness Institute at more than 5.8 trillion dollars in 2024. That figure folds in yoga, retreats, coaching, nutrition, meditation, natural products — but also everything sold under the broad label of 'healing': alternative therapies, plant medicine, sound healing, breathwork, energy work, and the rest. That economic mass bears down on the grammar of the word. When something is massively commercialised, it drifts slowly — its meaning gives way under the weight of marketing. Healing does not escape that gravity.

Anand Giridharadas, the American journalist, in Winners Take All (2018), documents how the global philanthropic elite has appropriated the vocabulary of care (caring, healing, well-being) to neutralise the structural critiques aimed at the inequalities it produces. Healing becomes a moral cover that lets one keep extracting while feeling good. Barbara Ehrenreich, in Bright-Sided (2009), similarly dismantles the tyranny of positive thinking — that idea that health, healing, success are personal choices, which amounts to blaming those who fall short. The two critiques converge: healing, in its contemporary neoliberal form, has become a moral privatisation of suffering.

The five strata of the trap

The trap of healing-as-new-command unfolds in strata that reinforce one another. First stratum: continuous healing — the idea that there is always something to work on, to unblock, to release. That grammar forbids stopping. When one cycle of therapy ends, another begins. When one wound is digested, you find it hides three more. The concept of generational trauma, popularised by Mark Wolynn (It Didn't Start With You, 2016) and Resmaa Menakem (My Grandmother's Hands, 2017), is powerful and true — but it has also been instrumentalised by the wellness industry to open an endless fountain of material to work through. If everything is trauma, and every trauma is intergenerational, then healing has, quite literally, no end.

Second stratum: performative healing. Instagram has turned inner work into spectacle. Inspiring posts about shadow work. Ayahuasca-retreat stories at sunset. Carousels on the five lies my mother handed me. Sharing healing publicly was, at first, a political act (the personal is political, as the feminists of the 1970s put it); it has largely become a social performance whose mental cost — for those who display and those who watch — is almost never measured. The sociologist Jia Tolentino, in Trick Mirror (2019), reads precisely this capture.

Third stratum: consumed healing. To heal, you must buy — a coaching package, a retreat, a book, a supplement, a training, a membership. Access to healing is filtered through purchasing power. This stratum is rarely named head-on, because it implicates the very economy that funds the voices who might criticise it. Yet it shapes the global wellness economy through and through. Corporate yoga, oligarchs' retreats, the concierge medicine of healing — these are not marginal. They sit at the heart of the market. Healing is worth what you can pay.

Fourth stratum: deserved healing. If healing is a product, then those who cannot access it do not deserve health. This logic is rarely stated outright, but it shapes contemporary conversations: if you are still burnt out, you haven't meditated enough. If you are still depressed, you haven't found the right therapy. This blaming logic is the exact inverse of the grammar of solidarity — it individualises structural problems and shifts onto people a responsibility that ought to be collective. Vanessa Machado de Oliveira reads this precisely in Hospicing Modernity (2021).

Fifth stratum: violent healing. When you have invested years in your own healing work, it becomes hard not to project that grammar onto others. The parent who won't do their work. The partner who won't go to therapy. The friend who stays in their patterns. Healing-as-social-command then becomes a new morality — one that excludes those who do not consent to it. The writer Adrienne Maree Brown (Pleasure Activism, 2019) names this drift sharply: the grammar of healing can become as violent as that of religious salvation, insofar as it claims to know what is good for another without their consent.

Vanessa Machado de Oliveira — Hospicing Modernity

Vanessa Machado de Oliveira, a Brazilian academic (University of British Columbia in Vancouver, where she directs the Decolonial Futures Hub), published in 2021 a book that left a mark on decolonial education and eco-philosophy: Hospicing Modernity — Facing Humanity's Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism. Her central thesis: modernity (the modern Western civilisational project, with its individualism, its extractivism, its infinite growth) is dying. It will not be saved. It will not be healed. The work before us, as people who are part of it, is not to repair it — it is to accompany its death with dignity. Hospicing as an ethical posture.

This inversion is radical. Where the dominant discourse invites us to repair (the climate, inequality, our relationships, our own psyche), Machado de Oliveira proposes to accompany. Where wellness invites us to transform, she proposes to compost. Where personal healing invites us to become better, she proposes to hold the discomfort of contradictions without resolving them. This posture is neither pessimistic nor nihilistic — it is a mature posture, one that recognises that certain forms of life do not survive, and that our task is not to avert their death but to accompany it, so that what grows afterward can grow otherwise.

The book develops a framework called GTDF (Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures), which offers four practical exercises for growing this hospicing posture: exit (leaving the modern fictions of salvation), entanglement (accepting that we are entangled in what we critique), grief (mourning), guidance (learning from Indigenous peoples who were never modern). These four movements are the exact inverse of contemporary wellness grammar — which offers entry (into a new programme), liberation (from your knots), positivity (over grief), expertise (of the coach). INFUSE holds this framework as one of the most rigorous critiques of the contemporary healing industry.

Bayo Akomolafe — slowing down in urgent times

Bayo Akomolafe is a Yoruba-Nigerian philosopher, founder of The Emergence Network, who articulated one of the most counter-intuitive and most precious intuitions in contemporary thought: the times are urgent — let us slow down. This phrase, seemingly paradoxical, opens a specific posture. As the sense of urgency rises, our reflex is to speed up — to act fast, repair more, produce more solutions. Akomolafe proposes the exact opposite: it is in slowing down that perceptions, questions, sensibilities can surface which are invisible at reflex speed.

In These Wilds Beyond Our Fences (2017), Akomolafe develops this posture through the lens of post-humanist epistemology — how do we know what we know once we recognise that we are inextricably entangled with the more-than-human living world, with our ancestors, with all that precedes us? His answer is patient: we know by walking slowly, by waiting for what wants to show itself to show itself, by trusting the wisdom of the living fabric. This posture is deeply animist — it assumes the world is full of consciousness, and that our task is to listen, not to direct. It is also deeply critical of the wellness industry, which presses for personal performance inside an economy that presses for economic performance.

Akomolafe offers a central image: the cracks are where the light gets in — taking up Leonard Cohen, but giving it an epistemological reach. The cracks of modernity (exhaustion, eco-anxiety, the feeling of having tried everything to no result) are not problems to repair. They are thresholds. It is precisely by slowing down before them, by inhabiting them rather than sealing them over, that transformations which cannot be planned can come to pass. This posture is compatible with the use of plants, of therapies, of practices — but not with their compulsive stacking as a strategy of repair.

Sophie Strand — wild care vs self-care

Sophie Strand is an American writer who has lived with a chronic illness (an undiagnosed neurological syndrome) since adolescence. That condition runs deep through her writing, and through her book The Flowering Wand (2022) in particular. Her thesis: self-care as sold by the wellness industry is a privatisation of care — it individualises something that cannot be individual. In its place she proposes wild care, care gone feral, resting on three principles: avowed interdependence (we do not heal alone), porousness with the more-than-human (trees, rivers, animal companions are part of care), and acceptance of chronicity (some wounds do not close, and that's all right).

This last dimension — accepting chronicity — is especially hard for a wellness grammar that always assumes a before-and-after. Strand insists: there are wounds that are not made to be healed in the sense the healing industry intends. They are made to be lived, accompanied, integrated into an existence that includes their presence. This position joins that of Eli Clare (Brilliant Imperfection, 2017), a trans and disabled activist, who critiques the 'cure imperative' — the cultural mandate that any different condition must be repaired to fit valid normality. These voices of authors living with chronicities are essential to the contemporary critique of healing.

The concept of wild care stands term for term against commercialised self-care. Where self-care invites the solitary bubble bath, wild care invites a walk in the forest with a friend. Where self-care offers a membership to a meditation app, wild care offers a local talking circle that costs nothing. Where self-care assumes you can tend to yourself in the absence of community, wild care insists that isolation is precisely what produces contemporary exhaustion. It is a radically different politics of care.

Compost instead of repair — the INFUSE posture

INFUSE draws a practical posture from this critique. Our offer is not anti-therapeutic. We offer plants, perspectives, traditions, encounters. But we do not sell healing. The distinction matters. To sell healing is to promise a result — that you will be repaired once you have consumed our product. To offer a tool is to open an encounter — which may yield something, may yield nothing, may yield something other than what was expected. This humble posture is consistent with what one learns in working with plants: a plant is not a medicine, she is an encounter. What emerges from it is never under our control.

Composting is our guiding metaphor. To compost is to not demand of suffering that it turn into visible personal growth. It is to let certain organic matter die, decompose, feed the soil. It is to accept that not all waste becomes compost — some stays waste, and that's all right. This grammar is fundamentally more ecological than the grammar of healing — which looks more like an industrial production line (traumatised input → therapeutic process → healed output) than a natural cycle.

Concretely, what does it change? It changes INFUSE's editorial posture: we never promise that a plant will heal you of X. We tell what the plant has done for the peoples who have lived with her, what science is beginning to document, what INFUSE has personally received from her. It changes our commercial posture: we sell no cures, no programmes, no transformations. We sell plants, perspectives, supports. It changes our relationship with you: we are not your healers. We are fellow travellers sharing what we find. You are the arbiter of what grows in you.

Nuggets & lore — fragments of another grammar

Nugget 1 — The French word 'panser'. In Old French, to panser a wound did not mean to heal it in the modern sense — it meant to attend to it, keep it clean, make conversation with it. It is a grammar of accompaniment, not of repair. The word drifted toward its contemporary medical meaning, but the root remains: panser and penser (to think) come from the same Latin verb pensare, to weigh, to consider. To tend = to weigh. Not to repair.

Nugget 2 — The figure of 5.8 trillion. The global wellness economy is estimated by the Global Wellness Institute at more than 5.8 trillion dollars in 2024 — roughly 7% of world GDP. For comparison, the OECD's annual official development assistance is around 200 billion. For every dollar invested in development aid, humanity spends nearly thirty on wellness. That disproportion is itself a symptom. We tend to our individuals better than to our collective systems.

Nugget 3 — Eli Clare and the 'cure imperative'. Eli Clare, an American trans and disabled activist, in Brilliant Imperfection — Grappling with Cure (2017), articulates the most rigorous critique of what he calls the cure imperative — the dominant cultural idea that any different condition (disability, neurodivergence, minority gender identity) must be repaired to fit valid normality. This critique reaches well beyond the context of disability and applies to the contemporary wellness industry: healing as a moral requirement is a subtle form of violence.

Nugget 4 — The Tzutujil concept of chumij. Martín Prechtel, who spent thirteen years in shamanic training among the Tzutujil Maya of Guatemala, recounts in Secrets of the Talking Jaguar (1998) that this language has no word equivalent to 'heal' in the Western sense. The nearest word, chumij, means something like to re-plaster continuously, to re-weave, to re-mesh. Tzutujil cosmology assumes there is no final point of healing — there is a continuous work of chumij that keeps the living fabric coherent. This grammar is compatible with the use of plants, ceremonies, practices. It is not compatible with a healing industry that assumes a reachable final state.

Nugget 5 — Carolyn Elliott and Existential Kink. Carolyn Elliott, in Existential Kink (2020), proposes another path: instead of trying to eliminate our shadows, learning to inhabit them with pleasure. This radical inversion (that the unconscious desires what consciousness refuses, and that recognising this desire frees more than fighting it) is compatible with Machado de Oliveira's composting posture. The aim is no longer to become luminous — it is to inhabit fully, shadows included. This thought is disturbing but clarifying.

Nugget 6 — The Rilkean cadence. Rainer Maria Rilke, in Letters to a Young Poet (1929), writes: 'Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart, and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms, like books written in a very foreign tongue.' This posture is the exact inverse of the grammar of healing — which would resolve, open, translate every locked room. Rilke proposes to love the locked room. It is a discipline.

Nugget 7 — Adrienne Maree Brown and pleasure activism. Brown, an African-American activist and writer, proposes in Pleasure Activism (2019) that pleasure is not the opposite of social justice — it is its infrastructure. You cannot hold for long in a structural struggle without embodied pleasure. But the pleasure she speaks of is not the hedonist consumption sold by marketing — it is the slow pleasure of a living fabric that knows itself to be in relation. Eating together. Making love without performance. Walking in the sun. This politics of pleasure as the infrastructure of collective care is radically different from commercialised self-care.

Nugget 8 — The silence of therapists. Many trained therapists (Lacanian analysts, humanist psychologists, serious somatic practitioners) are themselves deeply critical of the wellness industry — but their voices carry less than those of influencers. That media asymmetry is itself a symptom. For anyone seeking sober care, you often have to look in the quiet margins (classical psychoanalysis, peer supervision, long accompaniment without promise) rather than in the visible hubs (Instagram retreats, certified coaching, festival-organised plant medicine retreats). This contrast is worth observing.

Primary sources

• Machado de Oliveira, V. (2021). Hospicing Modernity: Facing Humanity's Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books.
• Akomolafe, B. (2017). These Wilds Beyond Our Fences: Letters to My Daughter on Humanity's Search for Home. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books.
• Strand, S. (2022). The Flowering Wand: Rewilding the Sacred Masculine. Rochester: Inner Traditions.
• Clare, E. (2017). Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure. Durham: Duke University Press.
• Brown, A. M. (2019). Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good. Chico: AK Press.
• Ehrenreich, B. (2009). Bright-Sided: How Positive Thinking Is Undermining America. New York: Metropolitan Books.
• Giridharadas, A. (2018). Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
• Prechtel, M. (1998). Secrets of the Talking Jaguar: Memoirs from the Living Heart of a Mayan Village. New York: Tarcher/Putnam.
• Elliott, C. (2020). Existential Kink: Unmask Your Shadow and Embrace Your Power. Newburyport: Weiser Books.
• Tolentino, J. (2019). Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion. New York: Random House.
• Menakem, R. (2017). My Grandmother's Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies. Las Vegas: Central Recovery Press.
• Rilke, R. M. (1929). Briefe an einen jungen Dichter. Leipzig: Insel-Verlag. English translation: Letters to a Young Poet.

Secondary sources

• Global Wellness Institute (2024). The Global Wellness Economy: Country Rankings. Annual Report.
• Wolynn, M. (2016). It Didn't Start with You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are. New York: Viking.
• Schwartz, R. C. (2021). No Bad Parts: Healing Trauma and Restoring Wholeness with the Internal Family Systems Model. Boulder: Sounds True.
• Federici, S. (2020). Beyond the Periphery of the Skin: Rethinking, Remaking, and Reclaiming the Body in Contemporary Capitalism. Oakland: PM Press.
• Decolonial Futures Collective (2018-2024). Collective publications (gesturingtowardsdecolonialfutures.net) — GTDF practices.
• The Emergence Network (Bayo Akomolafe). The network's site and podcasts (emergencenetwork.org) — 'slowing down' practices.