Unlearning the wellness myth

To be whole is often preceded by a life lived in pursuit, and to be well is to reconcile the unknowingness that comes with the search.

An extrapolation, poised to be an affirmation from a fellow seeker whose whole public persona had been lathered with extraordinary fandom, is the late essayist Anthony Bourdain, who, in one of his filmic episodes of Parts Unknown, opens with a sequence of tying crip cloth on his chalked fingers in preparation for a Jiu Jitsu session and says: “I will never be young again. Or any younger than I am today. I will never be faster or flexible. I will never win competitions against 22-year-old wrestlers in my weight class. I will never be a black belt. None of those things will happen, but none of that matters anymore.”

This, for me as a novice yoga student at the behest of domestic guidance from my much more accomplished yogi wife, opens a door to this quest of searching. Often a laggard in keeping with the code of the mat — which essentially instructs that I accept its invitation on a regular basis to be grounded, while its pull extracts all sorts of daily toxins —  I find there is much to learn from it. That what has been in the name of physical vitality matters less than the perfect pose, and more in its capacity to centre the self.

The wellness industrial complex, catalysed by our existential preoccupations toward a purposeful life, is estimated to be worth $4.5-trillion, with a growth rate of 6.4% year on year, according to one report. Against the backdrop of a complex and entangled world whose accelerating and often violent ways debase the human spirit, a cohesive sense of direction and connection with something beyond ourselves becomes increasingly important. For some, this takes the form of faith-based approaches and particular diets, and for others — like me— that relentless search for self through meditation.

But in seeking, the competing narratives around wellness are loud and cannot be ignored. From the crowd work associated with clickbait headlines on YouTube channels dedicated to horoscopic card readings, to lunar gatherings on Instagram Live feeds, the grammar of wellness beckons vigilance — for the rabbit hole is bottomless, with many “truths” in tow, vying for attention.

What distinguishes modern wellness, aside from its expansiveness, is its relentless focus on the self as the repository of all improvement. It’s trickle-down wellness — the idea that, if you work hard enough on your body and mind, your inner glow will leak out of your fingertips and touch the world. It can be disorienting to see so much profit attached to the notion of “self-care”.

However, unassailable is the fact that our bodies do, in reality, keep score of the traumas we’ve experienced — be it unengaged grief from losing a loved one or a lifetime spent botch-metabolising food that’s better suited to fuelling an aircraft than nourishing a living being. On a micro level, that phone that is always on, constantly interrupting one from being present with endless notifications, is a blight.

That said, the idea that a briskness toward wellness can somehow regenerate the frame externally probably holds water to a degree. But that it can reverse looming mortality? That has to be observed from a vantage point of suspicion.

Yet, the much more subtle truths, those that do not scream through influencer reels or corporate retreats, lie in the unnoticed: how your breath steadies when the body is humbled into stillness; how water tastes different when you’ve sat long enough to actually notice it; how being barefoot on the earth begins to feel less like a trope and more like a remembering and rooting. It is in these seemingly minor recalibrations that the pursuit shifts from spectacle to sustenance.

So here we are, doing poses on the mat and having taken up a plant-based diet. It illuminates life, yes — but only so far. I am, like Bourdain, inclined to be vested in the eternal search — for it is that search, carried in the spirit of joy and tumult, that is the true marker of a life lived. And everything else outside of that? Well, “none of that matters anymore”.