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Your Breakdown, Their Billboard: When Healing Becomes a Marketing Asset
When Healing Is Framed, Filtered, and Sold Back to You
Author’s Note:
This piece is not a rejection of spiritual spaces. It’s a reckoning with what happens when care is traded for content, and when moments meant to be private are rebranded as proof of transformation.
The Sacred Made Marketable
There’s a moment at almost every retreat.
Someone is crying, body trembling, heart split open.
They’re mid-process — raw, honest, undefended.
And then, the camera clicks.
At the Awaken event I attended, this wasn’t just spontaneous. It was predictable. Cameras weren’t an afterthought; they were part of the architecture. A key moment during the breathwork session, when people were most emotionally disarmed, was always captured. Photos were taken of bodies on the floor, hands reaching toward the sky, tears streaming down faces, all while facilitators hovered just out of frame.
We were told we were safe. That our healing was sacred. But somehow, it always seemed to align with the lens. A convulsion during “light language” transmission. A collapsed body in the circle. A…
