Wellbeing’s Dictatorship3 min read

The new-age industry has been set up on the need of human beings to find answers to their existential questions and manage the pain and distress of their traumas. In the capitalistic model, this suggests a fast and easy approach, all kinds of therapists, coaches, influencers, gurus, etc. trying very hard to incriminate “bad” feelings and replace them with joy, abundance, love, peace, fulfillment and other vague concepts for the human mind (theirs and rest of the people as well). And all these fast and easy. With the help of “positive energy”.

How? Without any introspection, or observation and analysis. Half of the emotional pallet that people use to express themselves has been demonized and the ultimate goal is now to ignore it. Absolutely meaningful and useful emotions like sadness, sorrow, anger, disappointment became something bad that everybody should cover them at any cost, in order to fit the new age model of the happy shiny and healthy person that appears on Instagram.

There is no invitation to the search for the cause of these feelings. The only thing that you need to do is relax, attract the energy of peacefulness, open yourself to the universe, and heal with the power of love!

Really? How come I haven’t thought of that till now?

Of course, most of the people are so traumatized that they can barely be open to another person. And these suggestions are completely incomprehensible to the people that they are given, as well as to the people that they give them. The truth is that this approach is nothing more than denial, denial for the person to look at their existence in the mirror as it really is, and embrace all aspects of it, even the darkest once.

Who can blame them for that? Even modern civilization is based on the intentional concealment of the truth. Who wants to know the face of the African slave that mined the cobalt for the device that you use right now to read this text at this very moment? Who wants to know the face of the kid in China who manufactured it?

None of us. And if we don’t want to see the pain of other people it’s because we don’t want to see even our own pain. We just want the pain to go away. We bury our sorrow and move on making a blend of activities to fill our time. We bury it with 2kg of yoga, 1kg massage, ½kg meditation, one person to sleep with at night, one job and we put all these to the “life mixer” in order to make a blend that is going to fill our lives and make everything be full of joy, bliss, and love.

Of course, as the blend fails and, as we fight to bury the pieces of ourselves even deeper, the traumas that scarred our existence strike us back even harder. It’s an indisputable fact that anything I push away becomes a neurosis. I know dozens of Neurotic people that are selling seminars of self-improvement and in their own lives, they can barely stand.

Very often what I’m saying to my clients and students is that treatment is not always like a walk in the park. Some times it will be beauty and relief, but some other times it is like a roller-coaster. Because our goal is not and it shouldn’t be to cover our issues but to bring them to the surface and work with them. And when this happens, the burdens will be lighter. And it’s not that we will stop feeling “bad” emotions, it’s that they will stop ruling our lives.

There is no easy way to work with our traumas, but there is a safe way to do it. We owe to our self to do that, to make that effort, the effort against a centrifugal civilization which cares more for the wrapping and less for the core. Because when we will manage to heal our wounds with time and patience,  who we really are is revealed and not who we became.

Only then, existence can feel love, joy, fulfillment, bliss, and peace.

Whatever all that means anyway.


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