Julia Cameron (whose creativity manual The Artist’s Way is one of the most enduring books in the broader
self-help genre, its purpose and style seemingly invulnerable to social and cultural shifts), Eckhart Tolle,
Gabrielle Bernstein and Danielle LaPorte. Spiritual self-help seeks less often to fix, and more often, to
understand, and to soothe and calm like self-care.
At the intersection of spiritual self-help and self-care is the reason for them: the pursuit of something
deeper, something more elemental.
The leaders and vendors
The authorities of a self-help-informed kind of wellness, who sell a specific programme to live by and
complain about, include exercise alphas like Jillian Michaels, Billy Blanks or any of the locally worshipped
spinning or CrossFit instructors, as well as diet gurus like Melissa Hartwig of the Whole30 (so many rules!)
and Dr Alejandro Junger, of the Clean program.
The original and maybe only self-care star is Audre Lorde, whose conceptualisation of self-care as a form of
protest is the most critical.
Gwyneth Paltrow is a kind-of Gen X corporate wellness avatar – the Oz of an industry that confidently
depends on women trying to mitigate their various anxieties. Her Goop empire sells self-care products,
often at exclusive price points.
Wellness blogs promote methods like
meditation as a means of self-care (iStock)But other wellness entrepreneurs serve the kinds of seekers who want spirituality and connection and self-
awareness along with, say, great skin. These include Amanda Chantal Bacon of Moon Juice, a nu-groovy
operation that specialises in juices and adaptogenic “dusts”; Erica Chidi Cohen, a co-founder of LOOM in
Los Angeles, which offers support around sexual and reproductive health and parenting; Ty Haney, the
founder of Outdoor Voices, the Austin, Texas-based “you-do-you” apparel brand; and Liz Tran, who
founded Reset, a new wellness space, or “sanctuary”, in Manhattan that offers classes and workshops in the
“formation of the integrated self”, with corporate career coaching, sound baths and astrology. (The space
could be a sign of what’s next: Instead of millennial pinks and modernist clutter, here are jewel tones, warm
wood and an 800-pound smokey quartz crystal from Madagascar.)
Authority vs the Me-Archy
Many of the newer wellness products are direct-to-consumer. The individualisation of self-care wellness
includes custom vitamins from subscription services, like Ritual and Care/of, as well as curated boxes filled
with candles, jade rollers and succulents.
Wellness might currently be code for “thin”, according to Jessica Knoll writing in The New York Times, but