Part One of a Five-Part Series
Long before there were jade eggs, $18 bone broth lattes, or men livestreaming their anti-aging protocols, Los Angeles was already the cradle of American wellness culture — a place where health, spirituality, and reinvention merged into something new. Sociologists have long noted that LA was uniquely primed for this experiment, with its combination of postwar self-help movements, celebrity mysticism, immigrant healing traditions, and a population always hungry for transformation. In many ways, the city became, as one researcher put it, “the Ellis Island of new spiritual identities.”
I landed there (Los Angeles) in the mid-1990s, and shortly thereafter landed in a room full of others announcing their milestones of recovery from drugs and alcohol. I was broken, raw, and hopeful at the same time. Like so many women emerging from addiction, I was searching for something to hold onto — a sense of safety, belonging, and meaning. Psychologists who study early recovery often describe this stage as a “spiritual vacuum,” a period when the nervous system is craving community and stability after years of chaos. I didn’t know any of that language yet.
I discovered Erewhon — the tiny, earnest health-food store before it became an Instagram shrine — it became my sanctuary, along with the Bohdi Tree bookstore.
Inside, every aisle of Erewhon was a promise: tinctures for calm, tonics for vitality, herbs for clarity. The first time I drank GT’s kombucha, which was still a fringe elixir back then, I felt like I was stepping into a secret world. This is what anthropologists call “ritualized healthcare” — practices that, as the scholar Arthur Frank has written, restore a sense of control when the body or life feels unpredictable.
But LA’s wellness scene wasn’t just kombucha and colonics. It was also crawling with spiritual movements that hovered on the edge of control. In the 70s and 80s, EST and its successor, The Forum, swept through the city. These weren’t casual workshops; they were marathon personal development seminars known for their emotional intensity and rigid hierarchies. Psychologist Margaret Singer, who spent decades studying high-control groups, documented how EST’s techniques blurred the line between self-help and coercion.
My friend, Kelly, begged me to join The Forum (Landmark) when I was newly sober. It will change your life, she said. And it did change lives — sometimes positively, sometimes with the kind of disorientation that cult researchers like Janja Lalich later traced to “bounded choice,” the phenomenon where personal agency is slowly replaced by group ideology. I didn’t join, and looking back, I’m grateful my intuition kicked in before the recruitment did.
As LA evolved, so did its wellness culture. By the early 2000s, the groundwork laid by those transformational groups made the rise of Goop almost inevitable. Gwyneth Paltrow didn’t invent wellness; she simply branded it. She packaged an entire aspirational lifestyle — purity, discipline, “clean living” — into a system that scholars like Charlotte Biltekoff argue reflects America’s obsession with “healthism,” the belief that personal virtue is expressed through wellness behaviors.
Goop’s power wasn’t in its jade eggs or psychic vampire repellent sprays. It was in the identity it offered: a woman enlightened enough to detox, curate, and constantly refine herself. When researchers talk about “moralized wellness,” they mean exactly that — the merging of personal health with personal virtue.
I watched these trends unfold not just culturally but personally. In 2014, I became one of the first Bulletproof Coaches when Dave Asprey turned buttered coffee into a movement. Those early years were intoxicating — a heady mix of biohacking science, startup bravado, and what sociologist Deborah Lupton has described as “self-surveillance wrapped in empowerment.” The implication was clear: if you tracked your sleep perfectly and managed your mitochondrial output, you were a superior version of yourself. It was also understood that Dave’s perspective was the only correct one!
Years later, I attended a Bryan Johnson “Blueprint” event in San Francisco, where men wore “sheeple” T-shirts unironically and hung on every quantified promise of biological immortality. I was witnessing a society obsessed with optimization to the point of spiritual exhaustion.
Next, let’s talk about Teal Swan. Her shadow-work empire on YouTube is something to stand clear of—it’s been dissected by everyone from licensed therapists to full-blown cult scholars. Why the fuss? Her content is incredibly seductive, weaving powerful healing language with a kind of untouchable spiritual authority. Clinical psychologist Jessica Taylor nailed it: it’s the ultimate sleight of hand, creating deep emotional reliance all while telling followers they’re totally in charge.
Personally, I wouldn’t go within a hundred feet of her methods. When you’re dealing with the raw, exposed nerves of deep trauma—a process that requires absolute safety and careful boundaries—Teal Swan’s approach isn’t just misguided; it is, in my view, dangerous. Her brand of spiritual authority demands unwavering loyalty, a dynamic fundamentally incompatible with genuine, ethical therapeutic healing. The risks of emotional manipulation and further psychological harm in such a vulnerable state are too high to ignore.
The truth is that wellness didn’t drift toward cultish dynamics by accident. It was built on a lineage of spiritual experimentation, self-help extremism, and the American fantasy of self-reinvention.
By the time I began working in genetics, stress physiology, and nervous system resilience, wellness had become not just a culture — but an identity economy. (The identity economy describes a market where people’s consumption choices are driven less by the functional utility of a product and more by the desire to express a specific self-image and align with a chosen social group. This framework perfectly captures the modern wellness industry: it’s not just about health maintenance, but about embodying the identity of a “well person.”)
People don’t join cults. They join communities that promise healing. I didn’t mean to join a cult. I joined a community, an optimization community!
That’s the part we rarely admit, we frown upon these ideas, a cult, oh no, not me!
But we do—we join because we are searching for relief, meaning, answers, solutions, validation, belonging—the same needs that neuroscientists like Naomi Eisenberger have shown are tied to our survival systems. When a group offers that belonging, it lights up the same neural circuitry as physical safety.
Which is why me leaving — or being pushed out — felt like danger!
Stay with me, tomorrow I will release Part Two