What Does Your Calm Make Possible?

Spirituality After Innocence in an Extractive World

Sourced from: https://www.ethicalpsychology.com/2023/07/conspirituality-how-new-age-conspiracy.html

During the 2010s, I regularly organised solstice gatherings that sat comfortably on the esoteric side of things. The details changed, but the intention was familiar: mark the turning of the year, step outside ordinary time, and create a space in which people could speak with more honesty than daily life usually permits. I also took part in personal development workshops and seminars of many kinds. I still do, and I still like some of them.

I do not want to rewrite those experiences as mere gullibility. I have had a strong need for connection to the greater-than aspects of human life since I was a teenager, expressed through learning about religions and quasi-religious movements within anthropology and ‘spirituality’ (I will leave defining that for another article).

The gatherings I organised as an adult offered things that many of our institutions do badly: permission to slow down, create sacred space, attention to the body, a language for grief and desire, and a sense that life might be more than productivity. Ritual can restore texture to time. A good workshop can loosen a pattern that argument alone cannot reach. A circle can make room for speech that has had nowhere else to go.

Since the pandemic, however, some of the language around these spaces has begun to sound different to me. Awakening. Sovereignty. Purity. Natural health. Hidden knowledge. The courageous individual who sees what the compliant masses cannot. In the Make America Healthy Again, or MAHA, ecosystem, parts of wellness culture have converged with right-wing politics, conspiratorial thinking, rigid gender roles, and a moral ranking of bodies according to gender, race and cisheteronormativity. I explored that convergence in one of my first Substack articles. What interests me now is the more difficult question left behind: what should we keep?

How do we become more than mindful in an extractive world? How do we cultivate an inner practice without turning suffering into a private self-improvement project? How do we act with force, clarity, and persistence while practising nonviolence in the spirit of Thich Nhat Hanh?

What the industry extracts

The most convenient response would be to oppose reason to spirituality, abandon the whole field, and congratulate myself for having become more critical. It would ignore why people seek these practices in the first place, including the failures of conventional medicine, work, education, and politics to meet many human needs. It would also let activism off the hook.

Spiritual bypassing uses spiritual language to avoid grief, conflict, history, and power. There is also something like political bypassing: using correct analysis, urgency, or ideological certainty to avoid vulnerability, ambivalence, relational repair, and the possibility that we reproduce harm ourselves. These two forms of avoidance are not politically equivalent, especially where power is unequal. Still, both can become ways of not listening and not changing.

My concern is therefore less with spirituality as such than with the spirituality industry. An industry extracts a practice from the ethical and communal ecosystem that gave it meaning, processes it into a portable technique, and sells it back to us. Attention becomes a productivity aid. Compassion becomes self-soothing. Ritual becomes an experience to consume. Trauma becomes both an identity and a market. The practitioner becomes a permanently unfinished improvement project.

Mindfulness can be extracted in exactly this way. A practice that might help us perceive suffering more clearly is repackaged as the capacity to tolerate an intolerable workplace, an unjust institution, or an ecologically destructive economy. The problem is not that contemporary spirituality is too spiritual. It is that the techniques are often sold with the vows removed.

The body is not a fortress

The phrase body fascism needs care. I do not use it to dismiss concern about food systems, pollution, chronic illness, pharmaceutical power, or the loss of bodily autonomy. Those concerns can be entirely legitimate. I use it for a political and moral logic in which health becomes proof of virtue, illness becomes evidence of personal failure, dependency becomes shameful, and the imagined pure body becomes a model for the pure society.

This is one reason right-wing wellness politics can be persuasive. It attaches itself to real grievances, then redirects them towards private purification and social hierarchy. Buy the correct products. Expel contaminants. Distrust outsiders. Recover supposedly natural roles. Become individually invulnerable.

A different politics begins with the recognition that health is collectively produced. Bodies are shaped by air, soil, food, housing, labour, income, care, discrimination, public infrastructure, and ecological conditions. The opposite of the pure body is not the neglected body. It is the supported, interdependent body.

This is where Thich Nhat Hanh remains essential for me. In engaged Buddhism, mindfulness is not an isolated technique for producing a calmer individual. It lives within ethical trainings concerning consumption, livelihood, speech, openness to revising one’s views, nonviolence, community, and compassionate action. His teaching of interbeing punctures the fantasy of the sovereign self. My body is made of food systems, other people’s labour, water, microbes, institutions, histories, and countless other beings. If interbeing is more than a beautiful idea, it is also an obligation.

Inner work across scales

Tara Brach helped me think through the most intimate scale: how not to transmit inner violence. Her RAIN practice, Recognise, Allow, Investigate, Nurture, offers a way to meet shame, fear, defensiveness, and blame without either suppressing them or handing them the steering wheel. People who cannot stay present with discomfort often turn criticism into persecution, disagreement into betrayal, and uncertainty into an urgent need for an enemy.

It would be unfair to describe Brach’s work as merely therapeutic or apolitical. Her teaching on engaged spirituality explicitly connects inner practice with racism, climate breakdown, inequality, and violence towards human and non-human beings. Yet the question of scale remains. RAIN cannot redistribute power, organise a campaign, change a budget, or protect someone from an abusive institution. It can help us become more able to hear, to remain in relationship, and to act without making unexamined reactivity the movement’s hidden leader. That is necessary, but it is not sufficient.

Rhonda V. Magee’s work provides the bridge. In “The Inner Work of Racial Justice,” she refuses the easy separation between private prejudice and structural racism. Our bodies learn. Perception is conditioned. Ideas about who is safe, credible, intelligent, threatening, or deserving settle into reflexes, habits, and institutional decisions. Mindfulness can make some of that conditioning available to interruption.

This does not reduce racism to an individual attitude problem. Nor does it imply that breathing through discomfort is a substitute for redistribution, institutional change, or reparative action. Magee’s contribution is to show why structural analysis and embodied practice need one another. People with admirable politics can still reproduce domination in meetings, organisations, and movements. For European readers, her work also invites a locally grounded question: how do colonial histories, class, borders, finance, and racialisation live in our own institutions and bodies?

Kazu Haga then moves the inquiry into open conflict. In “Healing Resistance” and “Fierce Vulnerability,” he brings Buddhist practice, trauma awareness, Kingian Nonviolence, restorative justice, and social organising into the same frame. His most valuable contribution is to rescue nonviolence from niceness. Nonviolence is not passivity, politeness, or the avoidance of conflict. It can be confrontational, disruptive, disciplined, and boundaried. It seeks to mobilise the power required to stop harm while refusing to make dehumanisation its method.

Haga is especially relevant in a context of collapse. Under prolonged stress, people narrow their field of attention, polarise, project, and reach for simple enemies. Movements are not immune. Inner change does not become structural change by osmosis, but structural change does not automatically produce people capable of living differently either. We need practices, relationships, and forms of organisation through which both can meet.

There is an important caution. The language of collective trauma can blur differences in material power. Those causing harm and those absorbing it are not equally situated, and vulnerable people cannot be required to perform the emotional labour of humanising their aggressors. A credible nonviolence must be fierce enough to stop violence, precise enough to name responsibility, and humble enough to remain open to repair.

When the ritual is over

Taken together, these practitioners offer a movement across scales. Brach helps us meet inner violence. Magee shows that the inner world is already social and historical. Haga asks how to confront harm without reproducing the logic of domination. Thich Nhat Hanh provides the ethical ecology that holds practice, community, and action together.

The synthesis I am looking for is simple to state and difficult to live: mindfulness helps us notice what is happening; justice analysis helps us understand why; nonviolence disciplines how we respond; community makes the response durable.

An accountable spirituality should therefore make us more revisable, not more certain of our special insight. It should help us distinguish intuition from evidence. It should name the structural causes of suffering, not relocate them entirely inside the individual. It should deepen solidarity rather than purity or superiority. It should increase our capacity for conflict, boundaries, repair, and sustained action. And it should have consequences beyond our emotional state, in how we work, spend, organise, govern, consume, and share power.

No single meditation, ritual, or workshop can do all of this. The problem begins when a practice mistakes its own scale for the whole of transformation.

Would I still organise a solstice gathering? I think so, and I may well do sometime in the future. But I would ask different questions. Not only: what do I want to release, and what do I want to call into my life? Also: what harm am I prepared to stop participating in? What comfort am I willing to relinquish? What am I committed to protecting? Who will hold me accountable when the circle has ended?

I do not want a spirituality of innocence, purity, or escape. I want a practice capable of facing collapse without turning suffering into a self-improvement project or another person into a disposable object. The opposite of conspirituality is not cynicism. It is a spirituality capable of doubt, history, material analysis, collective obligation, and courageous love.

The test of a practice is not how peaceful I feel when I leave the room. It is what forms of violence I am less willing to participate in when I return. What does my calm make possible?

Further reading and sources

Charlotte Ward and David Voas, The Emergence of Conspirituality, Journal of Contemporary Religion, 2011.

Matthew Remski, Derek Beres and Julian Walker, Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat, PublicAffairs, 2023.

Stephanie Alice Baker, Alt. Health Influencers: How Wellness Culture and Web Culture Have Been Weaponised to Promote Conspiracy Theories and Far-Right Extremism during the COVID-19 Pandemic, European Journal of Cultural Studies, 2022.

Philippine Chachignon, Emmanuelle Le Barbenchon, and Lionel Dany, Mindfulness Research and Applications in the Context of Neoliberalism: A Narrative and Critical Review, Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 2024.

Plum Village, The Fourteen Mindfulness Trainings.

Tara Brach, The Courageous Heart Workbook & RAIN Resources online.

Rhonda V. Magee, The Inner Work of Racial Justice: Healing Ourselves and Transforming Our Communities Through Mindfulness, TarcherPerigee, 2019.

Kazu Haga, Healing Resistance: A Radically Different Response to Harm, Parallax Press, 2020.

Kazu Haga, Fierce Vulnerability: Healing from Trauma, Emerging through Collapse, Parallax Press, 2025.