I watched a guy from my local coffee shop yesterday spend 20 minutes arranging his “self-care” setup for Instagram before actually doing anything. Meditation cushion positioned just so. Gratitude journal artfully opened. Crystal water bottle catching the light. Adaptogenic mushroom coffee steaming photogenically.
He snapped about 30 pictures, spent another 10 minutes selecting filters, then packed everything up without ever having meditated or written a single word.
This, my friends, is modern wellness culture in a nutshell.
We’re not actually doing the work. We’re performing the work.
Think about it. How many times have you seen someone post about their “healing journey” online? The perfectly lit selfie with a yoga mat. The screenshot of their meditation streak. The aesthetic “morning routine” reel. But behind the scenes, they’re still angry, anxious, and avoiding their actual problems.
It’s like homework. You can look super busy flipping through your textbook, highlighting stuff, and organising your notes. But if you’re not actually understanding the material, what’s the point? You’re just performing “studying” without studying.
I should acknowledge something here…sometimes the performance can be a starting point. Posting about meditation might help some people stay accountable. Going through the motions might eventually lead to genuine practice. I get that. But when the performance becomes the end goal rather than the pathway, we’ve lost the plot entirely.
The Root Problem…We’re Healing From the Neck Up
Most modern wellness practices cater to the mind. They teach us to control our thoughts, upgrade our habits, track our progress. But healing doesn’t happen at the level of thought alone – it happens in the nervous system. It happens in the body. And it happens when we feel safe enough to slow down and actually face ourselves.
This mind-body connection isn’t an either/or situation. Sometimes we need cognitive approaches to get started, to understand what’s happening to us or to create enough psychological safety to go deeper. But eventually, we need to move beyond concepts and into embodied experience.
Stillness is terrifying for most of us.
When we slow down, the body starts speaking. And most of us have no idea how to listen. Or worse – we’re afraid of what we’ll hear.
We think we lack motivation, discipline, focus. But what we really lack is safety. Regulation. Integration.
We don’t need more hacks. We need more honesty.
Biohacking the Shadow
We try to meditate our anxiety away, journal our grief into gratitude, ice-bathe our way into inner peace. But here’s the truth:
You can’t hack your way out of your shadow.
Your unprocessed emotions, your unmet needs, your inner child – they’re not problems to solve. They’re invitations. To sit. To feel. To integrate. Not to rush. Not to bypass. Not to perfect.
Because real healing is raw. It’s nonlinear. It’s uncomfortable.
And that’s why most people avoid it.
They want to “feel better.” Not to “feel deeply”.
This isn’t just a Western or affluent phenomenon, though it certainly takes specific forms in those contexts. Across cultures and throughout history, humans have found ways to avoid emotional discomfort…whether through spiritual bypassing, toxic positivity, or numbing behaviours. The modern wellness industry has simply commodified this avoidance into an aesthetically pleasing package.
What We’re Actually Seeking
Strip away all the apps, journals, hashtags, and aesthetic wellness gear…and what are we really after?
We want to feel okay with who we are.
We want to stop running from the parts of ourselves we don’t like. We want to feel whole – not because we’ve become perfect, but because we’ve stopped treating ourselves like projects that need fixing.
But the wellness industry keeps us always chasing the next thing. Because if you ever actually felt good enough as you are, they couldn’t sell you anything else.
The irony is…the more you try to “fix” yourself, the more convinced you become that you’re broken.
Because what you’re calling healing is often just subtle self-rejection.
The Invitation. Moving from Performance to Presence
This is not a call to abandon all your practices. It’s a call to remember why you started.
You don’t need another checklist. You don’t need another protocol.
You need presence.
And presence is the one thing that can’t be faked, tracked, or performed.
So how do you begin shifting from performance to presence? Start with this…the next time you engage in a wellness practice, do it without documenting it. No photos, no tracking, no sharing. Just you and the experience. Notice what comes up – the urge to reach for your phone, the feeling that it “doesn’t count” if no one knows, the discomfort of being truly alone with yourself.
Then try this…set a timer for just three minutes. Sit comfortably and place one hand on your heart, one on your belly. Breathe normally and simply notice the sensations in your body without trying to change them. If you notice your mind wandering to your to-do list or how you’re “doing it wrong,” gently bring your attention back to physical sensation.
These tiny steps can begin to build your capacity for presence – the foundation of genuine healing.
Start there.
Sit with your breath – not to change it, but to feel it. Sit with your emotions – not to reframe them, but to honour them. Sit with yourself – not to fix you, but to “be” with you.
Because you’re not broken. You’re just disconnected. And maybe the real work is remembering how to come back to yourself.
That’s the kind of healing no product can sell you.
But it’s the only kind that actually works.
If this resonated, let it sit with you. Or better yet – breathe with it.
Big Love,
Dino