The Hollow Temple: Spiritual Disenfranchisement in the Age of Wellness
There’s a quiet unraveling happening behind the curated aesthetics of Instagrammed ashrams, overpriced yoga retreats, and charismatic spiritual leaders with book deals and merch lines. It's a disenfranchisement not from spirit itself, but from the performance of spirituality — especially as it’s been packaged, sold, and diluted in the West.
For many seekers, the journey begins earnestly. There’s a longing for depth, peace, and transcendence — a genuine hunger for meaning. But somewhere along the path, perhaps during a $4,000 weekend retreat or a 200-hour yoga teacher training, a subtle, disturbing realisation starts to surface: this isn’t what I was looking for.
When the Sacred Becomes a Sales Pitch
In Western wellness culture, spirituality has been rebranded. Yoga — once a deeply rooted spiritual discipline — is often reduced to body sculpting and self-optimisation. Eastern philosophies are cherry-picked, stripped of cultural and historical context, and reassembled into digestible mantras that look good on tote bags. Spiritual teachers become influencers. Healing becomes a product.
At first, it feels empowering. But for many, after the incense fades and the retreat ends, a deeper emptiness sets in. It’s the feeling of being spiritually had — sold a performance instead of a path.
Spiritual Disenfranchisement in the Wellness Era
This experience of disillusionment is a form of spiritual disenfranchisement — a loss of trust in the structures and voices that were supposed to guide us toward something higher. It's not about rejecting spirituality. It's about feeling betrayed by its commodification.
People have described it like this:
“I thought I was healing, but I was just buying more stuff.”
“Everyone was talking about consciousness, but no one was actually practicing compassion.”
“It felt more like a lifestyle brand than a spiritual path.”
The disenfranchisement isn’t just with the systems — it often turns inward. You begin to question your sincerity, your discernment, your worthiness. You wonder: Was I naïve? Was I just chasing a fantasy?
The Violence of Spiritual Superficiality
At its worst, this hollow version of spirituality is not just empty — it's harmful. It bypasses real trauma, encourages toxic positivity, and reinforces privilege while pretending to transcend it. It sells “oneness” while excluding the voices of the very cultures it borrows from. It invites people into transformation, but rarely does the hard work of holding space for real, messy change.
The result is a spiritual void — a sense that the temple is empty, the teacher is selling something, and the sacred has been replaced by a slogan.
The Cult of Ego in a Cloak of Enlightenment
One of the most jarring contradictions at the heart of modern Western spiritual culture is the centrality of ego in spaces supposedly devoted to its dissolution. In traditional yogic philosophy, ego — ahamkara — is something to be observed, humbled, even transcended. The spiritual path is meant to loosen our attachments to identity, status, and personal power in service of something larger than the self.
And yet, in many wellness circles, what you find is not the softening of ego, but its amplification. The language may be spiritual, but the engine is still vanity, control, and self-branding.
This irony plays out in a number of ways:
"Spiritual influencers" post endless selfies in curated sacred spaces, turning enlightenment into content and followers into currency.
Retreat leaders build cults of personality around themselves, often with no accountability, while preaching surrender and detachment.
Competitive compassion emerges, where individuals subtly (or not-so-subtly) signal their superiority through diet, rituals, or how many plant medicine ceremonies they've attended.
The aesthetic of humility becomes yet another layer of performance — robes, malas, “earth tones” — all carefully crafted to present a brand of holiness.
This isn’t just hypocrisy. It’s a distortion of the very traditions these figures claim to represent. True spiritual practice, particularly in traditions like Vedanta, Buddhism, and classical yoga, is about confronting the self, not aggrandizing it. It’s about becoming more ordinary, more honest, more connected to the suffering of others — not less.
What we often see instead is a repackaging of the ego in spiritual drag: the same hunger for attention, power, and control, now dressed in Sanskrit and sage smoke.
And for the sincere seeker, this contradiction can be incredibly disorienting. You walk into a retreat expecting humility and truth, and instead find hierarchy, posturing, and curated transcendence. You expect a guide, and encounter a performer. You expect a sanctuary, and find a stage.
Chögyam Trungpa coined the term spiritual materialism to describe this phenomenon — the ego’s ability to co-opt even the most sacred tools for its own ends. Meditation becomes a way to feel superior. Mindfulness becomes a lifestyle flex. "Being present" becomes another checkbox in a productivity app.
The deeper tragedy is that many people don't realize they've simply traded one form of identity for another. From corporate ladders to spiritual ladders. From consumerism to "conscious consumerism." From Instagram envy to “enlightenment envy.”
This ego-driven spiritual culture doesn’t just fail to help people awaken — it often makes the ego more cunning, more disguised, and harder to see.
What Comes After the Disillusionment?
This spiritual disenfranchisement can be devastating. But it can also be clarifying. Many who walk away from the performative spirituality of the wellness industry begin to ask deeper questions — and find more grounded, less glamorous paths:
They return to the roots — learning from authentic teachers, often outside the spotlight.
They reconnect with community-based, culturally aware spiritual practices.
They embrace silence, solitude, nature — unbranded spaces where the sacred still whispers.
They begin to value presence over performance, and humility over hype.
A More Honest Way Forward
To be spiritually disenfranchised by the modern wellness movement is not a failure. It's a sign of discernment — a refusal to settle for the spiritual equivalent of fast food. It’s painful, yes. But it's also a kind of liberation. When the illusions fall away, something else can emerge: a quieter, humbler, more honest relationship with the divine — whatever that means to you.
This isn’t the end of the journey. It's the moment you realize the real pilgrimage begins where the curated retreat ends — in your own body, your own questions, your own quiet return to truth.