The Wound is Not for Sale: A Poetic Reckoning with Wellness and Wanting

We live in a culture where the ache to “get better” has been commodified, shrink-wrapped, and sold back to us in amber glass jars and neatly edited reels. Healing, once the intimate labor of the soul, now comes with affiliate links and algorithmic affirmation. The ache itself—your tender humanity—is no longer honored as a rite of passage, but as a problem to be fixed, optimized, and branded.

It begins subtly. A promise whispered through curated feeds and pastel packaging: This will change your life.
A mushroom powder. A hormone-balancing protocol. A $300 course that guarantees transformation in four weeks or your money back.
We reach for them with trembling hope, not because we are foolish, but because we are human—and our longing to be whole is real.

But what if I told you this longing has been weaponized?

Capitalism—slick, smiling, insatiable—knows our ache intimately. It does not aim to heal it, only to monetize it.
It packages the sacred into strategies, turns rituals into routines, and convinces us that wellness is a lifestyle rather than a birthright.
Underneath the surge of supplement trends and influencer-endorsed programs is a hunger that no product can touch: the longing to feel safe inside our own skin.

And that safety—true safety—cannot be purchased. It must be remembered.

Why do we do this?
Because the body remembers what the mind disowns. Because stillness is terrifying when the noise has been your only tether.
Because capitalism has trained us to believe that we are only worthy when we are producing or improving.
So even healing becomes a project: a hustle cloaked in softness.
We become addicted to progress.
To peeling back the next layer.
To becoming the best version of ourselves—even when that version is built on the bones of burnout and bypass.

We bypass the rage.
The grief.
The boredom.
The sacred boredom that comes before rebirth.
We skip past the unglamorous truth that healing often looks like lying on the floor and weeping, not posting a time-lapse of your morning routine.

But what is healing, really?
It is not the tincture. It is not the retreat. It is not the $120 session with a practitioner who calls your pain a “block” to be cleared.
Healing is a remembering. A reckoning. A return.

It is the moment you stop searching for your soul in someone else’s framework.
It is the moment you sit with your sadness and do not try to transmute it—only hold it.
It is the moment you realize that you do not need to be fixed.
You need to be witnessed.

Sometimes herbs help. Sometimes the workbook shifts something real.
Sometimes the ritual opens a door.
But none of it works without the willingness to stay—to stay with the mess, the mystery, the mundane.

This culture will keep telling you that you’re just one more product away from peace.
But your peace was never missing.
It’s only been waiting beneath the noise.

So here is the rebellion:
To slow down.
To feel what is unbearable.
To choose presence over performance.
To heal in ways that cannot be monetized.
To remember that the deepest medicine is made of breath, of grief, of truth,
and that the wound was never meant to be sold.

Somatic Practice: Returning to the Uncommodified Self

1. Arrive & Acknowledge (2–3 minutes)
Let yourself arrive in your body, just as you are.
Close your eyes if that feels safe, or soften your gaze.
Feel the contact between your body and the surface beneath you.
Say silently or aloud:
I am not a project. I am not a brand. I am not for sale.

Let the words land in your body like warm stones in a riverbed.

2. Sensory Reclamation (2–4 minutes)
Begin to notice what’s real right now—what no one can sell you.
What do you hear?
What textures do you feel against your skin?
What scent rises in the air?
Name them slowly. Let your senses be enough.

This is a return to the wisdom that cannot be packaged.

3. Palms Over Heart & Belly (3–5 minutes)
Place one hand on your heart, the other on your lower belly.
Let the warmth of your own body be felt through your hands.
As you inhale, sense your hands rise.
As you exhale, whisper softly to yourself:
I do not need to get better. I need to be with myself.
Repeat slowly for a few rounds of breath.

If emotion arises, let it move like weather through the body—no fixing, no analyzing. Just witnessing.

4. Unwinding the Performance (5–7 minutes)
Gently begin to let your body move—any way it wants.
Let go of how it looks.
Shake out your hands, stretch into awkward shapes, roll your spine, sway.
Let it be messy. Let it be yours.
Let your body reclaim its language—unbranded, uncurated.

You might say aloud:
My healing is not content. My healing is alive.

5. Closing: The Sacred Enough (2 minutes)
Come to stillness in any posture that feels restful.
Whisper this closing phrase to yourself, or write it down:
I am already whole. I do not need to buy my way back to myself.
I will listen. I will stay. I will remember.

Let that remembering linger.