I’m a journalist with multiple sclerosis,
on a journey into the heart of the wellness industry,
to see if there are better ways to manage my condition
outside of conventional healthcare.
Wow. We’ve landed on an alien planet.
Throughout my journey so far, I’ve come across
a fair bit of mistrust about conventional medicine.
The mainstream scientific community have their limits.
And the deeper you go, the more unorthodox it becomes.
I think there is some cow brain.
So has the world of wellness strayed too far from mainstream science?
We have to guard against continually confirming things
to ourselves that we already believe.
And when does a healthy interest in pushing back the boundaries of personal wellness go too far?
Well it smells terrific.
To find out, I’ve come to a quiet corner of Cheshire
for some me time at the UK's first harmonic egg healing centre.
What on earth is a harmonic egg?
What is a harmonic egg?
So a harmonic egg is a light and sound vibrational frequency pod,
which creates the right environment to bring the body back into homeostasis.
I mean, what made you buy it?
I'm a mum of two.
I became increasingly concerned with the levels of stress and anxiety in our teenagers.
And how does the egg help with that?
So the egg works on vibrational frequencies and energy to bring the body back into balance.
Tesla famously said, if you understand the significance
between three, six, and nine,
you can literally unlock the secrets of the universe.
Well, this is a dodecahedron in shape, which is 12 sides.
So one plus two equals three. So inside the egg,
the chair sits on a hexagonal platform, which is six sides.
And then once you are immersed in the egg,
you are surrounded by 360 degrees of sound and light,
three plus six equals nine.
It's quite sort of ‘out there’.
Do you worry that people will look at this
and think it's just ridiculous or do those people not really matter?
Um, you say it's out there.
Do you not think, though?
It looks like it's landed from space or something.
With all due respect, yes, it does look like something
that's landed from space and it's not meant for sensationalism.
That's not the whole point here.
The methods that we are using here have been around since time began.
They've just been suppressed.
So when I shut the door, the music will start, any emotions that rise to the surface,
it's really important that you let that out.
If you feel emotional, if you feel that energy,
it's just asking to be detoxed, just detox it, let it come out.
OK. I shall see you in 50 minutes.
Enjoy, remember your intention.
Well, Goodness me.
OK?
Yeah.
I mean, it's such a luxury, isn't it?
To, in the middle of the day, to sort of lie down and not do anything.
And in fact, you know, that be the challenge, to do as little as possible really.
People often get out the egg and go, oh my God, was that nearly an hour? It felt like two minutes.
You know, there's no concept of time in here, which is really healthy.
Oh yeah, this is, I remember this.
How long ago was I out here?
Wellness, as an industry, has exploded over the last few years.
Where does that come from, do you think?
If we treat our body and our mind and our spirit,
because that’s what we’re comprised of, in the right way.
In a beneficial way. I think we just scratch the surface.
And people are understanding that now.
The last couple of years that we’ve just had with Covid
and whatnot, have really woken people up.
When you go quite deep into some of this stuff,
it's very easy to, to be painted as kind of like a conspiratorial,
conspiracy theory kind of thing.
I mean, the anti-vax movement, for instance,
people who are unsure about conventional science will say,
hang on, I'm not putting that in me.
Where's that line,
and how do you, how do you navigate that?
I think that's down to the individual. Wouldn't you agree?
Probably, but ...
Definitely.
I would also potentially suggest that there can be,
there can be problems when people go too far down that rabbit hole, perhaps.
This is the world we live in, where everybody has access.
If you choose to social media, everyone's got free will to choose
which rabbit hole you go down and what you believe in.
But I worry that that is exactly kind of the thing
that is pushing people further apart as they kind of,
they look and they find something else and they go over here,
and they're taken down a complete sort of separate rabbit hole
that's so away from what sort of the reality, perhaps of the situation is.
But whose reality? That, you are saying,
that's the reality, in your opinion, that's the reality.
How do you know that the reality isn't over here and that's different for every individual person?
What is truth now? I'm totally lost.
Yeah. And I think the truth lies with you.
This is the point, where’s your reality?
Don’t even ask, honestly.
What is your reality? You can create your own reality.
Whilst spending an hour cocooned in a giant egg was not without its charms,
I wasn’t convinced the version of reality I emerged
to was necessarily for me.
I was beginning wonder if the wellness industry’s focus
on the self came at significant cost to the collective.
Back in Stroud where my journey began, I’m visiting bliss Magdalena Gadesh,
high priestess of the local goddess temple.
Thank you. Isn't it calm in here? Hi.
I wanted to understand how an industry so focussed
on personal wellbeing could be so seemingly ambivalent
about the health of society.
Would you like me to put the heater on?
No. I’m OK with this lovely blanket on.
I also wanted a sound bath, and bliss was happy to oblige.
I really like working with sound because it's very noninvasive.
So you don't have to take your clothes off.
No one is gonna be prodding you or poking you.
It's not going to create any kind of stress in the body
that could potentially exacerbate
what's happening for you physiologically.
The phrase ‘sound healing’.
Yeah.
What's the healing part? I mean, are we talking about healing conditions like MS?
I think there's been a lot of damage done within my industry,
by people who are claiming particular healing from a particular modality.
When I talk about healing, I'm talking about creating
a space where the body can begin to rest and recover.
When you look at the world of complementary and alternative medicines,
some of it does get sort of tarnished with this sort
of pseudoscience, quackery brush, right?
People do say, well, it works for me, but when it's actually kind of peer reviewed
and people have actually looked into it, it has no benefit whatsoever.
It is harder to design and conduct research studies
with this type of work.
But people have been visiting temples and they've been receiving sacred sound for much,
much longer than the Cochrane system standards of research critique have existed.
And they've been finding benefit from it.
How much of that do you think might be down to a placebo effect?
I think the placebo effect is very powerful.
But you can take a bath in baked beans,
and if you think it’s helping then that’s a placebo, right?
That’s right. There’s something about dismissing the placebo
effect that I think people are kind of missing the point there.
I think there’s so much that we can learn
from other cultures, other ways of doing things, different philosophies.
I guess the potential danger within that is that people
dismiss some of the mainstream stuff
and basically end up being labelled a conspiracy theorist
for some of the choices that they make,
some of the worries that they have.
We have to guard against continually confirming things to ourselves that we already believe,
because I think you have to be open to new possibilities.
It’s broken my heart in so many ways - especially in Stroud.
There’s been a lot of division between different ideologies.
It’s been really difficult to engage with this hard libertarian element
which is in wellness, which is very focussed on the individual
and having the freedom to make particular choices,
but then not being conscious of the impact that those choices have on others.
It feels very much like you’re in a sort of spiritual
camp as opposed to a rational one.
But actually you have a foot in both camps, right?
I can't see anything more rational than looking after one's spiritual health.
Yeah. I think that is possibly the most logical
and sensible long term plan that you can do to look after your wellbeing.
My conversation with bliss took me back to a chat I’d had right at the beginning
of this journey with Marcus Blackett of the Stroud beacon.
There's lines of energy all over this town.
Some call them ley lines. You know, we can put
all these buildings on top and pretend it doesn't exist, but ...
But it does.
It does exist.
Marcus’s wellness hub had recently been closed down by its landlords,
with plenty in Stroud glad to see the back of it.
Now we're coming down to what was the Beacon.
Is it difficult for you to come down and see this as it is now?
We've got a thousand members and we still put out a newsletter.
Really we can meet anywhere.
You know, we found each other.
There's a lot of statements and that sort of thing, right?
Yeah. Well, this was when, during the first lockdown.
We felt that there was a lot of people who were getting psychological harm from the lockdown.
Which is undoubtedly true.
But do you understand why some people found this sort of thing problematic?
Yes, I do. Yeah. I mean, I understand that this was divisive
and the people we met in the street, they were saying,
‘oh, thank you so much for doing this’.
Not all of them were, I bet.
Oh, no. A lot of people were, you know, completely
with the government narrative, you know, wear a mask,
you know, 'what are you doing out?
You know, you're dangerous, you're spreading disease.'
And what, I just didn't agree with the way the government
were doing it one single bit.
And I don't even believe it was the government who were controlling it.
Who was controlling it?
They're being told to do by a group of people who are also probably being told what to do. So.
But where does that end?
Where does it end?
Yeah, this is starting to sound a little bit, conspiratorial?
Conspiratorial. Yes. Mm Hmm. Conspiracy, are we plotting
a conspiracy or are we conspiring a plot? I don't know. Um, you know.
What makes someone who is interested in wellness potentially
also interested in, for want of a better phrase, conspiracy theories?
And you can call it something else but you know what I mean.
I really can't speak for anyone else, but I don't, I don't see that link myself.
You don't at all? But if you are interested in alternative
thought and that could be from holistic therapies to anything,
then there is a different frame of mind going on,
a different mindset, that isn't following the crowd.
Possibly. I mean, I certainly don't trust a government
minister to give me any medical advice. So ...
But they would say, well, we're following the science, we are being ...
Yeah. I'd say I'm following science as well,
or following, you know, my own gut instinct, my own intuition.
It was intuition that got me into this mess in the first place.
With Marcus having to rush off to avoid getting a parking ticket,
I got chatting to a couple of locals who had been watching our conversation.
It's a good spot. Isn't it? What would you do with it?
A wellness cafe?
Possibly.
That's what was here.
Is that what was here previously?
Yeah. Yeah. – In your opinion?
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah? He would say he's just asking questions. You don't agree?
Though far from a new phenomenon,
the conspiracy theorist tag is applied quite liberally today,
but is not overly helpful in creating dialogue between conflicting opinions.
With so many of us spending a confusing couple of years stuck at home,
with online communities ready to step into the void of solace and answers,
it is perhaps no surprise that, like wellness itself,
such ‘alternative thought’ is no longer the preserve of a few fringe outsiders.