When healing becomes a product

Healing isn’t a transaction - and grief was never meant to be marketed

Welcome to EverGrief
A home for the kinds of grief that often go unseen - quiet, complex, and deeply human.

I write from the landscape of chronic illness, unresolved grief, and the many other unnamed losses we carry. But this isn’t just about pain - it’s about presence. About living inside what doesn’t heal, and still finding meaning, beauty, and becoming.

If this resonates, I invite you to subscribe for free. You’ll receive essays, reflections, and fragments - tender, embodied, and alive.

Our topics for June:

• Storytelling: Narrative as reclamation

• The Grief of wellness: Performative vulnerability & false promises

• When it’s not “love with nowhere to go”: Trauma, Body loss & Complex grief

• Comparison: The thief of self compassion

• Sometimes to run is the brave thing: the grief & gifts of ghosting

• Time heals all wounds and other lies

---

Healing can’t be purchased, packaged, forced or swallowed.

You can’t buy your way out of unmet emotional needs.
And yet, that’s exactly what so many of us have been sold.

In fact, this belief is the very foundation of the wellness industry: that the next device, diet, coach, or course will finally fix us. That there’s a glowing, whole version of ourselves waiting on the other side of the paywall.

I’ve witnessed this in real time - behind the scenes, in the back rooms, in the group chats. Facilitators celebrating that our yearning to heal would fund their lifestyle for years to come.

These are the ones selling you solutions they never possessed.

As someone who became enthralled with the wellness world aged 18 - who trained in various modalities, who once believed those spaces would fix my chronic illness - I’ve seen this more than once.
I’ve left rooms with my jaw dropped.
With shame.
With grief.
With a bone-deep knowing: something here is not what it claims to be.

---

I share this because I know I’m not the only one.
And I want to open a deeper, more honest conversation:

How do we find spaces that are actually supportive and honest?
How do we navigate the underworld of new age spirituality and healing ads, without becoming hardened or disconnected from our longing?
How do we find those with integrity — not to pedestal, but to learn from and form connections with?

I don’t have all the answers.
But I believe it starts with naming what hurts.

---

This is one of the most repressed griefs I know:
The grief of doing everything “right” and still feeling unwell.

Of showing up to all the circles.
Taking all the tinctures.
Writing all the affirmations.
And still waking up in a body that aches, in a world that hurts.

When healing becomes transactional in this way, we lose more than money.
We lose trust in our own timing.
We lose faith in our own bodies.
We lose the truth that not everything broken can be fixed.

We lose ourselves.

Grief isn’t something we can stretch out of our hips.
You can’t journal, juice, or mushroom-trip your way out of trauma.

And yet we’re told that if we aren’t seeing results, we’re not trying hard enough.

---

So where does this leave the chronically ill?

The ones who can’t afford the next course.
The ones whose conditions won’t resolve with breathwork.
The ones excluded from healing spaces - physically, financially, emotionally.

In many cases, wellness doesn’t help us escape the systems that keep us sick.
It simply pretends they don’t exist.
It places blame on the already suffering.
It adds a layer of self-betrayal to years of medical gaslighting.

And it preys - gently and beautifully - on the most vulnerable.

Because who’s paying for the healing?
The ones who feel whole and alive? Or the ones desperate for their lives back?
The ones who don’t get well soon.
The ones who keep coming back.

---

Support matters.
Community. Grief & Rest work. Nervous system tools. Plant medicine. Coaching. Embodiment. Supplements. Psycho-education.

These can help — but they aren’t miracles.
There is no substitute for trauma-informed practices, systemic care, or genuine recognition.

They are tools. And like any tool, they require intention, context, and real discernment.
They need space that’s honest.
Space that doesn’t sell certainty.

---

When held with integrity, healing spaces feel different:

Facilitators won’t be promising.
They won’t be performing.
They won’t be comparing or minimizing your pain.

They’ll be listening.
They’ll be adapting.
They’ll invite relational repair.
They won’t speak or act in the binary.
They’ll admit they don’t have all the answers.

They won’t target your pain points.
They’ll connect through presence and shared humanity.

---

Healing is not a product.
It is not a destination.

It is a relationship —
With ourselves.
With our grief.
With our bodies.
With the parts of us still yearning to be seen.

(This essay reflects my personal experience and perspectives. It is not a statement about any specific individual or organisation, but rather a reflection on patterns I’ve observed within wellness spaces over time.)