10/08/2025
Much of contemporary wellness and New Age culture elevates positivity as a commodity, marketing it as both remedy and aspiration, while quietly stigmatizing the necessary currents of radical honesty, grief, rage, and shadow work. The oft-repeated platitude of “higher consciousness” and the accompanying injunction to “hold things in the highest light” (an example Yvette of recently raised, which resonated with my own critiques) is less an invitation to transcendence than a mechanism of self righteousness, cultural division, and control. It’s frequently weaponized to silence critics such as those who call out spiritual bypassing, “us vs them” thinking, or spiritual consumerism, all by reframing their concerns as failures of vibe rather than legitimate critique.
This is not to say that love or light are without value. But when invoked as an universal sole spiritual truth, “love and light” becomes disingenuous. It rests on the false premise of a level spiritual field for all, one in which suffering can be overcome simply by recalibrating thought, as though history, power, and embodied reality could be dissolved by affirmation alone, by ‘good’ intentions alone, by external performances, by nice language.
“Love and light” rhetoric uses the same mechanisms that are hallmarks of (oppressive) dominant culture.
