I’ve been seeing this “healing journey” phrase everywhere lately. It’s in every Instagram caption, every wellness retreat brochure, and every “spiritual” podcast. It sounds poetic. It sounds noble. It sounds like we’re all just travelers on a path to some shimmering, enlightened version of ourselves.
But the more I look at it, the more it feels like a treadmill. A high-tech, beautifully branded treadmill that keeps you running in place while telling you that the finish line is just one more “breakthrough” away.
“If there is always more work to do, you are never actually allowed to arrive.”
— Gina Kearney
That hit me hard. When the “journey” becomes the goal, you stop living your life and start managing a project. You’re no longer a human being; you’re a set of symptoms to be optimized. You clear one trigger, you “integrate” one shadow, and immediately the goalposts move. You’re told there’s a “deeper pattern” to uncover. A “more integrated” version of you waiting on the other side of the next program.
It’s almost like a business model. The wellness industry doesn’t want you to arrive; it wants you to stay in the “seeking” phase. Because people who have arrived don’t buy another $2,000 retreat or a 12-week “shadow work” masterclass. The industry thrives on the belief that you’re fundamentally broken—and that the “fix” is always just out of reach.
I’m not saying the work isn’t valuable. I’m saying the *obsession* with the work can become its own kind of prison. We’ve rebranded suffering as an identity, and “healing” as a full-time job. We’ve turned the act of being human into a series of KPIs.
Maybe the move isn’t to run faster on the treadmill. Maybe the move is to just… step off. To admit that some wounds are just vents that need to breathe, and that the most “healed” version of you might actually be the one who stops trying to fix themselves and just starts living.
If you’re exhausted from the “repair manual” approach to your own existence, you might find some peace in exploring The Violence of ‘Healing’.