When anxiety becomes the background of the times, “healing” is packaged as a universal antidote: everything from crystal meditation to life coaching can be healed. However, the boundaries are blurred, standards are absent, and the track is crowded with people who want to make money, but there may not be a real cure. Who is selling calm? Who is paying for despair? The end of healing may just be to sell the wound again.
When the external environment seems unchangeable, people naturally seek Vipassana. Just like a plant that lacks water in the desert, it cannot flourish on the ground, but it will grow a developed underground root system.
In recent years, body, mind and soul healing is gaining more and more audiences in China. In 2023, the media report about the top student cat has allowed many people to see the dark side of the physical, mental and spiritual industry, and also shows the huge healing needs of young people in China.
According to data from the World Health Organization in 2022, about 1 billion people worldwide are affected by mental disorders, accounting for 13% of the total population, and moving this proportion to the country is hundreds of millions of mental health problems that need to be solved urgently. In addition to traditional physical therapy, drug therapy and psychological counseling, the emergence and rise of the healing industry has given sustenance to most people in the emotional “gray area”.
However, in the face of huge demand and market, the boundaries of the body, mind and soul healing track are extremely blurred.
01 Everything can be healed, everything is training
In today’s common definition, healing is the process of helping individuals recover from physical and mental imbalances to a healthy state. This is a broad concept and gives practitioners a lot of room for interpretation.
Search for “healing” on various social platforms and you will find a variety of healing methods: yoga, mindfulness meditation, music therapy, painting therapy…… They are more mainstream healing techniques. Many mind-body healing institutions or workshops use these methods to help those who are healed improve their sleep, improve concentration, and reduce anxiety.
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In addition, aromatherapy using plant essential oils, crystal healing that harmonizes the body’s energy, dramatic healing centered on expression and play, and forest healing in nature…… These emerging healing methods also have a certain audience. They can also combine with each other to form a set of compound healing methods.
Source: Xiaohongshu@NatureGlow Nature Notes
If a person is new to healing, he will definitely be dazzled. It seems that everything that makes people feel better is putting on the cloak of healing. Buying bracelets is not just for good looks, it’s for healing; Listening to music is not just about listening to melodies and beats, it’s healing; Writing is not just expression, travel is not just playing, they can also be healing.
When a person does something beneficial to the body and mind, it will naturally have a calming and relaxing effect. However, these simple and intuitive behaviors are incorporated into the framework of body, mind and soul, and it becomes a “manifest learning” that needs to be cultivated, and there will be mentors to guide and train students. For consumers, how to identify the body, mind and soul institutions on the market is a more difficult knowledge than self-healing itself.
Even after excluding words and concepts such as “energy field”, “spiritual awakening”, and “chakras” that have not been empirically studied, the quality of the remaining physical, mental, and spiritual practitioners is still uneven. The negative evaluation of the body, mind and soul industry on the Internet mostly focuses on “poor quality of teachers, low threshold for employment”, “pseudoscience”, “spending money but not improving”, etc. And when a person encounters emotional problems, how does he choose between traditional psychotherapy and body-mind-soul healing?
We contacted Xiaohua, a psychology graduate who has interned at a body-mind-spirit institution, who said that her institution focuses on mindfulness meditation, and most of the users are elite groups such as returnees or international students.
I opened the product page on the mini program of this institution and found that many mentors in it all had the name of “life coach”.
Life coaching is a profession that has become popular in recent years and can be certified by the ICF (International Coaching Federation). According to a report by Zhejiang Daily Chao News last year, the number of ICF-certified coaches in the world has reached 50,000 in February 2024, compared with less than 2,000 in Chinese mainland. Many people who call themselves “life coaches” on social platforms say that they are still in the process of ICF certification.
Source: ICF official website
Workplace transformation, interpersonal relationships, emotional regulation…… Life coaches can help those who encounter problems through TA’s bootcamps, mostly in the form of online courses. Xiaohua’s job in that organization is user operation, mainly responsible for collecting feedback in the WeChat group, and serving as the host from time to time, guiding participants to express themselves on fixed topics, which sounds like an online mutual aid meeting.
Among the practitioners of various body, mind and soul institutions, there are also people with professional training. Master of Psychology, Master of Education, Master of Social Work, Mindfulness Facilitator Program Trained, Registered Behavioral Therapist and Clinical Social Worker in the United States…… Judging from the title, they have the ability to provide users with relatively professional healing services.
However, healing is not like psychotherapy, there are clear clinical standards and ethical norms, and its actual effect still needs to be verified. When the concept of “healing” is generalized, almost any activity with a positive experience can be packaged in it, which makes the track more and more branched.
02 Subjective standards, standardization problems
At the beginning of 2025, CCTV News released the content of “Ministry of Public Security: Crack Down on Illegal Training in the Name of “Spiritual Practice” and “Spiritual Healing”. This is not the first time that the official media has named the mental, mental, and spiritual chaos. As early as 2017, the People’s Daily reported the news that a woman was defrauded of more than 3 million yuan by “spiritual counseling”.
To this day, the body, mind and soul industry still lacks clear industry standards, but there are more and more subdivisions. Weight loss, social fear, procrastination…… Various courses target the pain points of contemporary people in all dimensions and carry out refined customer acquisition. Users are bothered by different questions, but the courses they are taking may be “the same set” that is not bad. Someone posted: I spent more than 100,000 yuan to report for spiritual classes, and the conclusion is only three words, be yourself.
In this context, some institutions will emphasize their scientific attributes more, highlighting their scientific principles based on brain science and psychology in their introductions to help users improve themselves. After getting rid of the suspicion of metaphysics and superstition, healing is more like lightweight psychotherapy – allowing people to improve their mental health problems without the pressure of “illness”.
Image source pause laboratory
Since you have chosen to heal, it is not easy to talk about ethics, you can only talk about cost-effectiveness. Most of the relatively mature healing courses (exercises) on the market are priced from a few hundred yuan to thousands of yuan, and for a month or even several months, users need to train, do tasks or participate in interactions every day or regularly.
The healing process also seems to have played a role in improving user stickiness for the product. Through comparison, it can be seen that the frequency of most modern psychological counseling once a week may actually be a fairly prudent industry decision.
In the incident of Xueba Cat back then, paying for her courses was a kind of “knowledge payment”. Today, the payment logic of buying courses has not changed, and consumers no longer seem to think that they are buying knowledge, but more like buying experience or therapy. In contrast, the payment model of the healing app is closer to the logic of mature Internet products: open a membership and listen to the meditation audio inside.
Image source: Tidal APP
In the psychological counseling industry, there are many practitioners who have worked in large enterprises or changed careers from management positions in Internet companies, even if many people do not like this kind of counselor temperament, but in the final analysis, psychological counselors are also a profession that can be hired after taking the certification, which is just a matter of value orientation.
The healing track is also a popular choice for the transformation of large manufacturers, and many practitioners have not had time to obtain IFC’s life coach certification, and have already dreamed of “soul mentor”. Before choosing a healing product, more people may first realize that they are a seed user of an entrepreneurial project, and then talk about other things about how to heal.
And what is the effect of healing products? This is also a difficult thing to prove, without 315 supervision, it can only rely on the subjective evaluation of users. After spending hundreds of thousands of yuan and investing a lot of time in it, how much of the self-feeling after the course is better because of the practical methodology, and how much is due to the placebo effect? Only the experiencer himself knows.
Many of the entrepreneurs in the healing track are people who have experienced healing in depth before – this may be due to their recognition and love from the inside out. But not so many patients want to be doctors after recovery, which is a slightly dubious reproduction in the healing industry. But the fact that there is no objective standard in the industry makes us suspicious.
Source: Xiaohongshu @徐昌大王
03 Healing: Fake track and real needs
There is no doubt that this is an era in which we are more concerned about mental health than ever before. We analyze the family of origin, test the MBTI and Enneagram, and find out whether we are avoidant or anxious attachment…… This psychological knowledge is a new tool on the Internet in recent years that can be used to explain our lives more accurately.
Body, mind and soul healing is just a “pan-psychological” way of life for more people. The cultural tradition of staying away from the occult gives us a natural sense of defense in “spirituality” and “metaphysics”; When it comes to being able to be free from anxiety in life, stay focused and calm, and be able to improve one-day up healing, some people are not sleepy, thinking that this is a way to gain transcendence from the heart when the upward path of reality is blocked.
There is nothing wrong with Vipassana, this is a topic that was not solved by the previous generation, and there are always people who need to try to complete it. But since it is Vipassana, it can be carried out through all kinds of external objects – this is the fundamental reason why the healing track has no boundaries and norms. When more and more things can be labeled as healing, in the face of massive demand, people will naturally start “healing entrepreneurship” from all walks of life.
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What is the core of the healable track, and does it make users “feel better” through certain behaviors? Is playing games, eating fried chicken, and watching short videos healing? Maybe playing games is because I am escaping reality, eating fried chicken is relieving stress, and watching short videos is because my concentration is too low – these behaviors and psychology require me to become a healing member and take a good look inside.
Anxious young people seem to have been created by competitors in the healing track to create a new “healing need”. But this need has always existed, and we have never stopped healing before the healing track appeared: everything we do outside of work hours is a subconscious way of healing ourselves.
A product that teaches the public how to better heal themselves should be the icing on the cake, not a lifesaver. If there is really a person who opens his arms on the street and is regarded as a saint of fraternity, it can only mean that no one on that street has ever felt love – in other words, we are slowly losing the ability to comfort ourselves and even entertain ourselves, so we will regard body, mind and soul healing as a guideline.
The healing track shouldn’t be so crowded. Healing is a normal need for everyone, and the responsibility corresponding to this need is borne by all parts of society such as the government, enterprises, communities, and citizens. When we cannot get concrete healing, we will pursue abstract healing. And as more and more people seek abstract healing, these user expectations are enough to make an industry ethereal and unrecognizable.
Perhaps, the core product of the healing track is not “I heal you”, but “I care about you”.
