Is the personal development world truly about healing – about helping us return to our wholeness – or has it, in some ways, become billion dollar industry that intentionally thrives on our longing to be more?
I ask this not as a critic from the outside, but as someone who has been all the way in. For seven years, I ran a personal development marketing & sales agency. I was deeply embedded in this world – representing programs & retreats, partnering with people I believed were soul-aligned, and committing myself to the mission of transformation. Like many others, I truly believed in the work. I believed in the power of healing, the importance of growth, and the possibility of changing lives.
But it took a deeply painful rupture – personally and professionally – for me to start seeing the cracks in the foundation I had been standing on. The relationship I thought was divinely aligned turned out to be a trauma bond. The business I believed was built on purpose showed signs of being shaped by power, performance and blind motivation. And slowly, I began to recognize how even a well-intentioned industry I had trusted began to look less like a sanctuary for healing and more like a blind-machine.
Looking back now, I can see how easy it was to get swept up in the glitter of transformation – the polished branding, the promises of breakthroughs, the endless invitations to the next level of yourself. And yet, underneath the surface, something began to feel off. The more I chased growth, the further I felt from myself. The more I worked to “heal” the more I internalized the idea that I was never quite enough. There was always another course, another modality, another retreat that would finally fix the thing I couldn’t quite name.
What I didn’t realize at the time was how exhausting that cycle had become. The very industry that promised liberation was, in many ways, reinforcing the idea that I needed to be more – more healed, more conscious, more high-vibe, more optimized. And it was all too easy to lose sight of the fact that healing isn’t something you can package, market, or sell in a seven-step funnel. It’s not a brand. It’s not a business model. It’s a return to something much quieter, much deeper, and far more personal.
It’s a return to the body. To breathe. To stillness. To nature. To silence. To the moments when nothing needs to happen and nothing needs to be fixed. The truth is, the more I stepped back from the noise, the more I realized that real healing often doesn’t look like a breakthrough moment on a stage – it looks like walking by the ocean. It looks like being able to sit with yourself in the discomfort. It looks like choosing rest over proving your worth. It looks like saying no to the things that are out of alignment, even when they are lucrative or applauded.
In spite of integrity issues that I have discovered during my traumatic breakup. I’ve been lucky enough to work with some incredible mentors and teachers in the space – people who actually say what they do, who do shown up when it was needed, who didn’t need to be followed or admired and genuinely cared. They make you feel safe, empowered, and more like yourself. They don’t seek to create dependency or sell another shiny package and retreat. They meet you where you are and honor your capacity to walk away when it’s time. Looking back, I recognize how rare these teachers are and often not the ones featured or promoted.
And that’s what I’ve come to value more now: discernment. The ability to listen for what’s real. The courage to question the things that once felt sacred. The strength to walk away from what no longer resonates, even when it’s familiar, or we believed in it for way too long. It’s not always easy to admit that the world you helped build might have contributed to the very wounds it claimed to heal. But honesty is part of the return. Owning what we didn’t see before doesn’t make us wrong – it makes us human. And it opens the door to something more grounded, more honest, more free.
So where does that leave me now? I’m not abandoning the path of growth. But I am walking it differently. More slowly, more intuitively. Less interested in hype and more curious about truth. I don’t want to sell transformation – I want to live it. I want to remember the wholeness that has always been here. I want to trust in the intelligence of my own process, even when it doesn’t look like progress.
This is not the end of the story – it’s the beginning of a new chapter. One that doesn’t require me to perform my healing or prove my worth. One that’s rooted in presence, not pressure. In simplicity, not spectacle. In freedom, not fear.
There’s a quiet revolution happening among those of us who’ve been deep in the machine and are now stepping out of it. We’re returning to what’s real. And in that return, we are reclaiming ourselves – not as projects to be fixed, a program to be sold but as sovereign humans to heard, seen, recognized and fully met.