Helena’s forehead is pressed against the cold, pebbled leather of her steering wheel, and for exactly 7 seconds, she is technically dead to the world. It is 2:07 PM on a Tuesday. In 3 minutes, she has to lead a global “Resourced Nervous System” workshop for 127 women who have paid 77 dollars each to learn how to stop vibrating with anxiety.

Helena is the gold standard for this work. She has the soft voice, the linen layers, and the curated background involving a single, high-end ceramic vase. But right now, her own heart rate is 87 beats per minute while sitting perfectly still, and she is so profoundly exhausted that the sound of a distant lawnmower makes her want to weep.

She woke up at 5:07 AM to “create space” for her own practice, which mostly consisted of her scrolling through 17 different notifications from women who are “spiraling” and need her specific brand of magic. The irony is so thick she could choke on it. She is a regulation teacher who hasn’t felt a genuine sense of stillness in at least 7 months.

The Collision of Perspectives

I watched this happen to a friend recently. We got into an argument about it-well, less of an argument and more of a collision of perspectives where I ended up being right, but because I didn’t “win” the emotional exchange, the truth of it just sat there like a cold cup of tea.

I told her that the way she was teaching “healing” was just a 40-hour work week dressed in a mala. She got defensive, citing her “reach” and her 77,000 followers. She told me I didn’t understand the “responsibilities of a leader.”

I lost that argument because I walked away. I walked away because I realized that for her, “leadership” had become synonymous with “visible depletion.” If people didn’t see her working hard to be well, they wouldn’t believe her wellness was worth buying.

We have built a spiritual economy that functions exactly like the extractive capitalism it claims to replace. It demands constant “content,” which is just a fancy word for turning your most private, sacred moments of realization into 7-second clips for someone to consume while they’re on the toilet.

“If you owe the bank $47, that’s your problem. If you owe the bank 4,007 hours of sleep, that’s the bank’s problem, and the bank is your body. Eventually, the bank just shuts the doors.”

– Hans R.J., financial literacy educator

Hans is a man who treats dollars like soldiers and minutes like oxygen. He told me that most people in the “helping” professions are operating on a 17 percent deficit every single day. They think they can make it up on the weekend, but the interest on that exhaustion compounds.

Hans isn’t a spiritual guy, but he sees the math. He sees women like Helena trying to “scale” their souls, and he knows the numbers don’t add up. You cannot scale a bespoke, intimate healing process to 10,007 people without losing the very thing that makes it healing: the presence of a rested human being.

The Absence of Rested Elders

The most terrifying thing about the current “awakening” scene is the total absence of rested elders. Look around the next time you’re in a workshop or scrolling through a curated feed. Where are the women who have been doing this for 27 years and look… quiet?

Not “quiet” as in performative silence, but quiet as in their energy isn’t leaking out of their pores to prove a point. Most of the “leaders” are just 37-year-olds who have learned how to market their own burnout as a “process of shedding.”

We’ve created a healing class that visibly cannot rest. They are the most “aware” people on the planet, and yet they are the most frantic. They have 7 different types of magnesium in their kitchen cabinets and 117 different breathwork techniques in their pockets, yet they are still napping in their cars between calls.

This happens because visibility has become the primary metric of validity. In the old world, the healer lived at the edge of the village. You went to her when you needed her. She didn’t send you 7 emails a week reminding you that she exists. She didn’t have to “post” about her morning tea to ensure her “engagement” stayed high.

Output is the opposite of rest.

Even when she is “resting,” she is often thinking about how to talk about the rest. She takes a photo of her bath salts. She writes a caption about “honoring the void.” This is why the awakening journey is producing tired women. We are asking them to do the impossible: to be both the deep, still well and the frantic, splashing fountain.

You cannot be both. When we demand that our teachers be “relatable” and “visible” and “consistent,” we are essentially demanding that they never, ever truly go into the cave. And a teacher who hasn’t spent real, unrecorded time in the cave has nothing to give us but recycled words.

I think about the Unseen Alliance and the way they talk about embodied wholeness. It’s a radical thing to suggest that the most important part of a person’s work is the part that nobody ever sees.

Relevancy is Just Another Word for Noise

The pressure to be a “visible success” in the wellness world is a trap. I’ve fallen into it myself. I remember trying to explain my “brand” to a consultant who told me I needed to be posting at least 17 times a month to stay “relevant.”

I asked him what I was supposed to be relevant to. He didn’t have an answer. He just had a spreadsheet. I realized then that “relevancy” is just another word for “noise.” If I am relevant to the noise, I am part of the noise. And noise is what makes people tired.

Yet, we keep doing it because we are afraid that if we stop, we will disappear. We are afraid that if we aren’t “helping” or “healing” or “awakening,” we are just… ordinary.

But ordinariness is where the rest is.

Ordinariness is the 47 minutes spent staring at a beetle in the garden without wondering how to turn it into a metaphor for “transformation.” It’s the 7 hours of sleep that doesn’t start with a guided meditation on a phone that is emitting blue light into your pineal gland.

It’s the realization that the world does not, in fact, need your “healing” today as much as it needs you to be a person who is not fraying at the edges.

The argument I lost-the one with the friend who has 77,000 followers-still stings, not because I want to be right, but because I see her getting thinner. Not physically, but energetically. She is becoming a ghost of herself, a 7-percent version of the woman I knew ten years ago.

She is “successful,” she is “awakened,” and she is absolutely exhausted. She told me she hasn’t had a day where she didn’t check her “stats” in 157 weeks. If that is “awakening,” then I think I’d rather stay asleep.

We have to stop equating “impact” with “visibility.” We have to stop thinking that because a woman is running a retreat for 47 people, she is somehow “more” than the woman who is simply holding her own life together with grace and quietude. The “healing class” is failing because it has adopted the metrics of the machine. The machine wants more. The soul wants enough.

Helena finally sits up. It’s 2:09 PM. She has 60 seconds. She wipes a small smudge of mascara from under her eye, checks her reflection in the rearview mirror, and takes a breath that only reaches the top of her lungs.

She hits the “Join Meeting” button on her phone. Her face transforms. The exhaustion vanishes behind a practiced mask of “presence.”

“Hi everyone,” she says, her voice a perfect, melodic 7 on the intensity scale. “Let’s start by checking in with our bodies. Where are you holding tension?”

The 127 women on the screen all close their eyes, unaware that their teacher is currently holding enough tension to snap a power line. They are all looking to her for the permission to rest, not realizing that she is the last person on earth who can give it to them, because she hasn’t given it to herself in years.

The Wealth of Private Peace

This is the cycle. We are all waiting for someone else to be the first one to stop. We are all looking for an elder who is truly rested, so we can ask them how they did it. But the elders are all busy recording 7-day challenges on how to find peace.

If we want to be rested, we have to be willing to be invisible. We have to be willing to be “irrelevant” to the algorithm. We have to be willing to let the argument go, even when we are right, because the energy it takes to “win” is energy we could have used to actually live.

Hans R.J. once told me that the wealthiest people he knows are the ones whose names aren’t on the buildings. They are the ones who have “private wealth.” I think the most awakened women I know are the ones whose names aren’t on the “top 47 under 47” lists.

They have “private peace.” They aren’t napping in their cars. They are at home, with the curtains drawn, not being a lighthouse for anyone but themselves. And ironically, that is exactly why, when you are in their presence, you finally feel like you can breathe.

I’m still learning this. I still catch myself checking for the “7” on the notification bell. I still feel the itch to turn a quiet moment into a “teaching.” But then I remember Helena’s forehead on the steering wheel. I remember the 7 seconds of death in the 2:07 PM sun.

And I decide, for today, to stay dead to the world and alive to the room I’m actually sitting in. Is it enough? I don’t know. But I do know that the “bank” hasn’t called in my debts in at least 57 days, and for the first time in 7 years, that feels like the only “awakening” that matters.

The price is the price, but the cost is who you have to become to pay it.

We don’t need more “awake” women if being awake just means being more aware of how tired we are. We need women who are brave enough to be boring. Women who are brave enough to be “un-impactful” in the eyes of the market.

I’m going to go sit on my porch now. I won’t take my phone. I won’t think about how to describe the way the light hits the 7th step. I will just be there. And if the world needs healing while I’m gone, it will just have to wait. It’s 3:37 PM, and I have a date with a very quiet, very invisible piece of my own soul.