New Age and Health

Rodrigo Toniol*Anthropology, Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre, RS, Brazil

Keywords

Holism; Science; Energy; Self

Definition

The emergence of religious, moral, and aesthetic sensibilities, expressed in the experiences of subjects andgroups identied with the New Age movement, was related from the 1960s onward to the assertion thatthe ecological, consumption, and temporal patterns imposed by modernity had caused a state of dishar-mony between human nature, the planet (Gaia), and culture. In response, it would be necessary to developalternative models of living capable of restoring the primordial balance between nature and humanity, andthereby improve health.

Introduction

Three aspects implicit in the above denition are central to understanding the relationship between NewAge and health: (1) there is a deep unity on Earth that connects all the physical and metaphysical reality ofthe world in a single associative chain; (2) the original state of balance of this relationship was upset,above all, by modern Western culture; (3) the systemic nature of this unity of the world implies that statesof harmony and disharmony extend throughout the entire global chain.These three aspects in mind, we can get a sense of the way in which the relationship between health and

sickness, though intimately connected to human life, is never limited to the biological condition of theorganism. New Age philosophy involves an ample notion of health that extends beyond the corporalboundaries of subjects and involves body, self, lifestyle, and environment simultaneously. Hence theengagement of New Agers in ecological causes, for instance, can be understood as an attempt tore-establish a kind of relationship with nature that to some extent also contributes to maintaining a healthylife. Although we can trace this type of perception back to different historical moments which, forexample, would allow us to consider its connection to gnosis it was only in the postwar period that ittransformed into a movement, albeit not institutionalized. Among the events usually cited to support theidea that New Age came into being in the 1960s is the emergence of alternative communities in Englandand along the west coast of the United States. Among the diverse community experiences in the 1960simbued with the anticipation of the Age of Aquarius, we can pick out the Esalen retreat in California,which has been concerned since its foundation with the development of therapeutic procedures in linewith New Age principles.Esalen was founded by Michael Murphy and Dick Price, both graduates in psychology from Stanford

University, interested in bringing together people who wanted to experience and disseminate philoso-phies, religious practices, and psychological techniques deemed to lie outside the boundaries of universitycourses at the time. There they would encourage the dialogue with scientic research and experiments

*Email: rodrigo.toniol@gmail.com

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whose progress was being blocked by the Cartesian methodology and fragmentation of mainstreamacademic knowledge. In 1962, for example, Abraham Maslow, one of the founders of the Journal forHumanistic Psychology, joined the Esalen group, attracting with him a large group of students andresearchers interested in the epistemology of his proposal for a humanistic psychology. Maslowsunderstanding of psychology emphasized self-realization as a potential intrinsic to all human beingsbut simultaneously recognized that this potential is not always awakened or sufciently developed(Alexander 1992). According to his approach, once individual needs are satised, people can becomeself-determining and act not on the basis of what they lack but on their condition as complete and fullbeings, releasing states of satiety and bliss (Carozzi 1999, p. 11).Following the arrival of Maslow and other intellectuals in Esalen, the owner Michel Murphy decided to

open the property up to the nonresident public, converting the space into a retreat offering seminars andworkshops on diverse themes. After Maslow, other intellectuals who became closely involved in theEsalen community included the likes of Aldous Huxley, a number of students of Fritz Perls (the founder ofGestalt therapy), and Gregory Bateson (Carozzi 1999). The opening up of Esalens facilities and theemergence of other communities operating along similar lines in the United States and England multipliedthe number of seminars, experiences, and training courses available. It also helped form a wide networkconnecting centers, people, and professionals interested in adopting a lifestyle that valued nature andfocused on the development of human capacities believed to have been hampered by modernity. (Forstudies of the development of this network in Latin America, see Castellanos 2012; Gutirrez Zuiga2005; Semn and Battaglia 2012.)Although the centers belonging to this network did not share any single program, it was, as Leila

Amaral has observed, permeated by a common language devoted to the spiritual path towards self-realization through transformative practices that enable a continual moral and spiritual change as part of arelatively individualized quest (Amaral 2000, p. 30). The search for self-realization was converted,therefore, not only into an individual project of life reorientation but also into a practice for curing the selfand, by extension, the world.

Key Information

Self-improvement has been explored as a founding aspect of the NewAge movement by researchers usinga variety of analytic approaches. For the English sociologist Paul Heelas (1996), New Age is one of theexpressions of modern culture that best explains one of its central characteristics, the emphasis on self-worth. According to Heelas, the development of psychotechnologies based on ideas of human potentialfrom the very outset of the NewAge movement exemplies the radical centrality of the self in its practicesand principles. To comprehend that to which Heelas refers, however, we need to differentiate between twodistinct entities: the self, which refers to the true I, the subjects intimate and indelible nature, and the ego,the result of culture as a dimension that is extrinsic to the subject but that forges his or her personality. InHeelass view, New Age as a religion of the self is closely associated with the idea of an internal God,with less emphasis on cosmic holism or the critique of the establishment, and in favour of a morehedonistic and well-behaved version of the individual. This identication of the self with God confers thehuman-individual such power that it enables him or her to inuence the external world in an overwhelm-ing and even magical way (Amaral 2000, p. 31). The cure, which, in this case, would involve apermanent process of self-recognition and liberation from the ego, found fertile terrain for expansion inthe self-help publication market and in large-scale corporations. In other words, the ideal of empoweringindividuals through isolated techniques aimed at self-realization found common ground with theideology of progress, which emphasizes productive efcacy by cultivating the interior qualities ofautonomy, power, trust and creativity (Amaral 2000, p. 31).

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In parallel with analyses like Heelass, which foregrounded the idiom of the self in order to study theideal of self-improvement in New Age movements, we can identify a body of research that focusedspecically on the idea of individualism. The term is used in a variety of ways, but in most instances thesedisplay one of two kinds of emphasis. Firstly are those studies that treat individualism as a trait of reexivemodernity that tends to value subjects becoming autonomous and assuming responsibility for the courseof their lives (Beck 1992; Giddens 2013). In terms of the processes of becoming sick and being cured, thiskind of perspective suggests the individuals complete responsibility for both their sickness and theirhealth. This involves the establishment of a circuit that connects individualism, autonomy, and respon-sibility, as suggested by Anthony DAndreas (1996) denition of New Age sensibilities. A second groupof studies that based its analytic framework around the idea of individualism can be identied informulations that situate New Age within the long-term emergence of a psi culture (Figueira 1985).Seen in this light, New Age amounts to the kind of self-cultivation exemplied by the psychologization ofcontemporary modern societies. As Jane Russo has written,

The phenomenon of psychologization [. . .] represents a new form of the subject relating to him or herself and thesurrounding world. It concerns the way in which traditional forms of dealing with the different spheres of life [. . .] aregradually replaced by idiosyncratic forms, theoretically constructed through the subject through his or her desires andpersonal characteristics. Investigating psychologization means [. . .] attempting to account for the great paradox ofmodernity: the social production of idiosyncrasy and individuality as fundamental pillars of the social world. (Russo1993, p. 16)

In this case, the cure is based around therapies capable of unblocking whatever potentially limits thesubjects reexive capacity. The therapies par excellence related to this explanatory model are energetic,such as reiki and biodanza, which work to circulate energies between the bodys chakras.Another kind of approach to individualism in studies of New Age appears, for example, in Antony

DAndreas proposal (1996) of the concept of self-perfectibility. This line of thinking is close to PaulHeelass, but in contrast to the English sociologist, this notion connects the individual self to a widertotality in other words, it advocates holism. Although this approach reafrms the conversion of the egointo a self as a fundamental procedure for New Agers, it goes on to recognize this transmutation onenecessary for the encounter with the true I in three movements that extend beyond the individual:

(1) in the relation between the self and culture or society; (2) in the relation between the self and nature (which refers tothe non-human, the biological grounding of the Earth and human beings, their organism and their instincts); (3) in therelation of the self to itself (to its person), elaborating the personality and indissociable intrapersonal and interpersonalelements. (DAndrea 1996, p. 97)

The emphasis on the selfs relation to another dimension of the world paradigmatically situates theparadox of holism in studies of the New Age phenomenon. As the more primordial aspects of being (self)become accessed, in detriment to those imposed by the dynamics of authority over the course of thesubjects life, his or her connections with the cosmos become more visible. In other words, the closer onegets to the self, the better is the understanding of the relationship between the subject and society, natureand the person. Holism as a connective principle implies, therefore, that the interiorization of being is alsoan opening to the transcendent. In this perspective, the cure cannot be aimed solely at the subject: it mustalso affect the planet as a whole. The systemic order which means that everything alive is interrelated alsomeans that each individual engaged in his or her own curing process must also look to maintain thebalance with nature.This kind of individualism, which, paradoxically, the more radical it is, becomes the more focused on

the world, also comprises the starting point for Leila Amarals analysis (2000) of New Age cures:

The term New Age is thus linked to an idea of the cure as a radical transformation, an idea that permeates the differentvariants of this discourse, whether those of astrological transformation, imminent catastrophe or paradigm

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transformation. Its most zealous participants argue that they are concerned with the harmonious development of humanbeings and committed to the most important movement across the planet: the transformation of consciousness, rst at aninternal-individual level, with positive effects on the physical world and on humanity as a whole. Ultimately theobjective is to restore the Earths health, a process conceived as the great reconciliation. (Amaral 2000, p. 61)

The New Age movements attitude to the modern world is one of suspicion, meaning that the quest tobe cured is also invariably a project of salvation. The desired cure involves saving oneself from the evils ofcapitalist modernity and the type of ego it produces and, at the same time, searching for the true self. ForNew Agers, then, the rst step involves understanding the principle of a systemic connection between allbeings. This involves recognizing the existence of an ultimate metaphysical unity or even a transcendentalmonism that intertwines subject, world, and universe.The decentralized and noninstitutional character of the movement means that any characterization of

the relationship between New Age and health must always be provisional and unstable. The threefundamental aspects of this relationship, described at the outset of this entry, are elaborated in variousforms and result in distinct curing practices.

Cross-References

Alternative TherapiesAnthroposophyComplementary and Alternative MedicinesHarmonisationNew Age and Native SpiritualityNew Age and Self-Help

References

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Amaral L (2000) Carnaval da alma: comunidade, essncia e sincretismo na nova era. Vozes, PetrpolisBeck U (1992) Risk society: towards a new modernity. Sage, LondonCarozzi M (1999) Introduo. In: Carozzi M (ed) A Nova Era no Mercosul. Editora Vozes, Petropolis,pp 723

Castellanos R (2012) Religiosidades nmadas. Creencias y prcticas heterodoxas en Guadalajara.CIESAS, Guadalajara

DAndrea A (1996) O Self perfeito e a Nova Era: individualismo e reexividade em religiosidades ps-tradicionais. IUPERJ, Rio de Janeiro

Figueira S (ed) (1985) Cultura da Psicanlise. Brasiliense, So PauloGiddens A (2013) The consequences of modernity. Wiley, New YorkGutirrez C (2005) Congregaciones del xito. Interpretacin sociorreligiosa de las redes de mercadeo enGuadalajara. El Colegio de Jalisco y la Universidad de Guadalajara, Guadalajara

Heelas P (1996) The new age movement. Blackwell, OxfordRusso J (1993) O corpo contra a palavra: o movimento das terapias corporais no campo psicolgico dosanos 80. Editora UFRJ, Rio de Janeiro

Semn P, Battaglia A (2012) De la industria cultural a la religin. Nuevas formas y caminos para elsacerdocio. J Civitas Revista de Cincias Sociais 12:439452

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New Age and HealthKeywordsDefinitionIntroductionKey InformationCross-ReferencesReferences