Pilar Guzmán, the editorial director of Oprah Daily, sat down with bestselling author Elise Loehnen for a conversation about our society’s obsession with wellness—and how we should instead move toward a concept she calls wholeness.
Loehnen currently hosts a podcast, Pulling the Thread, and her next book, On Our Best Behavior, comes out in May; she is also a former media executive who helped usher in a new era of healing practices like meditation and mindfulness. This conversation comes in tandem with a feature Loehnen wrote for O Quarterly, “The Journey from Wellness to Wholeness,” which posits that the wellness-fueled fulfillment we’re looking for might not actually be about health at all.
Watch Guzmán and Loehnen’s enlightening conversation above, and read on for the full transcript.
Pilar Guzmán: Today we’re here to talk to Elise about a feature she wrote in our new issue that explores the pitfalls of our wellness obsessed culture. She makes a case instead for a lifestyle that prioritizes wholeness over wellness. You talk about the fact that wellness wasn’t even a word until a couple of decades ago, right? It’s a very American idea in some ways. It’s sort of something to be hacked, something to be bested.
Elise Loehnen: The wellness industry has definitely done a lot of appropriation. I think in part because we don’t have our own healing modalities. Western medicine is wonderful, but that’s in some ways what’s become even more commoditized. What did the app say about how I feel? Right? Rather than, how do I feel? Am I hungry? Am I tired?
PG: How do you make the distinction between wellness and wholeness?
EL: Wholeness, to me, is entirely personal. And it’s an internal journey, and I think it’s a return to ourselves. I think we are whole. Nobody can fracture that. It’s an inviolate fact. And we forget. And I think parts are cast in shadow and we spend our lives reclaiming them. But I think that’s the path is that we all have everything we need.
PG: I think the mantra is we’re not broken. We have to return to our deep knowing.
EL: I grew up in a medical family. My dad’s a physician; my mom’s a nurse. I grew up listening to conversations about the body at dinner. Even though I grew up in a highly medical world and have talked to so many people, I’m in no position—I’m not a scientist—to really be making informed decisions about my health. And I think that sort of really, really intensive look at what’s happening in our bodies every minute induces a lot of stress.
PG: Well, you have a funny story about, you were having trouble sleeping.
EL: Yeah, so I got a ring to help me theoretically sleep. I don’t even know what my intention was, but everyone had one. And I thought it seemed cool—and it is cool, I guess. But I found myself waking up in anxiety about my sleep performance and checking my sleep performance in the middle of the night, which seems counterproductive. And it was interesting because what I also noted—I didn’t wear it for very long—was that days, it didn’t necessarily correlate with how I felt.
It’s part of this toxic myth of rugged individualism and independence that we have in this country where it’s all on us. It’s all on you, Pilar. It’s all on me. I can’t count on anyone. And yet we need to keep our vision trained on what does it look like to live in a connected world where we take care of each other. I don’t think we’re all supposed to be doing all of this for ourselves.
PG: What are you into now that is helping you become more whole?
EL: I think that we have a pretty good understanding of the physical body in our culture. I think we’re starting to understand the impact of our emotional health and mental health on our physical being. And I think we’re at the beginning of acknowledging that the energetics of our body have a big role.
I’m really interested in this question of faith, outside of belief, and feeling connected to something greater than myself, whatever that may be, nature, universe, God. And it’s there that I’ve found most of my feelings of wholeness.
PG: I love that. And this notion of getting comfortable with uncertainty, I think, for many people, religious or not, this notion of faith is about the connection to something greater than oneself. And that in and of itself is the great comfort. And that’s the thing that allows you to weather uncertainty, whether it’s health, professional, ecological—this notion of resilience.
EL: And I think a lot of us are going through an experience, too, where I’ve done so much work on myself physically, emotionally, mentally, and I didn’t—it’s not that I had so much work to do, but now I feel like, oh, now I can actually turn and assess the world or think about a larger context because I’ve gathered up all those parts of myself.
PG: Thank you so, so much for being here.
