On the wellness industry’s feminist veneer, the class politics of self-knowledge, and what genuine somatic justice would require
Content warning: This article contains references to sexual trauma, sexual assault, and coercion.
Across the major cities of the Anglophone world and beyond, a new genre of cultural event has proliferated with remarkable momentum: the feminist healing workshop.
You see it first as an invitation. A soft-toned Instagram tile. A link-in-bio landing page. A promise set in breathy, political language: ‘Reclaim your embodied desire. Release trauma stored in the nervous system. Step into pleasure as resistance.’ Beneath it, the logistics of belonging: Early bird £180. Standard £320. VIP “integration circle” £480. A note on what to bring – a journal, water, a sarong – and what to expect: a ‘container’, ‘gentle activation’, ‘somatic tools you can use for life’. The rhetoric is expansive; the purchase is precise.
Variously billed as somatic therapy, embodiment work, erotic reclamation, sacred sexuality or trauma-informed pleasure education, these gatherings promise participants access to bodily knowledge and erotic freedom that conventional life withholds. They are led by practitioners with credentials of variable rigour, attended predominantly by professional women with disposable income, and positioned not as luxury goods but as political necessities – acts of resistance against the structural conditions that have estranged people from their own bodies. They typically cost between £80 and £600 for a weekend. In practice, the marketed audience is often professional-class, cis-centric and femme-coded, even when the rhetoric claims universality.
The expansion of the healing-workshop market cannot be understood without attending simultaneously to the genuine need it identifies and the economic and ideological conditions shaping its response. The alienation of women, trans men, trans women and nonbinary people from embodied desire is real, extensively documented, and structurally produced in societies organised by misogyny and gendered violence.
Here, the mechanism is misogyny: a system that polices gender, disciplines bodies, and distributes credibility and safety unevenly – often with particular intensity towards trans women and other femme-presenting people, and through gender policing that also targets trans men and nonbinary people. People are hungry for frameworks that take this seriously. The wellness industry has accurately identified hunger. Whether the market it has constructed around it is an adequate response to the conditions that produce it is a more complex question – one that the industry’s self-presentation is structurally motivated not to ask.
The Feminist Aesthetic of Capital
The healing-workshop industry has adopted feminist vocabulary and aesthetics with considerable sophistication. The language of embodiment, somatic awareness and erotic reclamation draws recognisably on feminist theoretical traditions associated with writers such as Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich and on somatic trauma theorists who have extended those frameworks into clinical practice (Lorde, 1984; Rich, 1980). The visual culture of the industry – earth tones, botanical imagery, the aestheticised ‘diverse body’, and the ubiquitous invocations of the sacred feminine – performs a politics of inclusion and collective care. Participation is positioned not as consumption but as transformation.
This aesthetic, however, is a purchasable good, and its purchase is structured in ways that reproduce the very hierarchies the feminist vocabulary nominally critiques. The £400 weekend retreat on radical embodiment available to a white professional woman in London is not available to the Ghanaian home carer who lives three Tube stops away. The Instagram-mediated culture of somatic healing, in which liberation is represented through aestheticised images of women (and, increasingly, femme-presenting people) of a particular class, race and body type, constructs a visual norm of the healed self that functions, structurally, like any other beauty standard – exclusive, aspirational and organised around the taste of the already advantaged.
“The wellness industry has absorbed the language of feminist liberation and sold it back at a price that ensures the most structurally harmed people cannot enter the room.”
Sarah Sharma’s analysis of wellness culture’s temporal politics is clarifying here. Sharma argues that the industry’s emphasis on individual self-optimisation and cultivated presence obscures the structural inequalities that make time itself – for rest, for reflection, for healing – unevenly distributed (Sharma, 2014). The person who can spend a weekend at a healing retreat has specific material advantages: they can afford the fee, take the days and regard the expenditure as an investment rather than self-indulgence. The industry presents this temporally privileged self-care as universally available in principle. The price tag refutes the claim in practice.
Somatic Knowledge Without Clinical Accountability
The therapeutic frameworks invoked by the healing-workshop industry – somatic experiencing, sensorimotor psychotherapy, and trauma-informed embodiment – are, in their legitimate clinical forms, substantive bodies of knowledge with research support. The work of Peter Levine, Pat Ogden and Bessel van der Kolk on somatic approaches to trauma has reshaped clinical psychology’s understanding of how traumatic experience is stored and addressed in the body (Levine, 1997; Ogden, Minton and Pain, 2006; van der Kolk, 2014). That work has real implications for people navigating sexual trauma, reproductive violence, dysphoria and the embodied effects of structural oppression – including women, trans men, trans women and nonbinary people, whose access to safety, recognition and care is unevenly shaped by misogyny.
The problem is not somatic therapy; it is the unregulated transfer of its frameworks and techniques into commercial contexts by practitioners without clinical training or accountability structures. A qualified somatic therapist working within a regulated clinical framework has access to supervision, professional standards and the capacity to respond to the crises that trauma-focused work can produce. A workshop facilitator working with thirty people over a weekend, without clinical training and with a financial interest in return attendance, does not have those safeguards – and the vulnerability of attendees, precisely because they are drawn by genuine need, makes the absence of those safeguards a serious ethical concern.
Crucially, the risks here are not hypothetical, but nor are they universal. What circulates in community journalism and survivor networks are documented allegations and reported cases of harm – including emotional crises without adequate support, boundary violations, and (in some settings) sexual coercion or exploitation. They rarely appear in mainstream coverage. These patterns become more likely under certain conditions: high-intensity formats that encourage catharsis without aftercare; weak safeguarding and unclear boundaries; isolation (including retreat settings); and charismatic authority paired with financial incentives for repeat attendance. The absence of regulatory oversight makes patterns difficult to identify and accountability difficult to enforce.
The patterns become more likely under certain conditions: high-intensity formats that encourage catharsis without aftercare; weak safeguarding and unclear boundaries; isolation (including retreat settings); and charismatic authority paired with financial incentives for repeat attendance. In those conditions, ‘trauma-informed’ can become a marketing badge rather than a standard of practice – and embodied desire can be reframed as a personal breakthrough instead of a political question about safety, time, labour and power.
A feminist critique of the pathologisation of women’s and queer people’s experiences by conventional medicine should not produce an uncritical embrace of the unregulated alternative; it should produce a demand for accountable, accessible, community-governed forms of care that are neither captured by medical institutions nor exposed to market exploitation.
What Somatic Justice would Actually Require
The genuine insights of somatic approaches to embodiment and desire do not belong to the wellness industry. They belong to feminist and disability-justice traditions that developed them and to the communities whose experiences they describe. The question is what would be required to make those insights accessible in forms that are accountable, affordable and organised around the needs of the most marginalised rather than the most affluent.
The model is not a luxury retreat but a community-healing practice: the grassroots organisations in Black, Indigenous, and immigrant communities that have been providing culturally appropriate, collectively organised, non-commodified forms of somatic and emotional support for decades. The Black Emotional and Mental Health Collective (BEAM) in the United States, and community-based healing-justice networks emerging from Black Lives Matter organising, offer examples of somatic approaches to collective healing organised around community accountability rather than market logic (BEAM, n.d.; Garza, Cullors and Tometi, 2013).
In arts contexts, the intersection of embodied practice and political community has produced some of the most serious examples of somatic work outside clinical and commercial frameworks: contact improvisation and release technique traditions, which have developed consent-centred approaches to physical interaction; butoh and physical theatre, which engage the body’s capacity to hold and express political experience; and feminist performance-art traditions that have used the body as a site of collective witness (Novack, 1990; Fraleigh and Nakamura, 2006). These practices are not equivalent to therapy, but they can offer forms of embodied community and somatic attention that the commercial workshop does not replicate.
The structural demand is clear: public funding for community-based mental and sexual health services; recognition of care work as socially necessary labour; and the material conditions – economic security, freedom from violence, access to rest – under which genuine healing becomes possible for more than those already advantaged enough to purchase it. Somatic liberation is not a product. The conditions for it are political, and they require political action to create.
References:
BEAM (n.d.) Black Emotional and Mental Health Collective. Available at: Black Emotional and Mental Health Collective website (Accessed: 3 March 2026).
Ellis-Petersen, H. (2018) ‘“Under Swami’s spell”: 14 tourists claim sexual assault by guru at Thai yoga retreat’, The Guardian, 6 September. Available at: The Guardian website (Accessed: 3 March 2026).
Fraleigh, S. and Nakamura, T. (2006) Hijikata Tatsumi and Butoh: dancing in a pool of gray grit. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Garza, A., Cullors, P. and Tometi, O. (2013) Black Lives Matter (founding statement and organising materials). Available at: Black Lives Matter official site (Accessed: 3 March 2026).
Hill, R. (2022) ‘Complainants warn against “sacred sexuality” courses’, RNZ News, 28 October. Available at: RNZ website (Accessed: 3 March 2026).
Levine, P.A. (1997) Waking the Tiger: healing trauma. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books.
Lorde, A. (1984) Sister Outsider: essays and speeches. Trumansburg, NY: Crossing Press.
Novack, C.J. (1990) Sharing the Dance: contact improvisation and American culture. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press.
Ogden, P., Minton, K. and Pain, C. (2006) Trauma and the Body: a sensorimotor approach to psychotherapy. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.
Rich, A. (1980) ‘Compulsory heterosexuality and lesbian existence’, Signs, 5(4), pp. 631–660.
Sharma, S. (2014) In the Meantime: temporality and cultural politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
van der Kolk, B. (2014) The Body Keeps the Score: brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. New York: Viking.
