Why Self-Care Is Not Enough: The Nature of True Well-Being

Abstract

The notion of self-care—like its precursor, self-help—has emerged due to a spiritual vacuum in the contemporary world. The burgeoning mental health crisis that is prevalent today appears inseparable from the broader existential predicament facing humanity. Mainstream psychology and its therapies have not been able to address these challenges, in response to which we have seen the inevitable rise of self-care remedies. Across humanity’s diverse spiritual cultures, these have always been available, yet they were invariably grounded in a religious tradition and its sacred psychology. The more we are marginalized from such roots, the more self-care is required—our current obsession with which is the unacknowledged search for wholeness due to modern people having lost their sense of the sacred.