RECLAIMING WELLNESS
A Manifesto from Vikasa
Michael Murray | Director of Wellness
The wellness world is rapidly losing its way. We’ve been watching it happen for years, quietly, from the practice room rather than the podium. And we no longer think staying quiet is the responsible thing to do.
Why We’re Speaking Now
We are not writing this for attention. Manifestos are cheap currency online, and we have no interest in being controversial for the sake of views or likes. We are writing this because Vikasa has spent years being trusted with people’s bodies, breath, and beginnings, and we believe that trust comes with an obligation. When something we love is being hollowed out in front of us, silence starts to look like complicity.
You likely did not come to wellness looking for a marketplace. You came looking for a way to live a happier, healthier life. That search should not be so hard, expensive, or so easy to get wrong. Increasingly, it is all three of these things.
A. Well-Washing
Wellness is no longer a niche. It is a $6.8 trillion global industry – larger than the pharmaceutical industry four times over, growing faster than almost anything else in the world economy and on track to approach $10 trillion within five years. That kind of money changes everything.
Wellness real estate is now the single fastest-growing wellness sector on earth, and hospitality has followed the money. A hotel adds a massage room, a sleep mask on the pillow and a smoothie menu, and rebrands itself a “wellness destination”. Industry insiders have a name for this now: “well-washing.”
We have nothing against a good massage or a well-designed pillow. But, we do have something against the sleight of hand; the implication that a spa menu is a philosophy, that an amenity is a practice, that proximity to wellness is the same thing as wellness. It isn’t. And every time it’s sold as such, it gets a little harder for people to tell the difference between a place that will change how they live and a place that will simply relax them for a weekend.
B. The Charlatans
The titles “health coach” and “wellness coach” carry no real legal meaning. There is no license, no board, no minimum training required to use them. An estimated 128,000 people in the US alone were already operating under the title years ago, with no education standard behind it. Anyone can hang out a shingle. Many good, careful people do, but so do many who are neither of those things.
Online, the picture is even worse. A study of tens of thousands of diet and nutrition videos found that only about 2 in 100 aligned with established public-health guidance. Separate research into wellness influencers on Instagram found close to half of their posts contained inaccurate information. This is not a fringe problem; it is the daily information diet of people trying, in good faith, to improve their lives and wellbeing.
There’s a second layer to this, not just bad advice but the treatments sold alongside it. PEMF mats, red-light masks, IV vitamin drips, supplement stacks marketed as “longevity protocols”, and the list goes on. There is now an entire economy formed around gadgets and infusions promising more energy, sharper focus, better skin, longer life; however, most of it is complicated, expensive, and unproven. A clinical review found no high-quality evidence that IV vitamin therapy benefits people without a diagnosed deficiency, and even physicians embedded in the biohacking world are blunt about it: “you cannot gadget your way out of bad biology”. None of this makes anyone well. It makes us poorer, further from understanding what wellness actually requires, and oftentimes, stressed that we aren’t ‘doing enough’ to keep up.
When there is no floor to stand on, the loudest voice wins, not the most honest one.
We believe in expertise. We believe advice about the human body, and the mind should be earned, not performed. The absence of regulation does not excuse the absence of standards. If anything, it raises the bar for what we, as practitioners, owe the people who trust us.
C. The Bastardization of the Practice
Yoga teacher training is meant to be a deep apprenticeship into a living lineage. Increasingly, it is a transaction: 200-hour certifications compressed again and again and delivered entirely online, with no teacher in the room to see whether a body is actually safe in a pose, or to determine a trainee’s ability to safely look after other people. Some schools that advertise the full 200 hours only deliver a fraction of it, and once registered, almost nobody checks. Other schools are handing out advanced trainings hand over first, as marketing promotional add-ons.
A certificate is not the same thing as a teacher. When the credential becomes cheaper to obtain than to genuinely earn, the word “teacher” stops meaning very much and the people who show up to class, trusting the title on the wall, are the ones who pay for that gap. Yoga teachers have the potential to change people’s lives – to guide and assist them on their journeys of self-discovery and transformation, and this should be recognised, protected and supported. This is not gatekeeping for its own sake. It is the opposite: a call to protect what makes teaching worth trusting in the first place, so the door stays open to people who’ve actually done the work, not just the ones who could afford the fastest course and tick a box.
The Cost: Gatekeeping the Real Thing
Here’s the paradox that we at Vikasa feel we can no longer look past. Gen Z is, by every measure, the most wellness-engaged generation in history. They’re more invested in health, more willing to spend on it, more attuned to it than the generations before them. And yet by their own report, they are also the least well. The share of Gen Z adults describing their mental health as “excellent” has fallen fourteen points in six years, and fewer than half say they are genuinely thriving. Researchers now call this openly a paradox: record investment, record distress.
This is what happens when wellness becomes an industry before it stays a practice. The people searching hardest for real wellness are the ones most exposed to well-washing, most likely to meet an unregulated coach before a qualified one, most likely to learn from a feed that is right about two things in a hundred. The search for a happy, healthy life has become elusive, paywalled, and out of reach, not because people care less, but because the path has been made harder to find on purpose, by people profiting from the confusion.
That is the real gatekeeping. Not standards. Confusion, dressed up as choice.
What Vikasa Stands For
Strip all of this away, and here is what we believe: wellness is not complicated. It is the practice of being healthy and happy, and it should be within reach of anyone willing to do the work – not priced like a luxury good, and not dressed up in more complexity than it needs.
It starts with lifestyle. Things like sleep, movement, food, breath, connection, nature and mindset – the unglamorous fundamentals carry the strongest evidence of anything in the wellness world. Modify these first, because for the vast majority of people, this is where the actual gains live. Medical intervention, supplementation, and treatments like IV drips can have a place for some people, in some circumstances, under real clinical guidance. But they are not broadly applicable, and they should never be the first place anyone looks. Lifestyle first. And if that genuinely isn’t enough, look further.
Our Compass
We don’t say any of this from a distance, and we will not say it as an accusation. Vikasa has spent years building slowly, off-camera, because we believe depth takes time and shortcuts eventually show. We are not interested in tearing down a person or a brand by name. We are interested in raising the floor.
Everything we say publicly is and will continue to be held to our three brand values, and we’re glad to be held to them in return:
- Authenticity: we will not sell you an amenity dressed as a philosophy, or a title we haven’t earned.
- Transformation: our measure of success is not how relaxed you feel for a weekend, but how differently you live afterwards.
- Love: for our students, our teachers, our guests, ourselves, the universe and especially for an industry we are frustrated with, because we still believe in what it could be.
What We Commit To
To lead where leadership is needed, not where it is easiest. To demystify. To explain plainly what separates a real practice from its imitation, so you can tell the difference yourself, wherever you train and whoever you train with. To help, always, ahead of being right. And never, ever to tear another person down to make our own point.
You look to us as elders in this space, whether or not we ever asked for the title. We accept it, and the responsibility that comes with it. This is our first word on the subject. It will not be our last.
References:
Center for Science in the Public Interest. (2026, January 28). Trendy, expensive IV therapies are not worth the risk.
Cleveland Clinic. (2025, November 18). What is a health and wellness coach?
Cleveland Clinic. (2026, June 17). What to know about biohacking and how to try it safely.
Consultancy.org. (2025, August 14). Wellness industry growth driven by Gen Z and millennials [Summary of McKinsey Future of Wellness Survey].
Gallup. (2025). Gen Z mental health data, as cited in Grow Therapy. (2026, June 24). 40+ statistics shining light on Gen Z’s mental health in 2026.
Helventic. (2026, May 26). Biohacking: An honest, evidence-based guide to what works.
Hospitality Investor. (2023, August 11). What’s next in wellness hospitality?
KTLA. (2026, May 8). Wellness influencers blur the line between advice and misinformation, citing Wall Street Journal reporting and an unnamed Australian study.
Bauer, B. (2024, October 3). IV vitamin therapy: Understanding the lack of proven benefit and potential risks of this health fad. Mayo Clinic Press.
Bhagwat, M. (2025). The importance of Yoga Alliance certification in yoga teacher training. Substack.
Global Wellness Institute. (2025, November 19). The global wellness economy hits a record $6.8 trillion and is forecast to reach $9.8 trillion by 2029 [Press release].
Precision Nutrition. (2023, May 3). Wellness coach: Is it the right kind of coach—or career—for you?
STAT News. (2023, May 9). Health care coaches are the next big thing. They’re also completely unregulated.
The Angelfish Fieldwork. (n.d.). Gen Z & millennials: Wellness insights [Pulse survey].
The Healthy. (2026, May 15). Experts agree: These 7 biohacks aren’t worth your time (but offer 5 that are).
The Yoga Journalist. (2025, November 4). Exposed: The yoga teacher training model is fundamentally broken. Medium.
Vikasa. (2025, August 20). Wellness trends vs. mental health: Why Gen Z still feels unwell.