Beyond Wellness Book Review: The Cost of Secular Self-Care

How can we learn from other faiths and cultures to take better care of ourselves, each other, and the world? Can we adopt—and adapt—the practices of others without distorting them?

Liz Bucar is a religion professor at Northeastern University who does not belong to any faith community, leaving her free to sample and explore many traditions. She is also a certified yoga instructor and an avid pursuer of various wellness practices. In her new book, Beyond Wellness: How Restoring the Religious Roots of Spiritual Practices Can Heal Us (Tarcher/Penguin Random House, 2026), she examines what is lost when we try to separate traditions of healthy living from their religious roots—and what we could learn from them.

Bucar surveys both familiar wellness programs, such as yoga, mindfulness meditation, and Alcoholics Anonymous, and some more esoteric ones, such as psychedelic sacraments. She describes her own sampling of these practices and shares some of the scholarship about them.

In an earlier book, Stealing My Religion: Not Just Any Cultural Appropriation (Harvard University Press, 2022), Bucar explores the challenges of importing the practices of a faith community into an entirely different cultural setting. White liberals, she notes, can be quick to condemn cultural appropriation but slow to see their own religious appropriation as they graze the spiritual salad bar of wellness practices.

In her new book, Liz Bucar, a religion professor at Northeastern University, has discussed both familiar wellness programs, such as yoga, mindfulness meditation, and Alcoholics Anonymous, and some more esoteric ones.

When wellness loses its spiritual roots

Those who see yoga merely as a form of exercise, for example, may be stunned to hear that some parents do not want their child’s school to teach it. How could anyone think yoga is proselytizing? Why would others claim teachers are presenting a watered-down version of their devotional life? South Asian yoga traditions deal with much more than individual fitness, Bucar insists. “Devotional yoga has resources for thinking about personal and social ethics” that are ignored by secularized yoga. We lose much, she cautions, in removing spiritual practices such as yoga and meditation from their religious roots: “ethical frameworks, long-term commitments in a community, systematic understanding of suffering and sickness, insights into human nature, and more.” (pp. 2-3, 30.)

Christianity could learn from yoga, Bucar suggests (as well as from other Asian faiths—from Judaism and Islam to Taoism and Confucianism) that its emphasis on orthodoxy (right beliefs) can lead it to neglect orthopraxy (right practices). Thinking correctly does not matter much unless we also do the right thing (p. 26).

Academia, Bucar points out, often limits its own ability to study and teach by demanding that wellness courses be stripped of all religion. Science requires researchers to proceed with a sort of methodological agnosticism—seeking natural explanations for phenomena rather than supernatural ones—but that should not prevent it from exploring practices rooted in religion. When a university psychology department insisted that religion be left out of a course on mindfulness meditation, this whitewashed the roots of this spiritual discipline, which was developed by Buddhists. It also denied students a chance to consider and test Buddhist insights into who is most likely to benefit from mindfulness training and whom it might harm (pp. 33-34).

From right belief to right practice

The chapter on Alcoholics Anonymous and similar 12-step recovery groups probes the beliefs and doubts of those who struggle together to cope with addiction. How can a skeptic faithfully attend meetings filled with talk about a Higher Power? Bucar reminds us that AA was born when a Methodist and an Episcopalian learned that they could help each other stay sober. The methods they used, and which recovering drunks still rely upon, came directly from the spiritual disciplines of Christianity’s Oxford Movement. In forging a path of recovery for those alienated from organized religion, AA pioneered the idea of being Spiritual But Not Religions. How can an agnostic follow 12 steps that begin with admitting that you need a Higher Power? The point of this, Bucar learns, is admitting that you are not God yourself.

Beyond Wellness helps us think about health and holiness in new ways. With fresh perspectives and practical wisdom, Bucar offers lessons for the skeptic, the seeker, and the deeply spiritual alike.