The rise of wellness, psychedelics, and electronic music festivals: healing or escapism?
April 27, 2025
Over the past few years, a new kind of festival has been quietly taking root, blending wellness rituals, psychedelic exploration, and electronic music into sprawling experiences that promise transformation.
Gone are the days of chaotic raves; today’s “transformational festivals” offer sunrise meditations, sound healing sessions, cacao ceremonies, and breathwork under the stars, all wrapped in the language of growth, connection, and awakening.
It’s easy to understand the appeal. In a world that often feels rushed, fragmented, and disconnected, the idea of gathering in nature, unplugging, and seeking “something more” feels deeply necessary.
Psychedelics, once taboo, are now explored for their therapeutic potential. Wellness has evolved from a personal practice to a booming lifestyle movement, influencing everything from food to travel to nightlife.
And yet, behind the beauty, a quieter truth also unfolds.
For some, these festivals genuinely spark renewal: a cathartic release, an authentic connection, a needed reminder that life can be bigger, softer, and more alive. But for many others, the experience becomes something else: a socially accepted escape. A place where boundaries blur, where temporary highs, emotional, physical, spiritual, are wrapped under the comforting umbrella of “healing”, “energy” or “journey”.
It’s easy to lose yourself in the music, in the haze, in the momentary euphoria of being another face in a sea of openness. It’s much harder (and rarer) to find yourself within it.
The deeper paradox is this: true connection to oneself doesn’t require a massive group experience, or the haze of altered states. Contemplation, healing, and real growth are profoundly personal journeys, often done in silence, in discomfort, in clarity, not in a crowd of thousands vibrating to the same beat.
When mass euphoria replaces solitary introspection, what is sold as “transcendence” often becomes nothing more than beautifully marketed escapism. The rise of these festivals mirrors something beautiful, and something broken, in us all : a longing to belong. A longing to feel more. A longing to heal something we can’t always name.
But no collective experience, no psychedelic ceremony, can replace the slow, steady work of standing in your own truth; unfiltered, unprovoked, unperformed. Spirituality, music, and psychedelics can open doors, yes. But they are not shortcuts to self-awareness.
True healing isn’t found when we lose ourselves in a mass of energy. It’s found when we choose to stay present, clear, and awake, even when it’s harder, even when it’s lonelier, even when it asks more of us.
Because real connection (to life, to love, to yourself) doesn’t happen in the moments you escape. It happens in the moments you stay.
Curious about trying it out? Just remember: the journey to yourself doesn’t begin when the music starts. It begins when the noise ends.
With love, from Sophie