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Beyond Wellness: How Restoring the Religious Roots of Spiritual Practices Can Heal Us
Go deeper than superficial self-care with the religious secret sauce you didn’t know you were missing
In the chaos of today’s world, we’re all searching for meaning. The wellness industry has sold us a promise that we can find it if we just buy the right products, attend the right retreats, and follow the right celebrity gurus. But is this true? Or are we picking and choosing from a self-care salad bar in ways that satisfy our hunger but don’t truly nourish us?
When we approach practices like yoga and ayahuasca as fitness routines and life hacks, we miss out on the sacred wisdom they have to offer us. But by digging into the real and often ancient religious traditions behind these practices, from Buddhism to Christianity and beyond, we can make them more meaningful, ethical, and effective—without the often unpleasant baggage of joining an organized religion.
In this engaging and deeply personal book, award-winning scholar and writer Liz Bucar embarks on a quest to get to the heart of “spiritual but not religious” activities from detox diets to sound baths. As she tries out each practice for herself, she asks how we can get more out of it by tuning out the hype and taking the religious meaning behind it seriously—with emotionally profound and often surprising results. Whether it’s as simple as setting an intention for a yoga asana or as complex as reevaluating what a “higher power” is, it’s time to understand, experience, and simply get more out of our spiritual practices. It’s time to dig deeper with Beyond Wellness.
In the chaos of today’s world, we’re all searching for meaning. The wellness industry has sold us a promise that we can find it if we just buy the right products, attend the right retreats, and follow the right celebrity gurus. But is this true? Or are we picking and choosing from a self-care salad bar in ways that satisfy our hunger but don’t truly nourish us?
When we approach practices like yoga and ayahuasca as fitness routines and life hacks, we miss out on the sacred wisdom they have to offer us. But by digging into the real and often ancient religious traditions behind these practices, from Buddhism to Christianity and beyond, we can make them more meaningful, ethical, and effective—without the often unpleasant baggage of joining an organized religion.
In this engaging and deeply personal book, award-winning scholar and writer Liz Bucar embarks on a quest to get to the heart of “spiritual but not religious” activities from detox diets to sound baths. As she tries out each practice for herself, she asks how we can get more out of it by tuning out the hype and taking the religious meaning behind it seriously—with emotionally profound and often surprising results. Whether it’s as simple as setting an intention for a yoga asana or as complex as reevaluating what a “higher power” is, it’s time to understand, experience, and simply get more out of our spiritual practices. It’s time to dig deeper with Beyond Wellness.
- GenresReligion
256 pages, Hardcover
Published April 28, 2026
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
June 7, 2026
I wanted to love this book (at least as much as I love Liz’s awesome substack newsletter, Reimagining Religion), because spiritual but not religious (SBNR) spirituality is one of my main interests after deconstructing a high-demand religion myself and trying to figure out what’s next.
I was expecting this book to be a much more open-minded embrace of different traditions on a spiritual level. It was more academic and mostly information sharing to contextualize certain practices instead. Nothing wrong with that of course! And still important work.
I’d say this book is more for those curious in purely secular spirituality from a non-believing lens, not SBNR believers like me who have already done a lot of the context-setting and research on our own. We know *something* exists, we’ve already tried and honor many of these practices through a religious lens, and we are more interested in the next layer deeper — how can we maintain belief and create a spiritual heritage when we no longer have one organized or designated spiritual home by choice?
It’s a subtle but important difference… For me being SBNR is more of a lived existential question about the meaning of life itself than a focus on wellbeing rituals alone. I had hoped to get more religious philosophical context on belief and meaning in the SBNR context vs. a few specific rituals/practices attached to them.
It feels like the book sort of fell prey to its own premise (giving permission to folks to adopt certain practices as long as they do it “right”). I get it’s hard to sell a book about wellbeing without making it about specific modalities that make you more well (doesn’t hurt if those practices are trendy and popular). But that meant it was very surface level, and I wanted to go even deeper. That’s what I love about Liz’s newsletter — explaining the religious philosophy behind current events to help us understand how we got here and what might be next.
To be clear, I still enjoyed this book a lot, especially the final chapter on psychedelics (which was the first time I felt like Liz herself connected with belief instead of taking a purely academic/analytical lens).
Overall, that’s probably on me for expecting a spiritual POV from an academic! Even still, I left this book feeling like, I’m not sure academics can truly speak to/understand the SBNR experience when they themselves don’t believe… just as I know religious leaders don’t understand the “believing but not religious” experience because they don’t understand losing faith/the benefits of a secular mindset. I still feel like I’m in the messy middle. 🤷♀️
I was expecting this book to be a much more open-minded embrace of different traditions on a spiritual level. It was more academic and mostly information sharing to contextualize certain practices instead. Nothing wrong with that of course! And still important work.
I’d say this book is more for those curious in purely secular spirituality from a non-believing lens, not SBNR believers like me who have already done a lot of the context-setting and research on our own. We know *something* exists, we’ve already tried and honor many of these practices through a religious lens, and we are more interested in the next layer deeper — how can we maintain belief and create a spiritual heritage when we no longer have one organized or designated spiritual home by choice?
It’s a subtle but important difference… For me being SBNR is more of a lived existential question about the meaning of life itself than a focus on wellbeing rituals alone. I had hoped to get more religious philosophical context on belief and meaning in the SBNR context vs. a few specific rituals/practices attached to them.
It feels like the book sort of fell prey to its own premise (giving permission to folks to adopt certain practices as long as they do it “right”). I get it’s hard to sell a book about wellbeing without making it about specific modalities that make you more well (doesn’t hurt if those practices are trendy and popular). But that meant it was very surface level, and I wanted to go even deeper. That’s what I love about Liz’s newsletter — explaining the religious philosophy behind current events to help us understand how we got here and what might be next.
To be clear, I still enjoyed this book a lot, especially the final chapter on psychedelics (which was the first time I felt like Liz herself connected with belief instead of taking a purely academic/analytical lens).
Overall, that’s probably on me for expecting a spiritual POV from an academic! Even still, I left this book feeling like, I’m not sure academics can truly speak to/understand the SBNR experience when they themselves don’t believe… just as I know religious leaders don’t understand the “believing but not religious” experience because they don’t understand losing faith/the benefits of a secular mindset. I still feel like I’m in the messy middle. 🤷♀️
April 29, 2026
Beyond Wellness is such a smart, thoughtful, and applicable book. In it, religion professor Liz Bucar argues that modern wellness pursuits that many of us turn to — like yoga — lose some of their power when we divorce the practice from its underlying theology. Dr. Bucar provides religious context for so many of these practices leading readers toward a more enriching and holistic pursuit of health.
May 20, 2026
I don’t have a high level of religious literacy, so many ideas in this book were new to me. I felt challenged and inspired by what I learned in this book. I’ll be thinking about these insights for a long time, especially about community and shared experiences.
May 26, 2026
Worth the read
June 7, 2026
How modern wellness culture is different from religious traditions while still coming directly from it. Good? Bad? Both? Unclear thesis. Not enough here for a book but she has an excellent substack
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews