Is woo on the rise or just where I live?

[HangingOver]

I permanently relocated to the South West a few years ago after being a long term weekend visitor for about 5 years....and I've noticed the rise in the amount of woo practitioners in the area has totally exploded!

They range from harmless stuff like dancing naked around the forest with no clothes on (but always mysteriously with a photographer on hand for Instagram!) to more questionable stuff like "yoni steaming" and putting their periods on their faces, to the downright alarming stuff like Kambo (if you don't know what that is it's where a lunatic with no medical training burns you then applies this stuff to the burn that comes out of a poisonous frog in the Amazon, and you really violently vomit and have the shots and sometimes your face and skin swells up). There's also a woman nearby who seems to be a sort of doula (sp?) who specialises in helping you to give birth avoiding medical intervention of any kind at all costs....which seems a bit questionable!

I thought I was quite a fuzzy live and let live type but it's starting to annoy me. My lovely housemate who had a traumatic past is into it and it makes me sad that she goes to the legnths of poisoning herself to try to vomit up "bad energy" She's not bad, she's lovely.

Is this just a local thing or are other seeing a rise in "magical" and "goddesses" near them?

Not round here. But there seems to have been an increase in flat earth, chem-trails, anti-vacc, lizard overlords, plandemic believers. Which is amusing/ worrying, depending on how you look at it.

Never leave the house without it...

I need to know about the Hot Chocolate thing (you sexy thing)

Don't mind the woo but would love to do that with all the noisy, messy summer fuckers who come out of who-knows-where to just mess the world up. Send them all to one place and let them get on with it!

There's a lot of it about at the moment. It seems to be mostly very conventionally attractive girls who appear on Instagram rambling on about breathwork or sacred cacao (expensive hot chocolate?) or the divine feminine. They all sell workshops or rituals or retreats and the accounts are heavily peppered with entries of them dancing and posing and pouting and prancing about in their underwear while staring moodily into the camera.

There's one near me that seems to make a living selling "rituals" that have different names every month but all seem to consist of dancing in a group wearing matching black underwear with a blindfold on in a blank room lit with a red lightbulb, I think the woman has a pet snake she lets slither about a bit and then they all have a hot chocolate. Apparently it's "life changing" though.

wow is Wells full of woo? I used to live there and it was totally woo-less then.

It's definitely on the rise in my town on the edges of London. The amount of educated women who advocate Reiki and homeopathy to help cure hayfever, cancer, IBS.... I find it quite worrying

Glastonbury. It's Glastonbury isn't it? We don't have quite that same social make-up in Taunton.... 🤷‍♀️

My first thought was Glastonbury.
Loads of big egos flying about in Glastonbury , it used to be very competitively ''Edgy'', and felt quite uneasy to me.
Lots of beggars , but then, they are everywhere now.
A woman in Holland offered some sort of drug detox ''Cure'' with a plant called Ibogaine , and there was much vomiting and a tragic death, Again, huge ego thinking she could ''Cure'' people, but she couldn't.

There's one near me that seems to make a living selling "rituals" that have different names every month but all seem to consist of dancing in a group wearing matching black underwear with a blindfold on in a blank room lit with a red lightbulb, I think the woman has a pet snake she lets slither about a bit and then they all have a hot chocolate

OMG we live in the same town 🤣

The rest sound very woo. But a doula? Not woo at all! Empowering & supporting women to give birth isn’t woo.

and no I’m not woo or a doula!

I mean I’m sure you can get a wooie doula. But the ones I know aren’t woo.

@HangingOver A vet receptionist said a lot of people try ''Woo'' treatments on their pets..rather than getting early treatment at the Vet.
{Glastonbury area again}

theres a group where I live who go up into the hills with no clothes on and bang small drums.

Second one here who wants to know more about the hot chocolate thing as in I’m assuming that we’re talking more than just, you know, hot chocolate?

If I go Google hot chocolate I don’t think anything interesting is going to come up….

Going to have to change my user name! Had never heard 'woo' being used to mean 'quackery' of this sort. Feeling a bit elderly now

My best friend is into lots of different woo-type things. I love her but dear god it gets tiresome sometimes...
She did go through some trauma a few years ago, and claims reiki really helped her, which is great. And she loves nature, meditation and essential oils and all that jazz, also grand.

Some of that stuff is nice and pleasant and generally harmless in small doses.

It's just when she claims that all this actually heals you, cures diseases and stuff that I tend to switch off a bit. She genuinely believes that she doesn't need medicine, and that's great for her, but I just can't get there.

Like a PP said, I think it's about feeling in control or something.

I permanently relocated to the South West

Here is your answer.

Oh no I know Douglas are totally a thing but this was something specific called radical birth keeping

I think it's true. My rabbi told me that there's been an upsurge in people wanting to convert to Judaism over the past couple of years.

It's sacred ceremonial cacoa tastes like muddy hot chocolate and costs £25 a bag

She genuinely believes that she doesn't need medicine, and that's great for her

It's not great if she gets really poorly and won't listen to the doctors though!

Very possibly! Although I expect it's not quite as unique an experience as she'd have you believe! 🤣

It's the matching underwear that gets me pondering how it all works, is there a strict dress code or does she provide outfits? If you forget your kit or don't want to strip off do you get kicked out or have to wear something from the lost property box? Or do they just make you do the ecstatic embodiment in the corner away from the hired Instagram photographer? I wonder what they do if you keep accidentally stumbling into shot in your non regulation, greying M&S briefs and blindfold?

Mindfulness! NHS are all over that and seems very accepted but people are 😡😱😖 about reiki.

depends where you moved to. it's not rising in more ordinary places ... but if you've chosen totnes you've only yourself to blame :) .. all that 'trend' comes with a dollop of lack of unreal woo ness.....
couldnt be doing with it myself .....