Life is Woo

...and how to take the woo out of woo-woo

This is the first of many guest pieces coming to Kainos as we bring in new voices, merging sensemaking, creativity and hope to imagine new futures.

We’re kicking things off with a perspective on an idea which has become central to my work: our experience of being alive and embodied is more important than what we can measure and quantify, and remembering this is essential for social transformation.

One of my favourite takes on this comes from Trish Blain, a facilitator and the founder of Alive Edges. Trish is a mentor, friend and coach who I’ve been working with weekly for five years now. If you’ve read my book The Bigger Picture, you might remember she helped me train for being repeatedly injected with high doses of DMT for 40 minutes at a time. Her wisdom was invaluable in helping me navigate hyper-dimensional chinchillas, existential voids and synchronistic ghosts.

Trish often says we need to ‘take the woo out of woo-woo’; to parse out the signal in New Age thinking from the considerable noise. I asked her if she’d write a piece explaining why, and I was delighted with what she came up with.

If it strikes a chord, she’s about to launch a free four-part training called ‘The Other Person Problem’ which I highly recommend - you can register for free here.

We also have a Kainos community session on Tuesday, 30 September at 6:30pm UK time (link here) and if you’re in or near London, I’m doing a live event called Viral AI Hallucinations with Ari Kuschnir and Schuyler Brown on the evening of Monday, 29 September in Shoreditch. - Alexander

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Trish Blain: Life is Woo

I remember the look of disdain on his face as he said it.

“You’re encouraging fantasy worlds that hurt people. It’s dangerous.”

You would have thought I was swindling grandmothers out of their retirement funds, rather than the producer of an alternative event called the Whole Health Expo.

He was a prestigious psychiatrist and professor at an Ivy League university. I don’t remember why we were meeting for lunch, but I do remember he had plenty to say about my event…all of it negative.

In an attempt to address his concerns, I began to acknowledge some of what were considered the more fringe elements:

“Yes, it’s true, there are some ideas that may seem really ‘out there,’ like animal communication…”

Before I could finish, he cut me off:

“Now, animal communication - that is real! I talk to my dog all the time!”

Excitedly, he started citing the latest scientific data about telepathy with animals (there’s a lot).

What I thought at first was going to be a short, challenging lunch expanded into an enjoyable dinner as the conversation opened into other aspects of nonphysical reality, grounded in his personal experience with his dog.

I’ve found there is often an entry point into conversations considered ‘woo’ or ‘out there’. Many of us have had experiences that don’t fit into the “normal” narrative of reality but are tangible, impactful and even life changing.

We use different words to describe it and a variety of ways we make sense of it, but these experiences are universal.

A 2024 CivicScience poll found that 64% of U.S. adults believe in at least one paranormal phenomenon (such as ghosts, spirits, psychic abilities, etc.). Another 2025 sociological study reported that over 70% of people in the U.K. believe in at least one category of the supernatural.

A Pew Research survey found around half of U.S. adults (53%) say they’ve been visited by a dead family member in a dream or some other form.

I recently had a profound personal experience of this after my mother’s passing. She visited me several times in my dreams. Each time, enjoying a cup of Christmas morning coffee (she loved Christmas) while talking and processing our relationship and her death. Even if it was “just a dream”, the impact was undeniable. My mother had serious mental health issues, and this time together felt like a deep healing through space and time for both of us.

Even with the majority of us having these experiences, we still use disclaimers:

“I know this sounds crazy, but…”

“This might sound woo woo, but…”

“I’m not one of those people, but…”

It’s a common occurrence for people to whisper their woo woo confessions to me when no one is looking. The ultimate irony….I don’t consider myself woo and I catch myself doing the same disclaimers!

As nervous as we may still feel about waving our “woo woo” flag, the truth is, woo isn’t fringe anymore.

Psychedelics are being integrated into western medicine. Meditation, yoga, mindfulness, breathwork, and energy healing are staples of corporate wellness. Tantra and kundalini practices are commonplace in many bedrooms. Flow states, peak experiences, and spiritual awakenings are being studied in labs and practiced in boardrooms.

Pop culture is exploding with the paranormal. In 2025, The Telepathy Tapes podcast hit #1 on Spotify in both the U.S. and U.K., surpassing 15 million downloads in just months. What was once mocked as fringe is now prime-time obsession. Spotify’s top podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience, has hosted countless conversations on psychedelics, remote viewing, and expanded consciousness, introducing millions to these ideas.

We are seeing a resurgence in the US of traditional and fundamental religion. Prayer, miracles, the felt presence of God: these are woo by another name.

If the majority of us have had experiences science can’t yet explain, why are we still apologizing for them?

Why We Still Apologize

It’s understandable.

“Woo woo” is commonly used as a derogatory slur. It implies fluff, gullibility and lack of evidence.

No one wants to be perceived as foolish or worse … fluffy.

But is it true that there is no evidence?

Nobel Laureate Brian Josephson has remarked: “Anything goes in physics - cosmic wormholes, time travel - as long as it avoids anything mystical or New Age-ish.” He calls it “pathological disbelief” pointing out that while truly extreme ideas might be tolerated, anything bordering on the mystical still triggers exclusion.

My current science obsession is Tufts University’s biologist Micheal Levin, who has recently said “I deliberately avoid saying ‘consciousness.’ In the vast majority of my work up until a year ago, I never mentioned consciousness…. It brings in a whole barrel of worms…”

He talks about the high degree of pushback he gets in sharing his findings: “Often my ‘Mind Everywhere’ views attract critiques from colleagues operating through the molecular biology lens, who believe that it is a dangerous category error to entertain the idea that molecular pathways, cells, and tissues could have true goals, intelligence, and an inner perspective.”

In a recent interview with science writer John Horgan, neuroscientist Christof Koch reflected on his evolving openness to philosophical idealism, joking, “I hope I haven’t turned woo-woo.”

Scientists have risked their careers even hinting at the nonphysical, despite the fact that modern physics has long shown matter is not physical at all.

The problem isn’t lack of evidence. It’s stigma.

So what? Why does it matter?

This isn’t just a fight about reputation. It’s about something bigger.

It’s about our collective experience. It’s about how we want to feel. Despite the stigma, we can’t escape the human longing for the transcendence of the mundane.

And even more importantly, I believe it’s impossible to create the lives and the world we long for without woo.

But there’s one caveat: we need a reframe. A more mature, sophisticated approach to navigating and engaging the nonphysical.

The point is not to explain away the woo, but to refine our relationship with it—practical, grounded, and still infused with awe.

Woo Makes Life Worth Living

In our current paradigm, we tend to hold the physical and nonphysical in opposition. You’re either “woo-woo” or you’re not. You’re grounded in the material world or you’re off in some airy-fairy altered state.

But that binary ignores reality. Woo isn’t rare. It’s the invisible texture that makes life worth living:

Love is woo. Love isn’t physical. We can hug, kiss, and express it through the body—but the feeling of love comes from allowing ourselves to be impacted by another being.

Empathy is woo. How do we feel another’s joy or pain? Through our subtle senses, our capacity to register nonphysical information.

Aliveness is woo. That electric charge we feel at a sports event or live concert, that swelling camaraderie that no single physical element can explain…is woo.

Art, beauty, and creativity are woo. Being moved by beauty and art, or lit by inspiration goes beyond physical mechanics.

Hope is woo. Hope only happens when we engage imagination, when we feel into a possibility more alive than what we see now.

Curl-your-toes sex is woo. Beyond physical pleasure, when we open to eros, energy, and subtle sensing, sex becomes transcendent, even ecstatic.

Meaning is woo. Our longing to be part of something greater defies the narrative that we are nothing but biology, destined to cease to exist.

Woo opens us into deeper experience, richer information, and more meaningful relationships with life and each other.

Think about what you remember most: it isn’t facts. It’s states of consciousness.

The feeling of oneness, the interconnectedness of nature, the rush of flow, the melting away of self. These aren’t just moods; they are states opened by our subtle senses.

The subtle senses are often described as refined extensions of ordinary perception: the ability to detect nuance, resonance, and non-obvious cues in the world around us including intuition, body awareness, emotional intelligence, and situational attunement.

Developing subtle senses is like training the palate of a wine connoisseur: you learn to discern nuance, complexity, and the layered richness of existence.

When they’re shut down, life flattens. We become numb, disconnected, isolated.

Subtle Senses and the Nervous System

When we are disconnected or overloaded, we can slip into hypervigilance: constantly scanning for danger, on edge without knowing why. This often shows up as generalized anxiety, the sense of threat without a clear source.

Our subtle senses are central to how we regulate our nervous systems. Feeling safe, connected, or unsettled isn’t just about what we see or hear. It’s about the nonphysical signals we are always reading: energy, atmosphere, emotional tone, the “vibe” of a space or person.

While these qualitative experiences can’t be measured, in day to day life, we use them as valid evidence and as justification for our actions.

When we learn to work with these senses consciously, they stop being a source of fear and become a foundation for resilience, safety, and connection.

Tapping into these subtle senses is essential for our quality of life, and we limit ourselves when we dismiss it as new age woo.

Which brings me to my earlier caveat…

The “New Age” served its time, but much of it is now outdated, tangled in clichés and distortions, and it needs an update.

Updating the New Age

The New Age movement gained popularity in the late 1960s through the 1970s, fueled by counterculture, Eastern spirituality, and a hunger for direct experience of the sacred. It was less an organized religion and more a loosely networked cultural wave blending multicultural mysticism, healing, ecology, psychology, and global consciousness.

It carried a feeling. A new dawn was coming, history was turning a corner, and ordinary people could midwife a whole new kind of world. We were standing at the threshold of a higher stage of human evolution.

Sound familiar?

In many ways, this is what we are still sensing and longing for.

We have different language now. We talk about the need for deep systems change, for a solution to the meaning crisis, that we are at a crossroads. We point to the need for a paradigm shift and use language like GameB, Second Tier, Metamodern, or “The more beautiful world our hearts know is possible.”

But what happened? Why didn’t the New Age deliver on its promise?

Ironically, the reason we reject the New Age as woo nonsense might be the same reason that materialism isn’t working as a philosophy of life.

1. From Control to Relationship

While the materialist view promises control through science and logic, the New Age became control through the nonphysical.

We want mastery over nature, over our bodies, over biology itself. Simply put, we want to make sure we can get what we want. This is the materialist promise: if we can just figure out how the machine works, we can dominate the physical world.

But there is also the New Age version: If I perform the right rituals, purify myself, become enlightened, follow the signs, then I will get what I want.

There is also the other side of control… the lure of surrender. We let “God take the wheel.” It all happens for a reason after all.

A friend of mine used to meditate on which shoes to wear.

We can also flip into “power-over,” commanding the spirit world to do our bidding. At one of my events, a vendor shouted at me: “My spirit guides are really pissed at you!” My response – bursting into laughter – didn’t help the situation. But it underscored the truth: the nonphysical isn’t ours to wield, and it isn’t ours to submit to either.

When we tangle the woo with control and power dynamics, it becomes a zero-sum game with life: either we dominate or we’re dominated. Both distortions miss the point.

The nonphysical isn’t here to control us, nor is it something we control.

We prompt life, and life responds.

Life impacts us, and we impact life.

That’s not dominance. It’s deep partnership.

When we reframe the nonphysical this way, we don’t gain or lose control: we access a deeper kind of power. One that keeps our sovereignty intact while opening us to multidimensional reality.

Which leads us to a related issue that needs updating: the idea that the nonordinary is “special” or dependent on something exceptional and external.

2. From Special to Skills Mastery

The woo woo is commonly considered bestowed upon us, or something we access by doing something exceptional. We have to be born with special abilities, officially ordained, or we have to sacrifice for decades. We need certain substances, rituals or perhaps it requires choosing the right church and faith.

It was my belief that the reason I was having spontaneous ecstatic experiences was because of the specific people I was with. After many years (I can be slow) I realized I was the common denominator. But rather than having my specialness be the end of the story, I got curious about why me?

Over the last 30 years, it’s been my experience that these states and abilities are not rare gifts. They are foundational skills we can all learn. When we understand how to navigate the nonphysical, the spectrum of states and how to access them, we gain the ability to shape our experience of reality in ways that simply aren’t available through a purely physical perspective.

Imagine these skills like primary colors: once you have the full palette, you can paint infinite art.

Or think of the woo as a soundboard with levers and dials. An interface for customizing your experience of reality. The soundboard isn’t the music, but it gives us more options for creative expression.

Mastery of the nonordinary doesn’t flatten us into sameness; it expands our capacity for diversity, creativity, and life itself.

And with that expansion comes another need: to widen how we communicate, not only with nonordinary realms, but across worldviews.

3. From Words to Translation

When we talk with others, we have no choice but to default to new age or religious language which carries a lot of cultural baggage. Words help us make sense of what we’re experiencing, but they also limit us.

What we need is twofold: to develop our own personal dialect for how we sense and communicate the nonordinary, and to cultivate the skill of translation so we can connect across different worldviews.

This ability to translate is a key to being able to break the increasing polarization. Understanding someone’s argument is different than understanding someone’s experience. Feeling their perspective is a powerful way to start to build bridges towards something new.

It offers a felt sense, that doesn’t default to sameness.

I remember a holiday when a long time family friend visited. He shared that since we had last seen him, he had become a born-again fundamentalist Christian. The focus of the group conversation quickly turned into a heated debate about his beliefs.

When I was able to have a private moment with him, I asked him about why he had converted. He began to describe an ecstatic experience he had had when he first went to his new church.

As he described it, I recognized the feeling instantly. His language was different than mine, but the resonance was unmistakable. I shared with him a similar experience of my own, translated into his terms. We bonded over the ineffable, undeniable love that we had felt.

I had to admit to myself: if my first experience of that state had been in his church rather than in my bed, I too might have become a born-again Christian.

This is the essence of nonordinary language. Each of us receives information through the filter of our past experiences, settings and beliefs.

Without nuanced skills of interpretation, it’s easy to get tangled – mistaking context for causality, metaphor for fact, reinforcing biases, or amplifying wishes and fears.

Developing subtle senses requires both rigor and personalization. There are universal skills we can all practice, but there is also an intensely personal process of learning our own dialect, recognizing our own symbols, and then building the capacity to translate them so we can communicate with others across traditions, maps, and metaphors.

That is how the nonordinary becomes not just mystical, but applicable.

And it’s worth it.

Enjoying the Woo

Finally, none of it matters if we lose the joy of being alive. And that’s a state of consciousness, not a thing we can demand.

We have to live the new world into existence, experimenting and enjoying the process as we go.

Cultivating the woo gives us hope, inspiration, and expands our capacity for pleasure. With each new experience of the nonordinary, our reality becomes fuller, bigger, richer.

Living in deep relationship with life shifts us from black, white and grey to technicolor. Nonordinary skills and states of consciousness give us access to new options that just aren’t there in our current paradigm, New Age or materialistic.

And don’t forget to share your stories. When we open up about our experiences, it gives others permission to talk about theirs.

Who knows, maybe they talk to their dog too…