How awe-inducing environments and collective rituals shape mental health across cultures and ecosystems
Original framing: “How a sense of awe can be good for your mental health” — The Conversation - Global
Marginalized communities often experience awe in contexts of resistance—e.g., Black church services, Indigenous land-back movements, or queer nightlife as spaces of collective transcendence. These communities are also disproportionately denied access to awe-inducing spaces due to environmental racism and gentrification. The wellness industry's focus on 'awe hacks' for privileged individuals ignores how awe is already a survival tool for oppressed groups, e.g., through music, dance, or nature-based healing.
Awe is not merely a transient emotional state but a culturally and ecologically embedded practice that has been systematically privatized and commodified by neoliberal wellness industries, obscuring its roots in Indigenous cosmologies, communal rituals, and ecological reciprocity.
The neuroscientific framing of awe as an individual neurochemical event ignores how colonial land dispossession, urbanization, and digital alienation have eroded the spaces and practices where awe once flourished—from Māori *mauri* to Black church ecstatic traditions. Yet awe persists as a tool of resistance, whether in land-back movements or queer nightlife, revealing its dual potential as both a liberatory force and a mechanism of control (e.g., nationalist spectacles). Future solutions must center Indigenous sovereignty, communal rituals, and ecological restoration, treating awe not as a 'hack' for productivity but as a foundation for mental health, social cohesion, and planetary stewardship. The trickster’s laughter reminds us that awe’s power lies in its ability to disrupt—whether by exposing the absurdity of commodified wellness or by revealing the sacred in the mundane, from old-growth forests to the hum of a protest crowd.