Mind, Body, Spirit books deserve more respect

Cambridge Dictionary has named ‘manifest’ as its word of the year. Celebrity after celebrity names ’manifestation’ or ’visualisation’ as the reason for their success. In TV press junkets, those same celebrities mention meditation or yoga as a daily act. You can’t join a dating site without someone asking you your ‘star’ (sun) sign. Everyone—and their therapist—is using tarot or oracle cards. So why is publishing still so snobby about the Mind, Body, Spirit (MBS) category? It is so reviled, I have noticed that the instant something bestselling comes out of it, publishers and retailers are eager to shunt said title over to another, more palatable category such as ‘wellness’ or ‘popular psychology’.

One reason for this squeamishness might be because most MBS subjects have their origins in the East and in ideas that Western, materialist science finds appalling. I recently read something that resonated with this idea. Sharmadean Reid, in her brilliant collection of essays New Methods for Women (Penguin Life, 2024), summed up my instinct about this when she wrote: "We are taught to be logical, to look at the facts, and to make decisions based on what we think is rational. Anything outside of westernised science (a mere few hundred years old in its conception) is disregarded." She was writing about the value of intuition, but it applies equally well to anything that is outside the measurement of scientific orthodoxy.

It isn’t as if the scientists themselves aren’t aware of their biases. The term ‘WEIRD science’  has been coined, with the acronym referring to the ‘Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich and Democratic’ approaches that dominate scientific discourse. There is a desire to continue to act as though we should hold MBS subjects to the same WEIRD method—and then find them wanting.

I challenge you to find a (rare) review of an MBS title in a newspaper or magazine that doesn’t drip with scepticism and suspicion

Think about the extraordinarily wonderful book How the Hippies Saved Physics (WW Norton & Co, 2012). Without even googling it, I can assure you that the author, David Kaiser, will have a background in STEM rather than psychedelic shamanism. It is not the hippies in the title that are important, but the impact they had on physics. It is only by treating the insights that emerge from MBS literature as equally valid and complementary companions to their lab-based cousins that either field can truly progress.

I have been writing and editing in this genre for more than 30 years. The mockery and eye-rolling has mostly served me well. One m.d. who had led the magazine house I worked for and had launched many famous men’s and music magazine brands told me, at his retirement lunch, that he was just not into “that woo-woo stuff your mag is about” and that this was why—apart from front covers—he had pretty much left me alone to do as I pleased.

Moving to books from magazines was a joyful shift, as the two publishers I have worked for in-house have strong MBS backlists and know the value of the category. Another positive was that almost everyone I’ve ever met in publishing has a natural curiosity about every subject, irrespective of their own beliefs.

However, I can’t name a mainstream non-fiction prize that has ever gone to this category, despite some number-one bestsellers emerging from it (there are plenty of MBS-specific ones but that is the category awarding itself). This is surprising since non-fiction grew by 4% during the pandemic primarily through sales in the Mind, Body, Spirit category (up 39% at $22m). Even our beloved industry organ The Bookseller is, on occasion, guilty of not shouting enough about MBS. This summer a category round-up of ‘Religion & Spirituality’ had a decent round-up of witchcraft titles, tarot and core MBS, but none of the five category highlights was from this section. And I challenge you to find a (rare) review of an MBS title in a newspaper or magazine that doesn’t drip with scepticism and suspicion, even if the reviewer is eventually persuaded of its worth. 

Perhaps it is the fact that crystals sit alongside counselling in this category that makes it harder to champion MBS as an umbrella term? When I worked at Watkins Publishing, I was asked to write a blog for Waterstones, so that booksellers could see the breadth of the category and curb some of its unwieldiness. Without a love for the category, it is fairly easy to get lost and I have seen occult titles on the same shelf as alternative health in the past, without sub-genre labelling.

Micro-categories are important, therefore, but so too is a wider admission of the value and validity of this genre as a whole. There is no doubt that it is a specialised subject area, but given its now affirmed move into the mainstream consciousness, shouldn’t we give MBS a bit more respect?

Visit tania.world for Tania Ahsan’s blog.