Toothpaste Selection and Your Spiritual Health

Navigating the Era of Abundant Choice In the Overflowing Wellness Aisle

Venture into the toothpaste aisle of any large chain drugstore and you might encounter 60-100 individual toothpaste items across 6-8 national brands. That’s a huge selection to choose from to brush your teeth. I recently had this experience, and it proved disorienting, as I tried to wade through the variety of health claims and slick, shiny, colorful toothpaste boxes, all vying for my attention and wallet!

Psychologist Barry Schwartz addresses this phenomenon in his book The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less (2004). The book explores the psychological costs of consumer abundance in Western societies. While some choice selection is beneficial, Schwartz notes that too many choices can lead to confusion, decision paralysis, ambivalence, and dissatisfaction.

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Schwartz’s book came to mind recently when I visited the website of One Commune, a teacher-driven platform for societal and personal well-being. The platform bundles more than 160 on-demand courses, thousands of short practices, and a wide range of videos and podcasts covering yoga, meditation, breathwork, goal-setting, nutrition, functional medicine, spirituality, and environmental regeneration. Its library features an impressive array of well-known popular teachers and subject expert influencers.

In the era of ramped-up wellness capitalism and spiritual branding, One Commune represents a pinnacle of high-production value, vast choice, charismatic teachers, and light community gatherings. It’s well worth checking out, but it’s not without its inherent contradictions that one needs to be aware of.

Today’s wellness landscape can feel like standing in front of that same toothpaste aisle displaying that endless array of brightly packed tubes that promise whiter teeth, fresher breath, and stronger, healthier gums. One Commune is like the deluxe endcap display in the drugstore: beautifully designed, expertly marketed, and genuinely effective, in doses.

But no matter how dazzling the options, you still have to pick one, apply it daily with focused attention, or nothing changes.

That’s where the rubber meets the road.

Years ago, when I studied the practice of Falun Dafa, we were encouraged to dedicate ourselves solely to its teachings and not be distracted by jumping among other spiritual systems and wellness modalities. This single-minded orientation reveals something often overlooked in today’s smorgasbord of wellness options: true inner transformation requires going deep, not only wide. This single-focused concentration remains one of the greatest challenges facing individuals who genuinely want to make progress on the inner path.

Picking up a little of this and dabbling in a little bit of that can bring on a feeling of immediate gains and initial rapid progress. Yet, from among the 160-plus offerings on One Commune, each one requires years — maybe even a lifetime of dedicated, committed practice for permanent changes to be experienced.

You might feel excited to sample as much as you possibly can from the overflowing palette of wellness programs, like someone participating in a high-end wine tasting, sniffing and sipping each option with gusto and increasing light-headed exhilaration. However, without staying true to any one wellness offering long enough to absorb its deepest texture, taste, and color, your experience can become more about variety and novelty than transformation.

Paradoxically, less might be more when it comes to nurturing one’s spiritual health.

The choice is yours. Choose wisely.

At everydayspiritualhealth.com, we’re not trying to compete with the volume of what’s out there in the wellness sphere. We help people to integrate what they already know, what they’ve always carried within, and to cultivate presence as a daily practice.

In a world bursting at the seams with content, we are here to remind you that spiritual health doesn’t emerge by adding more, but from learning to live fully what’s already alive in you, the quiet within that’s always been there.

If something here stirs you, don’t keep it to yourself! Leave a comment or reach out to me at: everydayspiritualhealth.com,

I’d love to hear what’s moving through you.