In this bonus episode, writer and podcaster Amelia Hruby returns to discuss critical thinking and why it’s important to question science with nuance, our different takes on astrology and tarot, how to dabble in “woo-woo” practices that feel fun to you without getting sucked into harmful beliefs and conspiracy theories, the role of social media in those rabbit holes, and more.
Amelia Hruby is a writer, educator and podcaster with a PhD in philosophy. Over the past decade, she’s been a university professor, a community organizer, and a radio DJ. Now she is the founder & executive producer of Softer Sounds, a feminist podcast studio that supports entrepreneurs and creatives. She’s also the host of Off the Grid, a podcast about leaving social media without losing all your clients.
Resources and References
Christy’s new book, The Wellness Trap: Break Free from Diet Culture, Disinformation, and Dubious Diagnoses and Find Your True Well-Being
Amelia’s new membership community, The Interweb
Amelia’s main podcast, Off the Grid
Amelia’s other podcast, My Tiny Tarot Practice
Christy’s online course, Intuitive Eating Fundamentals
Subscribe on Substack for bonus content and more
Transcript
Disclaimer: The below transcription is primarily rendered by AI, so errors may have occurred. The original audio file is available above.
Christy Harrison: Hey there. Welcome to this bonus episode of Rethinking Wellness. I'm Christy, and my guest today is writer and podcaster, Amelia Hruby, who is back to discuss critical thinking and why it's important to question science with nuance, our different takes on astrology and tarot, how to dabble in woo-woo practices that feel fun to you without getting sucked into harmful beliefs and conspiracy theories, the role of social media in those rabbit holes and lots more. I really like that we were able to have this great conversation about something we don't totally agree on, and I have a feeling you're going to love it to. And now, without any further ado, here's my bonus interview with Amelia Hruby. So Amelia, welcome back. Thank you so much for sticking around for this bonus episode.
Amelia Hruby: Oh, I am so excited for what we have planned to chat about. I can't wait.
Christy Harrison: Yes, yes, me too. We had talked offline about this and we both have different approaches to the woo-woo aspects of wellness culture. I have a very skeptical take on things like astrology, tarot, Cauchy records, et cetera, and I feel like I've heard you say that you're more open to some of those things. So I'm curious to hear from your perspective why you're interested in those things and a little bit more open.
Amelia Hruby: Yeah, this is so fun to talk about. I think because I normally spend my time in spaces where all of that's so normalized, and then occasionally I'll talk to someone like you or honestly I'll just mention it to my parents and they'll be like, what are you talking about? And I'm like, oh yeah, this is maybe not the larger cultural approach to these things. So I think for me, I really would say I have strong personal practices with reading tarot and interpreting astrology For myself, this is not a professional thing. I don't get paid to read tarot cards. I'm not a paid astrologer. It's just become a part of my personal practice and how I understand myself and how I relate to the world and make choices about different sorts of things. And for me, astrology and tarot are just different, meaning-making systems that I can choose to employ or not at any given time.
So as I was reflecting on this question and this conversation we're going to have about it, I was actually thinking back, it kind of goes all the way back to my philosophy studies, which started in undergrad where I remember reading a bunch of Foucault who is a 20th century philosopher and realizing and reading that that kind of everything's made up was what I took away from that was a very sort of postmodern approach. I suppose all of the things that we've agreed upon as a society are just social agreements that we have either overtly made or have just come in through our culture and so much of it, it's just I feel like I took away from this class I took, it's all socially constructed and that didn't turn me into a nihilist. I didn't become nothing matters. I actually became like, okay, so I can choose what matters and I can think about how did we land in this position?
And it really led me to question a lot of things and a lot of it led me to a lot of political questioning. It led me to a lot of eventually the diet-culture and social media realizations that we talked about in the main episode. And then once I liberated myself from that, I was like, well, I can think about astrology as a meaning making system. I can think about tarot as a meaning making system and I can apply that to making a decision in my business or my life the same way I would apply a business framework someone might teach me or the same way I would apply using the Eisenhower matrix. I was like, I don't think it's that different to use the Eisenhower matrix versus a tarot card pull when I'm trying to make a decision, they're both to me, just different meaning making systems that I can utilize to make meaning in my life.
Christy Harrison: That's really interesting. It makes me think of an episode I did with Alan Levinovitz early in this podcast and we talked about when he was talking about his sort of rethinking wellness approaches, he talked about the power of randomness and how helpful it is to sort of introduce elements of randomness into life and to go with the flow on those and practice being flexible. I don't think these were his exact words, but what I took from it is when you introduce something like a coin flip into a decision about it can be a low stakes decision, what movie to watch or whatever, but it could also be business decision that you're really struggling with or something. When you introduce that randomness and you sort of make an effort to go with the flow or be flexible, it can show you something about yourself or how you relate to the situation, maybe can show you like, oh, actually I do know what I want and it's the other thing, and I didn't know until I was sort of pushed in this direction by this random tool that I brought in to help me.
Amelia Hruby: Yeah, exactly. I think it all has to do whether it's a coin flip or a tarot card, particularly in decision making, it's just about externalizing whatever is happening in our brain and giving us something else to have feedback against. And so we need that external reflection to even sometimes know what our feelings or desires are. And so it could be the random nature of the coin flip that gives you that feedback or it could be the tarot card that gives you that feedback. I think that's really how I approach these systems and I would say astrology is maybe slightly different. I feel like with tarot, for me it's a lot about decision making and thinking about what's happening in my life or the world around me with astrology, with the idea of the natal chart. It's the idea is that it tells you something about yourself.
I think it's a little more about identity than it is about action or behavior like tarot perhaps could be. And for me, I just like to think of it, I do not think of my natal chart as deterministic or telling me what I will become or how things will unfold in my life. It just became a really interesting way to ask questions about myself. Okay, if my natal chart says I'm an Aries sun, which it does, what is an Aries sun supposed to be like and do I feel like I'm that way? Or if I am a Gemini moon, what is that supposed to mean and does that align with how I think about myself? And for me, it's been really, really helpful to have that, again, external mirror and feedback because when I broke up with diet-culture, as we talked about in the episode I left social media, those were some of my main feedback, like external mirrors diet-culture, always telling me certain things about how my body should be, social media always telling me certain things about what my influence should be and I needed new ways to ask questions. I kind of left those systems and I was like, who am I? And at a certain point you can look inside and ask yourself who you are all day long, but you might come up short without engaging and interacting with the world with those external feedback. It can for me just become a glut of things I don't understand going on inside of my experience of myself. And so astrology was really helpful just to help me see like, oh, do I think I'm like that? Yes or no, and move from there.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, and it sounds like your relationship too, it is not taking it at face value and saying, this is exactly what I have to do or this is who I am and I don't have any say in the matter. It's more a dialogue. You're in a dialogue with these things.
Amelia Hruby: Yeah, absolutely. I don't think anything or anyone should be telling you exactly who you are or what you should do. I think that I'm so committed to questioning and asking questions, and I think that it's interesting. The example that actually comes to mind is when I was in the first major system that I questioned in college was actually science and the sort of objective truth of the scientific method and I was like, is this, do I agree? I think especially for me because of some of the really problematic fatphobic beliefs in the medical community that the science doesn't even necessarily back up. I really had to learn to be questioning every system of meaning. And I think that we've seen, there's a lot that happens when you start to question science and now we live in this age of questioning vaccines and all sorts of things that were not a part of that for me, but I think I still stand behind as challenging as it can be sometimes the power of questioning systems and questioning the meaning making that we're just told to accept no matter what in the world.
Christy Harrison: Yeah, that's so interesting and I find so many parallels with my own experience. I studied rhetoric as an undergrad and that was a lot of continental philosophy and Foucault was a big part of it. I actually did my senior thesis on questions of truth and whether there is a way to determine any sort of objective truth in the work of Foucault and a couple other thinkers
Amelia Hruby: Speaking my language. Yeah.
Christy Harrison: I love this. I mean it's a question that's been sort of haunting me I think ever since I learned about postmodern theory because I think there's this real tension between wanting to question systems as constructed and understanding belief systems or just systems of the way things work or have always worked as people came up with this. And this is not something that necessarily has to be set in Stone forever and we can organize and make change to those things, which is really a powerful motivator to me and that some of these things like if you start questioning everything, if you start questioning or saying that science isn't real or that it doesn't have any value or that I've seen the example of critics of postmodernism will say, and even some people within postmodernism have made the argument that science is just as valid as witchcraft or something.
To me it's like, where are we going with this here? Where does this take us and what harms does that cause to have such a breakdown of a shared understanding of reality?
