Photos From America's Largest New Age Health Expo

The Conscious Life Expo is the largest New Age health and wellness expo in the United States. For the past 21 years, thousands of truth seekers, health nuts and conspiracy theorists of all stripes have converged on the white-tiled halls of a Hilton hotel by the Los Angeles airport, looking for energetic healing, angelic guidance, photos of extraterrestrials, and a window into the mystical secrets behind how the world Really Works.

In ballrooms and conference rooms throughout the hotel, a series of lectures offer a dizzying glimpse into the vast array of belief systems, fears and hustles present in the New Age health and wellness world. This year, famed UFO journalist Linda Moulton Howe presented a lecture on UFO whistleblowers, while anti-vaccine bigwig Del Bigtree ranted to an enraptured audience about the sinister “agenda” he dubiously claimed underpinned the COVID pandemic. At least a dozen lectures promise to teach some form of extrasensory healing, through contact with angels, extraterrestrials, or psychic surgery. 

But the sales areas of Conscious Life are where the event really comes into focus. Walking through the exhibitors’ tables is like visiting a chaotic, jubilant, occasionally overwhelming carnival; table after table of vendors sell pyramids, “structured alkaline performance water,” and information on ancient Lemurian teachings. A “Reader’s Village” offers a concentrated doses of psychics, clairvoyants and tarot readers in one, dimly-lit room. Products claiming to offer protection against electromagnetic fields were especially popular this year, with no fewer than eight vendors offering various “EMF protection devices.” And because it’s so large and influential, what happens at Conscious Life is also an excellent preview of the trends that will soon overtake the broader world of health and wellness. 

“Everyone is here,” Robert Quicksilver said, the event’s founder, as he stood in a hallway and watched attendees stream by. “All the producers of all the other shows.” 

Tod Seelie captured images of the commerce taking place throughout Conscious Life, a joyful, tumultuous sensory overload of mushrooms, crystals, and infra-red saunas.