When a Loud Country Starts Listening: The Rebirth of Wellness in Lebanon”
A Blog Post post by AYANI:
How did Lebanon lose its healing traditions? How is it coming back now?
I often say that wellness in Lebanon is not something new.
It is something ancient that simply lost its way.
Long before we had hashtags, studios, or imported mats, this land breathed its own medicine. The Mediterranean has always been a crossroads of healing traditions, and Lebanon, this small mountain-sea corridor, was one of its earliest laboratories of holistic wisdom.
The Phoenicians, our maritime ancestors, were not only traders but carriers of ritual. They honored cycles of nature, worshipped deities tied to fertility, storms, agriculture, and the moon. Their temples used incense, sound, and communal rites as forms of purification. They practiced herbal medicine across their coastal cities, exchanged remedies with Egypt and Cyprus, and believed that health was tied to balance between humans and the natural world.
The Greeks, who interacted deeply with the Phoenicians through trade and knowledge exchange, left us a legacy of philosophy and early medical theory. Hippocrates, though not Lebanese, influenced the region with his concept of humors, air, fire, water, earth, reflecting the belief that body, mind, and environment were inseparable. Greek colonies along the coast infused the land with ideas of physical cultivation, breathwork, early forms of gymnasium culture, and the beginnings of meditative practice.
The Romans, who later absorbed Greek medicine, expanded the region’s healing world through infrastructure, baths, aqueducts, herbal gardens, and early hospitals. Bathing rituals were not luxury; they were civic wellness. They believed in sweat, heat, cold immersion, massage, aromatic oils, fasting, and military-style physical training deeply linked to breath and discipline.
Then came Christianity, threading its monasteries across Lebanon’s mountains. These monastic communities became sanctuaries of herbal medicine, balm making, silence, fasting, chant, and contemplative prayer. Monks tended gardens of lavender, rosemary, chamomile, myrtle, sage, plants still used in village remedies today. Their liturgical chant was a form of vibrational healing long before we had a name for it. Christian village culture passed down birth rituals, protection amulets, poultices, oils, bone-setting, and the belief that humility, simplicity, and quiet were medicines of the spirit.
Then came the Islamic Golden Age, where healing in this region reached new sophistication. Islamic scholars like Ibn Sina (Avicenna) and Al-Razi shaped global medicine with systems that were holistic by nature. “Tibb nabawi,” Prophetic medicine, emphasized herbal remedies, honey, cupping, prayer, breath, intention, emotional regulation, and diet as a form of devotion. Hospitals (bimaristans) were built with gardens and flowing water, because beauty itself was considered therapeutic. Energy, spirit (ruh), and heart-centered healing were woven into everyday life. Body, soul, and community were not separate, they were parts of the same cosmology.
This land—Lebanon—held all of these layers: Phoenician ritual culture, Greco-Roman philosophies of balance, Islamic holistic science, mountain herbalism from Druze and rural communities, and Mediterranean diet as medicine.
We come from a lineage where wellness was not a sector. It was simply life.
This small beautiful land that is Lebanon, carried all of these lineages at once:
Phoenician ritual culture, Greco-Roman philosophies of balance, Christian monastic healing, Druze mountain herbalism, and Islamic holistic science.
Layered on top of each other. Interwoven. Complementary. Evolving. We come from a place where wellness was not a service, not a studio, not a trend.
It was a worldview. A way of being human.
**WHAT HAPPENED TO ALL OF THIS?
Anthropology has a simple answer: repeated disruption. Lebanon didn’t lose its healing traditions because they were weak, it lost them because life kept interrupting the conditions for wisdom to survive.
For millennia, wellness was woven into daily life: land, seasons, rituals, community, silence, herbs, prayer, breath, and song. Then centuries of upheaval, empires, invasions, mandates, and war, separated people from land, ritual, and each other.
Modernity shifted the ground even further:
Globalization: The Outside World Becomes Louder
Imported lifestyles replaced inherited ones. Herbalism became “backward,” silence “unproductive,” community healing “superstition.” Cultural overshadowing erased ancestral memory.Western Medicine: Miracles and Amnesia
Lebanon adopted Western medicine faster than many Western societies, because it was seen as superior. Hospitals and pharmacies replaced herbalists. Psychiatry replaced spiritual care. Generations began relying on endless pharmaceutical medications for anxiety, stress, and sleeplessness, SSRIs, benzodiazepines, and anti-depressants, while ancestral practices faded from daily life.Civil War: Survival Replaces Wellness
Decades of fight-or-flight rewired the Lebanese nervous system. Quick numbing, cigarettes, alcohol, nightlife, distraction, replaced stillness, healing and rituals People became restless, never slowing down, rarely going into nature, meditation, silence, or healthy community activities. Collective trauma made wellness feel unsafe. And yet, we took pride in being the best nightlife in the region, in endless parties and pulsing energy. Oh, how I wish we could turn this upside down replace relentless noise with quiet, exhaustion with presence, and spectacle with stillness.Modern Religions: From Body to Symbol
Christianity, Islam, and Druze traditions institutionalized, thinning their earth-based, embodied, and ritual practices. Monastery doctors became pharmacists; herbalists became stories. Chant, breath, fasting, and silence became symbolic, not lived.Global Capitalism: Wellness as Commodity
The 2000s brought Yoga studios, influencers, apps, and branding. Ancestral wisdom was replaced with aesthetic and content-driven versions.Social Media: Performance Over Lineage
Instagram and TikTok amplified surface-level spirituality. Unregulated healers thrived. Performance replaced lineage; ancestors’ knowledge was forgotten.
In short: Lebanon didn’t lose wellness—it lost the memory of where it came from. History, trauma, globalization, and modernity interrupted the chain
This is how Lebanon lost something deeply powerful
Not because it wasn’t strong.
But because history, trauma, modernity, and globalization interrupted the chain of transmission.
We didn’t lose wellness.
We lost the memory of where it came from.
Even as ancestral wisdom faded, a few pioneers tried to keep holistic practices alive. Mariam Nour was one of them, a visionary who introduced energy healing, nutrition, and consciousness work to Lebanon decades ago. She was laughed at, dismissed as eccentric, or treated as fringe. Yet her work planted seeds that, decades later, would blossom into a wider interest in alternative medicine, energy work, and mind-body practices. Without voices like hers, the country’s slow reconnection with healing traditions might never have taken root.
And then Yoga arrived!
After everything this land lived, war, fragmentation, globalization, the collapse of ancestral wisdom, Lebanon entered the 1990s and early 2000s hungry for something it couldn’t name.
The body was tense.
The psyche was exhausted.
The soul was malnourished.
People wanted breath.
People wanted pause.
People wanted to feel themselves again.
This is the soil into which Yoga first entered Lebanon in the early 2000s, carried quietly by expatriates, returning Lebanese women, and seekers who had traveled to India. At first, it was tiny, one or two teachers, a few mats, a few curious students. It was misunderstood by many, feared by some, and dismissed by others.
Some religious communities (both Christian and Muslim) initially resisted it, labeling it suspicious, foreign, or “too spiritual.”
To survive, Yoga had to disguise its soul.
So teachers softened the language, removed the Sanskrit, emphasized only the physical practice.
Yoga had to enter Lebanon as exercise, not as lineage.
But slowly, breath by breath, posture by posture, it began to find its place.
Why?
Because the Lebanese nervous system was starving for everything Yoga offered:
regulation
breath
slowness
quiet
somatic release
a space outside politics, religion, and chaos
Yoga became the first acceptable doorway for Lebanese people to re-enter their bodies after decades of trauma.
It became the socially permissible way to seek healing.
It was not just a trend.
It was a symptom, a response to collective pain.
The rise of energy healing and healers, a search for what was lost
As Yoga spread through Beirut, a parallel movement began emerging: Reiki, breathwork, somatic therapy, sound healing, plant medicines (often underground), meditation circles, women’s circles, trauma-informed practices.
People weren’t just seeking fitness.
They were seeking a language for their suffering.
They were seeking ancestral memory.
They were seeking what had been stolen by war and modernity.
And without realizing it, they were gravitating back toward things this land once knew intimately:
vibrational healing (like monastic chant)
plant medicine (like monastic herbalism and Prophetic medicine)
energy work (like Druze and Sufi traditions)
breathwork (like Greek and Islamic practices)
communal circles (like every village ritual we used to have)
It looked “new,” “imported,” or “alternative,” but anthropologically, it was simply our old wisdom returning wearing new clothes.
The sound healing revolution and the sanctuary I built
For years, Yoga dominated the wellness scene.
But something deeper was missing: vibration, frequency, breath, collective nervous system repair, something Lebanon desperately needed.
There was only one early sound healer here: Sofia.
Sound healing existed but lived on the margins, seen as too soft, too strange, too feminine, too unimportant.
And yet, sound is one of the oldest medicines on this land.
Our ancestors used chant, drums, rattles, prayer, liturgy, and vibration long before we had the word “healing.”
So I created a sanctuary.
Not another gym-yoga, not another performance, not another imported aesthetic.
A home for sound.
The first of its kind in Lebanon.
A temple of frequencies, vibration, breath, and presence.
A place where silence has permission to exist.
Where the nervous system can hear itself again.
Because this country is loud. Cigarettes clouded the air, traffic screamed, nightlife pulsed relentlessly, and the weight of survival pressed on everyone. A dominant techno-industrial masculinity filled our public spaces, loud DJs, heavy beats, inflated ego culture, artificial sound drowning out real musicians and real human emotion. A noise-based masculinity took over beaches, cafés, salons, restaurants, festivals, even children’s venues.
There was no space for softness.
No refuge for the feminine.
No sanctuary for the human nervous system.
So I built one in Baabdat forest.
A place where softness could return.
Where women and men could rest.
Where the land could breathe again.
My sanctuary is not a business.
It is a counter-culture.
A cultural repair.
An act of resistance.
And now a new wellness movement, beautiful and chaotic
Today, Lebanon is experiencing a wellness boom, Yoga studios, energy healers, retreats, content creators, breathwork guides, nervous system teachers, medicine circles.
It is beautiful.
It is messy.
It is unregulated.
It is sincere.
It is chaotic.
It is needed.
It is risky.
It is healing.
It is dangerous.
It is powerful.
It is confused.
But beneath the noise, something true is emerging:
People are remembering.
People are waking up.
People are seeking healing more urgently than ever.
Because Lebanon is a land of relentless wars, explosions, collective PTSD, and deep ancestral trauma.
People are turning toward wellness because their bodies are asking for medicine, medicine that hospitals cannot offer.
The essence survives
Despite the chaos, despite the aesthetic wellness trends, despite the unqualified healers, despite the content-driven spirituality,
the heart of it is real.
Lebanon is healing. Slowly, imperfectly, beautifully.
My sanctuary stands as a reminder:
Healing here is not new.
It is ancient.
It is ancestral.
It is a return.
A remembering.
A reclamation of something this land always knew.
We are not inventing wellness.
We are restoring it to a place that once lived it effortlessly.
And the work continues,
with sound, with breath, with ritual, with community,
and with the hope that one day, healing in Lebanon will become not an industry,
but a way of life again.
By Aya Hibri
AYANI SoundHealing
