Rainn Wilson explains how a Julianne Hough headline inspired his new book on spirituality
It was a 2020 headline that caught actor Rainn Wilson’s attention. A celebrity (Julianne Hough, he confirms) went through a spiritual transformation in Davos, Switzerland in which “stuck” energy was removed from her body by John Amaral, an energy practitioner featured on Gwyneth Paltrow’s The Goop Lab. Headlines circulated describing her treatment as an “energy exorcism” that made her “scream and writhe.”
“I’m like, ‘How is this spiritual?’” Wilson, 57, tells USA TODAY from his Washington state home. “To me, that has nothing to do with spirituality. It’s not about ghosts and shamans and demons. So it was important to define our terms.”
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The terms Wilson sought to define eventually turned into his new book, “Soul Boom: Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution” (Hachette Go, 288 pp., out now). And he believes regardless of how you practice spirituality, anyone can lead said revolution.
“The most important of the seven pillars for a spiritual revolution is to foster joy and squash cynicism,” he says. “It’s super important that if we want change, that we start in our own hearts and we stay optimistic.”
Through life experiences and his Baháʼí faith, which embraces an essential unity of all religions and the unity of humanity, Wilson takes readers on a 10-chapter journey that touches on how spirituality can be found in everything from official religious texts to quotes from Captain James T. Kirk, the “Star Trek” character.
Wilson is plenty introspective in the book too, reflecting on his bouts with materialism (like when he panic-purchased Japanese soybeans during 2020 lockdown shortages) to the death of his father later that year.
“(My father’s) body was just a vessel,” the actor says he realized. “He rode around in this really wonderful, silly, fun, handsome vessel for all of his life. Why are we here riding around in these meat suits on planet Earth? Those are the kind of big questions that I love to ask.”
