The New Living Expo is back at the Marin Center April 17-19, and if you've ever wondered where the intersection of crystal healing, conscious capitalism, and $18 kombucha lies on a map, the answer is — unsurprisingly — Marin County.

For the uninitiated, the New Living Expo is the Bay Area's long-running showcase for all things alternative wellness, spirituality, and holistic living. Think lectures on astral projection, booths selling frequency-tuned water, and panels about achieving higher consciousness — all hosted in a county where the median home price hovers well above $1 million. Enlightenment, it turns out, has a pretty high cost of living.

Now, look — we're liberty-minded folks here at The Dissent. If you want to spend your weekend exploring sound baths and aura photography, that is absolutely your prerogative. Free people making free choices with their own money is kind of our whole thing. No judgment.

But we'd be lying if we said there wasn't something deeply, almost poetically Bay Area about a wellness expo thriving in one of the wealthiest counties in California while San Francisco proper struggles with basics like keeping streets clean and transit running on time. Marin residents get to optimize their chakras while the rest of us optimize our commute around yet another Muni delay.

The expo typically draws a decent crowd and features a mix of speakers ranging from legitimate alternative health practitioners to, well, people who are very confident about things that are very hard to verify. It's a free market of ideas in the most literal sense — and some of those ideas cost $300 for a weekend pass.

If you're curious, it runs all weekend. Just don't forget to bring your wallet. Spiritual awakening isn't cheap in the Bay Area — but then again, what is?