In front of a large stage at Sydney’s International Convention Centre, a woman is singing with her eyes closed. In a long satin mauve gown and a headdress with artificial flowers and twigs standing on end, she walks slowly down the aisle, bisecting rows of black plastic chairs. Her song is wordless, operatic and, in no small way, quite beautiful.

As she nears the end of the aisle, the singer turns right at one of the rows, stands behind a woman, raises her arm and floats a hand, palm down, above her head. There, she continues to sing. Both women, like most others in the audience, remain still and keep their eyes reverently closed. They are all here for the “Sound Healing Journey”.

The singer climbs back on to the stage and gestures upwards, indicating to the sound technician to change the levels. Then her wordless song starts to feature words, but I cannot identify the language; it may not be a language at all. All the while the audience remains motionless and serious.

The Sound Healing Journey takes the 11.30am slot on the main stage on Thursday at the annual Mind Body Spirit festival. It is the first of four days of the event, at which organisers expect 18,000 people to pass through its doors. Next month the festival moves to Melbourne and in February it will return to Brisbane. It features talks, 200 exhibitors and workshops focused on wellness, alternative therapies and things that once would have been called “new age”.

By its own description it is Australia’s “largest health, wellbeing and natural therapies” event and on this sunny weekday morning, the hall is busy predominantly with women wandering alone and in small groups up and down the rows of exhibitors. There is a stall selling hair straighteners and curlers and another selling moringa supplements (advertising benefits including gut health, energy, immunity boosting, heart and brain health, bone health and skin, hair and eye health). There is Indigenous art and a book stall with piles of books on spells and tarot. Further along is a stall featuring a large poster of a man in thick black glasses, with a stethoscope and white lab coat; it is promoting “natural health teleheath” (online cannabis prescriptions).

There is an unknowable number of crystals and spirit animal drawings. There is a meditation stall featuring an altar on which “ignited” water sits in glass bottles. Rows of natural tinctures guide the eye with labels like “menopause”, “neurological conditions”, “blindness” and “tumours”. There are natural yoga products and there are aggressive yoga products (“namaste the fuck away”). There are Royale Psychic showbags. There is organic skincare and singing crystal pyramid therapy. There are artisanal smoked olives from New Zealand. There is a gratitude zone. There are devices that claim to counteract the effects of 5G in the home.

“It’s probably more than I expected,” says Monique, a young first-time Mind Body Spirit festival-goer. She wears a deep green stone in a pendant around her neck. She is interested in the crystals; she wears some for healing and uses others for decoration. “I’ve been on a little bit of a spiritual journey, so I just thought this would be fun. Have a look around, spend a lot of money.”

Monique’s friend, Frankie, has been before; she finds things at the festival she can’t get elsewhere. Books and jewellery, mostly.

Maria, meanwhile, has been coming for 20 years. Thursdays are a good day, she says, because the weekends can be a madhouse – crowded with people. She has come for the CBD gummies (and discovered she’s accidentally been taking a double dose), but she loves the crystals and the oil perfume. She is interested in health, in looking after herself. Mostly, she says, “I like the healing.”

She has come from a stall where healers free negative thoughts from the head “with their hands … they touch your forehead. Our hands have got a lot of healing – some people know they’ve got healing in their hands, some people don’t.”

“It basically puts your body back into state,” Maria says. “We live in a very toxic society. You know, the media, the news – some of it’s fake. You can tell. It’s really fake. It’s hard to trust, because a lot of people are trying to sell you stuff.”

Maria says she “probably” trusts some of the exhibitors at the festival more than her GP. She has had a lot of experiences, she says, which have caused her not to trust. Vaccination mandates are a point of concern, as was the management and reporting of the pandemic. “The media were controlled,” she says. “Over the years, I seem to get the information that I require.”

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Over the course of its three-decade history, a significant chunk of what might have been lumped in the Mind Body Spirit wheelhouse – non-western medicine, meditation, yoga, concern about toxins, the idea of food as medicine – has become embedded in mainstream culture in wealthy western societies. Outside the convention centre, an electronic billboard advertises lunch-break meditation and movement classes at the Chinese Gardens opposite the convention centre and later this month the centre will host a conversation with the actor turned “wellness guru” Gwyneth Paltrow, with tickets starting at $100 a pop. Scientists investigate the healing potential of turmeric, psychiatrists prescribe psilocybin and in the UK politicians push for a meditation room to be installed in parliament.

But there is scepticism too. Alongside the many thousand festival attendees that descend on Sydney and will next month congregate in Melbourne, there is also in attendance a small band of self-professed sceptics. Sue Ieraci, an emergency physician, is attending Mind Body Spirit for the first time. She became interested in alternative medicines and wellness after encountering the anti-vaccination movement in her practice.

She has come to “gather data” with other members of the Australian Skeptics (spelled with a “k” in the American way), a Sydney group who meet monthly in a pub and expresses concern about claims of the paranormal or alternative healing – of which there are many at the festival.

Exhibitions and Events Australia, which runs the Mind Body Spirit festival, told Guardian Australia that it discusses with exhibitors and speakers in detail what they will be promoting. “We do our due diligence – investigating websites and social media – to ensure we do not permit anyone into our festival claiming they can cure certain ailments,” the company said.

At the Mind Body Spirit festival, broadly accepted wellness sits alongside the non-religious spiritual; the seeking of something natural alongside the seeking of something, for want of a better word, magical – or beyond the natural. Through it runs a thin vein of distrust of the establishment and a much thicker artery of commerce.

Ieraci has concerns about the health promises made and a lesser concern on a consumer affairs level, about truth in advertising. But she thinks for the most part those selling products and services from tarot to crystals are doing so in good faith – they believe in what they’re doing. Many only want to help heal.

“You know as a clinician that when you help people you get this lovely glowing feeling,” Ieraci says. “You feel validated. I’ve actually made myself not less sceptical, but less cynical, by understanding that human nature part; there are a lot of rewards in helping people, and everyone wants to help others.”

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The psychic reading room is one of the biggest drawcards of the festival and has been a constant feature since its launch in Australia in 1989. At the Sydney event this year they have 60 psychics working over the four days, each one vetted personally by the reading room organiser, Merv Harvey (“I can tell in 30 seconds if they’re just in it for the money”). Harvey was an actuary who retrained after his mother brought him some astrology books when he was in hospital recovering from appendicitis. The numbers made sense to him and he began to do readings for the nurses – “How did you know that?” they’d ask him. He became hooked.

Readers sit at rows and rows of small tables, five across and eight deep, offering tarot, palmistry, astrology or psychic communication. At each table, there is quiet and intense exchange. At one, a woman leans forward to listen as a reader speaks. She takes up a crumpled white tissue and wipes her eyes but does not look away from the reader.

People might be drawn to a psychic, says Harvey, when an issue comes up in their life and they might not feel they have anyone to talk to. It could be issues of work, relationships, an unwell parent or a difficult choice. “Basically, when there’s a doubt in someone’s mind.”

“In real life we don’t get people we can talk to about our fears and emotions,” he says. Then a person comes to a psychic “and a random person lays out some cards and all of a sudden you get goosebumps”.

People, he says, will return to him years after a reading and thank him for the guidance he provided. He doesn’t usually remember the reading but is proud of the response it inspired in others.

“I have loved this festival for 30 years,” he says. “Mind, body, spirit – those three things combined,” he says. “What else is there?”