Sedona, a town among the red sandstone formations of northern Arizona, became in the late twentieth century a leading centre of New Age spirituality, built around the idea that particular places there concentrate spiritual energy.
The vortex idea
The distinctive claim attached to Sedona is that of energy "vortexes", specific sites, often named for nearby formations such as Bell Rock and Cathedral Rock, held to be points where subtle earth energies are concentrated and conducive to meditation, healing and personal transformation. This is a modern belief: the vortex concept was popularised at Sedona in the early 1980s, particularly through the work of the psychic Page Bryant, and it drew on wider New Age currents. It is a matter of belief and experience rather than of measurable physical fact; no distinctive energy has been detected, and the geology of the region has straightforward natural explanations. The account here describes the belief, without endorsing its physical claims.
Growth of the scene
The 1987 Harmonic Convergence, a globally coordinated New Age event, drew large gatherings to Sedona and cemented its reputation. The town now supports a substantial industry of retreat centres, healers, guides, crystal shops and practitioners of many alternative paths, and it attracts spiritual seekers, artists and tourists in large numbers.
The older claims on the land
The red-rock country is also the ancestral land of Indigenous peoples, including the Yavapai and Apache and, more anciently, ancestral Puebloan communities whose relationship to these places long predates and differs entirely from the New Age framing; the visible cliff dwellings and rock art in the region belong to that older history. Presented honestly, Sedona is a place where a genuinely striking natural landscape carries two quite separate things: the deep and continuing significance it holds for Native peoples, and a distinct, recent, commercially organised New Age spirituality that should not be conflated with it.