05/15/2025
What is wellness?
We live in a world that has manufactured and sold us wellness. With products, experiences, treatments and practices that lead to calm, relaxation and comfort.
I think wellness is inherent in all of us. It is part of our nature. It is instinctual. It is alive yet present. It It is more than embodiment, the attunement to the details of our bodily states and actions. It is more than attention to details without judgment. It is more than breath awareness.
All humans need to have states of emotional safety, security and a sense of belonging to BE. So embodiment can be seen as human need and a right that occurs naturally. If we have created and that prioritised states of stress, pressure and anxiety as normalised how far have we shifted from our innate human needs? We cannot then be well and so wellness becomes an adjunct to our lives, something we add to tell ourselves we are taking care of self, our wellness.
If we move, we move our body. The body knows this system of movement and action. It has memories, associations and pleasure in moving. Movement that is not conscious is repetitive, mind constructed and goal oriented. Bringing movement to consciousness, to attention to its details, its expressions and communication, its sensing, its emoting, its relating, finding the between, balancing, its breathing and our awareness of our direct life experience is our human need. I believe we have lost this wellness as we have developed and evolved as human beings in our technological and consumeristic world.
Christine Caldwell uses the term ‘bodyfulness’ as a “working towards our potential as a whole human animal that breathes as well as thinks, moves as well as sits still, takes action as well as considers, and exist not just because it thinks but because it dances, stretches, bounces, gazes, focuses and attunes to other.”
Welcome your innate wellness, whatever it might be now, later, tomorrow or next week.