As I recently added the term ‘wellbeing’ to my business name, many people have asked why not use the term ‘wellness’ as it is such a current buzzword . So I thought I would define wellness and wellbeing so you can see my thought process!
Wellness can be fairly easily defined. It is used to describe a healthy state of living where a person is not in chronic ill health. Fairly straightforward!
The word has become part of our common language, with even large corporations introducing wellness packages for their employees.
More recently, mental health has been incorporated into wellness so that the approach to wellness is a body and mind thing, not just a physical one. Which is great! There’s certainly nothing wrong with that.
But ‘wellbeing’ on the other hand goes a step further. It is truly a more holistic way to approach a healthy AND happy lifestyle.
Imagine someone who goes to the gym regularly, does their meditation every day, eats well and sleeps their allotted eight hours a night.
Are they intrinsically happy because of all of this? Not necessarily.
From the outside, they may certainly be healthy, but on the inside, they might hate their job, have no sense of being part of a community, no sense of purpose, and live with a dark cloud hanging over them. They might feel pleasure occasionally, but are they content?
For me, what makes the difference here is a spirituality of some kind.
And this of course means different things to different people. For me, leading a spiritual life means connecting and leaning into something higher than yourself. It’s about recognising that absolutely everything is interconnected. When you do that, you automatically start to cultivate more compassion. It’s about letting go of the ego, not being led exclusively by your own wants and needs. It’s about living for happiness rather than pleasure. It’s about living in close connection to Mother Earth and her cycles.
The closer we get to nature, the more in tune we are to the ebb and flow of the energy of the seasons, the more we can do the same with ourselves and almost as a by-product, the more likely we are to look after the planet we are living on.
Which, I think we can all agree, can only be a good thing.
How you define wellness may be different to me. It is, after all, a pretty new word when all is said and done. And it’s definition, I’m sure, will continue to evolve just as we will continue to evolve and need different things FROM our wellness.
If, like me, you are looking for something a little deeper and can dig my definition of wellBEING, why not some and join my Facebook Group The Resilient Yogi Club for regular wellbeing tips and tricks?