Collective Healing: It’s All Connected

Missed the BWF Summit? Don’t worry! Check out this guest post by wellness copywriter, Octavia Hartland, which captures our first panel - It’s all connected: How can we move beyond personal healing and towards collective care?

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The global Wellness industry is worth $trillions, yet collectively and individually the world is not well. With the inaugural Brighton Wellness Festival’s mission ‘to change up the way we think about wellness’, it was fitting that it formed the question for the festival’s first panel talk: It’s All Connected: How can we move beyond personal healing to collective care?

Festival-goers gathered at Platform 9 in Hove and taking to the stage for this first talk, was Megan Cooper (therapist for change-makers), who was joined by Matt Bagwell - Coach and breathwork instructor; Kaia Allen-Bevan - Multi-Award-Winning Activist; and Dr. Gemma Houldey - Wellness and social justice expert.

Megan began proceedings by quoting Matt, that ‘to be well is a global humanitarian challenge.’

Gemma unpacked this through her first-hand experiences of burnout after working in humanitarian crises in Palestine and Uganda. It led her to seek out wellness spaces, only to find them “fluffy, warm and welcoming”, but avoiding the injustices happening all around us. She feels: “It’s an excuse to say your higher wellbeing is being disrupted because someone has said the word Genocide.” By ignoring uncomfortable truths, we lose accountability.

Kaia says we can heal both ourselves and the world, and in turn, change the way we think about wellness. We need to: “foster the friendships we have, nurture them. Heal connections we are in to heal the planet”. Healing ourselves, our communities, and the planet aren’t and shouldn’t be, separate acts.

Megan: “Everything we can create here, chips away at the big macro system on a micro level.” Having a conversation with your friend, neighbour, colleague, family, creates a ripple effect that can build momentum and change. And for Megan and Kaia, the idea of perfectionism in wellness feeds into the problem.

Kaia: “We expect people to show up as perfect, as the best version of themselves. But this is not wellness. Saying ‘Yeah I’m fine’ is so British, but we need to hold spaces for uncomfortableness.”

For Gemma, self-care and collective care are both important and it’s not just about the people in the wellness classes. Yoga teachers are rushing from class to class, giving without getting support themselves. And this is also true in the workplace: “many wellness mechanisms consist of a stress management workshop, but then it’s back to work as if nothing happened. We need to challenge that so that people can say ‘I’m knackered, I made a mistake, I need help, I don't have the answer.’”

If all that wasn’t enough, the panel saw another big problem with the Wellness industry. All too often it’s shaped by ‘who can afford to be well’. Wellness is exclusive, rather than inclusive, and highly contradictory. Practices are usually taken from other cultures (e.g., yoga and meditation from the Far East), but divorced from their roots and repackaged for mostly white, middle-class audiences.

As Megan noted, there was barely time to scratch the surface of these huge issues, but with just ten minutes left, she opened up the floor to the audience's questions.

First was the question of how we can support young adults trying to navigate our complicated world?

Matt highlighted listening over preaching to the young, and viewing the world through their lens. He’s currently involved in a project in Manchester where heat is captured from data centres and given to community swimming pools. By “creating spaces for young people based on what they care about and what they want to do… [we create] positive environments for them to have these conversations.”

Kaia works with schools, and stressed the importance of having honest conversations with young people, the earlier the better. “The more we do this the more we normalise these difficult conversations.”

The next question was about how we can develop collective care in Brighton, one of the UK’s most unequal cities?

Kaia believes that the wellness space is made for these conversations. “It’s important that if you walk into a yoga space, you have these conversations as well as the lesson. Talk about the state of the world. It’s productive and allows people to unveil and vent. We can’t bypass it to practise, otherwise we will walk out feeling as heavy as when we entered.”

“Radical empathy,” concluded Gemma. “Come into conversations with an open heart whilst keeping the values we believe in. Listen and understand the other side. Bring in hope and joy, it doesn’t need to be all miserable. Dance, sing, play!”

And from Kaia: “I want to be well enough to challenge the systems at play.”

Bringing the panel to a close, Matt led us through a short breathwork journey, allowing us to all reflect collectively on why we came here. It was a heavy but inspiring hour, armed with practical solutions of how we can address these systemic issues, and we ended on a (calm and collective) high.