What does it mean to be well?
I don't know about you but staying well in the world today needs my full attention.
Gone are the days when a yoga class and meditation gets you back to a place of balance - instead our bodies, energy, outlook and mental health all require something much deeper. I've been trying to get creative about it recently - this week my mornings have started with dancing to 80s tunes in my lounge for 20 minutes followed by some check-ins with friends who are also struggling to process all that's happening in the world. Solidarity in dancing and rambling voicenotes to each other is surprisingly energising!
We've been thinking about our narrative around workplace wellbeing and what that actually means in the world we live in today where:
- we're reaching moral fatigue and ethical exhaustion with relentless challenges
- people are over-stimulated and under-equipped to navigate difficulties well
- polarisation is changing our ability to speak up, speak out, or speak at all
- fear and anxiety are growing - climate concern, the rising right, political collapse, wars and genocides, identity based attack - the list feels like its growing
We're just so ill equipped to know how to support this in workplaces and the narrative that wellbeing is yours alone to address and "fix" no longer feels sufficient as an organisational response. Whether leaders or team members, we are all struggling. One client said to me recently 'we all have pain right now' which was an insight that has really stayed with me. At a recent event I attended, one of the speakers, Payal, spoke of the Global North being in deep depression about what it's losing and the Global South being full of optimism about the future it's gaining and it's a reflection I'm thinking more about.
How do we hold an awareness of the horrors unfolding across the globe and continue working toward a more just and equitable world without completely burning out?
How do we shift the responsibility to be well from individual to collective, with shared investment in supporting one another's wellness? And what does this mean for leaders developing wellbeing support for teams?
How do we evolve our understanding of what is needed to stay well, embracing different kinds of support that embraces somatic awareness, decolonised approaches to care, creative expression, and genuine community connection?
The below resources and practices are designed to help cultivate a deeper, more authentic form of wellbeing within your organisation, transforming how you care for yourselves and each other in meaningful and sustainable ways.
SOMETHING TO JOIN
Join our summer workshop series on Radical Restoration
In response to this enquiry we have developed a programme of support in collaboration with our collective. Radical Restoration is a deep, embodied, creative journey into true wellbeing — rooted in community care, decolonised approaches to healing, and designed to reconnect us to the courage we need to imagine better futures.
We will be offering this as a series of four 90-minute workshops every other week, beginning in June, and running through July. We'd love you to join all four if you can, to get the full benefit of the experience we've designed for you.
This is for anyone who feels they are looking for some additional support - our inclusive spaces are always open and welcoming to all who share our belief that we need to be well and resourced to create positive change and impact for others.
Dive into intuitive art-making combined with somatic practices guided by Poonam, practice collaging with Eloise as a powerful method to process and reveal the unseen or unsaid, play with poetry with Nikita as a transformative tool for reflection, and engage with Letesia to explore "Integrity as Wellness". Each session offers a unique opportunity to restore and nourish yourself in community, cultivating deeper insight and connection.
If you are thinking - 'this isn't for me, I'm not creative', then this is especially for you. These are highly accessible sessions and there's no need to let this be a barrier to benefiting from what will be really nourishing workshops.
SOMETHING TO LISTEN TO
Tricia Hersey on The Toxic World of Productivity
We've highlighted Tricia Hersey’s transformative ideas in the past, and her insights continue to resonate deeply—making her work well worth revisiting. In this illuminating podcast episode of What They Don't Tell Us Hersey, founder of The Nap Ministry and author of "Rest Is Resistance," explores how grind culture is rooted in oppressive systems that disconnect us from genuine wellbeing.
She challenges conventional notions of productivity, offering rest not merely as individual self-care but as a collective, radical act of resistance - essential for our ability to imagine new ways of being. We particularly love how Tricia frames rest as an active, healing practice; a slow de-programming from white supremacy culture and capitalism. As Tricia says, "the more you rest, the more you wake up to the systems that aren't serving you."
This conversation provides crucial insights for organisations and individuals seeking to transform their approach to wellbeing, encouraging practices rooted in somatic awareness, communal care, and decolonised, liberatory frameworks.
SOMETHING TO READ
Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer
In Braiding Sweetgrass Robin Wall Kimmerer weaves together Indigenous wisdom, ecological science, and personal storytelling to remind us that true wellbeing arises from our interconnectedness with each other and the earth. Through beautifully crafted narratives, she offers a profound invitation to move beyond individualistic perspectives and toward a collective, reciprocal approach to care and healing.
As she notes in the preface, the book is "an intertwining of science, spirit, and story—old stories and new ones that can be medicine for our broken relationship with earth, a pharmacopoeia of healing stories that allow us to imagine a different relationship, in which people and land are good medicine for each other." It's an essential read for organisations and individuals seeking deeper, more authentic pathways to collective healing and sustainable wellbeing.
SOMETHING TO WATCH
The Friendship Bench: Healing through stories
In this video, psychiatrist Dixon Chibanda, founder of the Friendship Bench initiative, highlights how authentic wellbeing arises through storytelling, collective healing, and community connection.
Sharing insights from the early days of the Friendship Bench, Chibanda describes the powerful lessons he learned from the original 14 grandmothers engaged in the project. They emphasised the importance of stories as a powerful connecting force, as opposed to the more traditional model of a clinical diagnosis, followed by a treatment plan.
At its core, the Friendship Bench demonstrates that true wellbeing and healing emerge not from isolated self-care, but through mutual listening, which creates a sense of belonging, providing a much needed antidote to the epidemic of loneliness pervasive in contemporary life.
