Get a taste of the well life – come to the Taster Session
Here’s a date for your diary: 2 March at 8pm (GMT). That’s when The Well Person Course’s Taster Session kicks off. We’ll be exploring some key questions, including….What does it mean to be “well”? Who is well in our society? What does the well-lived life look like anyway, and how do I become more well?
Good questions, and the taster session begins to address them. But we can go further. What if we are physically well, but struggling with our mental, relational and spiritual health? Which is most important, and which should we focus on?
So what is wellness all about?
The World Health Organisation’s defines health in this way: it’s a “state of complete physical, mental and social wellbeing and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity” (spiritual, occupational and environmental aspects were added later).
So wellbeing is much more than physical health. It involves the whole person; and it is a real, tangible thing, not something you end up with when there’s no disease.
So, what is this health, this wellbeing? And how do we discover it? That is what the taster is all about…
The course itself consists of six sessions. Here’s a taste of the first two (the rest will come in my next blog)…
Register for the Taster Session
Session 1: What does a well-lived life look like?
We Westerners are well known for our ability to fix things – that’s what we do. And in the realms of physical health and material wealth we have done rather well, for example, in economics, science or medicine.
But some problems have proved more difficult to “fix”
….much more difficult. They lie in the less visibly material domains of mental health, relationships, and meaning. In our culture, we use words such as health, wellbeing and happiness very freely, but we tend to think of them in material terms. If we have health, wealth and pleasure, all will be well – or so the story goes. But a brief look at the statistics on anxiety, depression and loneliness leaves us wondering whether something is missing.
Session 2: Physically well
We take so much for granted in life – the air we breathe, the natural world around us…and our amazing bodies. They function in extraordinary ways throughout our lives. In this session we marvel at some of these endowments and begin to consider how we can keep them healthy and well for the long term.
Maintaining physical health need not cost the earth..
…but it does require something from us. The foods we eat, the sleep we take and exercise we engage in all contribute to our wellbeing – and not just physically. Once again, looking after one part of our lives (our bodies) results in benefits across the whole of our lives – a basic theme of the entire course.
