Last summer I went to see Alanis Morissette with my dear friend Nicki. She didn’t speak one word the entire night. She just sang. Song after song after song. It was so good.
But it was something behind the screen content that stopped me in my tracks…
I saw her again in Crystal Palace the weekend just gone, I also saw Skunk Anansie… yes they were epic!
Anyway Alanis has the same message, and it sang to my heart again…
Wholeness over wellness.
You might think, Ok but what does that even mean, well here it is…
My problem with wellness
I’ll be honest with you, I struggle to sit within the wellness industry. And that’s been bubbling for a couple of years now, if I’m truthful about it.
Because within wellness there is always this undercurrent of fixing. Of optimising. Of getting to some perfect version of yourself that is always just slightly out of reach. There’s a level of perfectionism baked into this industry that I have spent years trying to release from myself.
Hands up. I have said it in past content. I am a recovering perfectionist. And the wellness industry does not help with that.
So I’ve been asking myself… does my work actually belong here?
Here’s what I know about breath and menstrual cycles
I work intimately with two things: breath and menstrual cycles.
And here’s the thing about both of them. They are whole things.
We don’t only experience the good parts of our breath. We don’t only experience the ‘easy’ phases of our menstrual cycle. We experience all of it. The expansive and the contracted. The light and the dark. The rise and the fall. The soft exhale and the sharp inhale when something catches us off guard.
All of it is needed, there is no one without the other.
We cannot be always in one state of energetic productiveness, we have to also slow down and rest. We cannot deny the darker sides of ourselves and call that wellness. We cannot ignore our period and pretend we’re always ovulating. We cannot fix our way to being whole.
Wholeness asks us to include it all. To move through it all. To honour it all.
That’s a completely different way of being, not an easy one to connect with when the world is telling you, you have to be perfect.
So here’s where I’m landing
I’m done calling myself part of the wellness industry.
I’m in the wholeness industry now.
Actually… and the word industry is a whole other conversation for another day… I’m just in wholeness. Full stop.
Because that’s what this work has always been about. Not fixing. Not optimising. Not getting you to some perfect version of yourself.
Just helping you come home to all of yourself. Your messy, magical self. The bleeding and the blooming. The retreating and the expanding.
All of it.
That’s wholeness. And that’s where I live now.