What is wellness, really?
On health and well-being in times of collapse
“So much of the current rhetoric about healing is wedded to progress and to narrative. But the body is not a story.”
—Sophie Strand (from The Flowering Wand)
I’ve been rather quiet in this space for the past few weeks. If you read my last post, you’ll know that I attended a mindfulness retreat in Devon, UK at the end of July. I spent six days with a lovely group of people in a state of serenity and calm, enjoying time in nature, eating nourishing meals, practicing silent meditations, and getting plenty of rest. By the end of the week, I felt more deeply rested than I have felt in years.
Coming home, however, has been anything but restful. In fact, it has had such an alarming effect on my nervous system that is has called into question all the notions of “wellness” I used to have. Considering that my physical state has been rather poor for most of this year as I’ve been recovering from an excess of stress, it makes sense that my understanding of what “well” feels like is pretty off base these days. I haven’t felt “well” in years and, until a few weeks ago, I honestly couldn’t remember what it felt like.
At the end of the retreat, however, I felt so good that I really believed I had finally found it again. This is what “well” feels like! I felt calm and at ease; my sleep was brilliant and I woke up energised. My mind felt clear and I felt in tune with my mind and body and soul. I honestly forgot it was possible to feel this way, and as we approached the end of the retreat, I vowed to try and keep this feeling alive.
Suffice it to say, I failed. Coming back home to the busy city overwhelmed me completely. The constant street traffic outside our window and the regular sound of enormous jets flying overhead as they prepared to land at Europe’s busiest airport, just 12km away, presented such an assault on my senses that the deep sense of rest I had felt merely two days prior vanished in an instant. I felt anxious, irritable, exhausted, and overwhelmed. I even came down with a mysterious illness that knocked me out for about 36 hours. I had absolutely no symptoms other than deep physical exhaustion and the fact that I “looked quite ill,” according to my husband. I’m not sure if it was an actual virus or if my body had merely decided that everything was just too much.
In less than 72 hours, I had gone from feeling the best I had felt in years to feeling the worst I had felt in the past several months. I felt like a boomerang that just got a taste of that sweet nectar of “wellness” before the forces of physics turned me on my axis and brought me right back to where I started.
“We are not different from the environments we live inside.”
Since the city became eerily quiet in March 2020, at the start of the pandemic, it has become quite apparent to me how much my nervous system is affected by city life. I think, in some way, I always knew this; being in the mountains and wide-open wild spaces felt so healing for me. So much so, in fact, that I never wanted to leave the mountains and always missed the great outdoors when I returned to the city. But I foolishly believed that living in the mountains was some sort of pipe dream that could only be achieved at retirement age. Because, quite frankly, this is what I had been taught to believe. Cities are where the jobs are.
As a city-dwelling child, I thought I’d live in a city forever. And then, in my 20s, I thought I’d live in a city until I retired. And then, as I reached my 30s, I thought I’d live in a city at least until I had made something of my career, and then maybe move to the countryside. Or better, the mountains. And only now am I realising that, not only can I move to the mountains whenever I fucking want (i.e. NOW), I actually owe it to myself to do so. Or at the very least, to move away from the city as soon as possible. Because I simply cannot remain here without risking potentially permanent damage to my physical and mental well-being.
The sad thing is, it took me 35 years to arrive at this conclusion. You might say that I’m lucky to have figured this out by 35, and sure, some people don’t learn these types of things about themselves until much later in life. But the thing is, I already knew. I knew, deep down, but I ignored it because I’ve been told, over and over again since as early as I can remember, that I’m not supposed to listen to my intuition. Sure, my feelings are there for a reason, but they’re the backup to logic, rationality, and cold, hard data.
As writer Sophie Strand puts it in her book, The Flowering Wand,
“The problem is that our culture teaches us how to distrust ourselves. We no longer know how to identify healing plants, how to grow our own food, or how to build our own homes. We are told so consistently to work past physical pain and to ignore the “advice” of our own bodies that we are numb to the vital information our nervous and immune systems are trying to impart every day. When we ignore warning signs for long enough, they can manifest as physical disease.”
Having been on medical leave from work for half a year now, I’ve been meeting regularly with a doctor to check in on how I’m progressing in my recovery. (Again, there’s that nasty word: progress. As if human well-being can be charted on a graph.) That said, he did offer some useful insights on what actually happens physiologically when we experience excessive stress and the general trends that I might expect to experience during recovery. What these trends don’t show, however, is the likelihood that people will fully recover and remain that way. And considering the stress I feel from simply living in this busy city, I’m not even sure I will fully recover at all while I am in this current environment.
On the plus side, there have been some positive changes, the biggest one being that I am much more in tune with the signals I’m getting from my body. At the end of June, my husband and I had a big wedding party, during which we spent several days with family and other out-of-towners. I was beyond exhausted afterwards, to such a degree that I basically spent the next week in bed.
I spoke to the doctor during this week of exhaustion, and he confirmed that crowds, big events, and days packed with socialising are “a lot to handle” even for fully healthy people and that it’s good that I’m more in tune with my body’s signals that tell me when it’s too much for me. But then, why is this not a bigger conversation? Why are doctors waiting until we are already ill to tell us that maybe we should change the way we are living? Why isn’t there some huge campaign by medical professionals telling all of us city dwellers that maybe we should just fucking stop already?!
Our nervous systems are not designed for this. We are not designed to be invisible cogs in enormous machines and faceless people moving through crowds with no relationship to anyone or anything around us. It is unnatural. And yet, we keep doing it. Even doctors seem to recognise that this type of “go, go, go” behaviour isn’t good for us, but our medical system is not designed for prevention, so we only start to recognise these things after we become sick.
As Sophie Strand says,
“We are not different from the environments we live inside.”
The city environments in which more than half the world’s population resides are places of excess, of constant movement, of endless growth, of noise, of pollution. Our bodies mimic these environments, which would explain the excess fat and sugar many people ingest as a result of the processed food they eat; the food they eat because they are too busy constantly moving to make a proper meal for themselves; which eventually leads to some form of endless growth, be it depressive or anxious symptoms, or worse, cancer; which creates more noise, either inside our own heads or from the machines that are keeping us alive; which requires us to take drugs that leave our bodies polluted. Because nothing comes without a cost.
It’s a bleak reality, but a reality nonetheless. No wonder we’re in a mental health crisis.
“We are all increasingly strangers in the home of our own bodies.”
After returning home from my retreat, while I was still in the depths of my un-wellness, I caught up on an online session I had missed with Sophie Strand. As seems to be the case with these types of things, the session felt so timely and just what I needed in that moment. Sophie spoke about stories and decomposition and composting old and outdated narratives—but she also spoke at length about wellness and illness and her degenerative autoimmune disease.
Sophie is a true artist and poet. Her way with words and the tales she weaves and brings to life are absolutely stunning. Having just finished her book, The Flowering Wand, I am in awe of her. But mostly, I am in awe of how open and honest she is about her own disability and health struggles.
In a recent Instagram post, she said,
“I have come to the conclusion that I may not live long enough to finish all the writing and stories I want to tell.”
For a young person to be so open about her own death is already surprising. But on top of that, I find it inspiring that she is using her time on earth to seed as many stories as she can while also commenting on the brokenness of our medical and social systems. I found Sophie’s openness to be a breath of fresh air and a poignant reminder that life is simply too short not to share all of ourselves with the people (and more-than-human beings) that matter to us.
I’ve been following Sophie’s work for some time now. Her writing profile describes her as a writer who “focuses on the intersection of spirituality, storytelling, and ecology.” But having read her blog and now her book, I’ve noticed a thread through much of her work about wellness, wholeness, and healing. (She is also working on a forthcoming book about ecology and disability, which I am eagerly awaiting.) Given Sophie’s disability, it makes sense that there would be an underlying tone in her work about illness and healing. But she also creates a strong connection between this theme and ecology, which she has spoken to in podcast conversations and other online sessions in the past. Because, as many of us in the West seem to have forgotten, we are part of the local ecology, like it or not.
For me, pondering this relationship between wellness (or un-wellness) and ecology has led me to the following questions:
What does it mean to be “well” in this time of ecological collapse? How can we be well when the earthly systems of which we are a part are breaking down all around us?
It is not enough that we are already separated from our own bodies and intuition. Now the entire earth system of which we are an integral part is experiencing unprecedented and dramatic changes, and this affects us, too, whether we realise it or not. When the earth is “at ease,” perhaps it’s possible to get away with some unnatural behaviours, like dwelling in cities or flying in metal tubes to other continents. But now the earth is in turmoil, and it’s showing up in the inner turmoil many of us are experiencing on a daily basis. It is completely logical that we would feel unwell when our home planet, to which we are deeply connected on a cellular and atomic level, is showing increasing symptoms of distress.
“We are not different from the environments we live inside.”
Very few of my peers are “doing well,” by their own estimation. Most people I know are unwell, in some form, be it physically or mentally. And almost everyone I know is so damn tired. How could we not be? What the fuck are we all doing?
I felt really good in those six days at the retreat, but now I feel awful again. And I know I need to feel good in order to be useful to the world, the cause, etc. But I also know that my week on retreat was exactly that: a retreat. I was hiding from the truth, ignoring the reality, avoiding the things that are hard to look at. And that can be healing when done in small doses. But how can we hold both? Both the ability to maintain our well-being as well as the reality of ecological collapse?
As we approach the collapse of the systems that hold us—ecologically, socially, politically, economically—we, too, are feeling those symptoms of collapse in our individual and collective well-being. Our house is falling apart; of course we’re not ok. But in order to rebuild our house stronger and more sustainably and more communally than before, we need to feel well. Because unwell people cannot support themselves, let alone others. Unwell people also probably shouldn’t operate heavy machinery.
I know this all sounds devastatingly dark and pessimistic, but it might surprise you to learn that I’m actually not a doomsayer. I do believe that change is possible and that a better, “well”-er world is a future I might even see in my own lifetime. But it’s in this messy in-between time that is hard to wrestle with, where the two sides of the scale don’t feel at all compatible with one another. On one side we have apples and on the other we have the exhumed bodies of dead dinosaurs.
So, seriously, how do we hold both?
I don’t have an answer for this. It’s likely to be one of those complex questions without answers where we just keep trying things and seeing what the results are. But I, for one, am going to start listening to my intuition more, to heed my body’s signals and make a concerted effort to care for myself. Part of this is the little ways in which I actually take care of my body and soul, be it healthy food or exercise or lengthy walks in the forest. And part of this is also sitting with and coming to terms with the ecological tragedy we are facing. If we are in despair, we cannot do the work. We must grieve, openly and collectively, and we must give that grief a place in order to move forward with resolve and commitment.
For now, I’ll close with one more Sophie Strand quote:
“At its core, healing is transformation.”
Let us be willing to transform ourselves and the environments around us so that we can thrive in new and unprecedented ways. To heal the earth is to heal ourselves. So let us transform how we relate to the earth, so we can harvest her gifts as she blesses us with deep and profound wellness.
This is a future I would love to see emerge.
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Announcement 👀
Soon I’ll be rebranding this blog! 🙃 For those of you wonderful people who have been here for a little while, fear not. Very little is going to change in terms of the content. But, I’ve come to realise what I am really writing about and it doesn’t quite match with the current title of this blog. So, I will be changing the name! (There’s even a hint of what the new name will be in the post above. 😉)
I’m still working on a new logo and final details, but you can expect the big reveal sometime next month after I return from holiday. In the meantime, I’ll be changing the blog URL next week to personalise it a bit more, but that won’t have any impact on you lovely readers and subscribers. You’ll just notice the new URL when you arrive here next time!
Inspiration station ✨
Here are some things that are inspiring me this week. 💚
Read 📖
Obviously I’m going to recommend Sophie Strand’s book again. The Flowering Wand is a joy to read. Full review coming soon on Instagram, or you can already read my review on Goodreads. (If you’re on Goodreads, let’s be friends!)
This is a fantastic article by Rebecca Solnit in The Guardian about narratives, storytelling, and the power to change the popular imagination. She is a brilliant writer and activist, and I’m constantly amazed at how she is able to be simultaneously realistic and optimistic about the situation we are currently in. She’s a true storyteller for our times.
My friend and fellow Bio-Leadership Fellow, Rachel Musson, wrote a beautiful blog post about time a few weeks back. It’s such a lovely and thought-provoking read. Have you thought about what it means to be a good ancestor?
Listen 🎧
This podcast conversation with Tyson Yunkaporta is rather heavy, I must admit. He speaks about perception, identity, and capitalism—and the ways in which our perception-obsessed society makes real change nearly impossible. I found it to be quite powerful and eye-opening.
Final words
“Our culture is so focused on "finding" — on seeking a solution outside of ourselves — that it's easy to forget about "remembering." That everything we need is already right here, within us. That we do not need to look to someone else for the answer, or relentlessly improve ourselves, we simply need to come home to ourselves — to remember who we are.”
—Jocelyn K. Glei