Wellbeing Day
Last year’s Health and Wellbeing Weekend gave us an appetite for more. It showed us what was possible when practitioners, volunteers and community members come together around a shared belief that good health — physical, mental, social — should be accessible to everyone, not just those with the means or the mobility to seek it out. So this year, we came back: bigger, bolder, and with the addition of something that has already become, in the retelling, quite legendary.
The ice bath.
We will come back to the ice bath. First, the rest.
New practitioners joined us this year, including but not limited to aromatherapy and sound baths, bringing fresh expertise and fresh energy to the day. Alongside familiar and much-loved faces, they offered a range of sessions and treatments that gave people the chance to try things they might never have experienced — to be curious about their own health in a safe, encouraging and completely non-judgmental setting. The feedback was, as it was last year, extraordinary. People described leaving feeling lighter, calmer, more hopeful. Practitioners described leaving wanting to come back.
And then there was the ice bath.
For those who are not familiar: an ice bath is, in essence, a large container of very cold water, into which a willing participant climbs for a set period of time for the documented — and genuinely impressive — physical and mental health benefits. It requires, it must be said, a certain amount of nerve. Those who took the plunge (and they know who they are) emerged pink, exhilarated, and in possession of a story they will be telling for some time.
It would not, perhaps, be the right fit for everyone. But that is rather the point. The Wellbeing Day is about options — about offering a range of experiences wide enough that everyone who comes can find something that resonates with them, whether that is a gentle seated yoga session, a conversation with a nutritionist, or an ice bath that they will not be forgetting in a hurry.
Thank you to every practitioner who gave their time and expertise, to our volunteers who made the day run beautifully, and to everyone who came along and threw themselves into the spirit of it — some of them quite literally. We are already looking forward to the next one.