What wellness means to me
From moving weights to moving my mindset
I have always wanted to be the best possible version of myself. This search for my limits is something that has always driven me, however initially this led to me falling into a state of unbalance.
I initially started off on my wellness journey in my late teens, and wellness to me meant having the biggest muscles, whilst simultaneously being athletic. As a result my whole focus went on making this happen, and to some degree I achieved this. I was known as the “Gym guy” and was physically exactly where I wanted to be…for a while.
You see the problem with taking this approach was that I was focusing on only one piece of the pie. After a while I started to burn out mentally , suffer injury after injury and this started to drain my motivation to train. Simultaneously, I noticed that when I didn’t train other areas of my life also started to suffer. I wasn’t as productive with my work, or as attentive to relationships. The gym was providing the fuel for other area’s of my life, and when it wasn’t present they stalled. I carried on this way for a while until it dawned upon me that being dependant on this one source of motivation wasn’t healthy.
The key turning point for me came after I reached rock bottom a few times. It dawned on me that the same effort I was putting into building my physique was also required for other areas of my life. I started to walk down a path towards the centre of myself, to get a better understanding of the foundations that weren’t currently present . My self diagnosis was grim. Past failures had put me into a cycle of spending all my time chasing success , burning out, juicing up on “motivation” and starting over again — this was unsustainable and I was running off fumes.
My body began to react to this burnout by simulating effects of nausea and crippling abdominal pain, but when I would go to the doctor they wouldn’t find anything — physically I was fine. I wound up reading about the gut-brain axis which details how we have a “second brain” in our gut that has a two way communication pathway with our “real brain” located in our head. This posed the question:
What if it was my mental state that was negatively impact how I was feeling physically?
I started reading other stories of people who had pushed themselves too far mentally to see if anybody else had experienced something similar. Ariana Huffington’s now well told story probably had the biggest impact on me and made it clear that meditation and adequate sleep could help me. I began meditating and this practice of being still and present made a big difference to how I felt and before I knew it, the physical pain and nausea I was feeling were soon a thing of the past. Getting a taste of what it felt like to take an incremental step forward in my wellness, I was eager to continue making progress in all aspects of my personal wellness.
I have always admired this ideology of wholeness and often dreamt about what that could look like for me. I decided to create a project focused on the topic, documenting people who were striving to improve their own wellbeing as well as those who were teaching others to do the same. I have spoken to physiotherapists that specialise in workplace wellness, amazing people who use dance to inspire fitness , yoga and meditation specialists , and people who teach financial wellness (yes this is a thing) to name a few. Currently we (Wordjar) are contextualising this content, while curating more, before we start sharing it with the world. This process of learning wellness from others is a form of healing and growth for me , I hope it will do the same for others when they are touched by what we create.
