On Wellness, and why I've always hated that word.

A beautiful flower mandala created by a participant in The Well in 2025... a frangipani for each of us involved.

I was interviewed once upon a time by a woman writing a piece on “Wellness Retreats”. She’d found me on the internet and thought that the Yoga Retreats I offered fit the bill. For my part, I remember feeling profoundly uncomfortable with that term, “wellness”, and the images it evoked for me of white women in white clothes in white rooms doing Yoga, receiving massage, smiling and laughing in perfectly curated abandon.

Mostly, the word felt far too small, as though wellness could be assessed from the outside of a person only. Too stylised as to have reduced such a common sense-y kind of thing into a highly fashionable, highly coveted, and highly marketable commodity that makes us believe we need more than we do sometimes, stressing us out in the process. (I still don’t understand why we need Active Wear to go for a walk?). But mostly I hated the idea that it could exclude someone, just because their current reality doesn’t match with the images of ‘wellness’ we’ve been sold.

Yoga, as I understand it, has never been just about physical health per se, but freedom. Freedom of access to an Impersonal Witness that knows through repeated observation that all states, no matter how joyful or difficult, have a beginning and an end. And that even in illness, or grief, or fear, that wholeness and goodness remain forever accessible to us, for they are not of the body but of the soul.

As beings with bodies we live in a realm of duality, which means that every state has an opposite—light and dark, joy and sorrow, praise and blame, sickness and health, and all of the shades of the spectrum in between through which we constantly oscillate. But wellness cliches, inadvertently or not, keep placing value judgements on one end of that spectrum through their obsession with health, wealth, youth, ease, joy, lightness, and laughter. Don’t get me wrong, these things are truly beautiful, but what happens when we age, or get sick, or lose someone or something very dear to us?

What does wellness look like from there?

I find this a far more compelling and nuanced question than how can I stay looking young forever? Or which diet will prevent me from ever getting sick? Or what meditation technique will protect me from potential future messes of feeling? Yoga was never about that kind of certainty. Nor was it, or is it, an escape from the slings and arrows of the human condition.

What Yoga teaches us, ultimately, is balance and perspective. Balance means to notice, and to adjust, when we’ve become too enamoured or fused with any one position on the spectrum of thought or feeling. (The flexibility we really need here is mental more than physical). And perspective helps us to lift our gaze and find beauty in the world, even when we can’t yet locate it in our own body, or vice versa.

Knowing you know how to do these things is freedom, which is kind of the same thing as getting unstuck. Freedom is realising your capacity to endure— knowing innately that you are strong, wise, and supported, and that your very being-ness has immeasurable dignity.

“The idea of striving for some beautiful, perfect state of wellness, it mires us in eternal dissatisfaction— a goal forever out of reach. To be well now, is to accept whatever body and mind I currently have”, wrote Suleika Jaouad in her beautiful memoir ‘Between Two Kingdoms: what almost dying taught me about living’.

Musician Alanis Morissette also speaks really compassionately, and cautiously, about the way that perfectionism can creep into wellness sometimes, and in her words: “co-opt the whole damn thing”.

“I’m careful with the use of (the word) wellbeing”, she says, “because it can be just another term that we use to beat ourselves up”. For that reason she speaks about being on a wholeness journey, rather than a wellness journey, even if from the outside they look an awful lot alike sometimes.

I couldn’t agree more with these sentiments.

I named my annual 9-month online mentorship for women “The Well”, because of its wonderfully multi-layered meaning. The Well as noun— a place where women have gathered since forever to share stories. As adjective— a place synonymous with thirst-quenching and replenishment, of quite literally filling one’s cup. But also as a question, about what it really means to be well, no matter what else is stirring or shifting in our lives.

This all-inclusive, come-as-you-are kind of wellness (aka wholeness) feels like a breath of fresh air to me beside the heavily curated kind, and it's exactly what we'll be exploring inside The Well, on my retreats, and in my writing for the foreseeable future. It takes infinite curiosity and a whole lot of kindness to undo some of the unrealistic expectations that we place on ourselves in the name of "spirituality", but the result is something stunning— the ability t0 meet ourselves, situations, and one another, just as we are.

Registration has just opened for The Well 2026— a unique online collective, and a space of generosity, humour, shared wisdom, and mutual inspiration for a closed group of just 15 women, beginning March through to November, 2026. Read more & register here.