Real Wellness

I’ve been in the health and wellness industry for the last 12-13 years or so. Before that I worked in corporate, all related to employee and personnel well-being and the proper utilization of human resources. I remember a time when we could not mention the word “employee wellness” and “workplace ergonomics” in the boardroom. I remember a time (mostly before COVID) that physical health, mental wealth and spiritual wealth very much took a backseat to financial wealth and status. I remember consulting for a client with unhappy staff – all medical professionals, mostly medical doctors, and all they asked for was a bit less clock watching and some flexi-hours/or work from home on admin days. In their case, completely plausible for their non-consulting days. Due to traffic they would need to spend between 2-3 hours per day in traffic, and they felt they could use the time much better to work on ironing out overdue paperwork. After making this recommendation to the client, they basically “fired” me on the spot and accused me of “making the team up against the organisation”. I immediately understood why the staff were so disgruntled and left it at that. I’ve always had the policy that I do not work with a client that doesn’t want to work with me – hence why I never signed contracts with clients that included a fixed engagement period. I don’t want to be working with someone – much less accept their payment, if they weren’t prepared to implement and at least consider what they paid me to give them advice on.

I was not into window dressing and the field of equity in South Africa lended itself to that premise a lot at the time. Back to the disgruntled, client, less than a month later, COVID forced everyone to work from home. I always chuckle about that. It’s what happens when you carry a message way before your time, and people are not ready to accept or embrace the change. It’s either accepting the change, or be forced into it. Carrot or stick. But….whether you like it or not, change will come…. for you, for me – no one is exempted. Death and taxes they say, same for change.

COVID certainly highlighted humanity’s need to focus on health, which in turn, (as industries respond to demand), gave birth to what is today a thriving or let’s say a very active wellness industry. Every second person is either a health coach, a counsellor, healer, advisor, retreat facilitator, sound healer or mental health expert. It certainly is a good sign, as it means all these very important aspects of us as a human being, are by now firmly planted in the average person’s awareness field.Good! People are realising that they are more than a body – still unclear of what is mind and soul, but still – we’re moving out of the post depression, post war survival states of humanity’s consciousness.

Off course – there are opportunities for both good and not so real (or inauthentic) workers into enter this arena. Like with any builder, painter, school, medical practitioner, suiter, supplier that you want to engage with, there needs to be a screening or vetting process. This, is very hard, when you are the victim of traumatic past experiences. It’s hard to trust yourself and your own intuition, if you got burned. And I really have sympathy for vulnerable groups – of any kind. I personally would hate to see any marginalised groups extorted. However, are narratives to overcome. We all here to learn lessons, to face challenges and to learn from those experiences and choices. Let me explain with an example – one big after effect of trauma is that it almost always produces a victim narrative in the victim’s psyche. It is very easy for clients or patients in the wellness industry to cry wolf. If a person is not ready to heal, accept their reality or take responsibility for their part they played in their pain, its much easier to prosecute the ones who were trying to help. As much as clients can vet who they engage with, most practitioners cannot vet or screen clients as most of the time, they need to work with the client to get insight into their behavioural patterns and world views. This leaves practitioners open to incredible lashbacks which is incredibly hard to navigate, or even monitor. Especially when the practitioner starts to come closer to the truth, everyone is not equally happy to be “seen” for their actions and choices. I have seen this narrative play out many times over the years that I’ve been involved in the field of healing and teaching.

Yes, off course, there will be people or organisations who are not truthful in what they offer. Yes, there will be people who make promises and don’t deliver. There are also people who do what they promised they would, and that’s where things get so difficult. I really believe the wellness industry has come a long way. It has a long way still to go. However, I do want to commend any person out there, who is trying to make someone’s life better, who is trying to ease someone’s pain, who is trying to help someone make better life choices – whether physical or emotional. I do want to acknowledge people who choose to serve humans to the best of their ability. Yes, everyone may not yet be at the highest level of discernment or qualification right now, to know if that what they are offering, is really good for the long term health of the client. The medical field sits with the same predicament – they offer what they can after it’s been through clinical trials but it most certainly can not always guarantee healing or recovery and sometimes people can actively choose to become part of an experiment on a certain drug or treatment that’s never been used before. They know that some of the drugs they administer will have negative side effects for the patient. Does this make them stop moving forward with medical advancements? No. While no other healthier alternatives are available, a patient has the choice to accept a potentially shorter life span, or be part of the experiment that takes humanity forward in this department. Every single person’s effort to advance humanity is important, every single piece of effort will hopefully bring us closer to the real truth about physical healing.

I can not stand up and say that all ways of healing work or don’t work as I have not tried all proposed methods of healing. I will most certainly not stand up and claim that someone’s method doesn’t work if I have not tried it. That would be a disingenuous assessment.  Any sane human being will agree that giving an opinion about something you haven’t tried, is not authentic on the critic’s part. Yet I see so much of that in the wellness industry! Almost everyone has an opinion about the other person’s craft. Again, the medical industry itself is way more regulated to prevent this kind of thing to a larger extend.

In my view, the only people who are not contributing to this forward motion, those who sit on the sideline and criticize, while pointing fingers at pretty much anything and anyone that doesn’t fit their narrative: whether it’s a scientific or agnostic premise, whether it’s a religious or pessimistic world view. Anything that will justify their cause. Just as much as it’s possible for a patient to be cured by a placebo, or a priest to lay his hands on someone in faith, so is it’s possible for the neigh sayers and sceptics to be right about a person that will most likely not be healed.

The wellness industry has a long way to go, yes, it’s not properly regulated (but I don’t really see much evidence in South Africa, that proves health regulations created much reliability in the wellness sector). Yes, alternative therapies have long been squaffed off as “quackery” and thumbling in the dark. But, those who are out there in the field, working with people to create progress in their lives are still the heros. How can the positive reports from clients about their improved mental health after a session. be attributed to be fake and quackery only? Some people find healing in faith, plants, family,  diet and some in art. There must be a innumerable number of ways to facilitate healing, awareness, progress. If we are unlimited beings, surely our ways to heal should be unlimited?

The only people in my view, who are not making a positive contribution, are the sceptics, the critics who sit and cast a judgement based on theory, those who are not in the ring to draw from experience. It’s easy to cry wolf, it’s easy to be point fingers at everyone, accusing them of being fake – but who and what on this planet really is 100% real? How about the premise that life simply is a reflection, a mirror a whole holographic projection from our mind centers?  While sceptics are busy pointing fingers and sowing seeds of doubt with their minds and words, someone out there is helping someone connect with their joy again through the beautiful colours and texture of paint, someone is helping someone who was going to commit suicide or murder, someone is connecting with a long last family member, or someone is building a successful business because they could move past their bad past. I would much rather be part of the latter. In time, the results (fruits) will show the way.

Love and Moonlight,

Leonie J.