Global Wellness Day Meeting Report
Global Wellness Day
Gail Raborn
WaccoBB.net
On June 13, I joined a gathering of holistic health practitioners, wellness entrepreneurs, and locals from the Sebastopol area at the Dhyana Center in Sebastopol to honor “Global Wellness Day.” The flyer for this event invited us to meet and “share goals and intentions and look at how we as a community of practitioners can explore connections that will enable the deeper intentions that underlies the passion for our work to come out more strongly and visibly…find new ways to work with each other and form strategic partnerships…and evolve our community to even higher levels of vitality.”
Wow! higher levels of vitality! Networking! Partnerships! Sounded good to me. As a healer myself for over forty years, I was curious to see if this group could indeed unify their goals, values and ideas and then take the actions needed to turn them into reality: for healers can be as difficult to organize as a herd of cats. With many meetings under my belt, I know that it’s easy and fun to bandy ideas about. But they are usually left to die in the dust. Still, hope springs eternal.
A high-powered panel of wellness practitioners led the evening, moderated by Rachel Hazlett of Osmosis Day Spa Sanctuary. The panel included Michael Stusser (founder/President of Oasis Day Spa Sanctuary), DeAnna Batdorff (owner/founder of Dhyana Center), Vicci Oleski, (founder of Sonoma County Healing Academy),Rico Martin (founder of wONEderfest), and Michael Zilber (acupuncturist/natural and functional medicine). Stacy Conlan began our evening with a centering meditation.
First on the agenda: what is “Global Wellness Day”? In 2013, a group of women in Turkey created an international initiative by this name to increase the consciousness of “wellness” throughout all people, in every country. The World Health Organization defines “wellness” as “a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being, and not merely the absence of disease”.
“Global Wellness Day” actually became widely known in 2014 as part of the annual Global Spa and Wellness Summit in Moracco, with 400 international delegates. Now, GWD has expanded into a separate organization that was included in the 2014 Emmy Awards and the 2014 Eurasian Marathon. With forty ambassadors from over forty countries, GWD organizers hope to spread this movement across the globe.
On their website, they list seven simple daily principles to increase world wellness:
I mused, what about adding a few other vital wellness issues like sanitation? food for all? access to medical attention? population control? environmental protection? save endangered species? stop war? But I guess GWD figures that baby steps are best for starters.
Things got interesting when panel members shared their hopes and dreams for our wellness community. Michael Zilber mentioned the need to connect with, teach, and better support each other. Another person talked about the need to educate the public about wellness. Yet so much information is already out there, the public is already overwhelmed with ideas about how to get and stay healthy! The question remained, how to help folks integrate wellness habits and practices into their lives. Remember your New Years resolutions that lie dead in the dust? No answers really arrived.
Several panel members mentioned the difficulty that wellness practitioners have in self-promotion and marketing. The truth is that many healers and wellness practitioners are not only quite right-brained, thus have trouble learning marketing skills, they really don’t want to have to spend time learning marketing; they’d rather focus on their passions for teaching and working with clients.
One concern mentioned was that we have almost too many talented healers in the vital, fascinating seedbed of creativity and healing that is Sebastopol. Competition for business, with our limited population in West County, means making a living can be quite difficult. So how to reach out to the higher population bases like Santa Rosa, Cotati, Rohnert Park - even to the global stage? The Hispanic community, in particular, is not only very underserved by holistic health practitioners, it has a huge lack of holistic healing centers.
One answer was to better utilize social media, in it’s various incarnations, to educate the public and market our skills, workshops, etc. in Sonoma County and globally. Another exciting idea was to offer monthly “Wellness Open Houses” at various healer’s offices and healing centers, much like“Art Trails”. Each site would offer free or low cost treatments, classes, and information on that practitioner’s specialty.
Barry Chertov, owner of WaccoBB bulletin board, our beloved West County internet forum and business directory, encouraged everyone to write advice and guidance articles that can be posted on WaccoBB.net’s Health and Wellness category. He also suggested holding a weekly “healing day” in Sebastopol to showcase various health modalities.
Rico Martin talked about “branding West County as a mecca for the healing arts.” He suggested creating a “portal” for Sonoma County in order to bring healers together to showcase their skills and wellness programs. His project, wONEderfest, which will be held in Sebastopol this September 12, hopes to do just that. Starting with 108 Sun Salutations and a parade of flowers in the town plaza, it will be an annual celebration devoted to exploring many aspects of wellness and holistic healing through demonstrations, classes, special events, music, Kirtan, and dance. This year’s theme is yoga, in all it’s many forms. Rico hopes to “brand West County as a mecca for the healing arts, to increase the audience for our work so we all prosper”. If you want to learn more, see www.wONEderfest.com.
Corame, a colorful world traveler who joined the discussion, a resident of Bali and Ibiza, caught my attention when he announced that he will be launching a mobile app in the next month to connect wellness/health practitioners of every stripe with people in need of their services. The website, www.LightTribe.com, talks of this being a “marketplace for creativity and empowerment.” LightTribe offers a platform for “teachers, healers, classes, workshops, retreats, performances and sharing your passion.” Each person that’s accepted onto this app will have their own web page to market their skills or activity, free of charge.
Another vital concern: what - and how - to charge low income clients? Many of the Hispanics in Sonoma County, for example, cannot afford most wellness practitioner’s services. One idea was through discounted services, another was to create a barter system. In the Bay Area, there’s a barter catalog through which to give and receive medical, holistic health and other types of services. DeeAnna Batdorff said she’s successfully offered “donation” clinics for many years. An interesting idea was to “Pay it forward”, where well-to-do clients pay double for healing sessions, then low income clients can get free sessions.
I mentioned this can backfire. Years ago, I worked as a massage therapist under the sponsorship of a local Mendocino coast doctor. He billed for my treatments through Medi-Cal. But I found that some of my clients took my “free” massage for granted and never bothered to show up. What did I learn? To insist on some sort of energy exchange for my work. Currently, I still offer trades for my services as a hypnotherapist/healer. While back in the day, I was paid in salmon, weavings, firewood, pottery and Comptche KillerWeed, nowadays I mostly trade for massage or housework. More plebian, but just fine.
By this time, after more than three hours of discussion without a bathroom or hydration break, the air was totally aswirl with colorful ideas and possibilities. My head was spinning and burnout was looming. I’d absorbed all I could.
Just as I was about to stagger out into the night, DeAnna Batdorrf jumped in with the idea to expand “Global Wellness Day” into an annual day long Sebastopol community celebration. This great idea closed the evenings discussion. But what will we do until then? Where do we go from here? So many ideas left dangling.
After a sweet closing meditation to reground us, bring us out of our heads and back into our bodies, I left feeling vastly overstimulated. I’d met wonderful, inspiring folks, and shared tons of ideas.
Written by Gail Raborn, CHT: Clinical and Medical Hypnotherapist, Interactive Guided Imagery Practitioner, workshop leader, and writer. She has a private practice by phone and in her office in Santa Rosa, CA. Contact her at: 707-827-3615 or [email protected]
See her website: www.telehealing.com
