Your mind creates an appetising image that makes your stomach growl and your mouth water, sensations that are intensified by the smells your nose is picking up. You are savouring your meal well before its harmony of colours, smells, and flavours reaches your table. When you go to a restaurant, you are looking for more than solely meeting your nutritional needs: you are looking for an experience that will enrich all your senses.

It is precisely this type of holistic experience we aim to recreate at our wellbeing labs. These are anything from short inspiring talks through half-day interactive workshops to emergent personalised wellbeing retreats in Nature lasting from 2 to 4 days for groups of individual changemakers or changemaker teams and organisations. For instance, our immersive wellbeing retreats invite participants to our kitchen to taste the different ingredients of wellbeing through our recipes for the mind, body, heart, and spirit. These help them assess the status of their own “internal kitchen” whilst at the same time exploring ways to boost wellbeing in each of these areas. In the first post I invited changemakers to reflect on their work habits through our relationship with food. Do you consume hypercaloric fast foods, do you slip into binge-eating, or do you forget to eat altogether? What is the status of your internal kitchen?

Our longer wellbeing labs adopt an emergent approach to allow participants to personalise the wellbeing menu they wish to experience in order to meet their wellbeing nutritional needs. This means our wellbeing labs are completely unique as they cater for the needs of the participants who are present. From mindfulness meditation practices to become more aware of what’s happening in and around them without judgement; through collaborative exercises to increase team bonding, communication, and effectiveness; to methodologies and techniques to create wellbeing strategies and plans for their lives and organisations.

Moreover, our wellbeing labs go beyond simply offering a delicious tasting experience. In fact, they encourage participants to wear the kitchen apron and learn how to become “wellbeing cooks” able to recreate certain recipes to incorporate in their life and work to sustain their wellbeing. This sharing of knowledge, methodologies, and resources is at the core of our model as it empowers changemakers to take control over their internal kitchen without creating a situation of dependency upon us.

This blog post was originally written by Greta Rossi for The Wellbeing Project – click here to view the original post.