This year marks my ruby anniversary, with forty years engagement in the wellbeing field. Back in 1983, I’d just finished my first degree that combined medicine with psychology, and had set up, with other medical students a group applying holistic approaches to self-care. I was also deeply concerned about the state of the world, and had begun my life-long quest in search of approaches serving both personal and planetary wellbeing.
Roll on now to 2023, with the intervening years seeing both spectacular progress and devastating decline. Alongside modern marvels of technology, there has been a staggering dying back of the natural world. Polls show more people feel conditions are getting worse than better. Not unrelated are such high levels of anxiety and depression. How can we cultivate inner wellbeing in this age of climate change, when the future we’re heading into can feel scary and depressing? My short answer is we can take it on as a project.
When you take something on as a project, you might not know how to solve or address it, but you recognise it needs attention. A useful concept here is the preparation stage of change. This is when you know something needs changing, but you’re not yet ready, willing or able to proceed as you’d like to. What if we were to take on the challenge of preparing ourselves by developing skills and practices and understandings that help us face disturbing aspects of our world, and grow our capacity to respond?
I’ve been working on this project for a while now, and I’d like share what I’ve come up with. I’d been thinking, ‘what if there were a wellbeing practice we could do every day, that strengthened our minds and hearts, help make our lives more satisfying and supported us in finding and playing our part in a larger story of wellbeing?’ Perhaps it might have elements of a healing martial art, mixed with positive psychology and permaculture and systems thinking and a touch of playful energy too? Eight years ago, I started bringing such a practice into some of my trainings. I called it Su Ha – which stands for Sustainable Happiness. My friend Rosie Balyuzi drew this image to introduce its first move – arrival.
The first move is arrival,
we start from where we are,
and if I don't like how I'm feeling,
it's a great time to do Su Ha.
Each Su Ha move has three elements – a word or phrase you say to yourself, a body action and an inner shift. With this first move, I say the word arrival, as a calling of myself into presence. I move my feet and feel them connect with the ground, I look around me, noticing how I’m doing and what’s going on, I raise my arms to meet and greet the moment. The inner shift is of stepping more fully into facing my/our situation here and now. “So here I am” I might say. So here we are, we might say.
While still a work in progress, I’m introducing over thirty Su Ha moves in an online training I’m piloting. They are designed to nourish inner wellbeing, cultivate sustainable happiness and strengthen change-making capacity. Inner wellbeing grows when we live a life we believe in, where we show up to play our part in a story we have our heart in, in a story that rings true. Su Ha is designed to help us do this.
If you’re interested and would like to find out more, please come to the free webinar on Wednesday 6th Sept (this week!). If you can’t make the live event, I’ll send a link to the recording afterwards to everyone who registers.
I’ve also made a short video to launch Su Ha into the world – I know it isn’t going to be everyone’s cup of tea, but if you like to dance, it might be yours.