I just returned from the SpaTec event in Orlando, Florida where I was invited to give the keynote address on “In Defense of Pampering.” For the past few years I have been arguing that the spa industry, in its attempts to be more relevant in a down economy has been turning its back on the one thing that sets spas apart from other healing institutions in our society (you can [...]
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The Yoga World Gets Judgmental
The yoga blogosphere (yogosphere?) has been abuzz the past week debating two recent controversies that boiled up on the internet. The first one stemmed from a New York Times article written by William J. Broad, entitled, “How Yoga can Wreck Your Body” (which was excerpted from his soon to be released book on “The Science of Yoga: The Risks and the Rewards.”) The article reads like an exposé on yoga’s [...]
Sleep, Food, Mood, Exercise: Four Keys to Vibrant Health
When I subtitled my blog, “musings on the science of holistic wellness,” I did so because I believe that any strategy to improve human wellbeing has to look at things holistically. By this I mean nothing can be taken in isolation. Humans are complex and our wellbeing is affected by things that happen in many domains in our life. (Stanford Professor Richard Zare said it well: “real problems are rarely [...]
The Word on Wellness
Today’s article is from wellness expert Donald B. Ardell who wrote the landmark High Level Wellness: An Alternative to Doctors, Drugs, and Disease and a dozen others since, plus 673 editions of his insightful Ardell Wellness Report newsletter. He has won numerous national and world championships in triathlon and duathlon competitions and has been given lifetime achievement awards by the President’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports, the German Wellness Association and just this year, the National [...]
Trend Alert: The Health Benefits of Forest Bathing
I used to live in Hawaii, on the island of Maui. At least once a month, I would drive a few hours on the winding road around the island and spend a day or two hiking and camping in the rain forest. I would follow a trail, or make my own, weaving through bamboo forests littered with guava fruit and fragrant awapuhi flowers. Eventually, I would find a hidden waterfall [...]
The Evidence for Spa
The Global Spa Summit has just launched a new website, http://www.spaevidence.com, which serves as a portal into databases of medical research on spa and wellness therapies. From my years in the spa industry, I can tell you that the people behind this industry passionately believe in the services they offer and their potential impact on human wellbeing. I can also tell you, that the spa industry has not been taken [...]
Help, I can’t Meditate! (25 Tips for New Meditators)
“All man’s miseries derive from not being able to sit quietly in a room alone.” – Blaise Pascal No longer the exclusive domain of Buddhist monks and new age hippies, meditation is going mainstream. The newfound popularity of meditation is driven by a slew of new research in both psychology and neuroscience supporting the practice as a means of relieving stress, finding peace, and maintaining physical and mental health. Although [...]
Appreciating Joy
The playing field isn’t level. Research shows that, all things considered, negative emotions have an unfair advantage over us, grabbing and holding our attention more easily. We spend much of our time handling problems and figure that happiness will pop up on its own when the time is right. Our inherent putting-out-fires approach to life works well for certain crises, but the problem is that it leads to a very [...]
Dissecting the Spirit in Body, Mind, Spirit
In a previous article, I wrote about “Science and Spirituality in the Spa.” I recognized the trend in the spa industry to become more scientific and evidence-based, but I cautioned that spas should perhaps move towards spirituality and not towards science. After all, we already have a massive health care industry that is looking at health care scientifically, but we have very few entities in our society that look at [...]
On Physical Flourishing
Today’s article is also published on Positive Psychology News Daily. With the release of his new book, “Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-being,” Martin Seligman presents his new model for wellbeing under the codename PERMA. PERMA is an acronym for the five pillars of wellbeing that Seligman has identified through decades of research and thought on the science of human flourishing: positive emotions, engagement, relationships, meaning and (the [...]
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