PROMOTING A WELLNESS CULTURE

This is our immediate mission at Goodvibes.

While many young urbanites are becoming more concern about wellness, the environment and lifestyle, many unfortunately appear to be more ready to part with their money to look the part than to actually live the talk.

What do I mean?

At the turn of the new Millennium, many are awakening to the fact that we are more than just ‘human resource’ in a economic machinery; that life is more than just fitting into the social-cultural and political-technological systems in which we are embedded; but that we are all part of a complex adaptive system that is constantly making and re-making ourselves and our environment.

We are seeing a shift from a material culture to one that is more human, spiritual and holistic, embracing nature and others as part of our extended self. Huh? Well, perhaps not that many people think this way.

But the fact is that we are interconnected through energy and information flows, sharing of the same environmental media (especially, air and water), and our decisions and actions. We cannot live as though as our actions affect only us because many of our actions have unpleasant repercussions.

On the receiving end, we now live in a technology-driven, high energy and crowded world, where many decisions taken by others put us at risk from potential harm. For example, Electromagnetic field (EMF) radiation, which has been recognised to cause a range of problems from fatigue, back pains, ulcers to a variety of cancers is emitted by electrical and electronic devices. We live in a world surrounded by them. We also live in buildings that cut off natural (negative) ions so essential to neutralising free radicals generated through pollution in particular, that gets into our bodies killing us slowly and silently from within.

There are numerous threats in our environment and we succumb to them every now and then, and often we recover but the battle becomes harder as we age. It is no wonder that the older generations are more concern about wellness. The young, on the other hand, prefer recklessness – something that is increasing being link to too much exposure to EMF pollution (still needs more research to confirm) from computers, hi-fi systems, etc.

Consequently, many young – and not-so-young - people I talk to and see around here (in Brunei) are not particularly interested in wellness or the quality of their living environment. Most prefer escapism, preferring to pretend that they are living in style, ‘class’, embracing the ultra-high energy (and stressful) lifestyles – believing that the threats in the environment and from actions by others (including those with like attitudes) cannot touch them.

Well, we live in the same physical world. Sooner or later, we will get hit by some of these threats to our health. Hopefully, it won’t be the kind where the functioning of vital organs has been undermined.

We are promoting a wellness culture. By that, we mean we want people to recognise that we live in an environment that is not very safe anymore; that we should be clear-headed enough to face facts, rather than pretend that they don’t exists; that we ought to take steps to improve our position so that we are less at risk; and that we live a life to the fullness of our human potential. We have brought into Brunei a range of cutting edge wellness technologies to facilitate the cultural shift.

In this so-called Information Age, where society is constantly being feed with information, mis-information, dis-information and information junk, many people live in a world that is artificially constructed, and many such worlds are far from the real thing. It is no wonder that many young people are becoming obese, terribly unfit and has poor attention span and or decision-making capability – something associated with feeding on information junk.

A wellness culture therefore has to begin with the Mind, and that’s why we call our facility a “Mind Spa”. Where one goes to a spa to recover body vitality and beauty through ‘detoxing’, one goes to a mind spa to purge the mind of junk – to gain clarity of who we are, what we really want in life, and to develop the capacity to achieve them.

We wish you well and wellness (:->)

If you wish to write in to agree or disagree, please do so. Send your email to:

Gab Yong at gyong@goodvibesbrunei.com