"The biggest innovation is philosophical"

Life can be overwhelming, experienced as a flow that can be frantic and exhausting. Our minds fill with chatter, our view of the world becomes tainted and distorted, and our ability to be present is lost.

Factor in environmental factors such as pollution, food sources, climate change, immunity and a pandemic and you have what we have called this month “Wellness everything”.

It is dominating our feeds, future trend reports and now underpinning the very purpose of most brands and organisations, along with a focus on sustainability and how people are treated.

Wellness can be such a broad topic with constant newness and innovations. But to quote Marcel Proust “The real voyage of discovery is not in seeking new landscapes but seeing with new eyes”

In other words, a constant flow of future trend examples and knowledge doesn’t serve a purpose if it is not approached with new eyes, and merely just gathered in pre-ordained, perhaps even outdated ways of extracting meaning from trend research.

So how did we make sense of it all?

First we looked at the pillars of Wellness.

Wellbeing is maximum health potential. It is a holistic philosophy and active lifestyle that doesn't wait for something to go wrong before you do something about it. 

Holistic philosophy maintains that an individual is comprised of body, mind, and spirit. These components must be integrated as one in order for the person to be well.

The 8 pillars of Wellness

- Physical

- - Sleep

- - - Mental

- - - - Spiritual - Sense of Purpose

- - - - - Social - Community

- - - - - - Environmental

- - - - - - - Nutritional

- - - - - - - - Mindfulness

Then we looked at Syntropic farming and coined it Syntropic Wellness. Why?

As we were preparing for this month and trying to get the the bottom of what we truly believe Wellness is all about, syntropic farming is something that came to mind, a system created by Ernst Gotsch. 

Syntropic farming is an intensive form of agroforestry created by Ernst Grotsch that imitates market gardening and slash and mulch agroforestry, in order to provide yields at all stages of succession, generate its own fertility, and with the end goal of creating a productive forest that imitates the structure and function of the native forests. — very similar to permaculture. 

In Syntropic Farming, holes become nests, seeds become genes, weeding becomes harvesting, the competition gives way to cooperation and pests and diseases are seen as the “agents from the department of optimisation of life processes”. These and other terms do not arise by chance, but rather derive from a change in the way we see, interpret and relate to nature.

With this in mind, we created our very own Syntropic Wellness Flower model (pictured above), emboldened by the chart created by Ernst Gotsch.

The Syntropic Wellness Flower model was designed to illustrate how each one of the 8 pillars of Wellness feed off of one another, towards one central goal which is overall Wellness.

During our Trend Atelier Community workshop, we also extrapolated how this model could even inform a structure for future trend thinking and structuring.

Wisdom is not to know more of this or that, in our case as forecasters, the “this or that” is a constant flow of future trend signals/ examples.

Wisdom is to see in a different way. 

We are not experts in wellbeing, nor coaches. But it’s important to keep in mind that there is no one way to attend your ideal self, but we can all strive and do our best, change the optics and support each other in the process.

By Geraldine Wharry & Trend Atelier research assistant Coline Rialan