Cultural Wellbeing

Flourish takes you on a journey of self-discovery of the inner life. Unlike many other creative guides, I do not stay with the self but work to move your creative energy into the community and instil a larger awareness of our place within the cosmos. My doctoral research, and personal reflection on my creative practice over the last ten years, has taught me that creativity is driven by our connection with life force energy, a divine force concurrently within and beyond ourselves. Being aware of, and connecting to, life force energy can inspire our creativity and remind us that we are indeed a unique spark in the cosmos. Our life force is creation in process and irrevocably bound to living and non-living matter, desirous of manifestation into distinctive and ever changing forms which are possible at this moment in time (Mackay 2014). The way we experience our particular expression of being will influence the way we fashion our life, and is the most creative endeavour we can pursue. Despite the challenges of bridging disparate worlds, Flourish is a testament to my roots in community practice and acknowledges my lived wisdom gained in grounded life experiences. Likewise it is an invitation for you to walk an inspired, aware and connected spiritual path, whatever your cultural traditions and beliefs.

Wellbeing is commonly used to describe a person’s mental, physical, emotional and affective states of wellbeing but still often neglects the cultural and spiritual context of anindividual’s sense of wellbeing. This study uses data from sixty women’s stories and artworks exhibited at The 2009 Women’s Room Ancestral Connections Exhibitionexamining how approaches to art making influenced cultural and spiritual wellbeing infive groups affiliated with The Women’s Room. Arts based narrative analysis, in-depthinterviews and ethnographic observation were used to determine women’s approaches toart making and a new arts analysis tool called The SPICES framework was developed inthe course of research as there were no suitable frameworks to analyse the cultural and spiritual intent of stories and artworks. The study found that women primarily used threeapproaches to making their art being 1) Spiritual approach, 2) Intuitive Channeled approach and 3) Expressive Symbolic approach (SPICES framework). These findingssuggest that making art using a SPICES approach enabled a creative agency for theexpression of cultural and spiritual beliefs, a communicative action strategy which bothchallenged dominant cultural conceptions of societal roles, and assisted women to copewith the challenges of everyday life. The SPICES approach will facilitate deepened understandings of transpersonal art produced in community art contexts, art therapy or cultural arts practice. Implications for policy makers, practitioners and researcherssuggests the need to develop more sophisticated understandings of the cultural and spiritual meanings behind the art being made in diverse community settings as this willshed light on how cultural beliefs and practices influence health and wellbeing, leading to better understandings of client community needs and perspectives.

Addressing the continuous need for new growth sectors in post-industrial cities, this book considers the economic significance of wellness from a development policy perspective. The author goes beyond personal health discourse to conceptualise wellness as an emerging industry, presenting empirical cases of community, attraction, and export-orientated strategies around the world. Combining holistic health, urban governance and economic development, this book will provide valuable reading for those studying policy, tourism and the wellness sector as well as business entrepreneurs within this evolving industry.

As a group the women came together to celebrate their relationship to the spiritual energy that animates all life, even though they expressed this in diverse ways. The festival was a place which bought together disparate groups that had a common resistance to global processes of destroying the local and relationships to place and community. The women and their partners, friends and family by participating in the festival renegotiated what community meant for them and in the process they renegotiated global process of neoliberalisation and standardisation.

Presenting a case for a lived experience cultural wellbeing framework at the Western Sydney University Arts, Health and Wellbeing Cluster webinar. Current models of wellbeing are focused on measurement and while include aspects of natural and cultural capital still position wellbeing as something to be attained rather than something that is lived.

This essay argues that the concept of cultural wellbeing, which has given new direction to cultural policy in some countries, is not free from internal contradictions and does not help to shape an educational policy in India capable of transforming learning and teaching in government schools. The article describes an innovative arts-in-education project which precipitated wellbeing and social justice in schools by weakening the hold of divisive and hierarchical social realities in India on classroom dynamics and relationships.   

Regrettably, MARG published this essay under the less informative title 'Arts, Educational Policy, Government Schools'. .

this report output focuses more carefully on the physicality of the creative process, the way art works were made, and how making art in connection with a divine energy was good for women’s wellbeing. The video aims to communicate the embodied nature of the creative process used by the research participants through a rich symbolic language that can be read on many layers. The video uses a combination of photographs of the women’s art works, music, manipulation of virtual software and spoken explanations which have been creatively put together to create a virtual performance of the findings of the research, which was presented at the Arts in Society Conference 24th June - 26th June 2013Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary.