County wellness collective

Hundreds attend inaugural wellness show and market

Across the County dozens of small businesses are providing health and wellness services to residents, and practitioners Rebecca Dunning and Mariko Reilly thought it would be a good idea to gather as many of them together as they could for a one-day wellness exposition. Dunning is a registered massage therapist, and Reilly provides osteopathy services from their office in Picton. “The County is a really rich place for health and wellness practitioners, and businesses providing healthy foods or healthy skin care products and things like that, but there’s no one event that brings them all together,” said Dunning. “So we thought for one day we could gather them in one room so the community could access them more easily.” Their hunch proved correct, and well over 300 people attended the wellness show on Saturday at the Picton Community Centre. There were dozens of people waiting to enter when the doors opened, and a steady stream came throughout the day. The show included five paid workshops, and four of those were fully booked many days in advance. Dunning explained that “wellness” is an umbrella term for an approach to good health that encompasses a wide range of things including good food, therapeutic massage, herbal remedies, yoga and exercise, among other things. Nearly 40 vendors and practitioners took part in this exposition. There were several food vendors, offering samples of their products, as well as a few massage therapists who gave demonstration massages.

Melissa Condotta supplies botanical based skin care products available at Sunday’s Apothecary in Picton.

Herbalist Tamara Segal was one of the vendors as well as one of the workshop leaders. Her company, Hawthorn Herbals, provides herbs for both health and healing. “More and more people are interested in herbs for wellness,” she said. “I have a private practice and it’s busier than it’s ever been. I think it’s because people are looking for natural approaches to their healing, and herbs can offer that. They are the oldest medicines that people have used, and the herbs that I work with have been used for millennia in wellness.” She gave the title of her workshop as “Kitchen Witchery”, as a nod to this time of the year, but also as an acknowledgement that the lore associated with these herbs quite often had “magical” (her quotes) connotations.

Yoga teacher Kelly Cade led a workshop on how yoga could be used to address the problem of low back pain, something that she said is a consequence of a sedentary lifestyle and too much time spent at the computer or in front of screens. “Yoga can be effective because it is an opportunity for us to slow down and bring awareness to where we are actually feeling the pain and what might be causing it,” she said. “It’s about how we make that connection between brain and body so that we are communicating healthy ways of doing things.” She said that yoga is for everybody. “If you can breathe, you can do yoga. In my tradition, the way I’ve trained, it is about adapting yoga to meet the needs of the individual.”

Another popular workshop was the sound meditation session led by Megan Marie Gates. She strongly believes that meditation and healing are one and the same thing. “What sound meditation does is that it gives the opportunity to listen and tune in to the harmonic overtone sounds, which slows down our brainwaves into deep meditative states and creative awakening. You are soothing the nervous system, and that in itself, is healing,” she said. “Music is so powerful and is such a great medicine.” In addition to the paid workshops, there were a number of free demonstrations throughout the day on topics such as fascial stretch therapy, gyrotonics, medical qigong and the benefits of chiropractic care. The latter demonstration was led by Heather McDowell, who started her chiropractic clinic in Wellington in January of this year. As a new business, the wellness show was an excellent way for her to meet some of her fellow practitioners. “When I first heard about this event, I thought it was great because I’m new to the County and don’t know all the people in the wellness field,” she said. “It’s great for me to see the people I can refer to and work with. And chiropractic works really well with other practitioners, like massage and reflexology and acupuncture. There is a space for everyone and I think we can all work well together.”