Thinking outside the box about wellbeing: inside UK’s Medicine Festival

“Conscious festivals” are places where people come together to reconnect with themselves, nature and others, while exploring new ways of understanding the body and mind.

At Medicine, the list of activities is almost endless. There are sessions exploring movement, gender, sexuality and personal growth. The festival draws, among others, practitioners of alternative therapies from all over the world, eager to share their knowledge and explore new approaches.

Mylène comes from Strasbourg and is a yoga and kinesiology practitioner. Kinesiology is an alternative practice that claims to use the body’s muscular responses to identify imbalances or problems and seek to correct them.

“I help people understand what is happening inside their bodies,” explains Mylène. “To do so, I explore different ways of understanding the language of the body. Movement and dance bring a lot of things to life within us.”\

I take part in a Yoga Nidra session led by author and co-founder of the Yoga Nidra Network, Uma Dinsmore-Tuli. It feels like a theatrical performance — somewhere between a musical, a comedy and a guided meditation.

“Nidra is a Sanskrit word and it means ‘sleep’,” says Uma Dinsmore-Tuli. “So what it [Yoga Nidra] actually means is the state of consciousness that is very naturally arising when you are drifting in your sleep, when you are awake and nearly not asleep. You can cultivate conscious awareness of that state. It’s a good way to downregulate your nervous system, it supports good digestion, it supports the menstrual cycles and all the kinds of rhythmic practices within us, and it allows you to navigate your way consciously into a more relaxed way of being.”

Science is increasingly looking at what happens to the body when we change the way we move, think, create or connect.

But the evidence remains mixed, and many of the claims made in the world of mind-body health remain contested.

For me, though, events like Medicine are a source of pure joy — but also of deep conversations, new subjects to explore and ideas I feel inspired to share.