Mushroom foraging courses, yoga classes, guided meditations, workshops on confronting trauma: these occasions and extra populate Conscious City Guide, a newly relaunched international event-ticketing platform based by Kiki Falconer and Mel Nahas in 2016. As the primary web site of its variety, the platform thoughtfully highlights experiences which are nurturing, inclusive and would possibly in any other case be troublesome to search out (a lot much less belief). For these trying to lead a extra acutely aware life-style or just reconnect with themselves or nature, Conscious City Guide offers a gateway to wellness for each the newly curious and initiated.
While the phrases “wellness” and “conscious lifestyle” have been over-used and may appear imprecise (particularly inside an trade saturated with hyperbolic claims of sustainability and self-care), Nahas and Falconer clarify what their phrases imply and have demonstrated dedication to the location’s total values. Nahas explains, “Living a conscious lifestyle is the recognition and awareness that when we’re connected to ourselves, we also have a duty and responsibility to be connected to our communities as well as the Earth.” While conversations on wellness typically middle particular person care, Nahas and Falconer’s ethos considers individuals’s prosperity in relation to the entire. Theirs is an ideology rooted in sustainability, fairness and mutual respect, and it’s depicted all through the platform’s huge choices.
Nahas herself got here to comprehend the need of this dogma nearly a decade in the past. At that point, the co-founder—who was born in Indonesia and raised in Perth, Australia—had been working within the music trade when she reached her restrict with the fast-paced surroundings. Seeking alternate methods to stay, she started a weblog centered on touring and profiling individuals whose approaches to life impressed her to alter her personal. At the tip of her weblog’s e-newsletter, she included a listing of occasions that aligned with this. These occasions would go on to change into the thriving platform that Conscious City Guide is now.
Using these occasions as a catalyst for particular person and collective progress is a strategic synthesis of the co-founders’ personal journeys. “Because Kiki and I have such a huge background in creating—we worked at music television station Channel V in Australia together—we had such incredible jobs creating powerful moments that really inspired a generation. We just saw how these collective moments or cultural touchpoint moments really transform people,” says Nahas. The ticketing platform then, makes “conscious lifestyle mainstream through the same ways that music, fashion, food and popular culture does,” she continues.
Just as a live performance can transfer individuals in an viewers, Conscious City Guide seeks to harness this sense past the realm of music into wellness, collective care and extra. In making these occasions extra mainstream, the co-founders hope to make a want for particular person and mutual wellbeing greater than a pattern—however somewhat a life-style.
As the platform’s progress can attest, the acutely aware life-style is one many have change into invested in. In the start, Nahas and Falconer leveraged their music and media community to supply and vet occasions that align with their values themselves. Flash ahead to 2022 and the platform has amassed a group of its personal, with people who proceed to replace the location. This group of over 40,000 individuals worldwide helps to energy the platform.
Over the previous couple of years, the location has felt much more important for Nahas. She tells us, “We’re just in such a rapid time of transformation collectively. We’re all looking for lifelines, community, support and education for ourselves, to assist in that transformation and our humanity’s collective evolution.” The information focuses on serving to to create these lifelines by highlighting intentional occasions that, she provides, might be “anything that promotes or inspires people to connect or transform themselves, their communities or the planet. So that could be anything from a meditation workshop through to an anti-racism group or regenerative soil class.”
As part of the redesigned web site, the platform now provides articles written by a few of the occasion creators to go alongside their corresponding experiences. The replace attests to Nahas’ dedication to inclusivity and accessibility, because the founder noticed some individuals nonetheless felt hesitant to join actions they’re focused on as a consequence of feeling like they lack correct data about it. These articles—which vary from Foraging 101 to tips on queer relationship and planning large-scale waste-free occasions—act as standalone assets in addition to deeper details about what to anticipate. As Nahas describes, the options “that we now have on the site are giving people that extra layer of information that they may need before really jumping into an event.”
Encouraging others to spend money on holistic wellness and popularizing wellbeing by means of shifting occasions are the core tenets that make up Conscious City Guide. Filled with enjoyable experiences and introspective happenings, the platform makes caring for the self, others and the world at giant gratifying and accessible with out watering down its necessity or the work it takes to get there.
Hero picture courtesy of Audrey McGee