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Irish Examiner
28-06-2025
- Health
- Irish Examiner
How wellbeing festivals have grown more popular in Ireland
Back in 2009, a California-based festival premiered a new kind of experience, placing a traditional festival setting and health offering side-by-side. Wanderlust, set in North Lake Tahoe, curated a lifestyle which offset hedonistic nights with mind-boosting mornings, a combination instantly lauded as one worth following. Fifteen years later, Wanderlust's founders are still offering wellness benefits to the masses today — in the form of Eudemonia Summit, a three-day festival that hosted some 2,750 people in November. However, in lieu of heading for the sandy plains of northern California, revellers instead filled a gargantuan convention centre in West Palm Beach. There, they witnessed hundreds of speakers extol the virtues of cold plunges, regenerative health, and 'human potential'. This kind of event, one centred around feeling well, is catching on — and for good reason. In a society where headlines centre around healthcare, inflation, and war, true connection is hard to come by; feeling well has become elusive, and, something people are willing to pay for. This alchemy has fuelled the rise of the wellness festival — events and destinations promising the keys to self-actualisation. You don't even have to travel to North America to find them. The view from above of last year's Nourish & Flow RestFest Dublin's Wellfest (weekend tickets €100) celebrated its ninth and most successful year in May, with a myriad of performers: Sexual health expert Jenny Keane, plant-based entrepreneur Deliciouslly Ella, and Kardashian trainer Donamatrix among them — detailing the many ways any of us can be well. Further south, Cahir Wellness Festival (€20 for over 16s) launched its inaugural event early in the month to a 2,000-strong crowd following a 10-week run of advertisement by festival organisers Eddie Kendrick, Aaron Wall, Noelle Mulcahy, Paul Kearney, and county councillor Andy Molony. Kendrick, a psychotherapist who also runs The Heat Retreat Sauna, believes the interest is down to a mindset shift: 'The pub was the centre for everything for so long, and as a result, alcoholism was so normalised. 'Now we have an awareness of what that means, and people don't want to feel crap on their days off. They recognise the benefit of doing things that make you feel good. And that recognition is infectious.' The urge for alternative forms of healing is not new. Once considered in perjorative terms such as quackery and shrinks, the desire to seek new means of health and wellbeing has been accelerated by the difficult nature of feeling healthy today; higher food prices, GP appointment queues, anti-vaccination disinformation, and the rise in loneliness all contribute to a system that is resolutely making us unwell. As such, it can even feel necessary to tend to yourself in covert and unestablished ways. And yet, because of the term's vague and expansive nature, 'wellness' as a noun can be difficult to navigate. According to the National Institute of Health, wellness is 'a holistic integration of physical, mental, and spiritual wellbeing, fuelling the body, engaging the mind, and nurturing the spirit'. In theory, it encompasses stimulating mind and body work, but can feel co-opted by capitalism to mean anything from juice cleansing to LSD microdosing to skincare to transcendental meditation. Dr Clodagh Campbell. Picture: Brian McEvoy 'For me, wellness is feeling good within ourselves,' Clodagh Campbell, otherwise known as the 'Wellness Psychologist', says. 'It involves methods that make us feel balanced and grounded, like putting boundaries in place, eating food that makes us feel good, or anything that involves protecting our health and peace.' According to the Global Wellness Institute, the wellness industry is currently valued at $6.3 trillion (€5.4tn), with an expectation that it will increase to $9tn (€7.75tn) by 2028. Figures like that would make anyone cynical, even those calling from inside the house. 'There can be a sense of commercialisation of stuff that is kind of sacred, which had a question mark over it for me,' says Michael Ryan, a men's retreat organiser, and yoga and meditation teacher who regularly works with President Michael D Higgins. 'But the more I think about it, I think the people who attend these events are likely to be seeking deeper connection or meaning in their lives, and these events might be a great way to get a taster of what they're searching for.' 'I think the word is a bit loaded,' agrees Wendy Riordan, founder of retreat experience Nourish and Flow. 'As in, you have to look or eat or be a certain way. 'I think that's another layer of stress that we put on ourselves as a society.' Wendy Riordan, founder of Nourish & Flow RestFest Riordan runs Nourish and Flow RestFest (€450-€549, including meals and glamping), a festival-retreat hybrid in its third year. Taking place in Stradbally, Co Laois, a fortnight before Electric Picnic, the event will see 100 women eat together, attend talks, and sleep under the stars to obtain 'true rest'. Riordan credits a desire for connection with the rise in wellness-centric event attendance. She says: 'Hustle culture means we don't know our neighbours, don't have a third space, and any time spent alone is wracked with guilt. In a group setting, you're far more likely to lighten that guilty load.' Our day to day lives are relatively superficial, Ryan agrees, meaning true connection is hard to come by: 'In older cultures, we would have had elders to pass down information to do with wisdom or emotional intelligence, things we don't really get anywhere else. These are a gateway to getting that, in a world that can feel particularly harsh for so many people.' Campbell says: 'We're living such fast-paced lives that make us so stressed and disconnected that there's a yearning to slow down, connect with others and take a breath. And also a yearning to find someone who can help us do that because it's hard to do alone. I meet people all the time who are looking for help and guidance in that space to help them feel less stressed and anxious. There's a yearning for something different, and essentially to feel better, and less alone. 'Ultimately, people are seeking mental wellbeing. A lot of people I work with struggle with self worth, resulting in us being people pleasers. That, I think, lends itself to the psychology of this shift — it's hard to say no to people, but the resentment of constantly people pleasing is tougher still.' Kendrick agrees: 'I think the rushing we do is symptomatic of something deeper, and wellness is a break from that. Before now, particularly in small Irish towns, the only choice to socialise was the pub. Now, events like these give people a choice.' Last but not least, from a commercial perspective, the logistics of organising a traditional music festival are complex and multi-faceted, with any misstep potentially leading to significant issues. Most of these issues can be eradicated when elements like drugs, alcohol. and high insurance costs are removed, meaning that modern festival organisers and owners of the land they lease from are far more likely to pivot to a less hedonistic clientele. With all roads pointing to wellness, rest-filled weekends in lieu of boozy, muddy ones — should we all be redirecting ourselves towards yoga mats and drum circles? Hilary Rose, The Young Offenders actress, podcaster, and co-host of RestFest, suggests we change our mindset when considering it. 'When I was in my 20s, I loved music festivals,' she says. 'Now, I look for ones that make me feel good as opposed to bad. In many ways, too, music festivals were never about who was on the stage; it was the craic in the campsite or the woods afterwards. These kinds of festivals are much the same. We're looking for a community, more than anything else.' Tickets for RestFest are available now from


RTÉ News
12-05-2025
- Health
- RTÉ News
Easy ways to boost your mood throughout the week
We could all do with a bit more wellbeing. Starting the week should be energising and uplifting, but the reality is that feeling good on a Monday can be out of reach sometimes. From work anxiety, the pressures of parenting or caring, anguish over world events or just a plain old funk, there's a lot that can weigh on you. Finding ways to invigorate yourself is important. Wellness is often linked to how many matching yoga sets you can buy or how long you can devote to making the perfect matcha and while those are lovely treats to give yourself, there are many small but powerful switches you can add into your day or week for free that have the power to boost your mood and calm your nerves. WellFest, Dublin's fabulous wellness and fitness festival, descended on the beautiful grounds of the Royal Hospital Kilmainham once again this weekend, bringing with it a veritable tidal wave of energy, positivity and activity. I was invited to check it out, and I busied myself speaking to as many experts as I could about bottling that passion and taking it home with me. Here are four takeaways from some of Ireland's leading figures in health, wellness and fitness. Jenny Keane, holistic sex educator: Ask yourself these three questions. "For me, I really believe wellness is not a destination that we get to but is a state that is always moving, so that means that we don't aim to feel good and then we arrive at feeling good forever. It is a normal part of the human experience to be able to swing between states of connection and disconnection, back to connection again, to move between states of joy and sorrow and exhaustion and overwhelm and back to energy again. "It's that swing that allows us to experience, I suppose, the humanness of what life is, right? All of the emotions, all of the experiences. "So when it comes to introducing a wellness practice, I don't believe that it should look [like] the same thing each time. I believe that it's learning how to ask three simple questions often and frequently, over and over and over again. "Those questions would be: How do I feel? What do I need? Can I give it to myself? "Because then it looks like you understand whether one day you wake up and you need something like a high intensity, dynamic cardio class, or another time you might realise that what you need is a really gentle, slow yin yoga class, maybe with candle lights. Jennifer Rock, The Skin Nerd: Treat your skin as you would treat yourself. "There's a direct correlation between how you look after your skin and how you feel in yourself. I'm going to assume that everyone cleanses and [uses] SPF because that's essentially cleaning the organ that is the skin and protecting it. "The key ingredients are ascorbic acid, which is the pure form of vitamin C, it helps with colour, collagen, clarity and also is really protecting against the sun. And then retinoid. Retinoids are really the gold standard for truly helping repair the skin at a cellular level. "Honestly, it can be so easy: it's cleanse, vitamin C, a bit of vitamin A and an SPF. "After about three to six months, start taking photographs on day one, you will see the difference and you will feel the better for it. Dave and Stephen Flynn, The Happy Pear: Laughter, joy and friendship are superfoods. Dave: "One thing I'd recommend someone do to improve their mental health and wellbeing, is do something they love, something that's well, is good for their health, but is something they love, because if you love something, it could be more sustainable. "It could be dancing, it could be gardening, it could be painting, it could be going to pet a cat, someone's cat or mind a kid for an hour! [Stephen: "That sounds a bit weird."] It's just to do something that you love and make time for it because time passes quickly and you need to be intentional about what you spend it [on]." Stephen: "I think a really important thing that someone can add to their wellness routine, to their daily life is laughter and joy. We're caught up in a society where wellness can be so righteous and so perfect, whereas I think we're all flawed humans, and I think embracing our flaws and having a laugh, I think these are real superfoods: laughter and joy and friendship."