Sustainability Tribe Wellness Day: Virtual Community Event
June 30, 2020 By: Amruta Kshemkalyani

Tribe, as we are slowly and carefully reacting to the reopening after the Coronavirus lockdown which extended almost 4 months in the UAE, we are all reflecting and wondering how it is going to be, life after lockdown. As you all know, the Sustainability Tribe COVID-19 response was centered around being responsible as well as educating and inspiring our Tribe via our #SustainableQuarantine Initiative. The main goal behind this initiative was to focus on how we can be more sustainable during self-quarantine and lockdown as per local authorities. Moreover, utilize our time at home to make simple sustainable lifestyle changes and practice them. You watched our numerous sustainability video tutorials, which are all uploaded to our Youtube channel for future viewing, you even enjoyed our webinars, expert talks, and live sessions.

We even moved our free to attend awareness building, community events online. Looking back at this month, our first online community event, Sustainability Tribe Wellness Day was the highlight. To support Global Wellness Day, we hosted this online event in the form of a series of zoom webinars hosted by renowned experts. Like all our community events, we managed to keep our motto of ‘ Educate, Find Solutions, and Take Actions’ even for this online event. We invited wellness experts right from nutritionists, yoga, fitness & mindfulness teachers, psychologist, clean beauty coaches and they all hosted hands-on workshops to support our community events motto. This way, our Sustainability Tribe also received a golden opportunity to support local businesses during such challenging times and highlight their expertise and skills.

Our opening session included DIY Moisturizing Yogurt Face Mask by Marriam Yassin, I prefer calling her beauty secret queen, a holistic living expert. We had a blast making a DIY mask and our Tribe including the speaker applied the mask on their face during the session.

The second session was hosted by Jyotika Aggarwal, a clinical psychologist at LifeWorks. She talked about ‘Managing the Pandemic: A healthy & Practical Perspective’. She covered many important aspects like how do you cope with this change? What changes should we make in our daily routine? Decision making and Time Management as well as how do you avoid getting Stressed.

One of the popular sessions was hosted by Mitun De Sarkar renowned clinical dietician, the founder of Simply Healthy Foods who recently designed Costa Coffee’s healthy food range Costa 4u. Her talk was filled with tonnes of useful, practical tips. She is so knowledgeable and passionate about this topic that honestly I won’t be tired listening to her for hours. I saw many inspired faces on the screen, taking notes.

Another popular session was by Neli Merris, Yoga Teacher, Sound- Energy Healer, and co-founder of Seven Wellness Abu Dhabi. It was a sound healing meditation session, so our host was ready with all the set up of her sound bowls on the screen and we all enjoyed a very peacefully, calming sound healing session.

The next session was by Angelique Michel, Yoga instructor and founder of United Yoga Emirates. We learned and practiced Ashoof Yoga with her, where all techniques lead to “seeing” from within, bringing more awareness and therefore consciously releasing what you’re ready to let go of.

Our last session was a very appropriately Mindfulness session hosted by Kirsty Heaton, Mindfulness Teacher at MindfulMe. Grounded in ancient wisdom, yet backed by modern research, Mindfulness allows us to reconnect with ourselves and find that sense of calm and clarity when the world around us feels so uncertain. And truly we received that calmness at the end of her amazing session.

Every session at our event gave great insights, tips to our participants. Our experts reiterated so many points I keep mentioning in our wellness articles, like Eco-therapy for a healthy body and mind.

The best part of our first virtual community event was, for the first time my Tribe from around the world could join our community events. For our physical community events in the past like the Sustainable Food event or Beat Plastic Pollution event, we witnessed how our Tribe members from all of the different emirates in UAE traveled to attend our events in Dubai, this time we saw guests participating from all over the world including Asia, Europe, and the US. Such a great response honestly is a very humbling experience for me personally and gives me much more strength to keep working on the main mission behind Sustainability Tribe.

I am going to keep hosting our community events regularly online or offline. Don’t forget to subscribe here, so that you will receive notification of our next Sustainability Tribe Event.