Inhale, hold it and exhale – these breathing practices were shared with participants at a free Mitchell’s Plain wellness workshop at Dagbreek community hall, in Westridge, on Wednesday May 7.
Natalie Hurling and her husband, Aurbon, from Roots and Raw based in Strandfontein at the YMCA Rotary Camp, facilitated the session on sustainable healthy living practices and self-care.
They were hosted by Mitchell’s Plain Entrepreneurs’ Hub to equip the members with healthy minds, bodies and spirits.
Ms Hurling said she and her family have been on this journey of self discovery and have incorporated practices into their daily lives.
She said the aim was to live a balanced life, in moderation and mindfully including meaningful foods, practices and gestures to oneself and the community.
“It is journey of self-healing. It is long but with positive talk to oneself, listening to your body and empowerment to know what to feed your body,” she said.
Ms Hurling said Mitchell’s Plain has to go through a process of healing based on their past experiences of apartheid and be willing to accept that they are enough.
“I am enough and capable of living an authentic life,” she said.
The couple changed their lives completely when they realised their former lifestyle was not sustainable.
In 2008, they started living simpler lives and ate organic plant-based food, which became a “natural process of letting go of things you can no longer afford and eating healthy food to prevent getting ill to not spend money at the pharmacy”.
“We were eating and working ourselves to death, literally,” she said.
She said food is medicine and that it depended on how one thought of food, prepared and consumed it.
“It is to nourish and keep the body healthy,” she said.
Participant Belinda Bessick, from Portland, said her own journey to a better holistic lifestyle had rubbed off on her children.
Hub founder and director Lucretia Splinters, from Westridge, said that they were hoping to empower members to live healthy, happy lives that impacted on their families, flowed into their businesses and their community with environmentally friendly and socially responsible practices.
The couple invites organisations to contact them for free workshops in their communities. Call 062 658 1387.
