Celebrate Global Wellness Day on June 8th

Saturday, June 8, 2019 will mark the eighth annual Global Wellness Day (GWD) celebration and the fifth time the special day is being celebrated internationally. This year the focus of the event is building communities of wellness. Surviving a life-threatening illness inspired Turkish businesswoman, Belgin Aksov, to start GWD. It is her passion for the cause that has motivated over 100 volunteer ambassadors, advisors and supporters to help make her dream a reality across the globe. The caveat: the annual events organised each year need to be three things: non-commercial and complementary to align with the intention that wellness is not a luxury but the inherit right of every individual.

“We go to school from the age of two, hoping that the education system is going to help prepare us for our future,” says Aksov, “but nobody teaches us how to live, how to breathe, how to be mindful and how to love ourselves as these are things that are essential to be a happy adult in the future. In an era where global consumer kids are ending up unhappy and unsatisfied, a key goal of GWD is to teach children and families how to integrate wellness practices into their daily lives and then to carry on those practices throughout their lives.”

Living well is almost the entire world’s shared dream.

As everything that is precious to us has been honoured with a special day, why is it that we don’t have a special global day dedicated to the only thing which is really valuable to all of us, that is, living well? We can now answer this question by saying “it now exists”. This special day is called Global Wellness Day.

With the slogan “One day can change your whole life,” we celebrate Global Wellness Day on the second Saturday of June every year as an international day.

Global Wellness Day is an entirely not-for-profit day, a social project dedicated to living well. The purpose of Global Wellness Day is to ask the question, even if for just one day, “How can I live a healthier and better life?”, to direct the thoughts of both individuals and society towards “living well” and to raise awareness.

The main aims of the day are:

• To recognise the value of our lives
• To pause and think, even if for just one day of the year
• To be free from the stress of everyday city life and bad habits
• To make peace with ourselves
• To raise awareness about living well and increase motivation, not just for today, but for the remaining 364 days of the year

First celebrated in 2012, Global Wellness Day was established in Turkey as the “first” day dedicated to living well, and has now been accepted worldwide. Reflecting its success, in 2019 Global Wellness Day will be celebrated simultaneously in 150 countries at 5000 different locations with different events ranging from the GWD flag reaching the summit of Mt. Everest to giving medical care to children at the Thailand and Myanmar border and visiting elderly people’s home in Brazil.

To get one step closer towards living well in your own community, here’s some inspiring examples of planned events around the world with U.S GWD locations including Los Angeles and La Jolla, California; Cleveland, Ohio, NYC, Sough Florida and Whitefish, Montana. In the company categories: Gym Source – America’s largest distributor of fitness equipment – will convert all 35 of their stores to gyms on to the public on GWD and hotel companies such as Hyatt Hotels and Resorts are making GWD part of their corporate-wide wellness campaigns. Over 250 Hyatt properties, including Hyatt’s Miraval and Exhale brands and the company’s regional and corporate offices are expected to host health and wellness-related events reflecting their specific destinations and local communities – from Delhi to Chicago and Zurich to Tokyo. New countries joining this year being China, Kenya, Cayman Islands, Peru, Zimbabwe and Dominican Republic.

Look for the hashtag #globalwellnessday to follow what’s happening from sunrise to sunset around the globe on June 8 and provide inspiration for your own 2020 GWD event to increase awareness of “living well”.