Love To Be Well

Love is in the air, and not just due to the rapidly approaching holiday Valentines day. This past Wednesday, February 8th, CMHA staff, affiliated services and community members came together at the community creekside centre to celebrate wellness at the event Love to Be Well.

As guests entered the event they were invited to write their thoughts about mental health on hand cut hearts. They were asked to share what does mental health wellness mean to them, and if they had a wellness wish for another. The activity helped set the tone for the event and provided those present with the opportunity to see what others had written and wished for others.  

Everyone who attended had the opportunity to mingle over refreshments and meet representatives from different services and programs provided by the CMHA. Some of the services ranged from P.E.D.A.L. and Vancouver Area Cycling Coalition providing tips for this years community bike ride, to Get Set and Connect and super saturday club, which are regular programs run by the CMHA.

The guest speaker of the evening was healthy food guru Adam Hart. Adam is a nutritionist, Whole Foods chef, speaker, coach and author of e3 For Life. Adam spoke to the crowd about the strong food mood connection, and how what you eat can affect your mental health. During his talk, Adam touched upon how to reduce the impact of depression, how to use food to increase mental clarity and how to enhance your mental imagination.

The evening was capped off with laughter yoga led by Certified Laughter Yoga Leader Seia Roots. Laughter yoga includes traditional aspects of yoga like deep breathing and stretching with exercises designed to self-trigger laughter. Laughter yoga provides a stress release and studies have shown it provides positive psychological benefits. With a smile on their face after completing laughter yoga, guests left refreshed and renewed with new tools equipping them to love to be well.