Finding Balance: 3 spiritual wellness tips that go beyond the body and mind

Year in and year out, a new year comes with the promise of a blank slate – the perfect opportunity to set goals for the year ahead. But while most resolutions focus on external aims – fitness, career, finances and relationships for example – what about our minds and spirits? In a world with increasing levels of mental health issues and burnout, should we be focusing more on our spiritual wellness?

Yes, according to Farzana Ali, a leading expert in sound meditation and author of Sound Healing: How to Use Sound to Beat Stress and Anxiety. “It’s all connected. We aren’t just physical beings, we’re spiritual as well. You’d never start a business without taking a 360° approach and looking at everything from every angle, so your health shouldn’t be any different.”

Farzana, who works with clients one-on-one as well as running group and corporate sound baths, explains: “I think sometimes people don’t understand what spiritual wellness actually means.It’s about the relationship you have to yourself, your relationship to those around you as well as your goals and your vision. Many successful people will admit they had a “calling” about their work, or a “gut feeling” about an idea, or they just knew they wanted to work with someone based on how well they got on with someone immediately – that’s all energy work. And to tap into that you need to make sure you are taking care of your spiritual wellbeing.

If you want to relax, release blocked emotions, tackle burnout or stress or simply find more balance this coming year, sound can be a powerful place to start. “We evolved to respond strongly and fully to different sounds in order to stay safe and avoid danger. Sound healing works by activating our vagus nerve, which makes up a huge portion of our parasympathetic nervous system,” says Farzana.

“It works via a process called entrainment -–which basically means that your brainwaves change to match the slower soundwaves created by the instruments. It’s these slower brainwaves that tell both your brain and body that you are safe and that it can go into recovery and rejuvenation mode.” With sound baths surging in popularity, you should have plenty of local options to try this wellness trend out for yourself. “It’s meditation without the effort,” she adds.GROUNDING ENERGY

Hannah Baldwin, a former city trader whose burnout led her to seek more balance in her life, agrees that spiritual wellness underpins everything else – so acts to support your goals whether they relate to fitness, work or relationships. “It ties into your self-worth, your self-confidence and your self-esteem,” says Hannah, now a reiki healer and host of her own podcast, Wholeness with Hannah.

“So, a lot of people, for example if they’re always stressed, are like: ‘Well, this is my lot, I can’t do anything else, I’ve just got to get on with it’ – because they don’t actually believe in themselves. Because they’re not connected to their power. But when we’re connected to our own power, anything feels possible. It’s a process and it’s a journey, but it becomes about living from alignment rather than depletion.”

Reiki can help with this. “When we’re living on autopilot, like we are when we’re heading for burnout, we’re living in fight or flight. But reiki activates the parasympathetic nervous system, so it lets your body go into that state of rest and digest. Think of your energy as a hose pipe – when there are kinks in the hose, the energy can’t flow properly. And when your energy isn’t flowing as well as it could be, you’re just not going to be experiencing life with as much ease or as much alignment. You might feel more drained, you might feel more disconnected, and your emotions will be stuck in your body – which will be creating the lens through which you see the world.” She adds: “One thing I always say to people is that we have an energy field around us – science shows that it’s a bio-field, or I like to call it an aura. And it’s our energy fields that are actually interacting with people. So, when you meet someone for the first time and you’re like, ‘Oh my God, this person’s great, we’re really vibing’ – that’s energy. Just like if you walk into a room where there’s an argument happening, the vibe might feel off.

Hannah delivers ‘energy audit’ workshops to brands and big businesses – clients include Meta – and one of the frameworks she teaches is ‘ground, cleanse, protect, which harnesses the power of visualisation to stop energy leaks. If you ever feel harassed or drained after a meeting, or being on the tube, or any other situation, you could be picking up other people’s energy – so this is a technique we can all use in our daily lives to help combat that.

“You can ground yourself by either going outside and putting your feet on the earth or doing a visualisation – imagine you’re grounded in the earth, with roots coming out of your feet. The difference you feel when your energy goes back down and you’re not so scattered is really quite life changing. To cleanse your energy, imagine a waterfall washing away any energy that isn’t yours, and for protection, visualise a bubble around yourself.”FOCUS ON JOY

For Sama Trinder, who runs Bhuti – an eco-friendly wellness and wellbeing centre at Bingham Riverhouse in Richmond – 2026 is set to be the year of ‘soul health’. “Over the last 10 years, the wellness industry has grown but public health has declined –  from one-in-three [people] having cancer in 2015 to now one-in-two,” says Sama, a multidisciplinary wellbeing practitioner with qualifications in fields including yoga, breathwork and somatic dance. 

“We’re also looking at increases in stress-related illnesses, heart disease, autoimmune conditions, obesity, and a rise in depression and addiction. Especially going into the new year – we focus on our physical goals, we eat healthily, we know what we should do or shouldn’t do. But I think the spiritual connection is what is missing.”

The solution? Focus on joy – particularly if the idea of spirituality feels a bit much for you. “If you’re in spiritual connection you’re generally in joy as well – and everyone knows what joy is,” she says, recommending somatic dance – holistic, freeform movement – as a way to tap into this.“Everything is stored in the body so somatic dance is a way of allowing people to literally move stress out of their body through movement and sound. You get loads of endorphins, serotonin, dopamine, connection with each other, and with the music,” she explains, pointing out that around 70% of nightclubs have closed nationwide in recent years. “It’s in our DNA to dance together but there are fewer and fewer places to do it.”

Different rhythms or beats are used to help evoke different feelings. “It releases pent up stress and emotions, it clears energetic blocks and can boost creativity. And when you do it for long periods – maybe two, two and a half hours – you feel emptied of everything that’s been weighing you down.” So, in order to strive towards our most successful year yet, the best strategy could be to look within, rather than outside, of ourselves. 

“It feels like this was all booming in the 1960s and ’70s but we’ve gone backwards since then, says Sama, adding: “But it’s resurging again now.”

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