ABSTRACT
The working definition from previous philosophy, anthropology and psychology literature led to an acceptance that the key to understanding wellbeing is through the experience of joy mediated by the body, truth, beauty and/or the divine, which makes suffering in life experiences meaningful and worthwhile. As this is a subjective experience self also required a working definition which was established to be: the interaction between an individual’s ‘felt sense’ which provides meaning through embodied relational knowing and the world in which the person lives in time and space.
These definitions provided a foundation for understanding the evaluations, reflections, pictures and creative writing from two of the Stiwdio Arts Group projects. These two were used due to the amount of material available to provide some understanding of the participants’ experiences.
Both projects were led by Louise and structured in a similar way and therefore the main differences in the projects were focus, time and place. The reflections have been left as the individual’s written stories so that the reader can draw out their own interpretations and meanings; they leave the reader to develop, in turn, their own story.
Despite a lack of interpretation offered here it is clear that the phenomenon of mental wellbeing is an embodied experience within a certain sense of time and place that can be enlivened by creativity.
