Conscious City Guide Redefines the Concept of Wellness
The newly relaunched platform highlights events that foster individual and collective growth
Mushroom foraging classes, yoga sessions, guided meditations, workshops on confronting trauma: these events and more populate Conscious City Guide, a newly relaunched global event-ticketing platform founded by Kiki Falconer and Mel Nahas in 2016. As the first site of its kind, the platform thoughtfully highlights experiences that are nurturing, inclusive and might otherwise be difficult to find (much less trust). For those looking to lead a more conscious lifestyle or simply reconnect with themselves or nature, Conscious City Guide provides a gateway to wellness for both the newly curious and initiated.
While the terms “wellness” and “conscious lifestyle” have been over-used and can seem vague (especially within an industry saturated with hyperbolic claims of sustainability and self-care), Nahas and Falconer make clear what their terms mean and have demonstrated dedication to the site’s overall values. Nahas explains, “Living a conscious lifestyle is the recognition and awareness that when we’re connected to ourselves, we also have a duty and responsibility to be connected to our communities as well as the Earth.” While conversations on wellness often center individual care, Nahas and Falconer’s ethos considers people’s prosperity in relation to the whole. Theirs is an ideology rooted in sustainability, equity and mutual respect, and it is depicted throughout the platform’s vast offerings.
Nahas herself came to realize the necessity of this dogma almost a decade ago. At that time, the co-founder—who was born in Indonesia and raised in Perth, Australia—had been working in the music industry when she reached her limit with the fast-paced environment. Seeking alternate ways to live, she began a blog centered on traveling and profiling people whose approaches to life inspired her to change her own. At the end of her blog’s newsletter, she included a list of events that aligned with this. These events would go on to become the thriving platform that Conscious City Guide is now.
Using these events as a catalyst for individual and collective growth is a strategic synthesis of the co-founders’ own journeys. “Because Kiki and I have such a huge background in creating—we worked at music television station Channel V in Australia together—we had such incredible jobs creating powerful moments that really inspired a generation. We just saw how these collective moments or cultural touchpoint moments really transform people,” says Nahas. The ticketing platform then, makes “conscious lifestyle mainstream through the same ways that music, fashion, food and popular culture does,” she continues.
Just as a concert can move people in an audience, Conscious City Guide seeks to harness this feeling beyond the realm of music into wellness, collective care and more. In making these events more mainstream, the co-founders hope to make a desire for individual and mutual wellbeing more than a trend—but rather a lifestyle.
As the platform’s growth can attest, the conscious lifestyle is one many have become invested in. In the beginning, Nahas and Falconer leveraged their music and media network to source and vet events that align with their values themselves. Flash forward to 2022 and the platform has amassed a community of its own, with individuals who continue to update the site. This community of over 40,000 people worldwide helps to power the platform.
Over the past couple of years, the site has felt even more critical for Nahas. She tells us, “We’re just in such a rapid time of transformation collectively. We’re all looking for lifelines, community, support and education for ourselves, to assist in that transformation and our humanity’s collective evolution.” The guide focuses on helping to create those lifelines by highlighting intentional events that, she adds, can be “anything that promotes or inspires people to connect or transform themselves, their communities or the planet. So that could be anything from a meditation workshop through to an anti-racism group or regenerative soil class.”
As a part of the redesigned site, the platform now offers articles written by some of the event creators to go alongside their corresponding experiences. The update attests to Nahas’ dedication to inclusivity and accessibility, as the founder observed some people still felt hesitant to sign up for activities they are interested in due to feeling like they lack proper knowledge about it. These articles—which range from Foraging 101 to tips on queer dating and planning large-scale waste-free events—act as standalone resources as well as deeper information about what to expect. As Nahas describes, the features “that we now have on the site are giving people that extra layer of information that they may need before really jumping into an event.”
Encouraging others to invest in holistic wellness and popularizing wellbeing through moving events are the core tenets that make up Conscious City Guide. Filled with fun experiences and introspective happenings, the platform makes caring for the self, others and the world at large enjoyable and accessible without watering down its necessity or the work it takes to get there.
Hero image courtesy of Audrey McGee
