Living Landscapes: Connecting People, Place, and Planet
Reflections from NABAD Consulting’s online gathering held on October 12, 2026, in recognition of World Mental Health Day.
How do we create the conditions for people, places, and the planet to thrive together?
This question framed Living Landscapes, an online gathering hosted by Natali Ghawi, founder of NABAD Consulting, exploring the connections between personal, collective, and planetary wellbeing.
Bringing together Serena Sabala, Sonja den Elzen, and Tímea Szőke, the conversation connected perspectives from wellness, Taoist medicine, and regenerative placemaking. The discussion examined how our internal experiences interact with the relationships, environments, and systems that shape daily life, considering both individual agency and the wider conditions that support health, connection, and resilience.
The relationship between inner and outer landscapes
The gathering centered on the reciprocal relationship between our inner and outer landscapes.
Our inner landscapes include our emotions, thoughts, bodily experiences, values, and sense of purpose. Our outer landscapes encompass the spaces we inhabit, the communities we participate in, and the social and ecological systems that sustain us.
These dimensions continuously influence one another. Our environments shape opportunities for movement, rest, social interaction, and belonging. Our internal experiences, in turn, influence how we engage with others, make decisions, and contribute to the places and systems around us.
The conversation considered the implications of this relationship for wellbeing. Personal practices of care are important, alongside attention to the conditions in which people are expected to sustain themselves. Workplaces, neighborhoods, institutions, and daily routines can either support our capacity to thrive or contribute to exhaustion and disconnection.
This framing positions wellbeing as a shared consideration across personal practice, community life, spatial design, and institutional priorities.
Personal wellbeing and the capacity to contribute
Serena Sabala, founder of Whole Shift Wellness, discussed the relationship between personal care and meaningful participation in the wider world.
Drawing on her work in coaching, retreats, and workplace wellbeing, she highlighted focus, nourishment, and movement as practical foundations for supporting daily life. Her contribution emphasized adapting practices to individual circumstances, needs, and stages of life.
The conversation also addressed the balance between attending to personal needs and sustaining commitments to others. Caring for ourselves can strengthen our capacity to contribute, while supportive relationships and a sense of belonging are themselves sources of nourishment.
Serena reflected on how restorative experiences associated with retreats and time in nature might inform everyday routines. This raised questions about how people can sustain connection within demanding urban environments, and how daily life can better accommodate practices that support wellbeing.
Transformation through rhythms and relationships
Sonja den Elzen, founder of Cedar Healing Arts and the Living Spiral of Inner Alchemy, contributed a perspective grounded in Taoist medicine and the five phases.
Her reflections approached transformation as a cyclical and relational process, encompassing periods of growth, expression, discernment, release, and inward reflection. Through this lens, changing needs and capacities can be understood in relation to the rhythms of the natural world.
The discussion considered how awareness of these cycles might inform our relationships with ourselves, others, and our surroundings. Making space for reflection, recognizing limits, and responding to change were explored as aspects of a more attentive relationship with life.
Sonja also discussed reciprocity through everyday experiences of food, land, and seasonal practices. A personal account of foraging illustrated how direct engagement with a landscape can deepen appreciation for its resources and encourage attention to the responsibilities involved in receiving from it.
Her contribution invited consideration of how we participate in the living systems that sustain us, and how we care for them in return.
Regenerative placemaking, participation, and belonging
Tímea Szőke, an urban practitioner and researcher based in Barcelona, brought a regenerative perspective to the conversation, examining how public spaces can help restore relationships between people and the places they inhabit.
Her contribution explored four interconnected domains: the self, the community, the place, and more-than-human life. From this perspective, regenerative placemaking involves cultivating relationships and creating conditions for all life to flourish.
Community gardening illustrated how these domains can come together through physical participation, cooperation, care for a shared environment, and engagement with plants and soil. Tímea also highlighted everyday practices, such as learning about local history and connecting with neighbors, as accessible ways to strengthen belonging.
The discussion emphasized that community develops through repeated encounters, participation, and sustained commitment. It also raised questions about how the design and management of shared spaces can make these relationships easier to establish and maintain.
Drawing on an example from Budapest, Tímea described how informal gatherings beside the Danube River developed into collective advocacy for greater public access to the waterfront. The story demonstrated how shared experiences and sustained participation can contribute to changes in urban priorities.
Her reflections emphasized reciprocity, commitment, and collective agency as foundations of regeneration, connecting personal engagement with the wider transformation of communities and places.
Connecting everyday action with systemic change
Across the discussion, speakers considered the relationship between small actions and wider transformation.
Individual and community practices can create opportunities to experience different ways of living and relating. Their broader influence depends on the conditions around them, including access, institutional support, continuity, and opportunities for collective participation.
The gathering also highlighted the value of curiosity, creativity, and enjoyment in this process. Shared activities can help people develop relationships, identify common concerns, and explore possibilities for their communities. They can provide spaces in which different futures are practiced and experienced.
For practitioners working across wellbeing, design, and development, these reflections invite attention to both lived experience and the structures that shape it. Supporting personal agency and transforming wider conditions are interconnected responsibilities.
Regeneration as creating conditions for life to flourish
The closing discussion returned to regeneration and its meaning across the speakers’ fields of practice.
Contributions emphasized attentive relationships, respect for living systems, and the cultivation of conditions that support renewal. This included recognizing what sustains life, what contributes to depletion, and where practices or environments might need to change.
Living Landscapes reflects NABAD Consulting’s ongoing exploration of regenerative people and planetary wellbeing across personal, interpersonal, spatial, and systemic scales. The gathering offered a space to connect these perspectives and examine their implications for how we live, work, design, and care.
We thank Serena Sabala, Sonja den Elzen, Tímea Szőke, and everyone who joined us for their thoughtful contributions to this conversation.
