In the UAE in the past few years, there has been a substantial growth in the number of alternative healers and therapists offering to help residents and citizens improve their well being. Dubai’s Flordeliza Pesigan is farther along the “alternative” spectrum than some other practitioners.
She moved to the country 18 years ago and spent the first 15 of those years working various jobs, including as a secretary and as the manager of a craft market. Three years ago, she gave up everything, including her apartment and lots of her possessions, and moved to Bali to concentrate on herself and her art.
“I was really depressed and felt lost. I went to Bali with no direction, but it was pulling me. I needed to live somewhere as an artist, so for the first time I decided to go with the flow.”
For years before her move, Pesigan had suffered intestinal problems, visiting one doctor after another to try to fix it. In Bali she says she had a realization that changed her life, one she now tries to share with others back home in Dubai.
“I started realizing that our physical diseases are often caused by mental, soulful and spiritual problems,” she says. “It’s just a manifestation of what is wrong with the mind and heart.”
Pesigan now splits her time between Dubai, Goa and Bali.
Pesigan herself runs various courses when she’s in town. Her most popular are the Five Elements ceremonies, which use meditation, dance, music and art to take people “on journeys into their heart, inner truth and soul calling”.
She also uses Tibetan sound bowls to take people on sound journeys, a sort of meditation-to-music exercise.
Pesigan does a lot of her work at the Life’n One wellness center in Jumeirah. Set up in February, the centre hosts health coaching workshops, yoga, Pilates and barre classes, meditation sessions, hypnotherapy, inversion therapy and theta healing.
It hosts some of the world’s most respected alternative therapists, and is just as popular with Emiratis as expatriates, according to the center’s founder Eda Gungor.
Gungor moved to Dubai specifically to set up Life’n One after leaving a senior job in the corporate events and gifts sector in Istanbul.
The 32-year-old had a vision for a center where people could go on journeys of improvement and better their physical and mental well being.
Gungor found a supportive business partner and rented an old but character-filled villa in Jumeirah with a large garden space that she has turned into an indoor and outdoor vegetarian, gluten-free, dairy-free and sugar-free cafe.
From thenational.ae
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