The Business of Being Well ✨

A recent Global Wellness Institute report showed that Canadian wellness spending has reached US $143 billion.

That number stops me in my tracks. Not because it’s surprising, but because it makes perfect sense. People in Canada are spending an extraordinary amount of money trying to be well.

And I’m curious about what that means, especially through the lens of osteopathy.

Osteopaths are practitioners who specialize in how a body works and communicates. We’re translators and pattern-readers, taking a multilingual approach to structural health and wellness. When I think about this enormous wellness economy, I wonder what would happen if osteopathic thinking became part of that conversation — not as a boutique add-on, but as a foundation for understanding how wellness actually functions inside the living human body.

One of the tools I’m building to help people access that understanding is what I call the Five Storey Framework.

The Five STOREYS are all at once anatomical, mechanical, and symbolic — five horizontal transition zones that divide the body’s internal architecture like the floors of a building:

• the arches of the feet

• the pelvic floor

• the bottom of the lungs

• the top of the lungs

• the hood of the mouth

We ALL have these storeys in our fundamental layout. They are pressure zones — architectural diaphragms that organize the body in space and help distribute movement, force, and feeling throughout the structure. They serve as meeting points between the mechanical and the meaningful. Each STOREY carries not only its anatomical function but a mental-emotional resonance: how grounded we feel, how we relate to safety, how free we are to breathe, how we communicate with our inner and outer world. All this depends on how those five storeys are stacking up.

Around and through this architecture run different filters — ways of studying or speaking about what’s happening inside it. I often describe them as dialects: the musculoskeletal, neurological, hormonal, circulatory, and even psychosocial languages of the body. You can look at the same five-storey building through any of these filters, depending on which lens you’re trained in or which one helps you understand your own experience best.

But the key idea is this: the underlying layout — the basic foundation of our bodies — is shared. The filters layer on top. The structure comes first. And no-body should be left out of understanding this.

Mainstream exercise culture often cues people to “brace your core” or “lock your spine” to protect from injury. But that approach, meant to stabilize, can increase internal pressure, limit spinal mobility, and interfere with neural regulation over time. The body becomes more rigid, less adaptable, and — ironically — more vulnerable to strain.

One of the simplest antidotes is something we all know how to do:

Yawn.

Yawning is a full-body breath reflex that softens every diaphragm in the body — including all five STOREYS — restoring natural spinal motion and pressure balance. I teach it as a kind of warm-in practice before exercise: a way to remind your body of its own intelligence before you start adding load. It’s the opposite of bracing. It’s preparatory fluency.

What I hope osteopathy — and Well + Mortal — can offer this wellness-saturated world is a way to translate data into experience. There’s a difference between knowing about your health and feeling your own body. The wellness industry is increasingly built around data — wearables, metrics, tracking — and while that information can be valuable, it doesn’t always translate into a lived, felt sense of being well.

When your body feels less confusing or less frightening, you make wiser, calmer choices — about movement, healthcare, and where to spend your dollars and appointment time. That’s autonomy. That’s grounded decision-making.

I hope this framework — the Five STOREYS of Wellness — can help people participate in this massive wellness economy from a place of growing understanding rather than fear. I hope it can orient people back toward sovereignty in their own bodies — toward the ability to sense, interpret, and respond to what’s happening inside.

Because our bodies aren’t problems to be solved.
They’re relationships to be tended.
And in the end, it’s the most important relationship we’re in.

The first 5 STOREY workshop on February 21st is already full, which feels like a meaningful way to begin this work in community.

If you’d like to join the waitlist for that session, you can simply reply to this email.

The next workshop will take place on March 29th from 2–4pm, where I’ll teach the Five Storey Framework and guide the Warming-In practice that brings it to life.

If that feels aligned, you can learn more or register here:
www.wellandmortal.com/store

More soon,
Jill
Let’s help your body make sense.