Practice Being Well
with
Hyacinth Mensah-Maes
The Architecture of Cultural Wellbeing
What allows people to remain connected to themselves while learning, working and growing with others?
I write and work here as Hyacinth Mensah-Maes. Returning to this name is part of the practice itself: an ongoing reckoning with inheritance, cultural belonging and the histories a name may carryāor conceal.
I call myself a Cultural Wellbeing Architect and Educator because I am interested not only in what happens within a learning or care environment, but in what holds that environment up: its cultural assumptions, relationships, rhythms, histories and structures.
Through mentoring, facilitated inquiry, team development and educational projects, I work with diaspora communities, as well as students, educators and care teams working within established European systems. Together, we examine what shapes our experiences of learning, difference and belonging. My practice brings lived experience, reflective inquiry and research into conversation, creating space for people to give language to their experiences, deepen their understanding and respond with greater confidence and care.
The Body That Learns
Bringing cyclical knowledge into how we understand education, energy and wellbeing.
As a woman, my own starting point is cyclical. As I near completion of my training as a Peaceful Periods Facilitator in holistic womb care for teens, I am bringing greater attention to the knowledge held within menstrual, hormonal and life cycles. Alongside the circadian rhythm shared by women and men, menstrual and hormonal rhythms move across a longer, infradian timescale. Yet many educational and working environments continue to organise human energy around a predominantly male model of daily consistency and linear productivity. This attention to cyclical knowledge is becoming more than a separate strand of my work: it is shaping how I think about education, wellbeing and the environments we build together.
Ground Notes - Learning from within
Culture, communication and care as seen from inside the crĆØche.
My three years working in early childhood care in Flanders remain important ground beneath this practice. In Ground Notes, I reflect from within that crĆØche experience on culture, communication, care and what becomes visible when we pause long enough to notice.
Continue the Inquiry
Reflections, resources and conversations for further exploration.
From here, I invite you to explore the reflections, resources and conversations gathered across this siteāand to notice where they meet, affirm or unsettle your own ways of knowing.
