Wellness is the hot topic of the decade.

If you're prepared to address the issue, you'll get plenty of opportunities. If you creatively involve people in the learning process, reflecting, assessing, prioritizing, sorting, planning for change and affirming progress, your teaching will be much more helpful than even the most entertaining lecture.

Structured Exercises in Wellness Promotion Volume 2 provides 36 new designs you can use for getting people involved, whatever the setting and time constraints, whatever the sophistication of the audience. To aid you in the selection of appropriate content and process to meet your objectives, the exercises are grouped into five broad categories:

• Icebreakers: These short (10-20 minutes) exercises are designed to introduce people to each other and to open up participants' thinking process regarding wellness. They are lively! All five engage people actively in the topic and with each other. Try combining an icebreaker with an exercise from the wellness or self-care section for an instant evening program.
• Wellness Exploration: These exercises explore the issue of wellness from the whole person perspective. Rather than focus merely on the physical, these five processes help people examine their lifestyle. You'll find a mixture of moderate length assessments (30-60 minutes) and major theme developers (60-90 minutes). Any exercise can easily be contracted or expanded to fit your purpose.
• Self-Care Strategies: These eleven exercises promote personal responsibility for well-being. Participants examine their self-care patterns and explore specific self-care strategies in different life dimensions: physical (diet, relaxation, fitness), mental, relational, spiritual and lifestyle well-being. (10-60 minutes)
• Action Planning/Closure: These five exercises help participants draw together their insights and determine actions they wish to take on their own behalf. (20-40 minutes)
• Energizers: The ten energizers are designed to perk up the group whenever fatigue sets in. Sprinkle them throughout your program to illustrate skills or concepts.

Try one for a change of pace - everyone's juices (including yours!) will be flowing again in 5-10 minutes.

Donald A Tubesing, PhD, MDiv, is a retired ELCA pastor. He holds a PhD in Counselor Education from Ohio University and a Master of Divinity degree from Concordia Seminary, St. Louis. In 1973, with a grant from the Kellogg Foundation, he helped the church-based Wholistic Health Centers Project develop as well as the National Parish Nurse Program. In 1977 he founded Whole Person Associates, a training and publishing company focused on providing stress management and wellness promotion educational materials for professionals in medicine, ministry, social work, and counseling. Over the past 30 years he has trained over 10,000 professionals in the skills of designing and conducting stress and wellness workshops with a whole person focus and has served as consultant to several military health programs. Don is author of 21 books on stress management and wellness promotion. Don grew up on the grounds of several VA Hospitals, his father having served his career as a chaplain.