Cultivating one’s aesthetic lens can foster positive emotions around beauty, which has the potential to create an upward spiral toward emotional well-being and flourishing.
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Cultivating one’s aesthetic lens can foster positive emotions around beauty, which has the potential to create an upward spiral toward emotional well-being and flourishing.
To have a better understanding and appreciation for how beauty, or aesthetics, fosters greater well-being, it is important to have a context of aesthetics in a broader sense. Through this appreciation, we can reflect on how we cultivate emotions and experiences for our clients to gain additional insight into the possibilities of enhancing everyday life.
Emotions: Knowing Beauty as a Feeling
In my own work with cancer patients, I have done much research on the topic of beauty and well-being. What I have come to learn and appreciate is that beauty is more than a judgment of pleasantness; beauty is a feeling, and these feelings are called aesthetic emotions.
Aesthetic emotions are a sub-group of emotions that beauty (any kind of beauty) elicits. These feelings arise when we experience a harmonious interplay between our sensory perception (vision, tough, taste, smell) and our cognitive response of evaluating a “stimulus” or an object’s “perceived” beauty. This means that beauty is associated with specific feeling qualities (e.g., feeling in harmony with the object one is viewing or the experience one is having). (Shindler, 2017)
There are 24 aesthetic emotions that can be elicited through literature, music, visual arts and film. It has been proposed by philosophers that these same measures are also applicable to aesthetic experiences beyond the traditional arts. (Shindler, 2017)
What Makes an Aesthetic Experience?
Experiences are the foundation of our industry, but looking at it from an aesthetic lens may uncover new possibilities to support guest well-being.
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John Dewey, an aesthetic philosopher, greatly influenced the trends in aesthetic research, including:
- Broadening the aesthetic experience lens from the traditional arts to natural environments and into everyday mundane activities.
- The concept of having an experience that moves from observer into participation and engagement.
Though Dewey never clearly defined an aesthetic experience, he mentioned elements within an experience that is also relevant to our industry. These elements integrate the practical, emotional and intellectual components into a “whole” experience.
1. Relating to time (temporal in nature): The experience is dynamic and begins with an opening or initiating phase. The experience progresses and unfolds as thoughts, feelings, memories, images, observations are evoked and assembled into a whole experience.
There is an accumulation between the different phases of the experience, with a sense that the latter is built on earlier ones. The sequential nature builds up and reinforces what preceded it.
2. Interplay of doing and undergoing: Development of the whole experience often requires effort and imaginative activity from the one experiencing it. It is an interplay between activity and passivity, doing and undergoing, and the incoming and outgoing of energy during the experience.
3. Highly concentrated: The experience can be intensive, as the internal and external emotions and elements meld into a single experience.
4. Importance of rhythm – a sense of direction: Rhythm can be characterized as an internal momentum felt from the initial phases in which the experiencer can feel a sense of direction to it. The mind experiences a back and forth to form a whole experience. Each step or phase flows freely as it unfolds. Energy can be gathered during the experience and released through the procession, or the experience reaches a sense of fulfillment.
Reflect on the experience that you are creating for yourself and your clients. Recall a time when you had a pleasant aesthetic experience. How did it start; how did it build; how did if feel at the end? When you envision this experience, what aesthetic emotions are you feeling in your body?
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Reflect upon your guest’s journey: How does the experience open; how does it build; how does it flow into a unified ending? It is a bunch of steps in isolation or is it an aesthetic experience? The key word is experience—it's not just about the hydrotherapy circuit, but does the client know what to do, how to appreciate it and how to have an aesthetic experience in the environment that you meticulously created?
Everyday Aesthetic Experiences
When we focus on well-being, the role of aesthetic practices becomes richer in possibilities to align, support and invite our guests toward a new way of living. The evidence shows that the frequency of visiting positive emotions matters: Positive emotion from time to time is not enough, it needs to be frequent. (Barbara Fredrickson, 2002)
As we work with clients to create daily routines, we have an opportunity to help them to create aesthetic experiences within these daily activities, which will facilitate greater well-being.
I would like to reference two key pillars of positive psychology, an applied approach to enhance human flourishing: Positive Emotions and Engagement/Flow State.
Broadening and building positive emotions more regularly feels good and is good for us (Barbara Fredrickson, 2002). Positive emotions broaden one’s attention and cognition which further lead to increased flexibility and creative thinking. Studies demonstrate positive emotions accumulate and compound over time, which strengthen resiliency and wellbeing resources and reserves. Positive emotions are linked with longevity. Isolated incidents of positive emotions from time to time is not enough; they need to be ongoing to generate a spiraling effect on well-being.
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Engagement in the activity or object, or flow states, are often described as intense focus and concentration on an activity, a merging of awareness and action, loss of self-consciousness, feeling of timeliness, intrinsically rewarding. Aesthetic experts highlight the quality of engagement or flow state as a necessary component to aesthetic living or human flourishing.
It is the quality of a practice as an activity versus the quality of the product that is created. Becoming absorbed in the activity is seen more predominately. The selection of activities is important. Selecting activities and experiences that lift one higher in the hedonic range.
Having the ability to arrange one’s life to secure these experiences is necessary to flourish. Practices that are a challenge, yet permitting mastery are more likely to contribute to well-being than practices than those that are too easy or too difficult. Our clients can learn to select a situation and bring a renewed sense of aesthetic present moment attention.
The spa and wellness industry is uniquely positioned to help individuals invite a heightened aesthetic lens in to their lives. We create environments and experiences that facilitate many positive feelings across the aesthetic emotion. Our general areas and mind/body studios provide ideas for living more simply and functionally.
