COMO Shambhala

How do you digitise wellness for the 21st century? COMO Shambhala believes it has the answer. The integrated wellness brand, which owns COMO Shambhala Urban Escape and provides recipes for COMO Cuisine at Dempsey, recently launched a new digital wellness companion called COMO Shambhala By My Side. It’s an online wellness content repository that offers video content on wellness-related topics that include yoga, meditation, physiotherapy and nutrition. Unlimited access to this content is priced at S$22 a month.

For clients with more specific needs, COMO Shambhala By My Side also provides exclusive access to one-on-one consultations, charged per session, with its stable of in-house coaches that include nutritionists, physiotherapists, naturopaths and even a life coach. These experiences can be accessed anywhere you are in the world, as long as you have a connected device.

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COMO Shambhala By My Side

Nutrition, yoga, physiotherapy and the other wellness services offered by COMO Shambhala lend themselves well to the digital realm, and coaching sessions via your preferred video calling platform are natural product extensions. However, life coaching stuck out like a sore thumb to me.

As a long-time writer, I’ve built an armour of skepticism when it comes to numerous issues, and the idea of life coaching was admittedly one of those. While nutrition, yoga and physiotherapy are disciplines rooted in science and empirical studies, life coaching felt like hogwash to me.

After two hours with COMO Shambhala’s in-house life coach Ralitza Peeva, however, I’m happy to say that my assumptions were horribly wrong.

Unlike a psychiatrist or the ilk, life coaches provide actionable, distinct goals that you can act on so that you can achieve your personal goals, whatever they may be. Peeva likens it to her giving seeds to her clients. From there, they pick and choose the seeds and decide which one they would like to nurture to move a step closer to those goals or objectives they’ve set for themselves.

Life coach Ralitza Peeva.
Life coach Ralitza Peeva.

Peeva shares that she also has clients who were feeling lost in their lives, even though they had no reason to. They may be highly successful in their respective professions and have a happy family, but were still felt like there was something missing. For them, seeing a psychiatrist or psychologist wasn’t what they needed; a life coach, however, enabled them to get to the bottom of their malaise and understand the changes, if any, that needed to be done.

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So, in this uncertain and indefinite age that we’re living in, COMO Shambhala’s digital wellness companion seem like the perfect balm for trying times. And when it comes to new experiences, I say to bite your tongue and try it out first. You might be pleasantly surprised.