Two Approaches, One Shared Structure

Our top-down approach begins by asking what dimensions of human wellbeing the Commons should be capable of representing.

These include areas such as:

• Physical Wellbeing
• Emotional Wellbeing
• Cognitive Wellbeing
• Social Wellbeing
• Spiritual Wellbeing
• Environmental Wellbeing
• Financial Wellbeing

These domains are not used to impose a single definition of wellbeing. They provide a shared structure through which different cultural, disciplinary, and community understandings can be represented and compared.

We then identify the major traditions, systems, disciplines, practice families, regions, historical periods, and knowledge communities that form the global wellbeing landscape — including traditional, Indigenous, religious, contemplative, community-based, complementary, and contemporary approaches.

Mapping the landscape from the top down helps us identify:

• Which parts of the world are well represented
• Which traditions and communities are missing
• Which wellbeing domains contain many documented practices
• Which areas are dominated by commercially visible or extensively researched practices
• Where culturally important but data-sparse knowledge may be overlooked
• Where different systems use distinct concepts for apparently related practices

This prevents the Commons from becoming a collection shaped only by what is easiest to find online or most visible in English-language research.

Before practices can be meaningfully compared, the Commons needs a common descriptive structure. Thus we developed The Wellbeink Taxonomy.

The Wellbeink Taxonomy

The taxonomy establishes the questions that should be asked of every practice, while allowing culturally specific information to remain visible. It is not intended to force all practices into identical categories. Its purpose is to create enough shared structure for comparison without erasing important differences.

The top-down framework allows us to compare the desired scope of the Commons with what has already been documented. This reveals gaps such as:

• Missing traditions or regions
• Underrepresented wellbeing domains
• Practices known within communities but absent from formal datasets
• Inconsistent or overlapping terminology
• Weak documentation of origin or lineage
• Lack of cultural review
• Areas with little clinical research
• Areas where research exists but is difficult to compare

These gaps guide future desk research, partnerships, expert review, field research, and community-led documentation.