When someone tells you they live a healthy lifestyle or are into “body wellness,” what do you think about? More than likely you initially think of diet and physical exercise right? Maybe people these days need to be thinking just as much about emotional and spiritual health as they do about the way they look on the outside. With all the information available to us these days, it’s hard to sift through everything and determine what is right for you. Finding something that works takes time but the only thing you can do wrong is doing nothing. We only get one life and living it to the fullest takes having our body, mind, and spirit in the best shape possible.
Emotional and Spiritual Health as Part of Total Body Wellness
Emotional health in the context of this article means something different than the lack of mental illness. I’m not a doctor nor do I play one on TV so I’m not here to give advice on mental illness. What I do know about is emotions; something we all have. Learning how to deal with emotions in a healthy manner can greatly increase the chances of finding happiness in our lives. Take for example anger, jealousy, envy, and loneliness; all these emotions can generally be brought back to their root emotion of fear. It has been my experience that almost every emotion is rooted in fear; fear that I’m going to lose something I believe I have or not get something I think I want. By realizing that fear is behind something like anger, allows me to be better able to handle and deal with the emotion in a healthy manner. We need to pay attention to our emotional health and how it deals with total body, mind, and spiritual health and how it relates to creating total body wellness in our lives.
Here’s another way to look at it. No matter how often you check and maintain the oil in your car, if you let the radiator run dry, your car’s still going to blow up right? So what about your body, is it not much like the car in that all things work together in making it perform to the best of its ability? When thinking of a car we often refer to “total performance” when viewing the cars overall performance. Total body wellness then should encompass all parts of the body was well.
No doubt there are hundreds if not thousands of ways to enhance ones emotional health. For this article let’s take a look at spirituality and how it can relate to our emotional health.
Spirituality
Spirituality simply defined is: concerned with or affecting the spirit or soul. The biggest problem most people have when they hear the term spirituality is they associate it with religion. Spirituality and religion have nothing to do with each other. Bonnie Raitt once defined the difference in the two as, “Religion is for people who are scared to go to hell. Spirituality is for people who have already been there.” Generally, spirituality is considered to be more holistic and focused on nature and all things universal in the universe. The point here is not to get into a discussion on what spirituality is, but rather the benefits it has on our total body wellness and general health. Taking the time to increase the spirit of the body is important in a total body wellness program. Just like the car analogy earlier, it’s hard to have a good physical wellness without the mind and spirit.
There are so many different ways to increase ones spiritual health it would be impossible to list them all here. Many people find the power of Yoga to be extremely spiritual and beneficial to both the body and mind simultaneously. Prayer and meditation can also be considered as part of a spiritual wellness program. Many view prayer and mediation as being: prayer is asking for guidance and meditation is listening for the answer. For some, simply jogging can be a spiritual experience or walking with nature. The main purpose of engaging in spiritual wellness is clearing the spirit and soul of emotional turmoil. This leads us back to the importance of emotional health.
Our body communicates with us in various ways, emotions are just one of the ways in which our body shares what it is feeling. Although emotions can be considered to be mental, they often manifest in physical ways within our body. Headaches, body aches, and disease have been linked to emotional states. From Time Magazine’s article How Your Mind Can Heal Your Body, “What happens in the pancreas or liver can directly affect brain function. Disorders of the brain, conversely, can send out biochemical shock waves that disturb the rest of the body.” So a healthy mind can help create a more healthy body; after all, they’re all interconnected and part of the same organism.
One thing that I’ve learned about emotions, is that for most of my life I had no idea what they meant, let alone how to deal with them. What I have discovered is that the majority of emotions or feelings whether it be anger, jeolousy, envy, or loneliness can almost always be linked to fear as I stated earlier. Take for instance anger. When feeling angry, if I know that the root cause is most likely fear, I’m better able to look deep within myself and determine what exactly am I afraid of. This allows me to get at the root of the problem and deal with it at the source, thus allowing me to move on and live a happy and healthy life.
Putting it All Together
When we’re not healthy emotionally, part of our system is off and not running as good as it could and effects all other aspects of our body’s wellness. Putting together a total body wellness program can be as simple or as complicated as you want. It is true that you must make wellness a priority in your life. Just like eating and sleeping, living a healthy lifestyle takes commitment, but the benefits are endless and reach all aspects of your life. I find that by keeping it simple I increase my chances for success in working towards total body wellness. I’ve broken my wellness program down into three categories; diet, exercise, and mind/spirit. I won’t go into specifics on my program here since I tend on saving that for another series of posts all together; but I do work on each and everyone one of those every day of the week.
The main focus of this article was to remind everyone that a total body wellness program should consist of body, mind, and spirit. It seems that so much emphasis is put on “looking good” physically, that many times people neglect the importance of mind and spirit.
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