Let’s talk a moment and talk about health and what it means in your daily life. Health is one of those things that people generally forget about until they have that health pulled out from under them. They generally don’t see the billion dollar treasure they are sitting on and generally wasting like the proverbial “trust fund kid”. And by that I mean simply that they don’t understand it’s value and so easily throw it away without using it to feed their soul and build a life that would be fulfilling specifically to them
For some reasons, we like to divide our health in physical health which so to speak sits over here, and mental health(which subsumes emotional health) over there. And the two are somehow totally distinct from one another. This distinction has been helpful in diagnosing and in building pharmaceuticals but is functionally fairly deceiving.
To start with your brain uses neurotransmitters as a physical underpinning of your emotions and your ability to think clearly. Secondly, your thoughts and emotions definitely make a difference in your physical body. If you find yourself living in a chronic stress response due to fear and the use of your mind to imagine lots of dangerous situations for example, your hormonal system will necessarily be changed by that chronic emotional state that will change and modulate your immune system as well as your blood pressure depending on your bodies ability to deal with that long term stress.
As is said, the body keeps the score(there is a wonderful book with this as title by Van Der Kolk, definitely worth the read or listen). As an exercise I would challenge you to try to stay aware and conscious of your body the next time you are furiously angry or terrified. What does your body do? On the flip side, how do you feel emotionally when you have a terrible flu and have to miss work? At that time do you feel full of joy?
The most base way to define health would be something like: the absence of disease. That is certainly a place to start, but it really misses the mark when you consider the way the human’s mind, emotions, body and energy levels function and are all connected.
Would we consider “good health” to be a state of “blah no descriptness?” Are you in good health if the Dr. can’t find any disease but you feel exhausted? How about if you feel depressed generally but not clinically? What if you have no obvious disease but are so angry about people and life that you can’t sleep at night? Would we consider any of that “good health”
Again, consider what your body feels like when you are angry. Do you digest well at that time? What is your breathing doing? You could test your heart rate, what is it doing at that time you are angry? Can you even set aside that anger long enough to test your heart rate or look at your breathing?
Most people only consider themselves angry when they are ready to blow up and “go postal”(which is a bizarre phrase when you think about it). What about chronic anger you carry most of the time? How will your body feel and function if you stay there for a week or month or for decades?
Perhaps we need bigger, more robust definition of health to use for ourselves in our daily lives? What do you think?
But how much does your health determine your ultimate experience of life? Doesn’t your health significantly dictate how you feel in your life? If you are in chronic pain doesn’t life lose a great deal of it’s alluring qualities?
For me at least, I consider good health to be a treasure worth learning how to build, maintain and develop. And it is for this reason I have been building this method.
Thanks for reading, I hope you have a healthy and vital day.
