5 steps to wellness
Define your wellness. Visualize what it looks like, feels like to be fully connected to your wholeness. Are your physical, emotional, spiritual aspects in alignment?
Journal, draw, paint this vision and inquiry so it can be grounded and revisited.
Step into your body. Use each of your senses one by one to fully experience the current moment. When we are fully embodied, we become active participants in life. Health and wellness requires conscious and active participation. When we actively connect to our senses, a shift happens and our bodies receive the message that we are present and it doesn’t need to work so hard to get our attention through symptoms.
Practice mindful eating. Take your time to look at, smell, feel, and fully taste each morsel, considering the path your food may have taken to get to you and make its way through your body. Take breaks from technology. Move your body with intention, whether it’s one yoga pose or an entire series, perhaps a mindful walk to the mailbox - combine conscious intention with movement.
Tell the truth. How have you abandoned yourself? This is a hard one. It requires a look within and an honest appraisal of our unique responsibility to be stewards of our souls and hearts, not just the body and the mind.
Write a daily list of three truths before you go to bed as you take stock of the day. This is meant to be quick, writing the first three things that pop up. It can be as simple as “Today my neck hurt.” to something more complex, such as “I did not want to wake up today.”
In the morning, continue each sentence, followed by “because. . .” and simply see what comes up. Practice telling the truth without judgment or forethought and check in with the various aspects of you like you would a loved one. Over time, these simple truths may shift into deeper and more unconscious realizations as your psyche is given space to be heard.
Liberate yourself. What enslaves you? Have a conversation with your masters. This may be a symptom, a feeling, a part of you that may be resisting change. Assert your power and intention to be free.
Ask for understanding of its purpose, say thank you, then create a ritual of release. This can be in your mind, or a physical ritual in which you may mark the releasing with a prayer, an action (e.g. a long and intentional breath), or writing a goodbye letter.
Connect. We are not meant to exist in isolation. This is an existential invitation. Each day, connect with another living thing, whether it be a person, plant, the sun, the moon, or a part of you that may have been hidden away or abandoned.
This is simply being with, there is nothing to do or to say. Employ your senses. It is a simple acknowledgment that you are not alone.
Wellness includes, but is so much more than restoring balance within the body. This is actually the easy part in many ways as it is similar to solving a mathematical equation. There are often clear cause and effect relationships within the way symptoms and disease processes develop and present themselves. The art lies within the ability to then integrate the rest of the person into this equation as this is often where the unknown variables lie, waiting to be uncovered. The more one can enter into the senses and the depths within, the clearer the path often becomes as each unknown shifts into a constant and the mystery begins to unravel itself.
