Wellbeing
I learned the definition of wellbeing soon after I began taking yoga teacher training classes in my early 30’s. It became clear to me during the spiritual portion of the three-year program that wellbeing means not just the absence of disease, illness, or chronic pain. It’s a complex combination of a person’s physical, mental, emotional, and social factors that are all linked to life satisfaction. In other words, the measure of our wellbeing is measured by how content we feel about ourselves and the life we are living.
Maintaining
What many of us may find surprising is that on any given day we are constantly moving back and forth between feelings of wellbeing and feelings of impatience, frustration, and irritation. Recovering from the temporary loss of wellbeing is something most of us don’t think about and actually take for granted. Yet there is overwhelming scientific evidence showing that negative emotional energy lingers, on a kind of slow boil, whether we pay attention to it or not. Thus, when underlying negativity lingers, it will continue to disrupt natural life-force mechanisms of the body, often causing annoying symptoms of tension headache, back pain, upset stomach etc. etc. There are three simple secrets to maintaining a sturdy sense of wellbeing, and how to recover its loss when it has been overcome by distress. Here they are:
• Face the Past and Heal it: it will haunt you until you do and continue to cause stress reactions in your mind and body
• Cope with the Present: you can’t erase the past or control the future
• Build a Better Future: insights gained from past wounds and its healing process is your best guide forward
Personal Growth
We humans have this incredible idea that life should provide us with everlasting happiness and pleasantness, achievements and successes. If this was the case nothing, absolutely nothing, would disturb our wellbeing — ever. Problems happen for a reason, and usually those reasons are for our personal growth whether we like it or not. Fact is, wellbeing is humanity’s natural refuge. It lets us know that all will be okay, that we can handle life’s ups and down and don’t have to worry alone when we have trusted family and friends around, and that we will make it through the dark times because we’ve done it before, and have become better for it.
“When we change the way we look at things, the things we look at change.”