Personal Application

I. Introduction:

Health and wellness professionals are in the business of helping and encouraging people to live healthy. Health involves three areas of life; psychological life, spiritual life, and physical life. Traditionally, Western medicine has concentrated on the physical or biological aspects of health but research is showing that all three aspects are interrelated and important to the whole being of a person.

Psychologists traditionally concentrated on the psychological area of life, however, it is evident that all three areas need to be addressed in order to guide and encourage clients to a fully integrated life. In order to accomplish the goal of helping and encouraging others, a health professional must first put into practice healthy practices in his or her own life. Practicing and living an integrated life will serve as a role model for clients and also create a more empathetic session, with understanding of the struggles clients face along with encouragement towards success as a client determines their path and forges forward.

Learning about the interconnectedness between body, mind, and spirit are not enough. Professionals must create a plan for themselves in each area and live and work through the plan towards integral health. All three areas should be fully developed personally in order to create an environment that can be used to benefit clients professionally. The professional that has the goal of developing each area personally understands that it is an ongoing process and that each person is at a different place along the path to health and wholeness. The work is not finished in a single session or with a single action, each area can be developed farther, more deeply. The lesson learned in the personal life of a professional serves as an encouragement to the client. For myself, I plan to continue to develop each area of health and wellness and to use the experience to spur others onto health and wholeness.

II. Assessment:

Assessing where a person is in regards to their physical, spiritual, and psychological health is an important aspect of gaining health in each area; in order to make progress a person needs to know and understand where they are. I have spent a lot of time and energy on the psychological aspect of my health, determining not only where I am but how or why I got to this point. The psychological and spiritual have caused concern for the physical so there is no doubt in my mind of the interconnectedness, the question how do I move forward from here?

When I consider where I am in my physical, spiritual, and psychological life and where I want to be I realize that I am far from the goal. I would rate myself fairly low on a scale of 1-10, with 10 being the optimum for health and wholeness. I see the interconnectedness and realize that I need to work on an aspect from each area, perfect it to a habit, and then set new goals in order to continue growth towards wholeness of being. This is not a discouragement to me, I believe that growth will be fairly quickly at first, as I gain control over external factors, and be satisfying to my soul as I gain benefits from deeper growth.

Assessment is an ongoing process, and I plan on committing at least an hour a week to checking in on my progress. I have begun with a visualization of what it looks like to be happy, healthy, and whole. As I work through this process I am journaling to track where I was, where I am and where I want to be. I believe that by tracking through a separate journal I will be able to adjust strategies when needed and focus on areas that are immediate needs for the week while also implementing a plan for growth and continued change.



III. Goal Development:

My short term goals (goals that can be accomplished within weeks) for the physical, spiritual and psychological areas of my life include; physical- to gain control over my eating patterns in order to avoid skipping meals, to understand and satisfy the nutritional needs of my body, spiritual- to continue a daily practice of meditation with rest for my soul as the objective, psychological- to understand and deal directly with the anxious thoughts and feelings I have. Longer term goals include the following; physical, spiritual, and psychological- quit smoking. This is a crutch in all areas of my life, the addiction derails intentions. It controls me and it interferes with the physical, spiritual, and psychological healthy practices I am establishing. As I grow and succeed in the short term goals this will be the next on the list, and I believe it covers all three areas of integral health. It is simply not possible to have health and wholeness in the three areas and be addicted to anything in such a manner. I believe it is not the healthiest, best option for handling anxiety and I have relied on it for too long. As I work through my short term goals, this particular long term goal is also being worked on and soon it will be a part of my past. I will then make a list of new goals.

IV. Practices for Personal Health

Growth is an intentional process. After setting goals, a plan must be implemented in order to track progress and meet goals. I have decided on the following two practices for each area of growth; physical growth includes nutritional needs which will be implemented by planning healthy meals to prepare for myself (short term goal) and adding aerobic activity to work out my lungs (long term goal), spiritual growth includes meditation daily to simply rest my soul (short term goal) and reacquainting myself with the smells of nature that are not surrounded in a puff of smoke (long term goals), psychological growth includes recognizing the physical symptoms of anxiety and understanding how to calm the thoughts (short term goals) and reframing my thoughts when I believe the only thing that will calm me down is a cigarette (long term goals).

V. Commitment:

Progress will be tracked weekly through the visualization and journaling process that I have learned through this course. This is a modification of the exercise that involved visualizing yourself at a time when you were happy, whole, and healthy. I visualize myself happy, whole, or healthy and consider the goals I have made to achieve the state of mind. Through free journaling, a technique that involves putting the pen on the paper and writing continuously for 15 or 20 minutes, I will consider what worked that week, what were my successes, and what needs greater effort. Ideally, as I progress through the process, I will see growth and adjust the goals to foster deeper growth. Also, I will see what didn’t quite measure up and adjust in those areas. This will keep my goals in front of me weekly and allow me an hour a week to focus on my well being. I expect to be able to create a mini list for the upcoming week based on what did or didn’t work so that I can continue to adjust the plan. Progress isn’t to be measured by successes and failures, but rather progress is life, and through it all my commitment to myself is to live life abundantly, through the hills, valleys, and plateaus.