The importance for health and wellness professionals to develop psychologically, spiritually, and physically is beyond typical medical treatment. Health care professionals should help patients with overall healing, happiness and wholeness. Modern medicine has proven that holistic healing can change a person’s outlook on life emotions, help them to heal faster and even control chronic conditions such as hypertension, stress and anxiety. A doctor will usually hand a patient some medication and say “take this” and usually it doesn’t get further than that. Physicians should look deeper into that person’s history, maybe it is an addiction such as smoking or unwanted stress in that person’s life that is making them sick, and they focus on treatment and prevention but not ways on dealing with the emotions that sometime comes with a diagnosis. The area that I need to focus on is my emotional well-being, exercising and incorporate a daily spiritual walk with God. I do all of these activities but I need to make them daily instead of every once and a while. I have spent my whole life taking care of someone else, whether it’s my kids, husband, friends etc. and I don’t take the time to fix myself. For years I have struggled to rid myself of stress, harbored bad emotions about others that have hurt me and giving so much of myself to only have those people take advantage of me. By doing the exercises assigned in this class, I have learned to have loving kindness and was really able to step back and do some self exploration. My goals are to start to make time for myself, pay more attention to my health, and to set 15-20 minutes each day dedicated to my spiritual devotion. These goals are realistic and I feel it is something I can do for myself; I just need to make sure that I set aside the time in my busy schedule.
How do you score your wellness spiritually, physically, and psychologically? Overall I feel that I am doing really well spiritually and physically, but need to improve on the psychological part. I believe in God and started diet and exercising a year ago and have lost 28 pounds. The psychological aspect of my life is that I need to rid myself of bad people and learn ways to better deal with my emotions when going through trials and tribulation. My relationships have always been difficult and one of them ended in divorce, being so young at the time, I moved right into another relationship and now it is ending the same way. The good thing is that I have been in therapy and learning why I place these people in my life and it comes down to issues that I went through in my own childhood, but with help I am learning to change these patterns and making better decisions.
In goal development, physically I plan to get back to the exercise routine that I was doing all year, except I slacked off a little during the holidays. My exercise routine consists of 3-4 days a week of 30-40 minutes of cardio. I could be so stressed out and go workout and feel so much better, when I get done I take a deep breath and can feel such relief. By losing so much weight it has boosted my self esteem, I feel better in my skin and love being able to wear whatever I want too. My spiritual goal is to join my church. I have been attending for several years, but have never been dedicated like I should be and I need more spiritual support. It seems as things have happened in my life, it has brought me closer to God. I would also like to join a small group to be able to socialize with other Christians and be able to be more active in my community. A psychological goal is to try to learn ways to which I can build healthier relationships and friends that do not create excess anxiety and stress in my life. I want to continue to work with my therapist and incorporate my spiritual and physical goals to create happiness, health and wholeness for my life.
Practice for personal health is so important to me. Some of the strategies for physical growth are to keep exercising and eating a healthier diet so that I don’t have to take blood pressure medication and reduce my cholesterol levels. For psychological practices, I want to be able to be happy and create a new life for myself. How I have been implementing this strategy is by finishing the last two classes that I have to graduate, make a career change and starting to develop new relationships with more positive, less destructive individuals. My spiritual strategy would be to read a section of the bible everyday. I have even started a journal that I write in when I do my spiritual devotion, that way I can read over it and reflect of the importance of what the scripture means and how it applies to my life.
How will you assess your progress or lack of progress in the next six months? By starting to see changes physically, spiritually and psychologically. I try to weigh weekly to see if I am losing weight, maintain annual checkups to see if there are improvements in my health such as my cholesterol, and try to watch movies that make me laugh; these things will let me know that my integral health is getting better. I want to continue practicing the loving kindness exercise; I found it to be so effective in releasing some of the negative energy and emotions that I have held onto for a long time. Just doing the exercise once, I was able to feel a weight off my shoulders. If I see lack of progress I will strive harder. I didn’t lose 28 lbs in one week, it took weeks and months of working out and dieting, I guess you can say staying dedicated and not giving up, change doesn’t happen over night and we will never be perfect, but implementing spiritual, physical and psychological practices can help us to deal with the stressors of life and create happiness, health and wholeness.
Angela,
ReplyDeleteI must agree with you. During recovery for surgery I received many medications, most of them I didn't know them and had to search the Internet for information about them. Some had mild side effects will other had potentially dangerous side effects.
I think that most current practitioners believe that their patients are educated about their illnesses, and most often this is not the case. Patients are looking to their practitioners for guidance and re-assurance. I know when I was diagnois with uterine cancer I had no clue what to expect and what I needed to do, and searching the Internet was extremely overwhelming and frustrating.
Health care professionals need to have compassion, empathy, and excellent listening skills (not only hearing the patients' spoken words, but also knowing how to read body language).
Beauty