Hello Everyone! Here's my plan for this year to hopefully keep me happy and healthy.
Health and wellness professionals should continuously develop themselves psychologically, spiritually and physically. It is important that they do so in order to best help not only their own health and well-being, but of those individuals that seek their guidance. In this paper, I will identify the areas that I need to develop within myself to achieve optimal well-being. Making an assessment of my current health in regard to my mind, body and spirit will allow me the understanding of myself and the changes I need to make in order to improve as a whole person. I believe I need help in all areas. Physically, I need to start an exercise and nutrition regime that will help keep my body healthy. Psychologically, I can take steps to ensure my emotional needs are taken care of such as doing the things that make me happy. Spiritually, I would like to start meditation and some of the techniques that we learned about in class such as Visualizing and Calm-Abiding practices. My personal practices and commitment to become a healthier individual in mind, body and spirit will hopefully help guide me to be a better person. Eventually, I would like to be able to say that I am whole in mind, body and spirit.
I assessed myself using a feeling word checklist. This checklist is a simple list of descriptive words that can help me identify how I feel. A feeling word checklist is a practical method to classify feelings (Neukrug & Fawcett, p. 224, 2010). I searched online for feeling word checklists and I came across a few that helped me define how I feel physically, psychologicallyand spiritually about myself. There was no scoring method listed on these feeling word checklists, however it was suggested to use the assessment as a way to think about what I feel.
If I were to score myself on my health in each of these categories: physically, psychologically and spiritually on a scale of 1-10, I believe myself to be a 7 psychologically, a 6 spiritually and a 4 physically on the scale. The reason why I feel that I am a 7 psychologically now is because in my past life experience, I have come a long way in terms of my emotional health. There was a point in my life years ago that I was depressed and unhappy with my life. I used alcohol and cigarettes as a crutch to make me feel better. I did not care how these substances affected my physical health. It came to a point that I didn’t like myself anymore and decided that I need to make a serious change if I was going to get healthy again. It took about six years, but I eventually did it. I quit smoking, stopped drinking and started to hang out with people who didn’t bring me down emotionally and psychologically. I changed my lifestyle, but I know it is important to continue making changes.
In regard to my spiritual health, I feel I am currently at a 6 on a 1-10 scale. After all the years of negative thoughts about my life, I wanted to start having a more positive attitude and calm mind. I started to practice breathing techniques and try meditating, quiet contemplation. I still could use work of course in this area and plan to continue practicing.
Physically, unfortunately I am a 4 on the scale. I have been really bad with my diet and exercise in the past two years. There was a lot of issues that I was dealing with at work, lots of changes and drama and I just stopped exercising and watching my nutrition. Instead, I ate whatever I wanted, sometimes binging on food and eating junk food due to stress. I also stopped exercising and would come home after work, have dinner and fall asleep on the couch every night. I was not motivated to exercise at all. I am currently trying to get back to a healthy diet and exercise program, but it has been a difficult process.
I believe that since physically I am currently at a 4 on the 1-10 scale, I feel that I need to work on this area first. So, my goal this year is to commit to eating only healthy foods in my diet and exercise at least three days a week minimum for an hour. I plan on minimizing junk food, soda and desserts from my diet. I know myself and I am unable to cut these things out completely so minimizing my intake of these things will help me to eventually cut them out from my diet gradually. I want to practice yoga and Tai Chi on a regular basis as well. I have can practice yoga on my Wii, but would have to maybe get a video on Tai Chi in order to follow the movements properly.
Next, I would like to implement some of the practices that we learned in this course to help my spiritual and emotional growth. I think Loving-Kindness is a great practice to start with. “This is our most powerful antidote to destructive emotions like anger, intolerance, jealousy, pride, and greed that agitate our mind and make it unavailable for further development (Dacher, p. 51, 2006). I think this would be one of my main obstacles that would keep me from continuing to grow. I liked how our textbook mentioned that we need to show loving kindness to ourselves in order for us to show loving kindness to others (Dacher, p. 51, 2006). I will try and catch myself from thinking negative thoughts about myself and change them into positive ones. Once I get into this habit it should make it easier to do the same when thinking about others. Another practice that I would like to implement is eliminating the unnecessary activities that make my life busier than it needs to be. My life is filled with activities that I plan for myself. My calendar is always full, there is rarely a time when I just have time to sit quietly because I am always on the move, going somewhere, doing something.
Practicing silence stillness will definitely help me prioritize what is important and what is not in my life (Dacher, p. 55, 2006). In order to do this I will have to make a conscious effort to make time for myself. Setting aside at least an hour a day to start.
In order to assess my progress in the next six months, I will use the feeling checklists that I did at the start of this personal plan and do another one six months from now. This can help to see whether my outlook has changed in terms of my feelings about myself psychologically, spiritually and physically. To help assist me in maintaining my goals, I plan on writing my thoughts down in a journal. I did not have much success doing the blog site since it was difficult for me to have access consistently. So, having a journal notebook that I can take with me and carry in my purse everywhere is better suited for my lifestyle. In conclusion, I feel that this class has given me valuable information and tools to help me succeed in making changes towards a happy, healthy and whole self.
Thank you all, all the best on the road to your health and well-being.
Jill
Hi Jill,
ReplyDeleteSounds like you have really had some revelations about yourself, and like all of us, this is the first and most important step in making positive changes. Admitting and accepting our downfalls and weaknesses is such a powerful step and helps us see where we need to change. I have been down the road you described physically and still have work to do also but my belief is every little bit helps.
I like the idea of the checklist I think it would be a quick way to identify and correct those negative feelings. We are human and everything you described is normal I think it is if and how we fix these things that is important. I feel you are on a good path and you have the right attitude because you want to make changes.
I wish you all the best on your journey!!
Hi Jill!
ReplyDeleteI really relate to what you said about stress and drama taking it's toll on you. It does make it easy to grub on junk food and avoid exercise, those things are hard enough to change and when you through emotional challenges on top it is even harder. The good thing is when you eat well and exercise, it makes you feel better and it helps fight the stress and impact of the drama. I wish you well also!!