Checking up on my small garden boxes recently, I saw it had been overtaken by aphids. I started asking myself why I didn’t check it sooner. How I could let this happen? What was I thinking? As I was mentally bashing myself it occurred to me: the way I was seeing my garden was a good metaphor for how so many of us view our own wellness. We often spend a lot of time blaming and shaming ourselves for when our health goes awry. But what my garden really needed was not self-degradation but rather a little TLC.
If we beat ourselves up over our lack of wellness, that only compounds the situation and potentially makes it more challenging for us to heal. What is productive, however, is to make a plan for wellness. In future blog posts I’ll get more into mindsets and practices we can adopt to support our wellness and well-being. First I want to point out some typical wellness blocks I see, which tend to fall under the following three themes.
Some people think wellness is not possible. Many people don’t realize that they can play a role in their own wellness. (After all, if we can blame ourselves for our illness, then why can’t we impact our healing?) Believing they cannot attain wellness, some people aim for merely minimizing pain or discomfort, or at worst, they resign themselves to simply learning to live with it. Others might think they’re already so unhealthy that their actions toward healing won’t make any difference. Whatever your reasons for it, the belief that wellness is not within reach literally keeps it out of reach!
Many people blame themselves for their own lack of wellness. Sure, sometimes we do unhealthy things that have a negative impact on our bodies and minds. But shaming and blaming ourselves mostly just makes us feel worse. If we spend time dwelling on what we did “wrong”, didn’t do “right”, and why, we’re wasting energy that could otherwise be used toward supporting and ideally expediting our own recovery.
Many people are only focused on their physical wellness. When I use the term wellness it encompasses physical, psychological, financial and spiritual wellness. It’s a wholistic concept. Due to our society and its focus on looking outside ourselves for contentment, along with its emphasis on physical attractiveness, many people take wonderful care of their bodies and still don’t feel good, still find themselves in misery. They don’t factor in the wholistic element of wellness. Unfortunately, focusing on only one part of anything is a very narrow focus. The bottom line is, we can never really achieve optimal physical wellness if we’re hyper-focused on only one area of wellness.
In my upcoming blog posts I’ll be helping you identify your wellness blocks and offering tools for overcoming them. And hopefully, as we go, I’ll help you reframe the concept of wellness in a way that allows you to achieve more of it!