Wellness Journalism: You Are Worth It.

Our culture places different values on certain strengths/dimensions of wellness. Sometimes this breeds imbalance.

Take Physical Wellness for example. Diet and exercise are top industries in the nation, sometimes exaggerated to the point of obsession: we make ourselves sick over the perfect body, sexuality, ability to perform. If a person is in excellent physical condition, a “specimen” of sorts, s/he is automatically considered to be a good point of reference. S/he may be a highly-paid athlete, the one at the gym giving pointers, or the reason a marriage ends in divorce.

We also glorify on Financial Wellness, which we talked about last month (see: November, 2009). Profit is the key factor in the making of big decisions as we follow the money trail. Poverty is associated with failure, while people go broke buying expensive purses in order to appear successful.

Values=that which we hold most dear to the core of our being.

Spiritual Wellness, I’m sorry to say, is often overlooked. Perhaps because we live in a culture where spirituality has been associated with religion and divided into tiny pieces. As such it can be difficult to put together—and in fact, we each have to do it for ourselves.

Spiritual Wellness doesn’t garner the same automatic appreciation that other dimensions do.
You have a hot body? Great!
You have money? Great!
You have spirituality? What kind?
Generic Spiritual Wellness doesn’t carry the egotistical appeal that our society rewards and there is a lot of scrutiny and suspicion. ‘Spiritual folk’ are held to a higher, less realistic standard. Not everybody signs up to be Jesus, or Bono, or The Dalai Lama!

Every dimension of wellness holds a unique value.

Evaluate the way we spend our energy on a daily basis: we are often consumed by some physical or material endeavor. How good we look. How much cool stuff we have. I want to suggest a re-evaluation. What type of investment yields the highest return?

Spirituality, however you resonate with it, may very well have the highest rate of appreciation over time. This is because The Human Spirit is responsible for the greatest treasure in the galaxy…LOVE.

Spirit is the magic mortar with which we build our best lives. It is the Soul-ar Power that generates the energy which we then invest into our valuables: self, family, friends.

Empirical evidence in the form of war, disease, poverty, corruption, and environmental destruction shows that society has not yet learned to give Spiritual Wellness the attention it deserves. I like to think we are witnessing an evolution on this front. We are realizing that the human spirit holds the power to heal the world, and with love we can forgive our differences.

Believe it.