December 6, 2009 in Wellness by empoweringwellness

What is this "wellness" stuff?

“The doctor of the future will give no medicine, but will interest his patients in the care of the human frame, in diet, and in the cause and prevention of disease.” – Thomas Edison

Most readers are probably familiar with the names Deepak Chopra, MD or Mehmet Oz, MD. Both men are highly educated and skilled medical doctors. And in recent years both men have become known for espousing complementary, alternative approaches to health, as well as promoting the notion of body-mind connection.

Dr. Chopra in particular has become an increasingly recognizable face of alternative medicine. He has been a staunch advocate of the connection between mind and body. He studied with the founder of Transcendental Meditation, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, advocates meditation and self-awareness as primary factors in both illness and healing.

Dr Chopra, along with Dr. David Simon, founded the Chopra Center in 1996, and its’ mission is to bridge the technological miracles of the West with the wisdom of the East. Early on in his practice, he realized that perfect health is more than just the absence of disease. He began to envision a medical system based upon the premise that health is a dynamic state of balance and the integration of body, mind, and spirit. Today, Dr. Chopra is acknowledged as one of the world’s greatest leaders in the field of mind-body medicine.

What readers may not know, however, is that pioneering work in wellness was actually done by another Harvard-educated MD, more than 20 years before the Chopra Center opened.

In the early 1970s John W. Travis, MD, MPH, was completing his residency at John’s Hopkins and working with the US Public Health Service. A protégé of Dr. Lewis Robbins, creator of the Health Risk Appraisal (HRA), Dr. Travis worked on the earliest computerized HRAs, including one used by the CDC. But by the time he completed his residency, he had made a life-altering decision—rather than treating people as a physician he would dedicate his life to teaching people to be well.

Moving to Mill Valley, California, Dr. Travis opened the first wellness center in the United States in 1975, the Wellness Resource Center. A true wellness pioneer, Dr. Travis had developed a model for lifestyle change that focused on self-responsibility, and engaged the whole person—body, mind, emotions, and spirit. “Wellness” was a new term in American culture, and the new center attracted media attention, including Dan Rather at CBS, who featured the new “wellness center” on 60 Minutes.

As he continued to refine his work at the Center, he created the first wellness assessment, the Wellness Inventory, to use as the Center’s primary client intake. He captured his philosophy in the now classic Wellness Workbook, which has been used by wellness and health promotion educators in undergraduate and graduate programs in universities for over 25 years

So, what is wellness? Both Chopra and Travis agree that wellness considers the “whole person.” And according to Dr. Travis,

• Wellness is a choice—a decision you make to move toward optimal health.

• Wellness is a way of life—a lifestyle you design to achieve your highest potential for well being.

• Wellness is a process—a developing awareness that there is no endpoint, but that health and happiness are possible in each moment, here and now.

• Wellness is a balanced channeling of energy—energy received from the environment, transformed within you, and returned to affect the world around you.

• Wellness is the integration of body, mind, and spirit—the appreciation that everything you do, and think, and feel, and believe has an impact on your state of health and the health of the world.

• Wellness is the loving acceptance of you.

So, now that you know what wellness is, how do you embrace wellness as a lifestyle?

It starts with a conscious decision that you, and only you can make. You have to want to move towards optimal health; this is not something that your doctor can prescribe. It doesn’t come in a pill, or a treatment. As a coach, I always tell my clients that “I cannot coach desire.” The choice is, at the end of the day, yours.

Wellness is like a bridge supported by two piers. Each pier is crucial to the bridge’s integrity just as the two principles of self-responsibility and love are fundamental to the process of wellness. In each case, the piers support a connection between two separate places, allowing for movement back and forth. This freedom to move between different places or attitudes, rather than rigid attachment to any particular one, is the hallmark of wellness.

Self-responsibility and love are primary expressions of life energy. Together, they form the foundations of wellness, and encourage the free flow of all other types of energy. If either principle (or pier) is weakened, living harmoniously (or traversing the bridge) becomes more difficult. When both are strong, energy dances back and forth, and the crossing is easy.

Self-Responsibility Means:

• Discovering your real needs, and finding ways to meet them directly

• Realizing that you are unique and the expert about yourself, and

• Expressing yourself, both your ideas and feelings, in ways that effectively communicate to other people who you are, what you need, and what you know.

Love Means:

• Listening to your own heart–treasuring your uniqueness and your inner wisdom

• Experiencing yourself as your own best friend, and remaining faithful to yourself, especially in the rough times, and

• Realizing your connectedness with all things.

With love and self-responsibility as the foundations of our being, living and wellness are synonymous.

Wellness is a dynamic process because there are seeming contradictions to be resolved, apparent oppositions to be integrated, infinite shades of gray from which to choose. Even though you are connected with everyone else, you are also very much alone, and singularly must make your own life and death decisions. The area that we all need to explore is how to live your life with self-responsibility and love, so that any burdens can be transformed into opportunities, and questions become the impetus for experimentation, for learning, for trusting, and for loving this magnificent and paradoxical creation–yourself.

Travis developed The Wellness Inventory – a “whole person” assessment and lifestyle program designed to help you gain personal insight into your state of physical, emotional, and spiritual wellness. The program offers guidance and tools to transform this new awareness into lasting changes in your life, and a renewed sense of health and wellbeing. It also provides the tools, resources and services to help you reach your wellness goals and bring more balance into your life. If you’d like to learn more, you can take a quick tour of the Wellness Inventory.

In upcoming posts, I’ll discuss three critical components to overall wellness that Dr. Travis identified more than 30 years ago.

1) Wellness is a process and is never a static state.

2) Illness and health is only the tip of an iceberg. To understand their causes, you must look below the surface.

3) We are all energy transformers. All of our life processes, including health and illness, depend upon how well we manage energy.

“You already have the precious mixture that will make you well. Use it!” – Rumi