How are you now – still tired, struggling with a ‘bug’ that is still there three weeks later? Just back from a weekend away and still you know that you do not feel quite well but cannot say exactly what is wrong? You are just ticking over from one day to the next. Your blood pressure is not what it should be, and your weight has crept up, and you do not feel right. Maybe you have not slept refreshingly for some while?
To be honest when did you last actually feel well?
When did you wake up with lightness of heart, when the air seemed to go to the bottom of your lungs and your legs had a spring in them?
To be ‘well’ is so much more than clearing up the left over snuffles from a virus, or losing some weight. Often we see our lives only in symptoms, but there is so much more than that. We are very complex beings and one part affects another—that is common sense. If we are tense or worried we sometimes get a headache. If we are anxious , we can go off our food.
Let us look at the parts that we are made up of:
1. Physical. This is our body, flesh and blood.
2. Mental. This includes our intelligence, our thought processes, our moods, our communication skills.
3. Spiritual. We are less familiar with this part of ourselves, but it is the element that responds to love, to those things of beauty in nature, to kindness, and to affection.
4. Moral. We speak of our conscience; some have a more active conscience than others, but we all have a sense of right and wrong, or unfairness or injustice.
TRY THIS PRACTICAL HEALTH TEST
You may discover that your problems are not just physical symptoms. You may realise that you are not living as fully as you could do in one or two areas.
Write down the things that are physical problems for you– some you may have had for years.
Now think of your mental state—do you get ‘down’ or easily irritable for example? What is your particular problem?
How much does the spiritual side of your make-up play in your life? When did you last see something beautiful that brought a lump to your throat; or an act of kindness that that made you feel warm inside?
We cannot be truly well when we are carrying around a guilty secret. Is there someone that you need to say sorry to? Is there something that you know you should be doing, but you have been putting off? Our moral side is important.
STOP AND THINK! AND LEARN!
We have already said that each part of us interacts with another.
|
