Wednesday, July 7, 2010

Can you be healthy without being spiritual?

Lately, I have been thinking a lot about how Spirituality and Physical Well Being are connected. It seems intuitively obvious that they are related, but how? Clearly, there are spiritual giants with frail bodies; likewise, the glow of physically radiance in a human body can exist without a whiff of spirituality.

Is there a formula? Those of you who know me, will smile at this;
always the quest for the mathematical formula. All questions at this point. All hypotheses with too many variables, too many definitions of both well being and spirituality. So maybe head on is not the way to go here: defining terms, creating a debate. Maybe we need some stories.

I started out writing a health book about eight years ago. I was so gung ho, herding all my ideas into one corral so I could hang onto
them:
1. hot little health tips
2. ideas about intention setting
3. the power of one's attitude in creating health
4. alternative therapies from magnets to reflexology
5. the science relating mental activity to immune response
6. the power of water (that was before Dr. Emoto and What the Bleep)

I had this idea that humans had factory settings like appliances and power tools, and if we could dial those back in, we could regain the unimaginable level of vibrant well being for which
we were designed.

I found several of the settings, even finished the book proposal, then suddenly stopped writing. Some things happened that were the knock out punch for my book:
1. I was off track. I knew it. No matter how accurate my factory settings were, there was a missing piece to this puzzle.
2. I realized no publisher would touch
a health book written by a non-expert. My year of pre-med didn't count to anyone but me!
3. I realized the issue with health was not information but willingness. Almost everyone I knew,
including me, knew what to do to be healthy. We just didn't do it!! Why write another book that wouldn't really deliver.
4. Then the knock out punch:
MDs' Oz and Mesmet came out with You: The Owner's Manual; that
ghost written, Disneyesque , formulaic, aspirin pushing, career building drivel of a best seller. ( Oh my, she sounds bitter). I now believe Dr Oz and Co. are really helping people get healthy with their TV shows and website, even if the book was lame.

One problem with modern medicine is that the patient's experiential 'ground zero' is often not taken into account. Even Hans Selye knew that recent losses could so skew the patient's immune system that
disease was almost inevitable. Grief and loss have to be taken into account. Stress is finally on the board as a contributor to physical health. Some MDs even give a contribution percentage to stress, like 60-90%.

Spiritual Bank Account

But how about the other side of the equation? The ledger has two parts to balance. If stress is the red ink then optimism and hopefulness, empathy and joy, are the black. According to research, these emotions or attitudes actively create a medium for the maintenance of physical/emotional/spiritual well being.

I guess it's impossible to go further without defining spiritual well being. We all know what physical well being looks and feels like, at least for ourselves. For some, it means what it looks like-great skin, 6-pack, perfect figure, super endurance. For me, it is the internal homeostasis created by organs humming away at optimum performance that produces abundant energy, physical comfort, compassion, alertness, great sleep, elastic joints, etc. I feel good. I mean, I feel so good it should be illegal! Yeah, sing it, James.




To Be Continued...