Final Project - Creating Wellness - My Plan

 

Final Project

Sherry Slatosky

6/18/2013

HW420: Creating Wellness: Psychological and Spiritual Aspects of Healing

Professor: Beth Hart

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

            It is absolutely essential for a Health and Wellness practitioner to lead by example.  There is a saying: “Do as I say, not as I do.”  This sounds great but in reality when people learn from us, they watch by doing.   Most children watch their parent’s actions more than their words, I think because language is something that we develop later on in life.  It is in our human nature to study body language and when someone is not leading by example it discredits the practice itself.  If one is not living an integral life, they cannot show, talk or tell someone else about something that they have not experienced or are not experiencing in the present moment.  It is crucial for all practitioners to follow this integral path as they demonstrate for others what that road entails.

            We develop psychologically, spiritually and physically and each requires different attentions as far as treatment is concerned.  Personally, I would say the one area in my life that needs the most development is the Spiritual side as well as psychological.  I use mind/body practices such as visualization and hypnosis to work on the psychological side of myself.  Spiritually I have explored different religions and different beliefs and am gathering a firm understanding of my own spirituality. I was raised by Christians but did not believe everything they believed.  I decided that I would not call myself religious because that is a man-made thing.  I also found the beliefs I developed as a child fall along the lines of Buddhism and Judaism more than Christianity.   I have spent time at the synagogue helping to cook, as well as time learning about the Buddha ways.  I learned how to meditate in a meditation Center in Minneapolis and the energy I felt inside was amazing!

            Ultimately, my goal is to become a Naturopathic Physician.  I would like to go into research and advance our ideas of medicine as well as bridge the gap in communication from east to west.   To do this I must reach to the limitless potential of the mind and whole body in order to accomplish my goal.  I need to expand all these areas to a point that I can communicate what I know with others and we can develop more ideas and realities.   My ultimate goal is to help people for free or reduced fees to teach them how to become their own doctors.   I am not a money driven person, just need enough to get by and if I had extra, that would be great to be able to distribute to where it is needed.   There are obstacles in my past that have tripped me along my way but I got back up, stronger than ever and forged ahead.  I do not stop until I reach my goal and sometimes that goal is changed along the way only to be re-addressed at a later date.  One goal, that I was after, was this one of living in human flourishing (as Dacher would say).  I thought this level of consciousness would take me a lifetime to reach and one week about 3-4 years ago, I discovered it alone in my apartment.  There is unconditional love felt in this level of awareness that comes with understanding and deep inner peace.  I know what that feels like now and every day, do things to take better care of myself, than I use to in the past.  I love singing and this has helped me to build my confidence and telling the truth to myself and everyone else has also helped me along this path to wholeness.

            There have been times in my life that my physical health has been affected by my spiritual and psychological unhealthiness.   It wasn’t until it reached this point that I really started to take a look at myself.  I was very warn out and sick about 3-4 years ago and there was not a single doctor, I saw, who could tell me what was wrong with my physical body.   Being educated on psychosomatic disorders and psychology, I started to realize that this was psychosomatic.  I was the only one, at that point, who could help me.  I started getting more in touch with God and starting seeing more holistic type practitioners.   I saw a neuropsychologist and wanted to understand what he saw afflicting me.  In my heart, I believe, that the mind can cure the body.  

After taking this class, I can re-iterate that truth to myself in that I was on the right path.   It is hard for me to rate my spirituality, psychological, and physical health on a scale.  I do not reference myself to others but to myself and when I compete it, I try to push myself further than I went the last time in whatever it is.  I feel I am much healthier and more educated on life than the people I have met thus far who are still alive.  I feel like a very old soul deep inside with wisdom that I don’t even know where it comes from sometimes.  When I open my heart though wisdom pours out and sometimes I feel as if I need to tell others things to help them grow.  This helps me to develop my spiritual self.  I know these are all part of me, a whole being but I hope you can understand what I mean when I am separating these parts of my life.

 A quote I made yesterday says: “I am a combination of my life experiences, I am not defined by any one of them. “   Leaving quotes like this to myself helps me to develop my psychological mind.  I write them in places I see often like my bathroom mirror.  This one I wrote on my truck window, so, I can see it when I drive.  I also wrote above it: “Do not look back.”  This quote helps me to not fall back into old patterns of behavior or self-destruction.    I leave them vague so that at times I can think more about the words that I write and find all the meanings behind them. 

Physical development for me is easy to track since I have the most experience in this area.  I need my psychological and spiritual self to be calm and abiding though in order for me to focus on the physical.  I feel that our physical selves represent our internal selves and that our reality is projected out into the physical environment around us.   I have spent many years figuring out how to connect the dots on how our mind, body and spirit are all connected.  I know that at one point in my life, I realized when my car and apartment were disorganized, so was my mind.   I had developed false beliefs, irrational fears and phobias I am still overcoming to this day.  I used this as a tool in my life to keep organization out of chaos.  I would keep my things very neat and organized and would take care of my body as if it were my temple.   I knew that my mind and brain could take me far but I had to take of them too in order to get there.  I do Yoga, Pilates and play tennis now and this has helped me to develop more physically.  Singing also helps me develop physically in that it support more breathe and it encourages you to expand the lungs and exercises the muscles throughout your whole chest cavity. 

 Yoga has helped to realign my body from the slumped over position I developed to the tall, proud woman I am.   This has helped me decrease my need for a chiropractor as well.  These practices are designed for areas of ourselves but in reality they create a chain reaction to all aspects of our being and promote healing and wellness.

I have set goals for each area of development and have a hard time setting an exact goal because as I grow my ideas and perceptions of the world grow too and those goals have had to be re-evaluated and amended.  I think life is a continuous learning experience and by setting limits on ourselves, it hinders us from reaching our full potential.  When I make a goal, I work hard to reach it ASAP.  When I reach it, depending how much time I have left, I may raise the bar on myself.   I try not to limit myself to what is possible according to everyone else but rather go towards what I think is possible.  I once heard a saying that: “If you can dream it, you can build it.”  We can build things in our minds and later they can become part of our physical realities.  Spiritually a goal I would like to obtain is mastery of the law of attraction.  I would like to expand my psychic abilities as well as develop an attraction that I can understand and explain.  I would like to attract the positive things into my life that I have always wanted and by taking out the negative, I can do this.   The law of attraction works like this: Like attracts like.  If I am like the people I want to attract then I will attract them.  That brings me to my next psychological goal of removing all the: phobias, fears, false beliefs, negative emotions, pent up anger from my mind.  My goal is to have a clear mind, one in which I have purposefully and intentionally conditioned towards loving kindness.  My third goal of physical health would encompass my brain, body and it all starts with the diet.  I plan to eat mostly organic foods and more fruits and veggies.  I bought a juicer a few years ago and love to juice but sometimes am not so consistent.

 I plan to exercise regularly and take Yoga two times per week.  If I miss the class I will use the self-discipline I have to do the class at home on-line.  I will also stay away from sugar, preservatives, and caffeine because they cloud my thinking.   I will stay away from dairy and bread because I had consumed too many of those items throughout my lifetime thus far and have caused me some ailments. 

Some specific practices I began this past week with my psychological development are helping me a great deal.  I started using hypnosis therapy to build my self-confidence during this time of struggle in my life.  I am feeling much more confident and have started addressing things that I have put aside for many years.  The recording I have found to be the most helpful is this recording by Glenn Harrold, listed here on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7irn1Ga-Gyc .  The recording is called: Build Your Self-Esteem and is great!

I also started using the Subtle-mind practice to bring myself out of panic situations when my brain diverts back to the fight or flight mode.  When we are in this mode, we cannot fully think and understand things like the advances human beings.  In this mode, our pre-frontal cortex is shut down and we cannot think any more than our animal counterparts.  This practice helps me to bring myself into the present and realize what I am experiencing are memories of traumas and I am not reliving it again. 

I also play Lumosity, which is a brain enhancement game that can help to build the connections in the brain that deteriorate as we don’t use different aspects of the brain.  www.lumosity.com, helps build: focus, concentration, memory and has even helped me to stay calm and remember people’s names that I meet.  I use to struggle with names because I would be able to truly listen to the person until they already announced who they were. 

Yoga has helped me to avoid a chiropractor for the past 2 years now.  I have learned how to stretch my muscles and by using trigger-point massage, a tennis ball, and progressive muscle relaxation, can allow my body to re-adjust my back into the proper position it is meant to be in.  If I am creating my own reality, I don’t want to fight myself by seeing a chiropractor when my body is slowly shifting on its own as I develop and recover from the trauma’s I have experienced.   Yoga helps me maintain muscle tone, strength and stability in my body and practice this as I said twice a week for physical development.  It has also helped me to create a stronger core and feel more relaxed on a daily basis.

Another way I develop my physical body is by not consuming foods I know are un-natural to my body such as preservatives, sugars, chemicals, pharmaceuticals or any over the counter medications for that matter.   Just by eliminating these things from my body, I am becoming younger looking, more beautiful and my skin is gleaming.   My body seems to require little strenuous exercise when I can follow a 100% organic regimen.  I have no issues gaining weight but lots of issues losing weight.  I have had to take this process slow otherwise it would ware my body out.  I lost 60 pounds in four months when I first went 100% organic and broke two teeth out of the ordeal.  No matter how much I ate organically, I couldn’t gain any weight.

One other spiritual practice that I am going to implement into my life is praying more and demonstrating gratitude for things.  I use to be very grateful and giving and then somewhere along the lines, I got hurt and stopped being that way.  I am practicing more now and have come to realize the more that I develop psychologically, the more I feel like my old-happy-self again but in a new light.  I think I am reaching that Unity level of Consciousness as Elliot Dacher describes, but there is more beyond that.  This is where we are now but in the future, this paradigm with be expanding again.

During the next six months I will monitor my progress by making observations and journal entries that I can later reflect back on.  At every 3 month mark, I will go back and read my journal entries and analyze how much I developed since then.  I will judge the amount of effort I put forth in these goals and assess whether I can take on more stress or if I should back off just a little in some areas until others have reached a higher level of development.  I feel that I will be the most effective when all these areas of my development are in balance.  For example, if someone is intellectually over developed but emotionally under developed, there can be some big issues in building interpersonal relationships and growing in your intellect.  This can cause disturbances when one cannot properly communicate with another and has no one to talk to about ideas.   I am going to have a goal by three months of being steady in this yoga routine.  I want to be attending 2 days a week consecutively by that point in time.

As I mentioned before, all these practices affect each other in all areas for ourselves and I am eager to find out how much I can learn from this experience.   It is not always about the destination I have come to learn, it is the road in which we travel to get there and what we learn along the way that is the most beneficial in our overall health and wellness.  I plan to implement these practices and looking forward to the future when I can analyze myself and be proud of my development and observe and reflect on what I have learned along the way to the path of Human Flourishing.  

 

References:

·         Glenn Harrold, Build your self-esteem hypnosis, retrieved on: 6/15/2013 from: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7irn1Ga-Gyc

·         Dacher, E.S. (2006) Integral Health: The Path to Human Flourishing. Laguna Beach, CA: Basic Health Publications.

·         Brain Enhancement Games:www.lumosity.com