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       # 2023-10-07 - What Is Health?
       
       A long time ago a friend asked me how my spiritual health was doing.
       I was baffled to answer, so that question stuck with me and gave me
       food for thought.  Another friend had an obsession with health in
       general.  I woke up this morning with an impulse to write about it.
       I will pose some questions and give my own answers, which i think
       of as reference answers: basic, unrefined thoughts to refer to.  I
       intentionally avoided Wikipedia and search engines in an effort to
       put things "in my own words."  I would love to hear your thoughts on
       this subject.
       
       # Questions about health
       
       * What is emotional health?
       * What is physical health?
       * What is spiritual health?
       * What else do you think about health?
       
       # What is emotional health?
       
       Emotional health is the feeling that you are capable of attending to
       your emotions; that whatever may come up will not be more than you
       can handle; that you won't get overwhelmed and shy away from
       allowing, facing, and feeling your emotions.  It is related to having
       a centered and grounded baseline that is enough to have a gut level
       knowledge that "This too shall pass."
       
       # What is physical health?
       
       Physical health is the body's readiness to thrive in spite of the
       challenges of daily life.  Since in truth, no one lives in a vacuum,
       our physical health extends beyond the surface of our skin and is
       connected to the well-being of our human family, environment, and the
       non-physical aspects of our health.
       
       # What is spiritual health?
       
       Spiritual health is the feeling that you are a beautiful person
       living in a beautiful world, and that every living creature you see
       is a beautiful and miraculous being.  Worldliness involves a process
       of normalization where we filter out huge swaths of our day to day
       experience and how we feel about it.  Worldliness protects us from
       pain but it also disconnects us from the awe and wonder of being
       alive on this planet in a human body.  This disconnection is related
       to our natural negativity bias.  In order to connect with something
       larger than one's self, one must be willing to make sincere effort
       on a spiritual path.
       
       # What else do you think about health?
       
       The word health is related to the word whole.  This implies balance
       and integration where we pay attention and take care of all our
       different parts.  It can be envisioned as a circle radiating from the
       core of our being.  When we are injured or ill, this circle may
       contract leaving us without the resources to attend to other people,
       or even to all of our self.
       
       Our health is not entirely a choice.  As long as we are alive, we
       can always make choices that will impact our future health, making it
       better or worse than it otherwise would have been.  It can take
       effort and work to find those choices and get them "dialed in."
       
       Spiritual health is key for several reasons.  It helps us connect to
       the resource of our human family.  Since we are social animals, it
       does us as much good to give as to receive.  It also helps us connect
       to more subtle levels of our own selves, becoming aware of more of
       ourselves, giving us a broader and more nuanced range of choices.  In
       other words, it helps us uncover our power.
       
       tags: bencollver,health,qna,spirit
       
       # Tags
       
 (DIR) bencollver
 (DIR) health
 (DIR) qna
 (DIR) spirit