Hang on! Not Just Surviving, Thriving

When we greet someone it is quite common to ask, “How are you doing?” Other variations include what's up, what's going on and how have you been? Of course the standard answer is usually, “I'm fine,” “I'm okay,” “Pretty good” and my favorite, “I'm hanging in there.” My usual response to the latter is “Well, hang on.”

These less than enthusiastic responses remind me of the boiling frog story. This is a little gross but read on, there is a point. A few years back I heard about an experiment using frogs and water. First, a shallow pan of water was heated to boiling point and then a frog was dropped in. What do you think happened? He jumped out of course. Then a second frog was placed in a shallow pan of room temperature water, which was subsequently heated very slowly. Unfortunately for the second frog, the rise in temperature was so slow that by the time he realized it, he had become frog soup.

Now, I'm certainly not in favor of torturing frogs and to be honest with you, I don't even have the particulars of that experiment, but it does bring up an interesting parallel to how most people experience their life. In general, people don't lose their health, wellness and vitality all at once, like the first frog. It usually happens so slowly that we don't even realize its happening. If people were experiencing their optimal state and then, all of a sudden, were cast into experiencing their “normal” state, they would know something was drastically wrong.

So, when someone answers with the standard, “I'm fine,” what does that mean? It most likely means that they feel like they did the day before, and the day before that. Of course we know when we feel like crap, and in comparison, “fine” is certainly a whole lot better than that. Unfortunately, feeling okay has become the benchmark that most people have learned to settle with.

Usually when someone experiences symptoms they seek out a practitioner to help restore them to the state they were in before becoming symptomatic. Sometimes a practitioner will help maintain them in that state so the symptoms won't return. This way, instead of feeling bad, they can feel okay.

A wellness practitioner, on the other hand, would seek not just to restore them to their previous state, but to a higher level of functioning than they were previously experiencing. Besides, if you take the same path you'll land up in the same place. Unfortunately most people have forgotten what wellness feels like, so they settle for fine or just getting by. I've actually had people tell me they were in good health and then name the half dozen medications they were on in the same breath.

Well, I'm here to tell you that it doesn't have to be like that. Everyone, no matter what his or her health condition, has the potential to experience a higher level of wellness. All they have to do is wake up and jump out of that slowly boiling pan of mediocrity they call their life.

So, don't just hang on... Rock on!

Is it Worth Investing in Wellness Care?

It is not uncommon for people to make investments in their future. There are various areas in which one can invest. Many people will have a financial portfolio with stocks, bonds, IRA's and 401K's. They could invest in rare coins, art, real estate or any variety of other property, resources or material goods. People will also invest large amounts of time and resources in education for themselves and their children, in hopes of a better job and life.

While there are an endless variety of diverse types of investments they all have something in common. We hope that efforts made now will bear fruit and return to us not just what we put in, but a whole lot more. The term most commonly used for this in the financial world is growth.

There is a growing percentage of the population that is beginning to see their health as something they may want or need to invest in as well. The question then becomes, what is a good investment in our health? How much am I going to have to invest and what kind of return should I expect? One thing's for sure; if we don't invest in our health at all, we are almost completely assured of a poor return.

But what does a good return mean? For some it may mean that they live as long as possible, while for others it would be defined by the quality of life they had while they were alive. This is an important question to consider when deciding upon your mode of investment. The way I see it; there are basically three possible approaches we can take:

The first is to ignore it completely. I should hope that the people reading this right now can see the shortcoming of this strategy. While the marvels of modern medicine can do an amazing job of keeping people alive longer, it lacks greatly when it comes to the quality of life that accompanies this longevity. If you've spent any time in a nursing home, you need no convincing of that.

The second strategy would be to maintain our health. This is a seemingly sound strategy that a majority of investors are choosing these days. In all fairness it's a much better solution then the previous. There are, however, some pitfalls with this strategy.

If we were to stuff our money under the mattress and pull it out in twenty years, what do you think we'd find? We‘d have the same money we put in there two decades ago. By hiding the money in the mattress and not investing we would be able to maintain the same amount. The only problem with that is that we'd actually be losing money due to inflation.

Attempting to maintain our health is very similar. While it is much better than ignoring it completely it does not offer the potential for growth. Without strategies for growth our health slowly loses its value and cannot keep up with our aging bodies and all the toxins and stressors of a modern world. So, just maintaining our health means we are actually losing ground. All of our efforts become directed at not being sick or symptomatic.

There is yet another strategy that offers much more potential for growth. It is the strategy of wellness and with it comes the potential for so much more than maintenance. Wellness is not limited to maintenance of physical symptoms and sustaining the status quo. It is a strategy of growth and life enhancement. In addition to improved physical well-being, a wellness program must monitor an individual's ability to adapt to stress, their psychological and emotional well being, and their ability to make and maintain healthy lifestyle choices as well as their life enjoyment and quality of life. It means not just surviving but thriving and developing new and better strategies of adaptation for the present as well as the future.

So we must ask ourselves; is my wellness worth investing in and what is the best way to use my resources? Is getting by going to be enough to fulfill my current and future needs? Do I want more out of life and am I worth the investment? Obviously I'm a huge advocate of investing in Network Care as a wellness strategy because it enhances all the areas of wellness previously stated. Whatever you choose, educate yourself, ask these questions and invest wisely. You are worth it!

How can anger be good? The purpose of emotion

One day not too long ago a client brought me an internet story from ABC news, entitled “Anger Is Good for You.” The study, conducted at Carnegie Mellon University, showed anger may help people reduce the negative impact of stress. At first glance this may seem surprising but, it really makes perfect sense.

I've heard people label some emotions, like happiness, joy, love and serenity as “good” and other emotions like anger, depression or sadness as “bad.” The truth is that emotions aren't good or bad, they just are. Some may be more pleasurable while others are less enjoyable, but all emotions serve a purpose. If they didn't we wouldn't have them.

Just today I was discussing with a client the concept of getting a deeper level of connection with her body. She was concerned because at times she had seen other clients in the office, receiving Network Care, have an emotional response. She said, “I don't want that to happen to me.” She had an idea that it would be a bad thing to have an emotional release.

Not everybody will have an emotional release on the table but if it happens it's a necessary experience in their healing process. See, emotions are how we move and release energy and that's good because stuck energy creates disharmony in the body. Plus, when we are “holding it in,” so to speak, we keep ourselves in the stress physiology. I've written about the many damaging effects of stress in past articles.

I remember how I felt shortly after the terrorist attack on September 11th. Between that event and my recent divorce I experienced so many different emotions; many of which didn't feel so good at the time. However, I don't remember ever feeling so much on such a deep level before that. Looking back I realize what a healing experience it was for me. It also became much easier for me to express emotions after that.

Emotions are an expression of a psychological, biological and physiological state. By the time you experience the emotion, you're already in that physiology. The emotion just helps you move that energy.

If you keep experiencing the same emotion habitually then you might want to take a closer look. The real problem is not the emotion; rather it is the mechanism behind why you are continually creating the same ones. One of the objectives of Network Care is to create more flexibility in the body structure which allows for a greater range of emotions and responses. You can read about this in detail in The Molecules of Emotion by Dr. Candace Pert. A greater range of expression means a greater depth of the experience of life.

In addition to helping us release energy and experience more depth, emotions, like other symptoms, motivate us to make changes. We change, not because of information, but because we feel. That's why advertisers use emotions to sell us their products.

So I say, “Express them if you've got them.”

And to quote Dr. Donald Epstein; “It's not about feeling better, it's about better feeling.”