Last Bolg for Mr. Leis for a While!

Hello Everyone!
Thank you all for a great term!  My health ratings have not really changed since Unit 3.  I have had no time to myself to make the necessary changes in my life to improve my overall health.  I am still at a 7 for physical health and spiritual health.  I am also still a 9 for emotional health.  I wish I could find the time to really make the changes and make them stick.  I have not really worked towards my goals that I established in unit 3.  I have slightly increased my physical activity by running with my dog though.  This is really the only change that I have implemented into my life.  The time for change will come but right now I can only focus on things that I need to do immediately; it sounds like an excuse but it is really a time crunch for me. 

This course has really helped me understand the importance of the mind.  I have always known the importance of the mind in wellness but this class only emphasized it further.  The most rewarding part about this class was the meeting all the people in this class; I am now associated with some very wonderful people.  I did not really run into too many difficulties in this class.  It was enjoyable so nothing seemed too hard.  This class has help me help others by opening up new opportunities and exercises that I can share with clients.  Thanks again Everyone!

Bradly Leis

One More Week...Here is my Final!

Introduction: I

It is very important for a health and wellness professional to develop all aspects of health including psychological health, spiritual health, and physical health.  This is because health and wellness is not just about healing the body; health and wellness is also about developing a clear and healthy mind (Dacher, 2006).  A combination of these three aspects of health creates a picture of perfect health; perfect health cannot be attained if a person is lacking in any of the three aspects of health.  Patients/clients of health and wellness professionals are not a one size fits all when it comes to treatments.  These patents could be lacking in any of the three aspects of health.  It is important for a health and wellness professional to be able to identify where that person is lacking and how to improve that person’s overall health.  The identification of flaws in a patient’s overall health is easier identified if the health and wellness professional is strong in the area that the patient is lacking.  If a health and wellness is lacking in a particular aspect of health, they may have difficulty identifying where the patient/client is lacking in their personal health as well.  It is also important to exhibit manifestations of good overall health.  If a health and wellness professional has an overall good level of health it will show; conversely, if a health and wellness professional is lacking in an area of health then that will show as well.  A patient/client is likely to respond better to someone that expresses strong qualities in the specific area of health that the patient needs improvement in.  It is also important to develop the high qualities of health by experience.  Experience allows a health and wellness professional to pull information from their past to help aid a patient/client in improving their health.

I need improvement in the physical aspect of health.  I was once a very physical individual with very few physical limits.  I am not in bad shape now but I could use some improvement.  I have great psychological health and good spiritual health but my physical health could be improved.  To feel complete in my journey to health, I need to lose some weight and increase my muscle mass.  I need to revamp my physical activity level and improve my diet. 

Assessment: II

I would consider myself a relatively healthy person physically, emotionally, and spiritually.  I can rate each aspect of my overall health with a 1-10 scoring system; 1 means the worst health possible and a 10 being the best health achievable.  I would consider my physical health to be a 6.  I could be physically healthier but I am pretty content with my physical health.  I used to be a 10 but that went away when I quit my weightlifting routine about 6 years ago; before that I was a monster.  My spiritual health would be at a 7.  I do not have much religion in my life but I am content with that; I do have questions about life that are yet to be answered but my life is not over yet, I still have time to figure it out.  I have an emotional health of about 9.  I can control my emotions pretty well and do not let them get the best of me.  I never really have any emotional problems but I could not give myself a 10 because there are days that I feel really run down mentally. 

Goal development: III

I could help my physical health by simply increasing my physical activity level every day.  I could be a lot more physical and in a lot better shape.  I spend a lot of time sitting on a computer completing various task, this leaves much less time that I could be physically active.  I am always busy so time is very precious to me.  I am privileged with very little spare time.  This leaves me with limited time for meal planning and preparation.  This leads to an inferior diet.  If I were to alter my time management skills then I could make room for an improved diet and an improved physical routine.  I have a goal of beginning a fitness program at a local fitness facility.  My spiritual health could be potentially better with more life experiences.  I also could explore some religion branches in this life to see if anything really fits with what I feel about this life.  I have a goal to go to church with my wife and see what she was raised to believe in the Catholic religion.  My emotional health could be better if I had less stress in my life.  This could be accomplished my lessening my load of tasks that I try to accomplish every day.  I have a goal to take at least 30 minutes of time for myself every day.  I need time to just relax and do my own thing.

Practices for personal health: IV

The best strategy that I could implement into my life to improve my physical health would be to better manage my time.  This would increase the amount of time that I have available for exercise and diet preparation.  Both of these aspects affect my physical health greatly.  I can also implement an active physical regiment for an increase of cardiovascular and skeletal muscular health. 

Spirituality can be fostered by life experiences.  There are a lot of things that go on in this world.  Most people can only imagine the experiences of others and the experience of nature.  It is hard to connect the questions in life to answers if a person cannot fill in the gap with personal experience.  If a person is to find true spirituality then they must strive to live the most dynamic life possible.  Ever life experience allows a person to create a perspective on that scenario; this forms an opinion that forms an idea about a particular thought.  The thought process makes up a large part of spirituality.  What should a person believe and who they should follow, or not follow, are all decisions that need to be made by an individual.  These decisions cannot be taken lightly and these decisions should only be decided on when the individual has had a wide scope of experience in these matters.  It is hard to find out what is out there without broadening the scope of life and viewing all aspects.  Meditation is good exercises that can be used to get a better perspective on life.  It can be used to clear the mind of needless “chatter” so the mind can clearly assess the situation.  I could use more meditation to give my spirituality some reassurance.  I personally feel that the best way to find spirituality is to follow your heart and see what makes you happy.  It is very hard to have a spiritual side if you are not happy in this life.  Within that happiness is something that makes a person feel like they belong and allows them to welcome others into the fold of happiness.  Spirituality should not lead to despair and sadness but instead foster love and belonging.  I best achieve spirituality by spending time in nature.  This is a place uncorrupted by man and emotional influence.  This is where I can reflect on life and see life for what it really is.  I can also find spirituality in people.  I have always felt that humans are inherently good.  Negative human emotion and actions are fueled by non-human factors such as wealth.  People are people and just want to be happy.  Deep down people want to belong and to want to be loved.  I seek the inner feelings of people to help find spirituality.  A good exercise to implement into my life would be the “loving kindness” exercise.  This exercise is all about human relations between one another and how to foster forgiveness and love.

Psychological health can be fostered by happiness and lack of stressors.  Stressors are anything that causes wear and tear on the body's physical or mental resources (Stressor, 2012).  Stressors place a burden on people and cause negative feelings about many aspects of life such as financing, family, commitments, and work.  If a person can keep stressors to a minimum then they have a better chance at a high level of psychological health.  Another factor to keep psychological health at its highest is to maintain good physical health.  A high level of physical health fosters good physical feeling and great self-esteem.  A lack of self-esteem combined with excessive life stressors is a recipe for poor psychological health.  I will implement physical exercise into my life to better boost my physical shape thus improving my self-esteem.  I will also implement meditation into my life for some clarity.  I have a very big problem with keeping a clear, one track, mind.  Meditation can help clear that mind of unnecessary thought and foster clear thinking.  Clear thinking would help better organize my days; consequently, a better organized day leads to less stress.   A boost of self-esteem and a decrease of daily stress will help me foster a higher level of psychological health. 

Commitment: V

Assessment is a vital part of seeking improvement.  It is near impossible to see exact changes if you have little idea of where you were before the progress started.  Another major benefit of assessment is to see where you improved and how the improvement was possible.  This information is invaluable when it comes to even further progression or helping others achieve their goals in similar aspects of life.  I can log information and feelings a few times a week for the next 6 months.  I will do this during my progression to leading to an overall healthier level of health.  This logged information will be done in a personal journal that can be used to see where I succeeded and where I struggled.  I can see how my different aspects of health were affecting my overall health on a daily basis; this can lead to conclusions on how different events affect your personal life.  This information can be used to either eliminate or include more of specific events to better my life.  I can look back and see how I struggled and how I overcame that struggle.  That is a good example of how life experience can be an invaluable tool to foster better health in yourself as well as others.  Even though ever person on this earth is different, experiences gained in personal life have a chance to change another person’s life for the better.  

Thanks Class!

Wrapping Up This Term

I feel like all of the mind and body exercises that we did this term were beneficial but two of them were a cut above the rest.  Loving Kindness was one of my favorite exercises followed by Meeting Aesclepius.  There is a reason for choosing those two exercises. 

First, Loving kindness focused on loving and helping others.  This is something that people do not do much of any more.  I have seen the worst in people in my line of work; I work in the death and dying industry as a funeral director apprentice.  I have seen people just look at another and blatantly say that they were no good for anything or that they have nothing to live for, or even that they were a waste of skin.  This is not uncommon in my line of work, even within families.  People NEED to get back to helping their neighbors.  We are a global community and we cannot act as one if we cannot get along and get over our very small differences.  Love is something that can be projected towards others.  Love and kindness are much more important than the dollar bill; I feel that most violence, distrust, and greed is derived from money.  The world would be a much better place to live in if everyone could love one another.

Secondly, Meeting Aesclepius is also very important.  A person is defined by their thoughts and how ideas are portrayed through them and to them.  Ideas fly through the human mind at high speeds and with a lot of chaos.  This exercise is designed to see through the chaos to see thoughts clearly.  This exercise is also designed to let the participant focus on what is important and push aside ideas that are clogging the process.  I feel that if a person whats to be the best that they can then they cannot leave things to chance.  If a person can see thoughts clearly then they can anticipate an outcome or situations for the future.  This can be done if the mind is silenced and free of distractions. 

If these two ideas are combined they focus on both the individual and the community.  If both have a healthy relationship then the world becomes a better place.  These ideas are already in my life.  I try to love my neighbor and I try to see clearly.  I have a hard time seeing clearly; my mind is a hurricane of ideas all the time.  I can transition through a dozen different ideas in a matter of seconds, it gets hectic sometimes and it drives my wife insane.  I could implement both exercises into my life more frequently as a reminder of how important each of these factors are to human life and survival.

Bradly Leis

Silence that waterfall!

This weeks exercise is all about quieting the mind.  The narraroator first explains how the mind first begins as a loud waterfall.  Over time, with practice and training, the human mind can learn to silence the mind and sort out all the noise.  The mind is then compared to a quiet river merging into a calm sea.  This is something that does not happen overnight but instead is something that is developed and learned.  A human mind could be compared to an onion.  The outer layers are loud and the thoughts are hard to sift through.  As the layers of the onion are peeled back, the layers become increasingly quieter and the thoughts become more focused.  This is what this exercise was based on this week.  This was a pretty relaxing exercise.

"One cannot lead another where one has not gone himself."  This is a very important aspect of leading.  It is not possible to tell someone something that you, yourself, have not personally experienced.  This is because having "experience" is where experience comes from.  Without experience, one can only speculate on what that experience would be like.  This is very important to health and wellness professionals because a health and wellness professional is there to guide others towards a better and healthier life.  It is up to the professional to follow the directed path before they could tell someone else to follow that same path.  This is like receiving information from a doctor telling you to lose weight be he is also overweight.  One can best lead by example.  If you tell someone that a change in their life could lead to a higher level of wellness and that the work to get to that goal is worth the effort.  If the teacher does not follow that same advice then this shows two negative aspects immediately.  The first contradiction is that a healthier life may not be a better way to live.  The second contradiction shows that maybe the effort is not worth the payoff, if it was than the instructor would also be following that road.  There is an obligation of the health provider to develop themselves both spiritually and psychologically because a greater sense of spiritually and psychological health means a healthier level of wellness.  Spirituality can be accomplished by religion and by searching for aspects of life that are bigger than yourself.  Psychological health can be aided by the development of spiritual health; increased spiritual health increases the feeling of belonging and decreases the unknowns in this life that cause stress.  Psychological health can be improved by good physical health and by performing physiological improvement based exercises.

Bradly Leis