Wellness For-Evey-One: How to Create Optimal Health, Happiness and Longevity for the 21st Century

what is wellness?
Many definitions can be given. In fact, take a brief moment to state the first definition that comes to your mind/body.

The Webster's dictionary states that wellness is; the quality or state of being in good health, especially as an actively sought goal. This is a good definition, but for purposes that I will soon reveal, I have created a slightly modified version. The wellness definition I will be operating from in this presentation is; an ongoing lifestyle in which a person chooses to develop their highest potential of health, happiness, and longevity.

I will present a working model, which is my attempt to facilitate the understanding of wellness. It will give you something to visualize when the word, wellness, is used. We will use an octagon to create eight areas of this wellness approach. I chose eight because it is a complete number with no beginning or end, and with good balance. Now imagine along the edge of each octagon line, there are these following words, which I will list alphabetically, as there is no one area that is more important than another:

Body/Mind, Career, Family/Friends, Fitness, Leisure, Nutrition, Sleep, and Spirituality.

These eight areas are the major components that make up all we do and are, in life. I could have tried to divide wellness into twelve or one-hundred areas, however, this would terribly complicate matters, making it hard to digest or remember. And perhaps equally important, these eight areas are the ones that my intuition led me to, when I first created the Wellness For~Every~One concept. Furthermore, each area has subcategories, so anything you can think of can be placed in one of these eight areas, whichever area you feel it should go under.

Now, in the middle of each border of the octagon, imagine a straight line extending out three inches or three feet, depending on how large you imagined your octagon to be. After doing this you will have an octagon with eight lines extending out from it. Next, I would like you to give yourself a grade on a scale of one to ten, for each separate wellness area. A number one represents that you feel you are doing poorly and you have many concerns in that area. A number ten means you feel you are doing excellent with no concerns in that area.

It is vital to give yourself the grade you feel is accurate, not the grade your doctor would give you or what your mom would give you. Simply state the number your first intuitive feeling gives, and mark it appropriately along the line, a ten being furthest away from the border(see example). Do this quickly. All eight numbers should be filled out in less than one minute to prevent over-analyzing.

One of the main purposes of this book is to place the responsibility of your wellness on you. The first step toward doing so requires you to give yourself a grade. After finishing this book, you will have the option of going back to the octagon model to change any rating, once you have the big picture of the unlimited possibilities wellness has to offer.

Now that you have connected the dots, what does it look like? A square, an egg? No, I am not going to diagnose you by what shape you have. This model simply gives us a good way to begin our exploration into wellness.

What would it have looked like if you answered 'ten' to everything? That's correct, a wheel or a circle! What is this the symbol for? Balance, flowing, the circle of life, and wholeness. Did you have a complete circle? I mean a complete-ten-circle, not a complete-two-circle? If you had a complete-ten-circle, thank you for joining me, there is no reason to stay any longer, so please give this book to a friend who is not so fortunate.

No wellness area takes priority over another, as they all equally support the whole-you. Certainly if you gave yourself a seven in all wellness areas except sleep, which is a score of two, it would make more sense to initially focus your attention on addressing this as soon as possible. But you do not need to sacrifice the strength of the other areas to improve your sleep.

Some people may argue that there is no complete-ten-circle. It may be difficult to conceive of a complete-ten-circle because; 1. Most of us have been taught that we are not now, and never will be good enough to be a perfect ten. Partly because we have been taught the 'bigger and better' philosophy of life.

2. As we near ten, let's say you start off at a score of three in your sleep area, and you take steps which are working toward that perfect ten, over time your definition of what a ten represents has changed.

Why has it changed? As we learn, practice, and experience new possibilities, we realize what the potential of ten could bring.

Here is an Example: Sarah rates herself a three on the sleep scale because she wakes up often during the night, she snores, and she tosses and turns constantly. Sarah's idea of a ten sleep rating is only waking up once per night for no more than five minutes, to stop snoring after a hard day, and to toss and turn half as much. To her, initially, this is the definition of a ten or 'heavenly sleep.'

Now let's say, after four months of taking steps to reach her ideal sleep goal of ten, she has achieved all of her initial sleep goals, however, a ten in no longer a ten. Why? Because Sarah now realizes she would actually like to see herself sleeping eight hours a night, with no snoring at all, never waking up during the night, and she wants to remember at least one dream per night. And even then she has not reached a ten if her new goal is to master the art of lucid dreaming and out of body experiences. This could take forever.

So as you can see, our definition of superb sleep constantly changes as our knowledge and experience grows. This concept is true for all wellness areas.

Sometimes your wellness grade will improve without directly thinking about it. For instance, Tommy's body/mind and nutrition ratings were both a three, and he made many changes in his diet which has improved his nutrition score to a seven. Remarkably, his body/mind wellness rating has jumped to a six, even though he did not concentrate his efforts in this area at all. So improvements may be easier than you think, because all of the wellness areas support each other, sometimes in ways we never thought were related.