Taking care of our mental, physical and spiritual wellbeing is a daily practice. Therapy can support a client into living and practicing somatic principles of health and wellbeing a part of their daily life, rather than in a weekly or bi monthly session. We don’t just brush our teeth the day we go to the dentist – and any dentist that didn’t chalenge you on that might doing your teeth much good! Therapy and coaching is in part a practice of supporting clients to put tools and principles of wellbeing into action in all areas of their lives between sessions. As practitioners or clients we can engage with curiosity, responsibility and wisdom around practices such as nutrition, exercise, sleep, spaciousness and ease in daily scheduling, cultivation of nourishing intention and emotional states, fulfilling social engagements and service and other lifestyle choices as a factor of health and well being.
Physical health and well being of the body are an important and much overlooked factor in the practice of psychology: how we are sleeping, eating, pain and stress management, immune function and inflammation, the wellbeing and functioning of our bodies and the regulation of psychical and psychological processes and hormones. Whilst illness, injury and disability are a reality of many lives, we can still be committed and engaged with nourishing and intentional practices that affirm our potential and capacity for well being; maximizing our capacity for ease and health.
Physical health really does go a long way to help create well being, ease and stability of mind. Swami Vishnu-Devananda writes that ‘the yogi regards the physical body as an instrument towards his journey towards perfection.’ Perfection might not be the goalpost we have hung our hat on! but living in a way that respects and is in alignment with sane principles not only connects us deeper to ourselves but aligns us more finely to natural cycles, seasons and the world that we are part of. Health brings us greater possibilities on a physical, emotional, mental, spiritual and relational planes.
We all have these amazing things – bodies!!! – – that we are walking around in, yet not many of us really lack much depth of understanding of how the body works, nor live within limits that make sense or respect our bodies, or actively engage in learning how to optimise and deepen this experience of being alive – relaxed, alert, connected. Most people don’t even know what their organs do and where they are or how their nervous system works.
Many of us are going so much faster than our natural rhythm and the pace of health dictate. Health is there, we just overtook it. We overstimulate ourselves, live lives that exasperate health conditions and stress. Then we wonder why we feel tired, sick, stressed out, emotional and somehow victims of illness rather than creators of health. We make our health -and ourselves – someone else’s responsibility (medical community) to be treated and fixed as an object rather than a living being that we understand and can take active responsibility for as part of knowing ourselves as wisdom, love and wellness. Or we seek band-aid solutions, propping ourselves up with over or under eating and caffeine, addictions and so on to crunch more life out of a system that simply needs a different pace and alternative input.
Slowing down; reconnecting to natural cycles and seasons, local food; choosing the way we live and address situations, others and ourselves; integrating practices, nourishing internal states of wellness and integrating guiding principles or beliefs (spiritual or otherwise) that nourish well being – is going to be a way more successful life strategy than living like a chicken with your head cut off and going to therapy once a week. Believe me, I tried it!
So the importance of cultivating a life that can be added to with treatments is fundamental, rather than a life habitually swinging wildly out of balance, to be occasionally slowed down with a session.
If you need a little help with getting started with integrating balance and balancing practices into your life, please feel free to contact me with any questions or comments and if I can help on your journey or refer you on, I will,
With warm wishes,
Elise