Thursday, May 21, 2009

Society's views on Wellness and who we are

We move around in our respective worlds with one ear connected to a phone and the other ear connected to an ipod. We look at the people around us and assume that everyone is watching us with a critical eye when everyone else assumes we're spending our time watching them. We make sure that we look just right, and just right is what we assume everyone else expects. We don't worry about how we look in our own eyes, because we're too worried about the eyes of our friends and neighbors. When we look in the mirror, we ask the question "What will everyone think of this 'look'?", and we assume that the look defines us.
We've resigned ourselves to the perception that it's what people see in the first 10 seconds of the relationship that really matters. How much of this paradigm is real? Every bit of it that we allow to be real. If we base our self worth on what we believe everyone else thinks about us, we're resigned to a very unhealthy fate. The minute our perception of what everyone else thinks changes is the same minute we once again change our behavior.Our hair color changes, we tan or quit tanning, we go on another diet, because it is how we look that matters, not how we feel.
Yet how we feel emotionally has become inseparably connected to how we feel physically, and how we feel about ourselves is also inseparably connected with how we feel physically. Our emotional and physical feelings cannot be separated. When we are unhealthy, we feel like garbage. When we feel like garbage, we are unhealthy. It is time to pay less attention to our size and how we look and more attention to what is inside, both literally and figuratively.
If we truly wish to have health and wellness, we will work from the inside out, not the outside in, because when we start on the outside we rarely if ever go past what can be seen to what matters. Let us face the fear we have of what other people think. Let us stand in front of that fear and send it to the hell it came from. Let us declare without equivocation that we will be who we are because this is the only way to really find the truth. The opposite of fear is love, and it begins with loving ourselves.