The End

Well guys, this is my last post for this class!  Let me start off by saying I’ve had a great semester with all of you, and definitely some extra cool points for the Professor because this is the first time I’ve had a blog where the students can interact on their own time and terms and become more intimate just like we would in a real face-to-face class.  Since my final project hit on many of the points for this blog assignment, I’ll refer you to my previous post for my comparison to my previously rated psychological, physical, and spiritual well-being and what I feel that I currently am.  I’m not perfect, but then again I’m pretty sure no one is, so my numbers are real and honest and just because this class is over doesn’t mean I’m done evaluating myself. 

My goals are also listed above, as these have no changed.  I did have my first physical therapy session today and I’m right on track.  I can flex my knee up to a 100 degrees where I only needed to be able to achieve 90 degrees at this two week point.  I will adjust my goals and say that I hope to actually be running by this summer so I can compete in my second Color Run, along with a Mud Run that’s going to take place here in Anchorage, Alaska.  After my appointment today I know this goal is more possible than I originally thought. 

As for implementing these into my life, it’s only the beginning.  Now that this class has come to an end, I have to balance my life, with my physical therapy two hours a day, along with working out and doing homework, and of course Recruiting once I get back to that in February.  Time management has always been my down fall, but if it’s one thing this course has taught me it’s that if you WANT something to happen, you’ll always find a way to make sure that it does.  Everything is just what it sounds like, an excuse, and there are no excuses in success.

I can honestly say that I have no developed improved well-being throughout this course, instead found the tools to create that healthy lifestyle in which I’ll be battling with over the next few months.  The most rewarding aspects of this course have been the personal blogs where can be individuals on the same track yet personal enough to incorporate our own successes and failures and hopefully find out from a fellow classmate how to improve as well as the meditation sessions.  Meditation has always been my biggest hurdle within my religion, so to have a mandatory reason to sit down for a half hour each week and be guided through a peaceful space, was just amazing.  All the bull in the world just faded away and I was left to myself and the Goddess, where my mental and spiritual healing took place simultaneously.  Some of the harder parts were the reading when I just didn’t want to do much of anything!  I feel that after this course I have developed a better sense of myself that I can continue to work on, which will in turn make me a better people person.  I’ve already started to stop being I speak, and make sure what I was going to say wasn’t going to be rude or hurt someone, which is something I never used to.  Overall this course has given me great knowledge and I hope to be able to apply it in my everyday life with continued practice.

Thanks for a great class!

-Jess

Final Project: Self Reflection

Unit 9 Project

Jessica L. Houser

Professor Mark Maule

HW420: Creating Wellness: Psychological and Spiritual Aspects of Healing

14 January 2014

Unit 9 Project

            Throughout this course on the psychological and spiritual aspects of healing, I have had to take a deeper look into myself and evaluate just how healthy, or unhealthy, I truly was.  Throughout this paper I will stress the importance of not only the physical aspects of staying healthy but also the mental and spiritual aspects too.  I will continue on to assess myself, develop a goal, discuss practices for personal health, and express my overall commitment to achieving this goal within the next six months as well as how I will continue to achieve overall health and wellness throughout my life.

Importance

It seems only realistic that a health and wellness professional needs to develop themselves psychologically, spiritually, and physically because these are the aspects they will be trying to enhance in others.  I would not want someone selling me Nike’s that wears only Adidas or someone a Doctor operating on my knee that’s actually a pediatrician.  These are things that just make sense, in order to help someone in a specialized area; you yourself need to be well versed.  As a health and wellness professional, you need be constantly challenging your mind, body and fulfilling spiritual needs, whether it’s religious or lack thereof, so you can truly feel the full effects of whole health. 

Personally, I feel that I need to develop mostly in the spiritual and physical aspect.  My mind is pretty solid in comparison to the other two, where my body is recovering from knee reconstructive surgery I had last week and my spirituality is slacking the most.  The only times I have meditated or even attempted to be a little spiritual has been when this class called for a guided walk through, and I need more than this.  Since my surgery I have cut out 90% of my fatty, processed foods and eat primarily fresh vegetables, lean meats, and limit my snacks to Kind bars, Laura Bars, and 100 calorie fruit cups and ice cream cups because you cannot completely cut out bad foods right away.  I tried that once before and I ended up binge eating for a week due to cravings and lack of self-control.  My working out, however, will be a slow process where I’ll start with physical therapy and work my way up with my home gym.  Later in this paper I will discuss some three month goals, six month goals, and of course one year goals that I have set for myself, but for now I’ll talk about my personal assessment. 

Assessment

            Back in November of 2013 I wrote a blog posting that rated my overall wellness in the following categories; spirituality, physically, and psychologically.  I gave myself the following scores in each area: spirituality (5), physically (6) and psychologically (6).  If I were to rate myself right now I would change my scores slightly since it’s only been two months.  For spirituality, I would now be a 6 only because I have begun incorporating weekly meditation into my busy routine thanks the guided passages from this class.  This allows me a change to dig into my soul and try to find that connection with my God and Goddess to truly achieve full spiritual health. 

For my physical health I would now be a 7 even though I’m sitting on my couch all day, I have yet to gain weight like most people do after surgery because my wife and I have completely changed the way we eat and what we eat every day.  Over the next few weeks I will slowly start to have more time to do physical therapy and work out even with my limitations to actually lose weight and gain more muscle.  Psychologically I would now be a 7, not much improvement but with the higher spiritual and physical rating comes a healthier mind.  My changes have not been huge, but I’m sure in the long run I will be at least two points higher in each area.

Goal Development

            I have three main goals that have a few minor goals that go along with my 30-90-360 time line over the course of the next year.  By this time next month I hope to have incorporated meditation into my life at least once a week since this class will be over.  I will continue to eat healthy and begin working out slowly as my knee heals, while allowing that spiritual development through meditation to also help with any mental ailments that may plague my mind.  By my 90 day mark I hope to have lost at least 10 pounds and can walk without crutches (even if I need to still use my brace), have started not only meditation once a week but now practice rituals on the major sabots, and continue to have a positive mind.  A year from now I plan to have a strict schedule where I meditate twice a week and hopefully my wife begins to join in with me. 

My final goal will be to have a more solid understanding of my faith, which is Wicca, and a grasp of how to incorporate my religion into my families’ everyday lifestyle.  For my physical growth I hope to be running and sprinting on my new knee as well as working towards a beautiful six-pack, and of course overall slimming looks.  I plan on keeping this healthy living and even working towards cutting out almost all of the bad stuff, even salted butter.  A year from now I hope to be stronger physically, mentally and spiritually, as well as healthier all around.

Practices for Personal Health

            All of these goals will not just achieve themselves; I’m going to have to come up with a course of action which will allow me to hit my end result.  Some things that will allow me to achieve my spiritual goals are incorporating a strict schedule of meditation time along with a reading list and sabot preparation.  I will start off with every Sunday (which I usually have off) from 7pm to 8pm, I will have uninterrupted quiet time in the office to have either a guided meditation session or just work on intimate mental meditation where I reflect on that day or week without any guidance.  Eventually I will move up to twice a week, but that will come later.  Then I will allow myself at least one chapter a night of new Wicca material to familiarize myself with the ever changing ideas and ritual practices of others within my faith.  This will allow me the time to plan accordingly for the major sabots, or Wiccan festivals, so I can truly become one with myself, my family, and the earth. 

            In order to achieve my physical goals I need to maintain a constant standard of healthy foods that I consume and once I can finally workout I need to have a no excuse plan to work out every single day, with the appropriate rest days allocated.  For now, I have a free weight set, resistance bands, a rowing machine, a pull up bar, and of course a few exercise videos.  I will keep a log of the foods I eat and track it with fitday.com, a website that allows you to track what you consume as well as what you burn off in exercise.  This will allow me the ability to keep a constant eye on how many calories I’m consuming from day to day I know if I need to work out a little harder on the next session or maybe eat a lighter meal the next day.  Only by tracking what goes into my body and what goes out will I be able to achieve my physical goals.  Along with my physical goals I have a recovery goal of being able to run and sprint upon my one year mark.  The only way I can achieve this is by slowly easing into power walking, and then jogging, then finally full blow running with discretion to my physical therapist and their advice.

            My mental health is not really much of an issue, even though my score is not perfect.  I do not feel that anyone can honestly say they have tens across the board, because from day to day we all make mistakes or feel stressed from work and eat that burger from a fast food joint.  I do, however, feel that once my physical and spiritual aspects are on track, then so will my mental.  Sometimes, I do struggle with anger, which is the one aspect of my mental being that needs the most attention.  I plan on using the meditation sessions not only to hone in on my spirituality, but to also look back at instances where I was negative or angry and try to find the root cause of my anger and figure out how to deal with the situation differently for next time.  I have also begun taking vitamin D supplements which I call my ‘happy pills’.  In Alaska it gets very dark for 20 hours a day during the winter.  Generally I’m only outside to go to and from my car, so the exposure to sunlight is almost non-existent.  I found when I first got to Alaska that I had a sever vitamin D deficiency during the winter months which was much of the cause to my negative, depressed and easily angered attitude.  I plan to continue to take vitamin D during the entire year, but double and maybe even triple (if needed) my supplementation during the winter to keep my emotions balanced.

Commitment

            The only way this entire plan is going to work is with commitment, and I’m not talking about the ‘yeah let’s do it today’ commitment, I’m talking about the ‘I need to allocate an hour a day for working out and an hour a week to meditation no matter what else is going on’ type of commitment.  Too many times in the past I have started something that truly makes my health better, but for whatever reason or another I stopped it for a few days, then a few weeks, then I never started back up again and all that progress was lost.  My Cross Country running coach back in High School used to tell me that if you took more than three days in a row off from running, that fourth day would be like your first time running all over again because all of your progress was gone. 

I feel like any health kick is just the same way, which is why I plan to track my progress by used the fitday.com application to print out monthly reports.  This site allows me to track all of my calories in as well as calories out, and also has separate reports for nutrients consumed so I can adjust the results I want to see based on what information I want to know.  Upon reaching the six month mark, I will assess myself based on a printed report from fitday.com, a height and weight recording along with a body mass index (BMI) text, and a re-evaluation of my scoring for my mental, physical and spiritual health levels.  The same way I assess myself each month and at the six month milestone will be the same way I will maintain these practices for long term health and wellness.

Conclusion

            Throughout this paper I have discussed three major aspects of whole body health; physical, spiritual and mental health.  In order to keep these areas of our body healthy we need to learn how to heal them and how to maintain this level of health.  I have stressed the importance of not only the physical aspects of staying healthy but also the mental and spiritual aspects too.  I have developed a plan to assess myself every month as well as at milestones (30 days, 90 days, and 360 days), I have developed a series of goals in each aspect of my health, discussed practices for personal health, and expressed my overall commitment to achieving these goal within the as well as how I will continue to achieve overall health and wellness throughout my life.

References

FitDay - Free Weight Loss and Diet Journal. (n.d.). FitDay. Retrieved from http://www.fitday.com

Looking Back

For this blog I'm asked to look back on the last four posts, which include the meditation sessions that have helped me reach an extra part of myself.  Loving Kindness was the first session I had to complete, and quite honestly, I'm an angry gal which I've expressed in most of these posts, and for me to just forgive and forget, or well not forget but forgive and open loving kindness into my heart is just honestly nothing I can do.  Another one I had little benefit with was the subtle mind exercise.  I have little patience, but clearly one exercise is helping me with this.  Meditation is the most enjoyable exercise that I've completed throughout this course.  Meditation is what I associate these exercises with, they ask me to look into myself and feel whatever the narrator wants me to feel.  Visualization is what I have to do in meditation, see things with my mind that may or may not even exist.  This is how meditation takes me to another world, or at least another part of my mind, where I can truly be free to myself.

Jes

The Blind Leading the Blind

In this week’s experience I could feel an overwhelming feeling of calm and love brought to me during meditation.  It is an amazing feeling to think and feel that one person that I respect and find full of wisdom. In past weeks I have started to become more in touch with myself and my emotions. More aware of the things that I do and or say. I have a long way to go but I think that the more I take the time to think about things and the more I try to relax the more I may become less of a hot head. The saying “one cannot lead another where one has not gone himself” means that if we too do not feel happiness or positive than we cannot help people to feel those feelings either. The same goes for a health and wellness professional, someone who is obese not physically fit and unknowledgeable on health and wellness techniques cannot help another achieve any of these goals. You most yourself be versed in the areas in which you are helping others.  

-Jess

Discovery

Whenever I take on a guided meditation for this class, I expect one thing; to find a piece of me that I have long forgotten.  During this exercise, I chose to focus on my emotions.  I had long thought that I was an unemotional girl, who blocked out other peoples emotions and was 'strong' or 'hard' and of course crying was for the weak.  The more I look inside myself, the more I realize I'm even more emotional than my wife, who may cry and show her emotion, I may get angry and throw a tantrum, but even anger, no matter how subtle, is an emotion and a strong one at that.  I wanted to use this session to open my own heart to the idea of forgiveness...  My wife and I are planning to have a child in the next year; both of us are from the horrible lower-class families where violence and neglect were a thing of our everyday life.  We did not have the chance to see what a real family was like, or a loving and caring mother/father during our most important childhood years.  For that, she has mostly forgiven her family, but I have not.  I'm the one who holds grudges for years, but for this session, I wanted to forgive my mother for the life she gave me, and all the mistakes she made.  I wanted nothing more than to feel that hate, and anger subside from my mind..  Only once the anger is gone, can I truly move forward and free up that clouded space for happiness to enter.  I envisioned this dark cloud of negative emotions slowly drifting away as the beauty of the bright sun replaced it.  I became warm, and suddenly filled with joy, a joy that only I could fill.  If it's one thing that I've learned over my short 25 years of life and sessions with meditation, it's that what people do aren't the cause for our actions.  If someone dumps a cup of milk on my computer and I punch them in the face, it's not their fault for dumping milk, it's my fault for my reaction.  What we do, is give others power over us, over our emotions and over our actions.  Only through meditation have I been able to accept this fact, and start taking responsibility for my actions.  I hope one day I can use meditation to enhance my positive feelings instead of running away the negative.

Jess

Just Forget It All

Hey Guys,

So this week I'm going to take a minute to discuss my the Subtle Mind Exercise.  This one started off a little different than Loving Kindness, where a male narrator explains the process of the mind before going into the exercise.  The main female narrator is the same from Loving Kindness and the sound of the ocean is again played on the frequent gaps of silence where the mind is supposed to focus on one particular thing.  Just like studies can show, it's obvious in daily practices that when I'm happy, I'm healthy, and when I'm sick, I'm unhappy, quite the vice versa role of physical and mental well being.  If I bog my mind down with negative thoughts, stress, and anger, I tend to get sick more often, feel tired and exhausted all the time, and leave no willpower or strength to eat right or exercise, which in turn makes my body unhealthy just like my mind.  I'm currently two weeks in a caffeine, nicotine, alcohol free lifestyle (that won't completely take caffeine/alcohol out but will significantly decrease the consumption) and I haven't felt better in years.  My basement gym is almost complete, so even if I get home at 8pm, I can still make 30 minutes to jump on the rower or throw a few weights around.  Even when I'm in a crap mood, I find that my super emotional state can be highly productive in a physically exerting environment.  Hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving, and is preparing (without going broke) for the upcoming Yule, Christmas, New Years and others holidays.

-Jess

Love and Kindness

Hello to everyone, hope you all had a happy and joyful Thanksgiving!

I wanted to start off by saying I’ve been free of my own negative toxins this past week, that being tobacco, alcohol and caffeine.  This choice really came from being pretty sick on Sunday and parts of Monday, but more from my wife being offered a contingent position with the local Police Department (as long as she passes background check and psych).  She’s a bit older than me, so we had planned on her becoming pregnant in the next few months to start our family, with the new job on the horizon, we decided to switch gears and have me prepare, so here I am preparing mentally and physically for this change I will be accepting.  This is why the exercise for this week was so meaningful to me, because my worst enemy is stress, anger and negative emotions.  I’m quite the hot head, and the smallest of things make me angry.  I find it almost impossible to forgive someone without them hurting worse than I did, or letting a wrong word go.  I snap quickly, and loving and kindness are something I struggle to show, even though I feel them immensely.  I never thought I was much of an emotional person because I tended to see the glass as half empty, but when you think about it, I’m extremely emotional because anger, fear, hate; they are all emotions.  I’m learning to be more open to love, affection, and not only accept it from others but show it so others around me feel as special as they make me feel.  One part of the exercise said “loving yourself is essential in order to love others”, which couldn’t be more true.  If you don’t find yourself worth loving, or attractive, or good enough, then you’ll never be able to believe someone who does. 

 

Even though this exercise was easier to listen to because a woman’s voice is just more soothing to the hear, I wouldn’t recommend this others because it’s primarily water sound and requites a bit more mental fitness than most of my friends have.  Since there is no science that yet proves physiological changes from mental workouts, there are, however, numerous studies that prove the effects, like those of Lutz (Dacher, 2006) which compare the ability to concentrate on a specific emotion between scholars and a control group.  A mental workout is basically the same as a physical workout, only instead of reaching a limit to your physical abilities; you never reach an end to the amount of potential the mind can reach.  Working it out is training it to concentrate, to feed off positive emotions and to deflect the negative ones.  I can use mental workouts to alter my state of mind, make peace with a past decision or quell negative emotions.  This is why I meditate, to be away from myself, and become nothing. 

One of the greatest things I ever learned in a guided meditation session was this; take a clear glass jar, fill it with sand on the bottom and water in the rest.  This is our minds, at perfect peace, all the negativity that never goes away is happily suppressed at the bottom, until we think, and boom!  Shake up that jar and everything is jumbled, this is our minds every minute of the day.  Even when we stop shaking that jar, and put it down to rest, it’s clouded.  Try to look through it, you can’t see clearly, our mind is just like that, jumbled and distorted, and only through true NOTHINGNESS, can we achieve that sense of peace.

-Jess