The Six Realms of Wellness
The Mayday Project Day 42 — Mapping the Personal Wellness Journey
When I started this project, I identified six areas, or realms, of wellness and ranked how I felt the status for each area was. These are Physical, Emotional, Mental, Environmental, Social and Spiritual. I organized these realms into different categories, called focus areas, to identify specific tasks and items for improvement. Internal realms are the most personal, affecting the body, mind and self, with limited control outside of the body itself. External realms focus on the attributes, tasks and relationships that occur outside the body and require interactions with others and the world at large. The material category (Physcial and Environmental) is the physical world, the body, the home, the space around us and everything we can touch. The relational category (Emotional and Social) are the interactions with people, with the causes and effects of dealing with people every day. The abstract category (Mental and Spiritual) is the realms of thoughts, ideas and a sense of purpose, not secured in relationships or the solid world around us.
For the past month and a half, I have focused mostly on the Physical realm, eating healthy, tracking sleep and blood sugar, exercising. During this time I have also focused on what is important in my life and what I am doing to have a well rounded life. Though I have a long way to go in the Physical realm, I have mapped out the six realms and the areas of focus for each realm. This structure gives me a foundation for how to proceed when evaluating my total health and wellness, and giving me the opportunity to focus on some troubled areas and make a solid plan to improve. The Mayday Project is more art than science, but I believe this structure will give me a foundation for clarity, achieve my goals and identify what I’m doing next.
I’ve identified four areas of focus in the Physical realm: nutrition, hydration, sleep and movement. These areas are well regarded in the medical community as important to health and wellness at any age, and furthermore any improvement in these areas can increase health and longevity. Not only are these areas important but they are interconnected, where changes in one area can benefit another and vice versa. These are simultaneously foundational building blocks and keystones for feeling healthy, but also promoting wellness in the other areas like mental agility, emotional resilience and more.
Nutrition is more than just calories and macronutrients. It’s a holistic approach to nourishing the body and I’m coupling this with mindfulness in the Mental realm. Instead of trying to guess, listen to contradictory advice and counting calories, I’m going to listen as best I can to what my body is telling me it needs. Hydration is important to pair with nutrition, but drinking enough water is tied to better health and combatting a number of issues. I’ve talked before about tracking sleep and this is a big focus area for me. Of course movement is important too. This is not just exercise, but getting out, moving more in many ways and enjoying the body and all the amazing things it can do.
For the Mental realm I have identified three areas of focus that I sum up as focus, free, flow. Focus represents productivity, keeping the mind fixed on a goal or objective to accomplish a task. Free indicates mindfulness and the practice of being present, free of distractions and complications, just living in the moment. Flow is the feeling of intense engagement with creativity, which nourishes the mind and the spirit. Creativity is an important focus for me because it’s easy to be mindful and productive, but creativity for me is a place to find immense joy.
Emotional wellness is a duality of intuition and empathy. I believe both of these come down to trust. Intuition is trust in your own emotions, feelings and reactions experiences, to know them to be true and to respond accordingly. For me, intuition is extremely difficult and I have learned over the years to doubt my intutions and my own emotions, then rationalizing them away. Empathy is trust in other, as in trusting the emotional reactions and intentions of others to be true. It’s easy to take everything personally, but most people are trying to get through this life just like me. By having empathy, putting myself in their shoes, trusting their making decisions as best they can, I’m freed to focus on what’s important for me and not feel slighted or treated unfairly. Finally, this is all communicated and experienced through emotional vulnerability, making oneself raw and open, not guarded and walled in.
Environmental wellness was a tough realm to figure out. In the end, I decided to focus on timeliness, organization and comfort. Arranged as a period, I believe that timeliness is an environmental factor that can significantly affect wellness. Opportunities that have been missed are not opportunities at all. Organization is not possible without timeliness. It’s more than just tidy cupboards and neatly folded clothes. This is more akin to feng shui where the environment is meant to bring joy, not pain or anxiety. Finally, comfort is the top of the pyramid, difficult to achieve but so important in life. Comfort can manifest in many ways from physical, to emotional, to mental comfort, but this is tied directly to the material world. I’m going to look for more opportunities to reach the apex of comfort on this period to improve my life.
The fifth realm is Spiritual wellness, and I have identified three areas that intersect: patience, wisdom and generosity. I believe patience, appreciating the delays in gratification or completion in life, is important to living well. Wisdom is not just about an abstract right or wrong, but making decisions that feel right and nurture the soul and avoid stress and anxiety. Generosity is the freedom to give away things that tether us to pain like money and excess. The Spiritual realm is the most complicated to quantify and control, but is so important to living a healthy life.
The final realm is Social wellness, and this is an area of great focus for me. I have identfied five “rings” of social interaction that are all important in different ways, the most personal and intimate in the middle with the fewest relationships, to the lease intimate in the outer ring with likely the most relationships. Perhaps the most important is knowing where a relationship is in these rings to understand expectations and set boundaries. Intimate relationships are those with romantic partners, lovers and very close friends. Familial relationships are those bound by blood or law and represent an important early foundation for relationships. Amiable relationships or friends are a wide ranging group from close friends to acquantainces and can take many forms. I believe the amiable relationships are the most important to identify and categorize because it’s easy to have a number of these relationship, which really my be more formal or collegial. The collegial relationships are generally workplace relationships, but can be any relationship from an organization or institution where there may be a lot of time spent together, but intimacy is discouraged. Finally, formal relationships are those with strangers and people of authority like the police or teachers or bosses. These require interaction at the most superficial level with little emotion at all.
Those are the six realms and associated areas of focus that I will be working on over the next months an years. I will write generally about these areas in the upcoming weeks and more specifically how these areas affect my life. It’s been a challenge to identify this framework, but I believe it will be important to understanding my journey and to focus on specific parts of my life to achieve improved results.
I would love to hear feedback about these six realms so please email or comment.
The Mayday Project is a personal, total wellness plan. These essays will track my progress and development of the plan. Please follow for tips, ideas, inspiration and what not to do when you’re changing your life.
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