More to Wellness than only Health

Sevenfold Wellness, plus Keys to Authentic and Self-Honest World View Mindsets

Optional Teachings of Opinion

In this article I teach on several realms related to my conceptual modeling of some very basic and raw factors which I propose are involved in each individual person’s free will contributions to his or her own personal wellness.

This article remains only interested in personal effects on oneself, as it remains an article of teachings related to Zen Tao Buddhist meditation techniques, which only operate on oneself alone, primarily.

My teachings on these factors were independently concluded and are a matter of my personal opinion. Yet my terminology guesswork was and is guided by my education and experience with systems analysis, both being of credibility.

Basic and raw factors to personal wellness were modeled impromptu, while considering and writing on meditation goals and meditation topics, and while remaining sensitive to quality of human life, to personal liberty, and to societal opportunity.

Contributing to oneself happens continually and inwardly intimately, at all times while conscious, which differs greatly from our much lesser contributions or hindrances made that somewhat effect the wellness and lives of other persons. All effects on others, surprisingly to many persons, are operative in tandem with simultaneous self-steering effects on the self, and this is how I analyze how we each stay true to ourselves in the realm of contributing to self and others. “For others” never can truly exist without being rooted in the selves valuations of such efforts for others, for the self, and so our lives are ever “for self and others” in a more true to form and humble self-aware way.

Refresh and Renew!

The qualities and factors involved in accessing, gaining, or regaining the personal encounter and experience of truly “fresh and new living” could be considered, in notion, to be a matter of special and cherished uncommon experiencing of living one’s life, for some temporary nice and very satisfying and revitalizing stint, before return to a more typical average more washed-out and dry drone, possibly, to couch it a bit difficultly, at its worst and more challenging to our capabilities at managing and dealing with life.

Mindfulness, Zen Buddhism, and the Tao Te Ching

Also, in this article, I provide initial techniques and approaches to enable the reader to apply distinct and straightforward composure mindsets and world view building mental alignments, made of ideas and concepts, adoptable as viewports to oneself and to the outer world. This fits in with my practicing and textually teaching a casual, unassuming, and artless imperfect way: of mindfulness; Zen Buddhism; and Philosophical Taoism from the Tao Te Ching. I do not idealize any of these three roots, and teachings or information concerning them that is presented idealistically, perfectly, or ideally, I do disregard and consider misleading from truer Zen and truer Tao.

Personal Wellness at the Extremes

In a modern society supportive of human rights, there is no popular appeal to trivializing or downplaying the preeminent importance of personal wellness.

In a modern society supportive of human rights, there is no popular appeal to neglecting or rejecting that reductions in personal wellness that cascade or continue can bring about horribly ugly living for a person, whether noticeable to others or reportable by oneself, or at least feasibly could do such to any person, only in concept if realities were different and other fictional or imagined situations were truly the case.

In a modern society supportive of human rights, there is no popular appeal to vocational or income level class baiting against anyone for seeking good personal wellness or aiming to go for even better, or for happening to be in a state of fair, reasonable, good, or great personal wellness.

In a modern society supportive of human rights, there is popular inexperience with the bevy of experienceable states of the human condition, especially with the gamut or spectrums of degrees of degraded, enslaved, warped, twisted, deliberated, or ill of health states of the human condition. When experiencing hard living, matters continually are such that there is room for improvement and also room for at least slight addon worsening of personal wellness. This is the case even at the extreme low end of very poor personal wellness. Matters can get worsened, always, to some degree. There is popular misconception that only health matters to wellness, and there is popular misconception that at some point matters can only get better, and other such dangerous colloquialisms, which present the danger of a vast majority of society either making cruel remote decisions, or cruelly considering horrible effects on people to be no issue.

Hourly and Daily Efforts at Living

There are so very many ways by which people do keep their hourly and daily lives reasonably tolerable, and mostly free of monotony and stagnation in stupor, for themselves and by themselves. Every miniscule thought and personal mental or bodily action in each person’s life requires personal wellness to seize upon, initiate, and sustain until switching for next stage, and on another axis: every such action also has some or many effects on the ensuring states of personal wellness, with complex refeeding and delay coalescences.

Four Long Term Commitments to Enrich Lives

Educational programs, organizational vocational careers, parenting ethical commitments, and sole proprietorships vocational careers are more formalized and incentivized ways to exercise and benefit personal wellness. The first three cases are very hierarchical in leadership and followership, whereas the last and fourth is very independent and peer attitude fostering.

Largely the institution or organization provides most new goals, tasks, friends, environments, routines, projects. Employees in organizational careers often are blind to the great boon they receive in social satisfaction at contributing to more than just oneself, in a team mentality that is very rewarding. This blindness stems from serving only a supervisor and not an appreciative face-to-face customer, such as with the service industry or with retail jobs.

Self-starting vocationally is the Sole Proprietorship way. Morale self-involvement, investment of self-interest, accomplishment toward satisfactions, fostering of goals and missions, and ethical self-treatment alongside treatment of others, is all crafted and maintained by the independent individual alone, leaving plenty of causal factors to happenstance, randomness, and fitting mood.

100 Years of History in Societal Norms

Many of us might have felt agreeable with occurrences happening in our lives when these involved course changes which then did immediately present to us fresh new major journeys. These journeys themselves regularly presented us more continually with new projects, fresh environments, fresh routines, new and renewing studies, new roles, new friends, new learning, and fresh application of new skills. Such events having happened did prompt many of us to live more richly, by engaging in personal development toward new experiences, involving the expanding of roles and responsibilities, and adding vitality, relevancy, and activity to our hourly and daily living of our lives.

However, opportunity for such life changing and invigorating joining into new journeys does not present itself often, nor automatically, once education journeys are mostly complete, and career fields have been established for the long term. Such grand and sweeping epic journeys come standard as filled with recurring and changing updated fresh opportunities and stimuli to proceed into renewing incremental courses of living at each lifestyle routine.

Providing such opportunity is to the merit of such programs and practices (a boon and blessing from societal institutions that each of us has partaken in), but placing all stimuli to be external to the person as student or employee causes mental atrophy of personal practices. Student and employee personal goals are largely designed by other persons as standard practice, and with institutional or organizational routine and procedures acting the instigators of each small or large task. That side effect stands as a great disservice done to students and employees. The disservice shows at the job place, in how it renders people to be woefully inexperienced with independent self-guidance, self-counseling, and self-instigating between tasks potentially next up.

To my guesswork, this institutional and organizational dependence has plagued a majority of salaried workers globally for nearly 100 years previous, as of this year 2021. Before 1921 education differed and the work force did not much use modern transportation to perform jobs at large organizational buildings very remote from personal homes, as the automobile technology and the airplane technology had not much proliferated or integrated as of the World War I historical timeframe.

Combating the Drone and Rut States

In the remainder of this article, I will explore human and scientific factors involved in exceeding the drone state, to live fresh and new for some while, with quality of life temporarily and therapeutically rising to nearly match some of our fonder childhood memories.

Various degrees of the drone state are prevalent for most of us to live our lives within, and I find some level of drone processes to be agreeable in the main. (I haphazardly chose the term “drone state,” which is no objective assertion, but instead has allowed me conceptual license to consider these issues.) Drone living is a stable situation to return toward most often, which has its merits, though long weeks at the drone bring about the rut, which I glean from my experience of 35 years living independently as an adult beyond college graduation age, as of the time of this writing.

All persons, respecting that all do have natural human rights, and applying a mindset that regardless of crime all should be free of inhumane treatment or neglect, then would deserve better than to be desensitized for long days and weeks’ time in a rut of staleness and intransigence, deficient on surprise, and deficient on stimulation from within. Good fortunes can sometimes provide fresh and new living, which is a great way to exit the rut, at least temporarily for a good breather, if not for a longer lasting true renewal, smiling.

Releasing the Self and Accepting the World

Later in this same article, I will radically suggest that such fresh and new living stints could become more frequently available to us, if we were to leverage some Zen Buddhism teachings on personal attitude toward oneself and one’s goals and expectations, and leverage some Tao Te Ching wisdoms on interpretive stance toward other persons, and in how we regard the material environment around us. This sets the tone of our individual morale and aspirations, and it also sets the color of our in-activity world views. We are very sensitive to both. Success at boosting personal tone and world view coloration can result in otherwise impossible opportunities developing to be harnessed and leveraged, finding fresh and new living from very basic and unimpressive external conditions, weak on entertainment and recreation, and also otherwise weak on project self-actualization self-discipline satisfaction, and sometimes also otherwise weak on ethical relevancy and worth, to satisfyingly matter and apply which revitalizes us.

Many People can Find this Opportunity

Some readers might disagree, but I propose that temporary fresh and new living might happen to anyone, at any age, and in many reasonable situations.

Not All People can Find this Opportunity

People hindered, drained of spare energy, in poor health, enduring civil liberty restraint, or who are otherwise truly suffering entrenched pain or discomfort not found to be adjustable, are the only cases for which this could be understood to absolutely not apply to, and to not provide any possible readiness and state of body and mind for finding fresh and new personal living, limiting and excluding anyone and everyone, if and when in such conditions.

Wonderful Hours During Fair Enough Weeks

Relative amounts of time always matter. Digressing into great beautiful detail as to time nuances, I propose that common adult ground in our personal histories, between author and readers, could maybe establish a real-life reality, which might well be worded that such excellent living cannot be sustainable for long weeks nor months, and would be remembered to usually be in duration limited to a minority of hours, rarely beyond 12 hours in duration, and nearly never beyond a day and a half in total duration.

A nice temporary stint at fresh and new living would last long enough for beneficial personal boost to sink in and internalize within us. Long enough guesswork is notional and not exacting, and in this case, I assess that some sizeable fraction of one hour would be the sensible minimum. More hours would be better to enjoy in real time, and better at building momentum and boosting staying power for sticking with us long afterward.

Enough time in a very much nicer than typical way of living is required, given that maybe the state of mind I am aiming to refer to could only be attained by way of steadily “soaking in” several minutes or more in some uniquely great living, plus maybe by way of briefly “basking in” cumulative effects changing us for the better, and infusing us with “good baggage” to rest upon for long weeks afterward.

A glut on great hours of living would be practically impossible to pull off, to my considerations. Hence I chose to consider that 12/36 hours could be used in notion as a reference near-maximum, concerning the time at or less than that in duration, before a human animal like us would become adjusted to new ways of being, reducing the refreshing factor gradually, and also would maybe exit the balanced mixture of good and bad stress variety and alternation, if encountering many hours straight together of all positive stress, which can result in detrimental strain, also ending the renewal and revitalization.

Finishing my above digression into time sensitivities in human and biological factors, our potential happening to be fortunate to engage in this finding of refreshing and renewing living, only arises when personal wellness excels beyond the every-hour typical range. This potential great degree of situational opportunity I compare relative to, and to be well superior to, the notion of a weekly or monthly average quality of living one’s life.

Complexity and The Complicated need be Appreciated

Human personal wellness could be considered subjectively to be a multifaceted property that can flexibly vary, and would thus be very sensitive to changes, and would carry on quite unfixed and beautifully defiant of constancy.

Our human personal wellness is dynamically and heavily dependent on conditions and outcomes. Those conditions and outcomes occur in and of the self internally, and to a lesser extent exist external to us.

Exceptions to Reasonable Status need be Understood

Reasonable human personal wellness, only applies when faring better than when poor or when substandard, and this exceedance is what qualifies as what I am terming “reasonable.” (I do notice that my choices are in keeping with English word usage, as to how ranges compare.) Such a state exceeds the below average slightly, so in keeping needs logically to possess satisfying qualities far exceeding hard living situations.

Reasonable wellness could be modeled mentally as being comprised of several differing aspects. Each of all of those several differing aspects would need be at the ready, for wellness to qualify as reasonable. If any of the differing aspects were to stand thwarted or hindered, or burdened or drained, or forced to endure extended pain or discomfort not adjustable (and thus in suffering), then matters are not reasonable for such mindfulness techniques and meditative attitude to be practically leverageable with enough calm and composure powerful enough to focus the mind adequately. Also, considering the degree of degradation of a person’s resources in such states, it might be true that even the best performance would be facing too much stubborn detrimental and hard living to stand a chance of winning through.

A Sevenfold Model of Aspects to Personal Wellness

Maybe it would respect human biology and science better to model personal wellness in a lusher form using several multifaceted aspects, instead of doggedly remaining overly plain spoken and one track minded and defaulting cruelly to only “health” as one factor, and insufficient to be applicable alone by any person, to experience truly good or fair or adequate living of life. I have chosen to include six more aspects to wellness, with the health aspect being the foundational first, but with all in vain without more than just health. Simple and half-hearted descriptions of such a summary human nature quality like “wellness” for an individual, brings to our minds some previous disappointment with excessive descriptive simplicity, in contrast to more responsible elucidation and better proximity to reality reflective completeness, which not only serves the reader and learner well to provide a real feel for an issue, but also serves the author well to not accidentally misinform by grand omission, and spread socially dangerous misconceptions.

If personal human “wellness” were to feature several or more aspects operative for a person to indicate true situational sensitivities, then for proposal using a total of seven aspects, those aspects I propose, and term as follows:

• Adequate Health
• Open Liberty
• Personal Dignity
• Reasonable Comfort
• Surplus Power
• Self Chosen Incentive
• Mental Vitality

For all aspects to lift into the ready zone of “reasonable” and be ready to go for a real suitable attempt at fresh and new living, then the freely and casually mindful individual would naturally look for all the seven aspects of personal welfare to be operative in a medium to high range of favorability: reasonable health; reasonable liberty; reasonable dignity; reasonable comfort; reasonable surplus energy; reasonable incentive; and reasonable mental vitality.

If all seven aspects stand as in reasonable condition or better than reasonable condition, then all prerequisites to effective meditation would be likely met.

Meditation Techniques

Collecting oneself and adopting a fit with the world can be accomplished by eyes open or closed active mind meditation. This can allow a person to adopt a mindset near one’s best to oneself and others and perform a willful alteration to one’s perception of being human. If successful, the mindset and alteration can settle in and become a trend for many minutes continually, providing the meditator with faculties and attitudes much better for nearly new and nearly fresh living. During this period, great boosts to active or routine quality of life are made available. The ways of life that can be harnessed lie readily available for honing, in just the small details that glue our more pronounced actions together. If and when more stimulating involvement stands as doable, there would exist more acute notice and later memory of more blatant benefits.

Mindset Lensing

Deliberate consideration of concepts tied to words can build within us a mental lens, for tuning and modifying one’s own personal approach to oneself, one’s aims, one’s outcomes, and one’s situations. A personally composing and collecting approach is entered by becoming or remaining ungrasping and unneedy at successes in faring well or better, but while open to new successes in welfare, if fortunate and skilled. This approach can be further enhanced by letting go of expectations and choosing ahead of time to face potential downturns or disappointments with adaptability, acceptance, and grace, rather than fight failures unwisely.

World and Population Viewing

While this mental lens develops and settles in, it would also be possible to review and meditate affirming the beauty and wonder to this universe, in local nature and human nature personal assessments most colored and angled in keeping with personal world and population views. I also affirm that we all belong with our surroundings as much as the scenery does, which places myself no longer in opposition to my environment, and prevents demeanors of having to stand aside like an interloper upon nature. This prevention of self/human segregation from the remainder of nature, by way of earnest effort to not elevate humanity or play the observer/actor or responsible decider too much, does decrease the effect of having to feel even slightly estranged from reality.

Such an affirming but forgiving world view stays true to form, which defies conceptual collapse for long periods, by being legitimate to true actualities, fostered by one’s judgments remaining genuine, realistic, with neither an agenda to be positive nor an agenda to be negative, but instead valuing and affirming the beauty of modeling life accurately, case by case, be the results positive or negative in summary. It is heartening to engage in positively authentic technique of viewing matters, and it is disheartening to apply the negative technique of trying to paint positivity by default. This involves behaving authentically aware of, and not dismissive of, possible and sometimes actual ugly living for some few persons in this world, distributed in limited scope only here and there, and only now and then, but truly wronging some rare people badly, and that existing concurrently within an all-encompassing scope of universal and planetary overall widespread lasting beauty. So, it is important not to try to paint too rose colored of a view of nature and the human condition, just as it is important to find the perspective spot: the very bad is there but the overall aggregate remains good. This respects some tough issues, and stays upbeat and smiling, which is very good.

Closing Context

This has been a presentation of opinions and techniques to optionally empower the reader with meditation ideas. The teachings I presented seem to always stand as useful enough, if and when meditation prerequisites are available and practical. Teachings were developed by modeling pertinent factors in play when meditation aims at the maximum and best such techniques can attain: fresh and new living for a short while, and repeatedly. Teachings were delivered with respect for reader intelligence, reader independent judgement, and reader resilience if faced with challenging and taxing immersive reading to wade through. Teachings were presented with complexity intact, did attempt to provide comprehensive exposure to related factors, and did attempt to elucidate and expound enough to serve up examples alternatively available to replace short clause so-called wisdoms. I chose complexity as a reality to defend, to reduce likelihoods of furthering or worsening the contemporary prevalence of overly simplistic or dumbed-down status quo viewpoints, being taken by too many persons to stand as so-called wisdoms, and sadly sometimes leading those of us eager to learn astray.