Health and wellness professionals should continually be developing the important areas of life. Some of the best teachers are the ones who have experience themselves. Professionals that deepen their development psychologically, spiritually and physically are the best guides as they have overcome many of the obstacles that their clients face while trying to achieve integral health. For my personal health I could use a little work on each area. Psychologically I am struggling with depression, separation anxiety, and adjustment disorder. For these issues I am dependent on medication, I hope to achieve integral health and not be on my medication anymore. Throughout this course I have grown the most in my spiritual health which is helping me psychologically. My physical health is improving the less I let myself become stressed. I am making more time for me physically and mentally and in turn my spiritual health is still flourishing. I am just trying to maintain a balanced growth in all three.
Since our blog post back in unit three, I would say each domain of my integral health has improved greatly. The more I become closer to God the less stress I feel. The more I workout the less depressed and stressed I fell. In turn when I am flourishing spiritually and physically; it spills over to my psychological health. I have some goals that I would like to accomplish in each area. Physically I would like to achieve my weight loss and nutrition goals. The more time I take to care for my body the better I perform at work, home and school. Psychologically my goal is to work on the physical and spiritual areas to relieve my psychological issues. I’m also going to practice meditative, contemplative and visualization practices to turn to during times of anxiety, depression and stress. My ultimate goal is to be off of my medication for good. Spiritually I would like to maintain and grow my relationships within my church, family and friends.
In order to foster growth in each domain I plan to work on specific things. Physically I plan to continue improving my current workout schedule of training for a marathon with cardio, strength training and yoga/pilates. Also, use knowledge from my sport nutrition class to meet my weight and performance goals. Psychologically I plan to maintain meditating 10 minutes in the morning and 10 minutes at night. My aspirations are to work up to 30 minutes at each meditation session. Find contemplative and visualization practices to continue my mental workouts; dedicate two sessions a week for this. Spiritually I plan to continue current Bible studies, but add daily devotionals for me, my husband and our family as a whole. I will also strive to become more involved within my church; our church is in need of someone for military outreach ministries. I plan to become involved or lead the military outreach ministry with my husband since we are both veterans and can relate well with active duty members.
In hopes of achieving integral health I will implement monthly assessments at first and shorten the period to weekly after two months. Once I have been completing weekly assessments for three months I will strive to accomplish daily assessments. The need to increase assessments is due to the ever changing maturity in my integral growth. The practice of self assessing daily is ideal as you should always be aware of what areas you are weakening in. This is the key to maintaining and growing in my integral health. Possibly in six months I may sit down and complete this project again. Comparing this assessment to one in six months will show me how much I’ve grown and what areas I am still lacking in. I will never be perfect in all these areas but my goal is to be stable enough as to not hurt my integral health.
