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- Healthy: from old english 'hal' = whole, whence 'haelen', 'helen' to heal and 'heilin' to cure.
- The Seven Priniciples of Huna
- IKE - The world is what you think it is
- KALA - There are no limits & everything is one
- MAKIA - Energy flows where attention goes
- MANAWA - Now is the moment of power
- ALOHA - To love is to be happy
- MANA - All power comes from within
- PONO - Effectiveness is the measure of truth
- Health arises when the four below are in reciprocal balance
- FREEDOM - autonomy, power to stand alone
- RELATEDNESS - belonging, commitments, intimacy, compassion
- EXPANSION - inclusiveness, universality, variety, complexity
- INTEGRITY - inner unity, cohesiveness, harmony
Meet these four basic needs and you will likely be healthy and happy: - A sense of belonging
- Control over your life
- Self-esteem
- A purpose for existence
When I first started work as a psychologist it was in a department of health. 'Health' was not one of the patterns I experienced there nor was it the acutal mission of the organisation.
I do not have a guaranteed recipe for happiness like, 'happy people are most often characterised by a kind of uncalculating and outgoing generosity'. If you took that as a recipe, you might get ripped off. I have a skeptical framework for the question itself.
My concern about models or maps of health include -
- 1. knowing the map is not the territory
- 2. the dilemmas of intent vs. result - an ill intent may result in a healthy outcome and vice versa
- 3. expressed in public vs. private domains - the street angel, home devil and vice versa
- 4. conflicting inner self vs. outer self - e.g. knowing the potential for 'evil' within, one makes a saintly outer life driven by an inner demon eg the founders of AA
- 5. two witnesses ever agreeing on their observations of health i.e. the Heisenberg uncertainty principle
- 6. the different ways of knowing, perceiving and communicating
- 7. the isomorphic relationship between the knower and the known ................
Health is about individuation, self-regulation, connection with the environment, in contact with life, integrated and whole. Like relationships, people 'fail' in a few and similar ways but 'succeed' in unique and different ways.
Much 'success' in life and in business is due to the principle of obliquity and happy accidents. A closed mind is a sure way to 'fail' to grow as a person and reach full potential. A relationship closed off from the world around it will 'fail' to make its dreams come true.
'Dreams are processes trying to happen and are reflected in the body.' Suppressed creativity and repression are poison to life energy, which is then distorted, even perverted. Being open to visions and to dreaming promotes life. Awareness of these allows the process of life to unfold and health to manifest, even in disease and dying.
Yet creativity, dreaming and body awareness are often disavowed in non-indigenous cultures.
As movement and growth is the only evidence of life, and awareness particularly of human life, this is a place to start mapping health. One model that begins there is the Gestalt > Awareness > Cycle>
Health is here the ability to move freely around the cycle, around the seasons of relating, not getting stuck too long in any one place. Health is remaining fluid and juicy in awareness throughout the various stages of the cycle and during interruptions to contact. Both with the self and between self and other.
- "When you love someone, you do not love them all the time, in exactly the same way, from moment to moment. It is an impossibility. It is even a lie to pretend to. And yet this is exactly what most of us demand. We have so little faith in the ebb and flow of life, of love, of relationships. We leap at the flow of the tide and resist in terror its ebb. We are afraid it will never return. We insist on permanency, on duration, on continuity; when the only continuity possible, in life as in love, is in growth, in fluidity - in freedom, in the sense that the dancers are free, barely touching as they pass, but partners in the same pattern.
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- The only real security is not in owning or possessing, not in demanding or expecting, not in hoping, even. Security in a relationship lies neither in looking back to what was in nostalgia, nor forward to what it might be in dread or anticipation, but living in the present relationship and accepting it as it is now. Relationships must be like islands, one must accept them for what they are here and now, within their limits - islands, surrounded and interrupted by the sea, and continually visited and abandoned by the tides." Anne Morrow Lindbergh1906 - 2001
Dysfunction is considered a disorder of growth and movement.
The goal of therapy is choice, not change - that is a therapy of the obvious.
'In dysfunction there is a loss of a clear internal awareness (needs, wants, and desires) and self-responsiveness (experiences and good contact). The free flowing and flexible contact is blocked and/or distorted, erroneous conclusions about the world, other people and him/herself are drawn and acted upon. All forms of human psychological dysfunction are attempts at simplifying experience, alleviating uncomfortable feelings, or managing difficult adjustments. Therefore, they are considered "creative adaptations to inhospitable situations in a person's life"' quoted from excellent and authoritative overview.
How do we then include conscience and ethics, which must stop movement in a particular direction? How is it innate and how learned? The family is the bedrock transmitter of values including awareness of choice. All the world religions have at core the same basic tenents. What gives meaning in a particular life, however, may be unrelated to or transcends what precedes it.
We can choose to surpass the limitations of our ancestors. The power of our forebears in making a success of family, or not, is explored here on site. These are subjects of metanoia, values education and of critical thinking.
My test of a working model of health is that it both excludes 'evil' as an expression of health and differentiates the use of deception or mimicry by a predator who appears innocuous and also excludes the psychopath who may well be meeting the four needs stated at the outset, but in a homicidal way.
People who harm others do not generally live happy lives. Deliberate, remorseless harm done righteously, with pride and without contrition, is probably evil.
A list of quotes from some, possibly sane folk and more quotes from a site with an attitude- eg "It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder." Albert Einstein.
I have an ecological, long cycle view of health and happiness. They are reciprocal with the environment. Happiness is not an inalienable right, but a privelage and a result of generations of care for the world we live in, for the variety and complexity we celebrate and support.
Epochs of mass destruction are followed by ages of anxiety. Eons of care are followed by ages of harmony. It is not a simple one to one ratio, a quick give and get, fast food turn around. Yet within the play of shadow and light, happiness and joy are readily found in simple things, which delight the senses and enlighten the mind. In any life circumstance, the blessed quiet of meditation or prayer is always available, allowing us to 'detach with love'. Rabbi Ari Harman
