How Does One Define Wellness?
Does anyone here recoil upon hearing this oft-used term?
There was a time when I considered wellness as something to attain, and something illusive to strive for. But I’ve realized that when we define a term as a goal to arrive at, we miss the meaning entirely. This is true particularly when we use the term “wellness” to describe a state that can appear out of our grasp.
What is “wellness” exactly? I’m not looking it up in the dictionary- online or offline. I’m deciding for myself and my healing practice that wellness is not quantifiable. Wellness is so many different things to so many people. For some, it means inner peace. For others, it means content in their body or mind. For others, it means good health, and for others still, wellness is something akin to enlightenment.
What I’ve discovered on my healing journey from Lyme+, is that wellness can be all of these things, but it can also be none of them. The closest term I equate wellness with- is mindfulness. Mindfulness can lead to inner peace, contentedness, good health, and enlightenment, but not always. The key thing to remember is that mindfulness is a practice; not a thing to attain. It is also important to remember that wellness- like mindfulness- slips from our very grasp if we hold on too tight, strive for, and attempt to hold on to it. When we are mindful, we could feel any number of emotions- joy, sadness, anger, grief, hatred even. Is it safe to say that wellness could be seen the same way? Could we could feel any number of emotions, and think any number of thoughts that normally aren’t interpreted as wellness?
Maybe I’ve seen things differently than some, but I’ve seen some co-opting of the term “wellness” to replace the term “health.” I’m talking about medical establishments, corporations, and even government officials using language to identify wellness as something to attain, in place of health.
This creates a delusion about what wellness actually is (and what it is not). Being well describes an experience one moment in time, and can fluctuate from one second to the next. Being well can also fluctuate qualitatively, meaning that one moment you may feel well, and the next you do not, however nothing has changed in the intermediary time, besides your thoughts.
Being well is illusive. How do I know that in this moment I feel “well?” Do I feel “health?” Do I feel “mindfulness?” We might feel healthy, we might feel mindful, and what does it mean to feel well?
Personally, I’ve decided to shuck off the term as something to attain. Wellness encompasses so many ways of being, that to pigeon-hole the term (even by including it as anything similar to health) is to delude its meaning. Wellness could be equated to life itself, fore there are as many interpretations to life and wellness as there are humans.
What about you? What are your thoughts on wellness? What is wellness for you, and what do you consider being well?
