KEY CONCEPTS FOR PERSONAL WELL-BEING
DEFINING HEALTHY Our modern concept of quick symptom relief doesn’t get to the root of sickness. Instead, our free, anonymous online test defines what’s healthy as whatever does the most good and the least harm for the most people in the long run. Seeing healthy this way is quite practical, reminding us that health and sickness are both contagious, as we take in what we put out, and vice-versa.
HALLMARKS FOR HEALTH We look for six main signs of health: cooperation, strength, growth, caring, freedom, and gratitude. Sickness brings just the opposite: division, weakness, decay, apathy, bondage, and complaint. These hallmarks of life and death are important but invisible: they can only be fully seen by the eyes of a trained heart and mind. WELL gives you resources for that training.
BASIC HUMAN NEEDS For 3000 years, health experts have taught we need nine experiences for thriving, self-confidence, and self-esteem: · TRUTH (learning how … to know what’s real) · RESPECT (… to feel self-worth) · LOVE (… to care and share) · GRACE (… to forgive) · SEXUALITY (… to save/use genital contact for loyal pair bonding) · WEALTH (… to earn, save, give) · PURPOSE (… to find meaning, hope) and · HEALTH (… to exercise, diet, and medicate).
PADs These basic needs get met by connecting with People, Associations, and Dreams (PADs). We can think of them as sources of life, but better to see them as resources, channels and carriers of life. WELL shows you to discern how healthy your PADs are for you, before you take or give too much with them.
WELLSPRINGS & WHIRLPOOLS PADs showing the hallmarks for health often cooperate to create intangible attitudes of overflowing fullness in people. Such PADs are for us external WELLSPRINGS, and as we pay attention to them, they gradually become internalized, into healthy mindsets and lifestyles for us. Give from these internal wellsprings and you find the more you give of yourself, the more you are able to give.
By contrast unhealthy PADs often compete to consume finite, tangible resources, at the expense of others who end up with less. Mindsets and lifestyles of draining emptiness work like WHIRLPOOLS to exhaust inner strength from you and others. To disengage from whirlpools, pull back the attention you pay them.
PAYING ATTENTION Whatever you pay attention to will grow, both inside you and out. So will whatever we call others’ attention to. To disconnect from a toxic PAD, take back the attention you give it, and give your attentions elsewhere, to healthier PADs. We can give five levels of attention to our PADs:
Level 1 = Attention ~ deliberately focusing ourselves to notice a PAD
Level 2 = Acceptance ~ deciding it’s relatively harmless, and worth exploring further
Level 3 = Affection ~ becoming charmed by paying attention mostly to the positive
Level 4 = Allegiance ~ joining, subscribing, committing to be together regularly
Level 5 = Adoration ~ idolizing a PAD, and believing that it is virtually always healthy.