What is Holistic Health?
© Fivelements Puri Ahimsa Healing Centre, Indonesia
Imagine getting up in the morning feeling full of energy and ready to start the day with high spirits. Is this being healthy? What actually is health? And to take this question even further, what is holistic health? Certainly, feeling healthy implies the feeling of being alive and well.
Definition of Health
Joseph Campbell, a well-known Anthropologist stated, “to know the unburdened state of total aliveness is the pinnacle of the human potential”. When we are alive and healthy, we can unfold our fullest capability.
The concept of health is very broad and may be different for every single person. According to the World Health Organization (WHO) health is “a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity”.
Holistic health goes beyond physical health and disease symptoms, and incorporates body, mind and soul. Health is wholeness and omnipresent – not just a passing state adhered by medicine.
Why Wellness
Essentially one can describe wellness as the multidimensional state of being well. That includes having a strong constitution that is resistant to stress and disease, as well as having mental clarity, physical strength, healthy skin and hair along with having high energy levels and a sense of enjoyment and fulfillment from life. Moreover, wellness encompasses intangible elements such as happiness and inner harmony.
The term wellness is more closely looked at by Prof. Marc Cohen, who was part of the advisory board of Healing Hotels of the World and an expert in regards to health and wellness. Mr. Cohen is currently Foundation Professor of Complementary Medicine at the RMIT University in Melbourne in Australia. He performs research and leads the world’s first online Master of Wellness Program.
He states that “Wellness is largely determined by the quality of our relationships and the currency of wellness is connection. As such, wellness cannot be understood outside the context of the natural, social, and built environments in which it is experienced. Wellness is much more than a product or service you can buy or sell. Ultimately wellness is about awareness, which guides the quality of our relationships and is determined by our state of consciousness. Thus, if ‘health’ is ‘wholeness’, then wellness is the experience of an ever- expanding realization of what it means to be whole and the current evolution of the wellness industry can be seen as an inevitable consequence of the evolution of human consciousness whereby humans are coming to terms with how to live well on the planet.“
Conclusion
You may have the desire to become whole again and to enjoy live at its highest. In order to find the right path of total aliveness and your fullest potential you should look into your heart. Ask yourself and your body what you really need and want.
