9.7 Summary
Key Takeaways
- The self is comprised of three interconnected components: body (physical self), mind (psychological self), and spirit (spiritual self).
- Spiritual wellness involves actively pursuing choices, such as aligning oneself with a Higher Power that brings peace, harmony, and truth.
- Peace is a key fruit of spiritual wellness and is cultivated through acceptance, forgiveness, gratitude, patience, and stillness.
- Coherence, humility, and honesty are crucial for aligning beliefs with actions, reducing cognitive dissonance, and promoting authentic living.
- Maintaining harmony across personal, social, and environmental domains significantly enhances overall wellness.
- Ego poses significant barriers to spiritual growth by fostering control, defensiveness, jealousy, attachment, and resistance to forgiveness.
- Environmental wellness involves enhancing your immediate surroundings, engaging positively with community spaces, and promoting sustainability.
Key Terms
- Self: Refers to your entire being as an individual, encompassing your unique identity, beliefs, values, experiences, and how you interact with the world around you. It is a dynamic construct influenced by internal perceptions (e.g., self-esteem, self-image, personal strengths or weaknesses) and external interactions (e.g., how you interact or behave with others).
- Physical self: Refers to your body, health, and other physical characteristics (e.g., biological functions, appearance, and physical abilities).
- Psychological self: Encompasses your emotions, thoughts, beliefs, reasoning skills, creativity, curiosity, and learning capacity. Your psychological self plays a key role in interpreting experiences, making decisions, solving problems, and interacting socially.
- Spirit: The deeper essence or core of a person; the intangible, animating part of one’s being that shapes purpose and drive.
- Spirituality: The personal or communal pursuit of meaning, purpose, and connection with something beyond oneself.
- Spiritual well-being: The resulting state of feeling spiritually fulfilled, at peace, and aligned with one’s core values or Higher Power.
- Spiritual wellness: A process involving choices designed to seek and cultivate inner peace, harmony, and truth.
- Higher Power: An entity, force, principle, or system greater than the individual self that provides meaning, guidance, or a sense of connection beyond the individual self.
- Peace: A state of calmness, stability, and freedom from conflict. It is found internally (within oneself) or externally (in relationships or society) and is closely associated with emotional well-being, a sense of reassurance, justice, compassion, and understanding.
- Objective (“the truth”): Facts that exist independently of personal beliefs (e.g., gravity exists whether you believe in it or not).
- Subjective (“my truth”): Personal experiences and perspectives that shape individual understanding (e.g., preferences, feelings, interpretations of art or music). Note that interpretations of events or “stories” are not included under subjective truth, only the feelings one experienced during said events.
- Hypocrisy: When one’s actions directly contradict their professed values.
- Lie: A distortion of reality that disrupts integrity and creates internal and external disharmony.
- Deliberate deception: Intentionally misleading others for personal gain or avoidance.
- Self-deception: Convincing oneself of a false reality to avoid discomfort.
- Distorting facts: Cherry-picking information to fit a biased narrative.
- Omission: Withholding critical information to manipulate perception.
- Negative hypocrisy: Deliberately holding others to standards one knowingly violates (e.g., a leader who publicly promotes honesty and transparency but lies to the public and hides secrets).
- Positive hypocrisy: Acknowledging high standards or ideals but occasionally failing to meet them due to human imperfection (e.g., advocating patience but sometimes losing your temper).
- Land ethic: A concept described by Aldo Leopold where ethical behaviour must include how we treat the land and all its components.
- Ego: A part of the mind that plays a role in distinguishing ourselves from others, interpreting experiences, and making decisions.
