Unit 9 Final Project...whew!

Introduction

            Health and wellness professionals are in a unique position.  We are the harbingers of a healthy and whole life.  We are the ones our patients look to for guidance on how to begin their own journey to health and wholeness.  However, if we do not fully understand the process it can be difficult to teach it to others.  Therefore, it is very important for health and wellness professionals to work on their own physical, psychological, and spiritual development.  By continuing to develop these aspects of our lives, it will help to keep us moving forward on our own path, as well as keeping us in touch with our patients.

            We are made up of body, mind, and spirit; it is these aspects of our life that must be developed to help us reach health, happiness and wholeness.  Developing our physical body is a bit of a necessity since we only get one during our lifetime.  Keeping our bodies healthy can be considered laying a good foundation for the development of our psychological and spiritual life.  This leads me to the next area of development: our mind. 

            Our psychological development helps to expand our awareness of our thoughts and feelings and how they can influence our actions.  By working on our inner self, we can start to change negative thought patterns and behaviors into more positive ones.  This is an ever evolving process and one that may be frightening at times.  However, as we start to clean up the psychological clutter our minds become clearer and calmer.  This is essential if we wish to continue on to the area of spiritual development.

            Spiritual development, like our psychological development, can be a subjective thing.  It is something that we each must work on ourselves; no one else can do it for us.  Every soul on

this planet, at some point, was taught certain morals or values; things to believe in and help guide us.  In order to develop spiritually, we must choose to either make these beliefs a part of our being or discard them for ones that better fit who we are.  It is also important for our spiritual development to remember that our patients may have different spiritual beliefs from our own and to respect them.

Assessment

            For my personal assessment of my physical, psychological, and spiritual development, I will be scoring on a scale of 1-10; with 10 being the absolute best.  I highly doubt that I will get a 10 in either of these aspects because I understand that I am an imperfect being.  In the area of physical development, I feel that I am at an 8.  I have mentioned my passion for Crossfit and Krav Maga before.  These activities, coupled with my paleo lifestyle, help to keep me healthy.  However, I still have physical goals that I am working toward and I will touch on these later on.

            As for my psychological development, I will put myself down at a 7.5.  I have taken many psychology and stress management classes, as well as read a few books in these areas.  This has helped me to become more aware of my thoughts and my feelings and how my actions are a reflection of these.  I am happy to say that this awareness has helped me to change some negative patterns and develop more positive ones; especially in the body and self-image department.    I have also learned how to recognize when I am feeling stressed and how to calm myself down.

My spiritual development is probably the area that I need the most work on.  I consider myself a spiritual person, I have my personal beliefs about God, but I don’t really do much to cultivate this area of my life.  While I do pray, I do not go out of my way to seek spiritual enlightenment through other means.  For this reason, I believe I should score myself at a 4.5, maybe a 5.  As I said, I do pray, but not doing anything else to feed my spiritual development is keeping me from growing fully as a whole person.

Goal Development

            I have two Crossfit competitions coming up in January; an individual event and a team event.  Not surprisingly, my physical goals revolve around doing my absolute best at each competition.  To that end, my goal is to increase my load for both squats and deadlift.  I currently stand at 185 lbs. for my back squat, 225 lbs. for my deadlift, and 135 lbs. for my front squat.  I would like to see each of these numbers raise by twenty pounds by the time my competitions roll around.

            As for my psychological goal, I would like for my mind to become clearer and calmer.  Next year is going to be a stressful time because our three year tour will be complete and this means that we will be moving to our next duty station.  It also means that my husband will be back on deployment status.  I find myself worrying over where we will be sent and when he will deploy to and where.  I know what I want to happen; I want to move back to North Carolina so that I can be closer to family and have some support while he is gone.  However, this is not something that I can control.  I feel that if my mind were clearer and a little calmer, I could better accept what orders we get.

            My spiritual goal is a little more difficult.  To be completely honest, I am not sure if I even have one.  I am not interested in attending church because man always finds a way to mess up God’s simple message of love and faith.  I am not really sure what to put and maybe that is the problem.  Maybe I am not as in-tune with myself to recognize what I need to set as my spiritual goal.  In light of this, I feel that my spiritual goal should be to spend more time cultivating this aspect of my life.

Practices for Personal Health

            I believe that my current practices for my physical development, Crossfit and Krav Maga, are working just fine.  To help me reach my lifting goals, I have been working with my Crossfit coach and she has helped to design specific workouts in order to achieve them.  Tuesdays and Thursdays are devoted to strength work designed to help increase my speed and fine tune my form.  The rest of the week is joining in with my regular noon class, with some extra cardiovascular work afterwards.

            For my psychological development, I believe that continuing my loving-kindness prayer during my workouts will help to calm my mind.  Another practice that I think will help clear and calm my mind is just to sit quietly.  It has recently been brought to my attention that I never stop moving; I am constantly doing something or taking care of someone.  I never stop and just let myself be.  I believe that this constant motion is contributing to my cluttered thoughts and worried mind.  I am not suggesting that I meditate or focus on my breathing.  I just want to sit and quietly let my awareness spread out to all that is around me, and let it fill me.  Another practice that I believe will help me in this area is to start thinking about the positive side of our upcoming move.  If I can focus on the positive things that can come from this move, I believe I will be better able to handle whatever orders we get.  I will be conditioned to looking at the bright side, if you will.

As far as practices for my spiritual development, I will continue to pray.  I also feel that my sitting quietly, or attempting to sit quietly, will also help to further my spiritual development.  By disconnecting myself from the chaos around me, I believe I will be better able to “hear” my spiritual side.  This could help me better identify specific spiritual goals that can further my development.       

Commitment

            I believe that of the three developmental areas, my physical goals will be the easiest ones to assess my progress in.  In order to see how well I am progressing toward these goals, I will perform my bench mark 1 repetition max for each lift again.  Any increase in the weight for these lifts will indicate that I am on the right path.  If there is no increase or if I actually decrease, I will know that I need to collaborate with my coach and tweak my strength plan.

            Measuring my progress in my psychological and spiritual development may be a little more difficult.  As I have mentioned before, these are really subjective areas.  I could measure how long I am able to sit quietly and how often I do this.  It might be for a short amount of time at first, maybe 5 minutes or so, and only done once or twice a week.  I believe if I can manage to increase the time by a minute or two each week and even increase to three times a week, I will be making good progress. 

When we actually get our orders for our next duty station, I feel that this will be another test of my progress.  If during that stressful time I can keep the negative thoughts at bay and focus more on the positive aspects of it, I will know that I have come a long way to being mentally fit and hardy.  Ultimately, though, I believe that I will have to judge my progress on how I feel inside and how much calmer I am in stressful situations.

I hope everyone had a great term!  Thank you to everyone who either followed or commented on my blog.   Thank you, Mark, for another great class.  Merry Christmas and Happy New year to one and all!