Holistic Health
When health is viewed holistically, being healthy does not necessarily mean the absence of disease or illness. Being healthy means living as completely and optimally as possible within the conditions and the limits that exist in the present, while at the same time pursuing options that will improve things overall in the future.
Holistic health considers your environment as a dimension of your health. This includes your immediate surroundings as well as the larger context of the planet that sustains all life. Holistic health seeks approaches to wellness that are not harmful or toxic to you or to the environment around you. That means the space and all the people around you. This aspect of holistic health promotes balance and harmony not only for the individual, but for society and the world too.
Changes in your awareness of the intertwined dimensions of health can help you make choices that optimize your overall health. The Wellness Compass is a tool that helps you assess where you are and navigate toward a healthier state over time.
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The Wellness Compass
The Wellness Compass can be helpful in a variety of scenarios. It can help you learn from past experiences, and it can help you manage changes in your life going forward. You can use the Wellness Compass to look at what the impact might be of going back to school, or what the impact has been of inviting an elderly parent to live in your home. It helps you visualize and evaluate the impact different choices can have on your health.
When the Wellness Compass shows spots where you are out of balance, you can make adjustments. When it shows that you are in balance, you can make choices that help you maintain that balance while dealing with changes that come your way.
How to Use the Wellness Compass
The compass, by design, is very open to interpretation. How one person rates each dimension of health doesn’t need to match with another person’s rating. The compass isn’t used to compare one person’s readings with another person’s. The scoring only needs to be internally consistent for you. The lowest score is a 1 near the center of the compass and the highest is a 10 near the endpoint of the dimension. For optimal results, calibrate the Wellness Compass by clarifying what each of the 8 dimensions means for you.
Dips in the shape of the circle indicate overall wellness could improve by improving an unbalanced dimension of your health.
Step 1 – Rate how healthy your life is in each dimension
Step 2 – Connect the dots
Step 3 – See where your life is balanced or not
Step 4 – Formulate a plan to move in a healthy direction
Step 5 – Follow your plan
Step 6 – Repeat another compass reading
