Do you wake up on the right side or the wrong side of the bed each morning?  Do you wake up excited about the day or are you just putting one foot in front of the other? Are you tired of everyone telling you should be happy or upbeat?  Do the massive amount of tips for feeling good and healthy leave you high and dry? 

There’s an answer to that!  Be yourself, know thyself and accept yourself.  You are a unique and wonderfully made individual with your own path to greatness. This simply means, get to know who you are and what you want to be and do.   Take an overall inventory of yourself and find the magic inside.  Be patient with the process. 

The Wellness Inventory process allows you to explore the many wonders of you as a whole person.  You can take a spin around the wheel of wellness and find a deeper understanding of what works for you and what motivates you to improve.  Improving your overall wellbeing, can help you stay healthy or if you are challenged with a chronic illness, it can help you manage it better.

There can be so many factors to deal with when one has a chronic disease such as diabetes and heart disease, to name a few. Oftentimes, patients can find themselves overloaded with information from their physician, from Internet searches and from family and friends. This can be overwhelming and can stop a patient in their tracks. Which way should they turn and whom do they listen to? Primarily, it is essential to first listen to your physician, who is the expert on the chronic disease and is focused on helping manage the illness with needed treatments and medications. 

Does it seem impossible to live healthy always? How is it possible to live healthy if you have a chronic disease? Is healthy living possibly more than whether you have a disease or not?

Living healthy refers to how you manage your health in your mind, body, and spirit. As a nurse-patient advocate, I have witnessed people with serious illnesses live better and more meaningful lives than some that are extremely healthy and blessed with financial abundance. Why is this? It relates to the individual's overall level of wellness.

The World Health Organization defined health in 1948 as being “a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity”.  Later, Halbert Dunn, MD, head of U.S. Office of Vital Statistics, wrote a book called "High-Level Wellness". He writes about a definition of wellness to include the following core concepts: 

• Wellness is a continuum rather than a specific fixed state. All individuals, depending on their particular circumstances, are located somewhere along the continuum between death and wellness.

We hope you had a wonderful holiday season! There may have been some indulging involved with all the festivities. Maybe you ate or drank more than you wanted. Maybe you were stressed out and didn’t get the time to exercise. Whatever happened is in the past. Let’s move forward into a great 2020.

he Benefits of Winter

What l love about this time of year in the north is the opportunity to follow the trends of the seasons. It’s a time of cold weather now and although it can be a beautiful time to be out in nature, the days are shorter and thus darker and we tend to spend more time indoors

I engage the winter as a time, like my roses and perennials in my garden, to go within and lie more dormant and restful in order to restore and energize my “root system”.  I have found that more profound and lasting changes occur during this season, when you go deep within, whether through more rest, meditation or prayer, challenging yourself to start a new goal, or just learn something new.

The Reason for the Season?

 We are in the midst of the busiest holiday season of the year!  Are you feeling overwhelmed or are you feeling a sense of calm and order? Are you experiencing a racing mind or are you in the flow of the reason for the season, finding meaning and joy in the festivities and preparation?

Overstimulated?

At this time of year, we are getting bombarded with messages on retail deals, holiday specials, shiny objects we need to have, multiple parties to attend and arrangements for family gatherings.