Home »
Healthy awareness
By Carol Gordon
At the close of Let’s Talk About Staying Well (September 30, 2012) I mentioned some important additional ingredients that are not commonly on our list for staying well:
Awareness
An attitude of wellness
Being proactive
Over the next few articles I will explore each of these elements and their importance to our health and well-being.
Starting with awareness, what actually does it mean to have awareness?
“Conscious, knowing” The Concise Oxford Dictionary; “Apprised, cognizant, informed, conscious” The New Webster Encyclopedic Dictionary of the English Language.
All these definitions point us in the direction of: “mentally awake; to acquaint with facts, data, opinion, etc.; having knowledge.” Funk & Wagnalls Canadian College Dictionary.
With the in depth educational and training process that healthcare practitioners go through, we have understandably been encouraged and thus have become accustomed to relying on and trusting the knowledge and opinions of the experts for the simple as well as the complex issues pertaining to our health and well-being. In so doing, we may too often reframe from engaging in our own research to any extensive degree. Perhaps what keeps us from doing our own research may be our laziness, our feelings of inadequacy, not knowing where to begin, and/or feeling overwhelmed at the immensity of information out there and the equal number of opinions that accompany that information.
Regardless of the reasons we give to ourselves for why we reframe from engaging in our own health research, or to what extent we do, this can have an impact on our health and well-being. It affects our choice of the healers we seek out, the supplements we do or do not take, the questions we ask ourselves and our healers and the decisions we make.
Carol Gordon is a wellness consultant, writer/photographer, artist and entrepreneur. She has called the Columbia Valley her home part-time since 1981 and full-time since 1999.
www.inspiringhealthierlifestylesglobally.com
