3 Essential Principles of Optimal Natural Health
Three essential principles are needed to align your belief system with optimal natural health.
Optimal Natural Health
In my blog 3 Keys to Optimal Natural Health, I explained that you need to energize your mind, heart and body to achieve your optimal natural health. In this blog, we’re going to focus on the first key - your mind - to expand your understanding of the essential principles for mental energy. Although you hold these principles in your mind, they impact all areas of your life, so we’ll take a deeper look into each principle and its impact in each area.
3 Essential Principles
To achieve your optimal natural state of health, you must consider all your needs, tangible and intangible in alignment with three essential principles.
Your natural state is your optimal state of mental, emotional and physical health.
Your parasympathetic system desires homeostasis and returns you to a healthy state after a stress response.
Achieving and maintaining a dynamic, healthy harmony among your mental, emotional and physical needs is the key to optimal natural health.
Your Natural State Is the Optimal Natural State
You start life with infinite potential to fulfill your life purpose as your best self. Your natural state is the absolute of the state. Peace of mind is your natural state. Harmonious relationships are your natural state of relating. Physical health is your natural state. Your natural state is then impacted by internal and external factors or stressors that shift you into an alternate state of mental, emotional and physical health.
Some factors that impact you are out of your control, such as an absence or loss of a limb. But humans have always strived to overcome such limitations. The medical field is full of such accomplishments as prosthetic limbs and artificial hearts.
What Would You Love?
If you could wave a wand and have anything you wanted, what would your optimal state look like? Consider your mind, heart and body as you answer this question. Notice the order in which you list your details. Have you considered all your values? Are you listing what you think you should want? Or what others think you should want? Dig deep and really consider what you would love your life to look and feel like.
Testing for Resonance, Limitations and Alignment
One quick way to test whether you’re being honest with yourself is to notice your mental, emotional and physical responses to your answers. Are your thoughts swirling quickly or maybe in a fog? Are your emotions starting to churn, quickening your pulse and making your breath shallow or maybe even hyperventilating a little? Are your muscles feeling weak or your gut flooded with butterflies or nausea?
Notice where your responses are located and you’ll know where you need to question your answers more deeply. Where are your responses out of alignment? Are limiting beliefs jumping to mind? Are you rating yourself compared to others? Are you exhausted imagining all the work that is involved? These are examples, but you’ll know where to start digging to find out what isn’t resonating. Then determine if it truly is not what you want to be, do and have, or do you have some kind of limitation that you need to overcome mentally, emotionally and/or physically?
Create Your LIFE Vision
Once you’ve dug deep enough into your responses to ensure that they are truly in alignment with what you want to be, do and have, create your vision of your optimal natural life in the three major areas:
Relationships - personal and professional, which emphasize heart health
Occupation - paid or volunteer work or projects, which emphasizes mind health, and
Energizing - nutrition, movement, nature, which emphasizes body health.
Also consider any Lessons you need to succeed in the three major areas. Finally, consider your Spirituality, which encompass your whole life. Together these encompass the ROLES of your life.
You may make your vision fill a few pages or a whole notebook. You get to decide how much detail you want to specify. Then summarize your ideas into a shorter version that you can use for your daily intentions or mantra. Calling to mind your vision every day will help you align all your decisions with the life you love, resulting in your optimal state of mental, emotional and physical health.
Your Parasympathetic System Desires Homeostasis
You are created with the ability to shift back to your natural state after responding to mental, emotional and physical stressors. Problems occur when you do not allow yourself to return to your natural state. Prolonged states of stress can cause you to shift your natural state to a new level, called a setpoint.
To return to your optimal state of health, you need to shift your setpoint back to your optimal point. Consider where your current setpoint is no longer optimal. You gradually adjusted your setpoint, so allow yourself to gradually reset step by step, while also eliminating the gradual negative shifts as much as possible.
Stressors
What are your current and/or recurring stressors? Consider mind, heart and body. What thoughts and beliefs do you have about your stressors and your current situation? What feelings and emotions do you have about them? What verbal and physical actions are a result of those stressors? Were there any major events which led to the stressors becoming more prominent?
Once you have an understanding of your stressors, consider what steps you can take to eliminate the stressor or to reduce your stress after it occurs. What can you think, feel and do on a regular basis to reduce your stress and prevent more stress from occurring?
Reducing Stress Your Way
Remember that the ideas you choose must resonate with you, therefore, I’m not going to provide a “should” list. Instead, I’ll paint some broad strokes to get you started. If you identify as introverted, you will want to include plenty of alone time to recharge your energy doing things you love, which are most likely calm and quiet. If you identify as extroverted, you will want to include plenty of time with family or friends to recharge your energy doing things you love, which are most likely active and energetic.
Refrain from giving yourself a list of more things to do. Instead, attempt to overlap ideas with activities you already do, such as setting intentions or vocalizing your vision in your morning shower. You could do a 3-5 minute reset at mealtimes or work breaks to literally slow your breathing and/or meditate to calm your nervous system. Consider mental, emotional and physical ways to destress and the ways you can easily assimilate them into your life for more optimal natural health.
Your Dynamic Harmony Between Mind, Heart and Body Is Key
Your mind, heart and body naturally maintain a dynamic, healthy harmony, which rests in a calm, peaceful, relaxing state. You intentionally stress yourself mentally, emotionally and physically to grow stronger. You must continue to change dynamically or risk atrophy. Energy needs to keep moving. The key is to consistently exercise all three areas to maintain overall health.
Mind
What techniques do you currently use to challenge and exercise your mind, heart and body? Your work, projects and puzzles/games can all offer challenges and exercises for your mind. Instead of working too long and hard on mental challenges, do you shift from mental work to emotional or physical activities to give your mind a rest? Resting can actually make you more productive by reducing burnout.
Heart
Your personal and professional relationships can offer challenges for shifting from negative feelings and emotions to positive ones. Misunderstandings and fear of the unknown can often cause the negative feelings and emotions, so the challenge might be to discover which it is and how you can shift the cause and therefore the effect. It’s always good to start such an exercise by sending love and setting an intention for the best and highest good for all concerned.
Body
Physical challenges and exercises can be numerous, so I won’t even begin to list them here. Which ones come to mind immediately for you? Which challenges have you not been accepting, but instead are ignoring or stressing over by “shoulding” yourself? Which exercises would you love to do, but you’ve given up your needs to do things for others?
Make a commitment to yourself to take a small step each day to strengthen your mind, heart and body to maintain your dynamic, healthy harmony. Remember that after any challenging exercise, you need to rest to reset to your new setpoint. Find your balance between exercise and rest for optimal natural health.
Essential Principles
Remember the 3 principles as you read the next two blogs.
Instead of believing that disease is natural and aging has to be painful, remind yourself that health is your natural state. You can improve your mental, emotional and physical health, and it starts with your vision of the state of your optimal natural health.
Instead of pushing through to burnout or consistently moving your setpoint further away from your optimal health, love yourself enough to create ways to reduce your stress and return you to your calm healthy state after a stress response. Choose energizers that work well for you, whether you need quiet alone time or activities with family or friends.
Instead of resisting challenges and exercises, which leads to atrophy, use those challenges to strengthen your mind, heart and body. Take small steps to gradually return to your optimal state of mental, emotional and physical health.