What is health? Everyone wants this thing called health, and yet most people have never thought about what their “target of health” actually looks like. If you and your family were healthy, what would it be like?
It is like this: Imagine you are shooting a bow and arrow at a definite target and you have no idea what the target is. What do you think the chances are that you will hit the target? Not very good. Knowing what the target is dramatically increases the chances of you hitting the target. Everyone usually has some definition of health but that is kind of like saying the target is round. A definition doesn’t help much.
What would you feel like, what would your kids do, and what would life look like? Get a clear target of what you being healthy would actually be like. Instead of just shooting for some ambiguous non-defined target, figure out your target. How much energy will you have, what will happen to your symptoms and disease, and how else will you be free? Simply knowing your target dramatically increases the odds of you hitting it.
So what is “true” health? Let me begin to show you by pointing out what is not health.
When you wake up in the morning, do you spring out of bed, full of energy and vitality? Or do you hit the snooze bar two, three, or even nine times before you get out of bed? This, my friend, is a symptom. It is something that you think is part of life, part of working hard, part of whatever, and you accept it as the way it is, when it is nothing more than a lack of health. Because if you were healthy, you would wake up in the morning and get out of bed easily, with abundant energy.
Are you in a good mood all the time? Happy and fulfilled? Your moods are in direct relationship to your health, and when you are not as healthy as you could be, you are not as happy or happy as often as you could be, because of your lack of health. Happiness is just a certain chemical state in your body. Emotions are literally just different chemical reactions in the body. Different chemicals present in different amounts, and this is what produces different moods and emotions. That is why the medical profession gives drugs to try to change peoples’ chemistry when they are depressed. If you can change the chemistry correctly, the moods and emotions of that person will change. If you are not abundantly happy and happy most of the time, that is a symptom.
As you go through the day, do you have high levels of energy to do whatever you want to do? Do you have energy levels to carry you right through the day? Or do you get sluggish and tired during parts of the day, especially after lunch? This is a symptom.
Do you experience stress? This is a symptom as well. Why is it that one air traffic controller goes home stressed out of his mind, and another air traffic controller sitting right next to him goes home perfectly fine? What is the difference? It is not the job. They both have the same job. The difference is how the individual people respond to the different situations. The healthier you are, the less stress you experience, no matter what is happening in the environment.
There are many more things, just like this, that many people accept as something they “have to” have, something they just must deal with because of circumstances. And this is simply not true.
The full potential of health, to me, is that of a four- year-old child.
When is the last time someone had to fight you to get you to go to bed at night? When is the last time someone had to bargain with you to get you to take a nap? When is the last time you ran to the car, just because you could? Or even better, had a contest to see who could run “over there” the quickest, and then when you got there, had a contest to run back to exactly where you started? Or just ran anywhere, simply because you could and because you were in love with life, and wanted to do as much as possible? You don’t see kids getting up in the morning, rubbing their eyes, scratching their butts, staggering around with their cup of juice, reading their Fisher-Price books before they finally wake up. When kids get up, they are up, ready to take on the day. This is starting, and I mean only starting, to point to what having health really and fully means.
You can begin to start forming what your target of health actually looks like. In one of the later lessons I am going to help you form your target of health. But first, we need to help you discover the false beliefs you have happily accepted about health that are just not true. Because it is what you know that just ain’t so that prevents you from achieving true health.
