FEATURE Health=Happiness By Lynett A. Villariba Philippine Daily Inquirer First Posted 07:27:00 08/10/2008
MANILA, Philippines – During last year’s Asia Pacific-wide wellness summit held in Manila, medical doctors and PhDs defined wellness as a conscious state of being well, in which one’s inner and outer worlds are in harmony. If that sounds like New Age jargon, the experts also affirmed that wellness provides the best preventive medicine to stress and disease. Simply put, wellness is the synergy of mind-body-spirit, with science adding to the equation.
Are we ready to invest in preventive and holistic care now, in the same way that we are putting our hard-earned money in insurance to pay for a future that may be too late to save a body already in a state of disrepair? Why not, when it doesn’t take much to follow some sensible and practical ways to achieve well-being?
To Dr. Geraldine Mitton, pioneer in integrative medicine in South Africa, health is synonymous to happiness. And it can be achieved—following her prescription:
1. Stay in balance. Maintain a healthy formula of 50 percent diet, 20 percent exercise, 20 percent mental activity and 10 percent spiritual development. Devote proportionate attention to family, nutrition, career, spiritual, social and mental activities.
2. Eat well. You are what you eat. Nature is the doctor’s assistant. Digest, assimilate, eliminate.
3. Exercise. Be active: walk, dance, swim, stretch, breathe. Exercise is the most powerful antidepressant and creates happiness hormones known as endorphins.
4. Cope with stress. Stress is not what happens to you. It is what you do about it. Explore the heart-brain connection. Live each day fully, productively, joyfully.
5. Be creative. Your thoughts become your reality through the journey from imagination to intuition to intention.
6. Find your passion and pursue it. We must always change, renew and rejuvenate ourselves, otherwise we harden and stagnate. Have a purpose and mission in life.
7. Serve others. Our greatest well-being is dependent on giving and sharing. Look up to the example of Mother Teresa. Take a lesson from Buddha: Happiness comes when your work and words are of benefit to yourself and others.
8. Forgive. Release toxic emotions and set yourself free through forgiveness by giving up the need to always be right. Happiness is nothing more than good health and a bad memory.
9. Be grateful. Gratitude is fertilizer to the soul.
10. Laugh. Laughter is one of the few infectious things that cannot make you sick.
11. Be positive. Cherish family and friends. Be with good people and fellow optimists.
12. Attain inner peace. Time out. Rest, relax and meditate.
In achieving the elegant triangle pose, it took Kat Rempe Azanza to make her own fitness journey from athletics to aerobics to yoga to pilates (which she now teaches). Behind the yoga standing pose are coordination, balance and focus built through diligent practice in Ashtanga and Bikram styles of yoga.
Like her peers, the young mother of two boys admits to having swung from one end of the spectrum to the other many times. “I was a very athletic teen and young adult, but as I started a family at 23, my own needs took a step back, until I realized a few years ago that an unhealthy mom does not a good mother make, and I literally forced myself to get back on my toes.”
Being an athlete in her teens had given Kat a certain image of herself that she tried to maintain. She went so far as to become a vegetarian (though short-lived) for no deeper reason than thinking that this was the right thing to do. Coincidentally, this was the time that her parents, Eckard and Perla Rempe, took on a vegan lifestyle and started their own journey down the road of health and wellness leading to establishing the first integrative medical resort in Asia.
“Together they influence my life with their knowledge, and I do also honestly believe that we are what we eat, although I’m the first to admit that I still struggle to follow the path of my parents when it comes to matters regarding diet,” she muses.
“I breastfed my children till age two and raised them vegetarian until the age that they themselves wanted to try other food outside the home. We still make sure that we always have a vegetable dish or salad to accompany our main course (mostly seafood) on the dining table, and for the most part they eat and enjoy it. Fruit is also always plentiful in our home and smoothies are the merienda and breakfast of choice.”
The daughter speaks for her generation, “I honestly think that The Farm [the health resort my father founded] has an incredible mission that makes complete sense to me, and will make sense to anyone willing to, for a second, throw out their old beliefs and open their mind to a new concept on health and wellness.”
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