You now know the exciting and empowering fact that real wellness is available to us all – no matter our circumstances – the power to be well lies within you! Accessing that power requires you to understand and radically accept what you are – a flawed and vulnerable human – and that you’re living in a chaotic world, where among the few certainties are constant change and finite control. You use the power when you manage yourself in ways that holistically work for you and meet your needs most of the time, while practising self-compassion when you slip. Granted, this is easier said than done, but the greatest skill of adulthood is making yourself do hard things.
Now that you know what real wellness is, and what it is not, let’s turn our attention on how to develop this self-mastery. Here is my real wellness self-mastery blueprint that has helped me be well and I am confident it will for you too.
There are 3 key pillars to real wellness:
- Self-awareness,
- Self-acceptance, and
- Self-management.
The first pillar of real wellness is Self-awareness, which requires self-study. Makes perfect sense right? If you want to build your self-awareness, then you need to dedicate some time to enquiring within, and maybe you need to learn skills in order to do this. It is cultivated with mindfulness and other self-reflective practices. The desired outcome is building the understanding of what it is to be human as well as your uniqueness and individual values, priorities and needs. It is knowing who you are, why you are as you are, and how to best care for yourself. It is also knowing who and how you wish to be and why you wish to be as you do.
Life is amazing and wonderful and beautiful, but being human can be messy, ugly, and downright hard at times. Being human means living with a monkey mind – a term that describes how our thoughts ping around constantly as our brains ceaselessly process information, memories and future possibilities – inhabiting a sensate and vulnerable body that can fail our ego and test our tolerance; knowing that we make mistakes and can be unlucky and get into accidents, and surviving inevitable grief, pain and loss.
Despite this shared fate, each of us is capable of leading a life of real wellness via understanding our humanness, accepting it and being able to optimally manage it despite our circumstance. It means making the most of what you’ve got to work with today. It means fostering a healthy and reliable relationship with yourself through a lifelong commitment to self-care. With this realistic self-awareness and healthy sense of self, you will feel well.
Developing skill in this first pillar of real wellness takes identifying your intentions, values and priorities, becoming familiar with your two worlds – your inner world and your outer world – and their intricate relationship, and learning your core beliefs and how they affect your perceptions and filtering of life. I go through this more in Part 2.
The second pillar of self-mastery for real wellness is self-acceptance. It follows on from the work you do in the first pillar: in order to accept yourself, you first must understand what it is that you’re accepting. It also draws on self-compassion, self-honesty, and general acceptance.
You’re well on your path to living with real wellness when you approach daily life aspiring to experience your full potential while accepting yourself as you are now. It doesn’t mean giving yourself a free pass if, for instance, you’re doing harmful things to others: the focus of self-acceptance is to be able to meet your gaze in the mirror without looking away. There may be things going on for you or things you discover about yourself that you perceive as less than ideal or don’t choose for yourself long-term, and that’s perfectly okay! But you must first honestly accept your reality with compassion then gently work towards the shifts you choose for yourself. A compassionate view is that you are not inadequate or defective, you are not broken or a lost cause; you are human that needs kindness and care.
With a compassionate and honest self-appraisal, you’re in a good position to identify any painful truths that require growth and change and then to figure out how to go about that change. Whereas a mindset of self-acceptance cultivates an internal loving vibe conducive to real wellness, self-loathing has the opposite effect. If you approach any change process with negative self-judgement, your whole life will be unpleasant. If you can accept how, who and why you are as you are now, with the goal of optimising yourself, then you will be well as you grow – which you will do for the rest of your life.
The third pillar to self-mastery and real wellness is self-management. Once you understand and have accepted your human-ness and your current circumstance in life (Pillars 2 and 3), then the focus becomes optimally managing it all. This is where the ‘making the most of it all’ comes in. Our ability to manage our ourselves can be optimised by utilising skills in ideal self-management, goal-setting, habit autonomy, attention regulation, self-care, self-soothing, self-compassionate discipline, internal and external world regulation, environmental management and other holistic skills. The choice of skills you decide to cultivate is up to you. You are the decider of the things you experiment with and only you can know whether they resonate and are of use to you. Your evidence base is your lived experience, so experiment with yourself and your life.
Be willing to adopt an attitude of experimentation for personal transformation. The idea is to try, observe what you like and what you don’t, be prepared to falter and/or succeed, and to learn from the process. Learn to embrace, or at least accept, failure as a part of personal development. Flipping your perception of failure is a tried and tested hack for living a limitless life: instead of seeing failure as a bad thing and to be avoided, view it as a precious experience bringing new information. Failure means acquisition of data you would not have otherwise received. So what if you try something, don’t like it, and are not any good at it? At least having tried you have learnt something about yourself and can move on to the next adventure life brings.
Be willing to do things you may not be good at just for the fun sake of it. Try new stuff and invite experience for growth. If you come across any skills that seem like a good fit, are not harmful, and not unattainable to you, then give them a go! Why not? Be open to change and even if that means facing uncertainty and doubt. Rise to the challenge.
I truly believe that moving your body every day, getting a good night’s sleep when you can, cuddling the beings you love and nurturing your connections with community, drinking enough water, cutting out alcohol and cigarettes, and eating fresh healthy foods is the most economical and effective prescription for health. We need these things. We don’t necessarily need the latest costly wellness fad. It is not sexy, quick, nor easy, but it is true that the best things in life are the sensible, common sense and free things.
There’ll be plenty of times when you find yourself feeling run-down, grumpy, hungry, tired, sick, or in a position you’d rather not be in. Maybe you are newly facing unexplained symptoms or managing chronic health issues that get you down. For some of us, these are the challenges of everyday living. But in these situations, you can still have a profound sense of real wellness if you hold a healthy relationship with yourself and are able to adaptively meet your needs.
It’s the relationship you hold with yourself – the way you view, speak to and treat yourself – that will shape your suffering – it is the single most influential relationship you’ll ever have. It will heavily determine your life and health outcomes. If you can radically accept yourself and care for yourself in healthy ways most of the time, you’ll avoid illness that results from the harmful habits and coping mechanisms that we humans are prone to when living in denial, destruct, and disregard mode.
If you live using the skills of self-mastery (self-awareness, acceptance, and self-compassionate care), you’re most likely going to quite enjoy being you, like who you are, and be proud of yourself. You will feel safe and trusting of yourself. You learn you can rely on you to be there when needed and meet your needs – living this way is so fulfilling and creates an internal foundation of predictability, reliability, safety, and wellbeing. You will cultivate self-determination and inner peace. Inevitably your self-worth with build and because you are caring and relating to yourself in an accepting and loving way with discipline and boundaries you will inherently like who you are and enjoy living as you. With self-mastery you relate to yourself in a healthy, adaptive and functional way. This self-mastery creates your quality of life, and determines your wellbeing.
What it looks like is someone who can show up for themself each day, like a caring and reliable parent, and provide themself with a safe and predictable routine (shower, balanced meal, book and bed in the evening, for example). They do this even on the tough days when they may feel down or overwhelmed. The next morning, they wake refreshed and ready to start a new day.
Now picture how a human who lacks these self-parenting skills might behave at the end of a challenging day. Maybe they wallow in feelings of self-loathing and disregard their physical needs – skipping the gym and going straight to the couch. Maybe they smash down a tub of ice-cream or work their way through the drinks cabinet or stay up late doom-scrolling. It is not that these behaivours make them a ‘bad’ person or unethical in some way. But they won’t wake refreshed and may probably need a lie-in and kebab for brekky. These coping choices are not conducive to a state of real wellness long-term. But more important to their sense of wellness is their lived experience of not being able to care for themselves in the way they need when they need it most. This behavior is likely, over time, to leave them feeling unsafe, vulnerable to stress, and unhappy – cultivating in a poor self-relationship. At worst, their behaviour reinforces any existing belief of being unworthy, untrustworthy, and unsafe. Living controlled by these beliefs is never going to be conducive to a life of real wellness.
Scrupulously nurture the relationship you hold with yourself. To be well, you must learn to consistently show up and care for yourself as a healthy parent would, and be there for yourself in times of need, even when it feels hard, and you may want to ‘clock off’.
Remember that because we’re human, we will inevitably let ourselves down and falter in self-discipline and insight. We will have vices and coping mechanisms and, at times, they may not be ideal or in line with a gold standard picture of wellness. One day you may be living virtuously and another a little sloppy -that is normal and human.
Crucially, if you stuff up, don’t let that be an excuse to give up on yourself. Learn to forgive yourself; learn from mistakes. Provided you keep trying to live well with self-care, the overall picture is so worth the effort. And it’s never too late to make a positive difference to your wellness. Never give up on yourself – commit yourself to living your best life, challenges, slips, relapses and all. Remember that real wellness is a lifestyle. It’s a journey, not the end game. It’s about long-term commitment and ongoing effort, responding to stuff-ups by redirecting yourself onto your wellness path. It’s not something achieved and then fixed forever and it wont require a perfect path.
While real wellness is a never-ending journey of building self-mastery, it’s also one that may be enjoyed with gratitude. To me, daily cultivating and practising self-mastery isn’t a chore but an abiding passion and privilege.
In the coming blogs I will outline skills and concepts for each pillar starting off with building self-awareness through mindfulness. Stay tuned!
