A holistic approach to life is the most fulfilling way of living.

The holistic approach to life embraces all facets of being: the physical, emotional, and spiritual. And these things are inter-connected; one affects the others, and each affects how we feel. We have the ability to reason and we have choices. One of the best things we can do to help ourselves to feel good about our lives and to improve our overall wellbeing is to associate with compassionate people with whom we can have honest relationships that are mutually supportive.

When we associate with people who are nurturing and supportive, not toxic and abusive, whether those people are family members, business associates, neighbours, or people in our social environment, we experience a sense of well being and freedom. Abusive and toxic environments are not acceptable, and abusive people will tell you that you have to put up with it anyway, to be tough, to have a thick skin, that since the person is a family member or a spouse, or a supervisor, that you should put up with it. This is not a healthy, holistic mindset. Get away from abuse and toxicity and do it now. Seek the advice of a competent and compatible social worker or psychological counsellor who can help you. Emotional abuse is just as injurious as physical abuse. Get away from it now. It can poison your entire life; emotional abuse has long-term negative repercussions.

Holistic Information

Your mental and spiritual self is the most important aspect of your being and so everything in the physical realm should support that. This is the holistic viewpoint, which contradicts popular culture that shouts, cheers, and sells physical beauty and materialism. But remember, regardless of socio-economic condition or status, when we depart this world, we can’t take physical stuff with us. The only thing that remains is the remembrance of our life energy (positive or negative), and the intentions from which we made choices and out of which we acted. And even this, is transient.

Holistic Courses and Holistic Education

Holistic education is a philosophy of education based on the premise that each person finds identity, meaning, and purpose in life through connections to the community, to the natural world, and to spiritual values such as compassion and peace. Holistic education aims to call forth from people an intrinsic reverence for life and a passionate love of learning. This is the definition given by Ron Miller, founder of the journal Holistic Education Review (now entitled Encounter: Education for Meaning and Social Justice). The term holistic education is often used to refer to the more democratic and humanistic types of alternative education. Robin Ann Martin (2003) describes this further by stating, “At its most general level, what distinguishes holistic education from other forms of education are its goals, its attention to experiential learning, and the significance that it places on relationships and primary human values within the learning environment.”

The concept of holism refers to the idea that all the properties of a given system in any field of study cannot be determined or explained by the sum of its component parts. Instead, the system as a whole determines how its parts behave. A holistic way of thinking tries to encompass and integrate multiple layers of meaning and experience rather than defining human possibilities narrowly.

Holistic Diet

A holistic diet takes into account the interaction between the body and the mind.

According to the World Health Organization, “Health is more than the absence of disease. Health is a state of optimal well-being.” Optimal well-being is a concept of health that goes beyond the curing of illness to one of achieving wellness. Achieving wellness requires balancing the various aspects of the whole person. These aspects are physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual. This broader, holistic approach to health involves the integration of all of these aspects and is an ongoing process.

The reason many weight loss programs fail is because there are at least three things that need to be done before a person ever starts on any recommended diet or exercise plan. Find out what they are and you may succeed, no matter how many times it failed before.

Excess weight can be the result of many factors. In order to facilitate weight loss that is healthy and permanent, a comprehensive approach is in order. The areas of work include:

• Cleanse the body system
• Build the body system
• Balance the mind and emotions
• Find the right program for you. (This is when you are finally ready to start losing weight.)

Holistic Nutrition

If you look at almost any other system of medicine besides the Western, you’ll find a heavy reliance on food. Hippocrates, the father of modern medicine, after whom the Hippocratic oath was named, taught, “let food be thy medicine.” The “foods” of modern medicine, however are drugs. The typical American doctor completely disregards nutrition. Those who are concerned with nutrition are labeled as faddists, freaks, extremists, radicals and quacks. Why aren’t our doctors telling us about these things and trying to do something to change it? Many people think that medical physicians are experts in nutrition because they seem to know some things about the human body. Well, physicians may be great at saving lives in an emergency or for relieving pain temporarily, but very few are taught to prevent illness. Hard-working and dedicated, they are highly trained to diagnose illness (symptoms), administer drugs and perform surgical procedures. Their schooling demands so much time for pharmacology (drug therapy) that they have little time for studying nutrition. What scant information they do receive is usually outdated and less detailed than that which nurses and technicians receive in their training.

When the average physician is asked, “What should I eat?” The typical answer is “Just eat a balanced diet.” If you want to know what an average physician thinks a balanced diet is, look at any hospital food fed to patients, doctors, staff and visitors. The mutually-exclusive roles of dietician and cook are nowhere more apparent than in such institutions. All are identical. Iceberg lettuce, with a glob of cottage cheese, and a wedge of canned pineapple. Slices of overdone and warmed-over beef that have suffered for hours in some electronic purgatory, coated with gravy made of water, library paste, and bouillon cubes. Peas, corn, and carrots — boiled to a mush. The pie is a sickening slab of beige goo, flavored with artificial maple sugar, in a crust of reconstituted cardboard, topped with sweetened shaving cream squirted from an aerosol bomb. The problem is that the dieticians who actually supervise such “cooking”–as well as the hapless agents of the FDA and the USDA who inspect the forced and faked-up products that go into it — can indeed prove that it contains the proper amount of protein, carbohydrate, minerals and vitamins. But this is like judging the worth of music in terms of decibels and wave frequencies.

Holistic Living

The simple act of sitting down and following your breath while letting go of intrusive thoughts can free one from the entanglements of our hectic lives.

Holistic living is simply living your life with all aspects of it in mind, not simply being concerned about health, or wealth, or spirituality, or balance. Your entire lifestyle must come under scrutiny and improvements made in a holistic fashion. A healthy, balanced and fulfilling lifestyle should be at the top of your life long goals.

It is important to remember that living a holistic lifestyle is a proactive process. It’s a life-long journey of choices you make to create balance and to achieve the highest potential of well-being for body, mind and soul. Living a holistic lifestyle means a lifestyle that influences the “WHOLE PERSON”.

That means all areas of your life are impacted by your choices: body, mind, spirit, relationships, career, creativity, self-care, health-care and wealth-care, your environment, how you choose to spend your time and the thoughts and actions that produce the results of your reality. You have to start where you are, accept the lessons your life’s journey is teaching you and take individual responsibility for the balance, growth and change you want to make, for yourself and the planet. Living a holistic lifestyle doesn’t have to be hard and doesn’t have to take a lot of time. All it takes is to make conscious choices and live by them one choice at a time.

If you've enjoyed what you've read so far, you'll certainly enjoy my big-picture thinking in the booklet The 2012 Manifesto. You can read more about it here or just click on the big-ass Download button below and I'll take you straight to the download page.

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