Transforming Wellness: Accepting Balance

Welcome back, Cadre family. It's Eric again, clinical mental health counselor, here to connect with you on this idea of transforming wellness. It's my goal to bring mental health information, resources and tools to you in an affordable and accessible way. And today, what I want to focus on is, is what we've been building up to, which is this idea of wellness that creates some space from maybe what we've thought. Wellness is what we've seen in other people's lives and coined as wellness, maybe ways in which others have told us we're not well.

And getting to this idea of what is normal, right? Normal often exists in our mind as something outside of us, as something that we maybe desire to be or don't desire to be because of our relationship to that word. But normal is just a word. It's an idea. It's something that isn't as straightforward as we like to think it is. And often, in our pursuit of wellness, we equate it with normality. If you open up a DSM, the bible of diagnosing mental health disorders, all you will see is abnormal, malfunctioned beyond repair, is maybe the idea some people receive from the labels, the words found within that book.

I come from this idea that people, humans, exist along the spectrum of humanity. And if it exists within the spectrum of humanity, it is normal, because humans are not normal. When we think about normal, we often go to this place of control that I can be. Well, I can be normal when I have control over the fear that I face walking into a room full of strangers that might judge me, the way my friend judged and rejected me years ago, that I'm the only one with this experience and I'm abnormal because of it.

And so I'm going to put forth this image that I assume others want me to be, and maybe then I can be perceived as normal and accepted. And so we're constantly at war in this place, in our mind, that we dictate what is good and what is not good enough. And we create these Personas, these ways of approaching our life. And soon we find ourselves stuck because we, ourselves, us, haven't been making decisions. Our avoidance of the things we're afraid of, the painful things in life have been making decisions for us.

And so when we explore a new idea of wellness, maybe wellness is found in this place where it's all welcomed, where rather than to tightly control and dictate what something has to be in order to have value in our lives, we let go and observe. I want you to imagine that you're an artist and you're trying to create a painting, a beautiful painting that depicts something in your life. It doesn't matter. And the only tools I give you to make that painting is a bunch of white paint and a white canvas, the same exact shade.

Now imagine that making that painting something beautiful and worth looking at would be quite difficult, as nothing would show. In order to highlight the beauty in our life, we need to have the shadows, the dark cuts of outlines, the things that inform us where the light is and why it has value. When we push back against the darker shades, the dark outlines the shadows from existing in our life, from having value and having a place, we also cut ourselves off from the light. The things that reinforce this amazing, unique experience of what it means to be human.

We tend to look too far ahead and put categories over things that. That need to exist. Being well is letting go. Being well is letting go of the ideas, stories, thoughts, things in which we frame ourselves in the world. World around us has and then taking action. Look forward to seeing you next week. As we continue on this journey of what that action looks like. And if we're not motivated by just the things we avoid or the ways in which we don't want to see ourselves, what else can motivate us? What else is there that we may pursue in our lives to find fulfillment and wellness?