What Is Wellness?

• Wellness is a choice - a decision you make to move toward optimal health.
• Wellness is a way of life - a lifestyle you design to achieve your highest potential for wellbeing.
• Wellness is a process - a developing awareness that there is no endpoint, but that health and happiness are possible in each moment, here and now.
• Wellness is a balanced channeling of energy - energy received from the environment, transformed within you, and returned to affect the world around you.
• Wellness is the integration of body, mind, and spirit - the appreciation that everything you do, and think, and feel, and believe has an impact on your state of health and the health of the world.
• Wellness is the loving acceptance of yourself.

Summary

High-level wellness involves giving good care to your physical self, using your mind constructively, expressing your emotions effectively, being creatively involved with those around you, and creating supportive physical, psychological and spiritual environments. Wellness is not a static state. Wellness is about learning to love your whole self. It is about taking charge of your life, living life as a process, and channeling your life energy effectively. It is about knowing there's only one way to wellness - your way.

Dr Travis provides a comprehensive roadmap enabling individuals to take charge of their own wellness. Using his pioneering multi-dimensional Wellness Energy System, Travis shares tools for self-empowerment in 12 different areas and leads practical exercises and outlines tools for further growth. Beyond the preventive medicine triad of fitness, nutrition, and stress reduction, Travis expands our experience of wellness into such dimension as breathing, sensing, feeling, working, playing, self-expression, connecting, and finding meaning.

Through inspiring images, interactive exercises, and personal examples this engaging wellness presentation helps people begin a lifelong journey to greater wellness - one that that will reap enormous benefits for themselves, their families and their employers. The impact of this presentation can be further enhanced by providing Dr. Travis' Wellness Workbook, and/or the Wellness Inventory to participants.

Objectives

As a result of this presentation participants will be able to:

• Describe the Illness/Wellness Continuum and a framework of wellness beyond the prevention of disease;
• Outline at least 8 dimensions of wellness though completing a self-assessment in each;
• Complete a personal wellness plan by identifying likely obstacles and setting specific goals;
• Recognize that pursuing personal wellness will increase productivity, vitality and joy, while reducing medical costs.

Outline

I. Origins of the concept of wellness

• How the term was first used - the original meaning and use of the word.
• Development of the first wellness center in the US

II. The Illness/Wellness Continuum

• The limits of prevention and treatment
• Beyond disability, signs, and symptoms
• An integrated model for health and wellbeing based on awareness, education, and growth

III. Twelve dimensions of wellness:

• Self-Responsibility and Love
• Breathing
• Sensing
• Eating
• Moving
• Feeling
• Thinking
• Working and Playing
• Communicating
• Intimacy and Sex
• Finding Meaning
• Transcending

IV. A personal wellness program

• Completing a wellness self-assessment
• Designing a personal wellness plan

V. Questions, comments, and small group exercises.

 

References

John W. Travis and Regina Sara Ryan, Wellness Workbook, Celestial Arts, 2004
John W. Travis and Regina Sara Ryan, Simply Well, Choices for a Healthy Life, Ten Speed Press, 2001
John W. Travis, Wellness Inventory Online, http://healthypeople.com

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