The Illness-Wellness Continuum illustrates the relationship between the allopathic medical paradigm (or any other symptom-treatment system) and the wellness paradigm, which is based on self-responsibility.

Moving toward high-level wellness will involve the three steps of awareness, education, and growth. These writings are designed to get you moving. Use each of the sections ahead to help in self-evaluation, and in gaining awareness of what is working—or not working—in your life right now. Next, material is offered to assist you in your self-education. Some of it comes from others who have studied and lived it for a time. Much of it is a reminder of what you already know, but may have avoided or forgotten. In addition, each section includes growth options - suggestions of alternatives, invitations to stretch your limits, permission to risk, encouragement to change.

The Wellness Workbook is an invitation to you to consider illness and health in a bigger context: that of your connection with other people as well as with the entire planet. As we understand it, health is a result of a dynamic energy exchange between the individual and everything in creation. People cannot live well while remaining isolated from other people and things around them. We are interdependent elements in a living system. When any part is ill or healthy, it necessarily affects the energy, and changes the health, of the whole.

We think this understanding is so basic to an appreciation of wellness that we've built the entire structure and content of this book on it. So let's begin by exploring our foundation.

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