3 Principles of Vitality
The other day it occurred to me that there are really only three principles we need to pay attention to for optimal wellness and vitality in our lives.
- Prevention
- Pain Remedy
- Performance
When we were young, for most of us it was about performance. We had energy. We would fall down, get scraped knees and keep moving. The parks we played in were truly dangerous. You could climb up chain ladders that would pinch your fingers, jump down from ten foot precipices, take flying leaps off the swings to land on gravel. We would traverse the woods and follow streams all day. Kids don’t have to focus on performance, their bodies just do all the things, but as we age, we have to train just to maintain our performance.
When I was a kid in the late 70’s and early 80’s, the word cancer was rarely spoken and when it was, it was only in hushed, fearful tones. I remember looking around the corner to see if the Grim Reaper had arrived. People had injuries and needed to remedy pain. People had headaches and took pills to numb the suffering in our craniums. What many of us didn’t know at the time was that many of us had buried wounding from the secrets we kept about what went on behind closed doors. We didn’t know about epigenetics then and how the choices of our ancestors would actually affect our health and even influence how our body processes fats or craves certain substances. (Epigenetics is a fascinating subject, just in case you haven’t explored it yet.)
When we were young, we slathered on baby oil and stayed in the sun all day. Then we were told it was bad for us, so we slathered on sunscreen. Now some health gurus tout the benefits to our cells of light in the rising and setting of the sun and that we also need the sun’s rays throughout the day to help our metabolism, to energize our cells, to assist with mitochondria production. Healthy amounts of sunlight help prevent long term disease, and yet we have also been told to stay out of the sun. For prevention we need to have the right knowledge. As it says in Scripture, “My people perish for lack of knowledge.”
These principles of wellness: performance, pain remedy and prevention are not linear. There is no yellow brick road that begins with prevention and perfectly understanding how to care for your body, mind and spirit. There is no wizard who can teach you how to keep soreness and discomfort at bay while meeting all of your performance goals in the hypothetical land of Oz. The attainment of vitality through these principles is a continuum- the edges of each blur into one another.
Prevention takes knowledge from reputable sources, learning and trying new things to deduce what works for you. Prevention is made up of practices that optimize your body’s health. Pain remedy starts with not accepting pain as a life sentence, but rather, understanding that is a condition, here to teach you and to be worked through. Performance is something we forget to do sometimes as we age. We think we have arrived in our adult body and we expect it to do the same tasks over and over again. Performance calls us from the ache of the soul: Set goals. Try new things. Remedy old patterns. Change & grow. Keep moving like a child.
Speaking of moving like a child, I can’t play freeze tag anymore. If I did, I would be frozen the whole game. I have lost the ability to run fast and I am working to remedy that issue. My physical therapist, Amanda Lafalce of Wellspring, is giving me minute exercises that are building on one another so that I can get the performance of sprinting back again. This is going to remedy future pain that I would have experienced if I had not paid attention to my weaknesses now. Settling brings pain, y’all. Don’t accept the impediment. Learn from it. As I do these exercises, I am going to prevent pain and also enhance performance. These principles work together. You can’t have one without the others.
So, harness these principles into a program and stick with the practices of wellness that will undoubtedly give you a return on your investment. The payout is vitality. It’s gonna take patience and persistence, but you will produce powerful results.
