Updated on March 16, 2023
The term mental health is one that many are familiar with these days. The good thing, is it takes the taboo out of therapy in countries that haven’t yet fully embraced self-development as a positive thing.
But I want to look at the term mental health and why I find it in part, limiting.
It’s wonderful to have awareness and understand our patterns and behaviours. And it’s great that our society wants to make sure we’re mentally healthy. What I’m interested in though, is knowing that we’re healthy on all levels.
A holistic view on mental health would be to ask ourselves how we’re doing emotionally, physically and spiritually as well. We deify the mind and though the mind is a great tool, it should be the servant and not the master.
The mind is often the last on board. Most of our experience happens in our physical, emotional and cellular body. The mind’s role is to find a way to process all of our experiences and somehow make sense of them. Most often our mind is in reaction to our experience, which means it’s unconscious. When we begin to learn about our beliefs, patterns and behaviours, for example, we learn how to make our experiences more conscious and therefore can choose how we want to respond rather than react to something.
But on a deeper level, we have to build the awareness of how we are feeling within our experience. Our emotions are messengers that are constantly trying to communicate with us and our sensations in our body act as a barometer to how we’re feeling.
If we only stay in the realm of the mental, we’re looking at ourselves one dimensionally. Also, a thought that isn’t attached to a feeling, becomes empty words that don’t have much meaning to us.
We might say affirmations, for example, but the mind can easily learn by rote, go on repeat but no affect is felt because the mental thought only goes skin deep. The mental needs to be tied to the emotional for us to change our experience. A thought alone gives us a mental awareness but doesn’t help us necessarily evolve the pattern we’re wanting to grow out of.
If we look at mental health holistically, we can look at the story our mind is telling us, the beliefs that go with that story and the patterns that manifest out of them. From there we have to drop in.
We go into the body, into the sensations (barometer) and the emotions (messengers) within those sensations. Deep in the emotion we find a memory which leads us to the wound. Once we reach the wound we can go directly to the unmet need and finally give ourselves what we’ve been needing for most of our lives.
We then learn to alchemise our experience through feeling. Which means we give ourselves the feeling that we have been missing. We think it’s external validation, approval, love etc. Really, whatever we’re yearning for from the outside, is an indication of what we need to give to ourselves (and embody) on the inside.
This is part of the process I take my clients through when I guide them back home to their true, Authentic Self.
We cannot truly have mental health unless we include our emotional health. Just like we have IQ, our EQ is equally important. When we take a holistic perspective, we realise that we actually have three brains, or three centres of intelligence: the mind, the heart and the gut. But that will be a separate blog post so stay tuned!
