Wellness Starts at Home

These past weeks, I have adopted staying home, keeping my distance and disinfecting as primary strategies for maintaining my physical health. Both physical and mental health are critically important to maintain during this very challenging time. For mental health, I have been incorporating creative ways to express support and gratitude.

Something I’ve come to appreciate is that wellness always starts at home. Wellness is also very important at work, but it is not the same for several reasons. For one, few of us have sufficient control in the workplace to ensure it provides for our individual wellness needs. Second, our wellness beliefs and behaviors are typically shaped long before we ever take our first job; by early life experiences taking place within the home. Generally speaking, most learn that home life is supposed to be the antidote to whatever toxicity we should expect to experience at work. Whether it actually is, or not is a separate matter.

Support and gratitude play an important role in our lives at home and work. At work, we too often waste inordinate amounts of energy in the pursuit of support and gratitude from others for what we do. In many cases we pursue it for good reasons; chief among them being that without it, we rarely advance in any meaningful way. No advancement equals no new pay, no new challenges and fewer accomplishments. Support and gratitude are therefore commonly withheld in the belief that doing so can control the outputs of others to one’s advantage. The unhealthy culture of work diminishes support and gratitude into forms of currency for transaction; offered only exchange for something of value to us.

The coexistence of a transaction mindset along with imbalances in power have a profound impact on our lives. Most deeply, it impacts our motivation and the development of our work products. This is true of our work products both personally and professionally. The impact is not positive. Some of us have learned about transactions from an early age; utilized at home in order to get needs met by distant parents. In some cases that mindset simply continues into our work life to our ongoing detriment. We view life generally as a set of transactions with otherwise disinterested parties, offering little of ourselves without a positive assurance of ‘what’s in it for me.’

What a transformation it can be to freely offer gratitude and support without expectation; knowing that it is abundant within us to give. What many of us are discovering during this extended period staying at home, is how well we really are. In learning to survive in the world of transactions, has our home life preserved our ability to use our abundant internal resources in order to thrive? Are we still strong enough to use these resources to the benefit of ourselves and others?

During a pandemic we can’t offer support and gratitude in direct exchange for our health, our paycheck, or our next meal. Nonetheless, the powerful displays of support and gratitude from people’s homes throughout the world are lifting spirits beyond our circumstances. That spirit has inspired countless acts of generosity that help those in greatest need. Being in a position to know or discover these resources within us is liberating. Doing so in tandem with self-sacrifice can even be enlightening.

Is the world of transaction, represented as ‘the economy’ so important to some because it’s what puts food on their table or is it because it is the only way some know how to operate in this world? In some cases the former is true, but in some cases the latter (or both) is true. Such scarcity forges some unique and tragic alliances during these times. Nonetheless, I believe the power of our collective abundance of spirit will lift us through these times together. With that, I remain grateful and hopeful for our future.