What conditions do you need to thrive? What makes you feel better than okay? What do you need to grow and enjoy life?
When we practice well-being, we build up our resilience, the physical, mental and social contingency to cope better with adverse experiences in the future and enjoy life.
So what is well-being for you?
We often tend to think about liberation from something, which is a process of becoming free of barriers, abuse, challenges, and limitations. However, we can also think about liberation to or towards something. Liberation towards a better way of being. Liberation to have freedom of gender expression. Liberation to read any book you wish to read.
Yes, healing can be the mending of something broken, but it can also be the return to a previous, healthier way of being; a reconnection with a more nurturing community; finding our way back to our roots, our identity, and reconnecting with ourselves. It is a process of getting better.
In liberation psychology, it could be moving to a more nurturing community or learning the acts of resistance to advocate for our well-being.
What is recovery for you?
Having a diagnosis can be helpful as it leads to reasonable adjustments at school and work and adequate medical support. However, in some communities and situations, it can also lead to labelling, biased treatment or even discrimination and abuse.
When we are not well, we suffer, we are in pain. How do we define disease? How do we recognise it, prevent it and support healing?
Since today in the UK is the #TimeToTalk day, it is essential to remind ourselves that mental health is an integral part of our health too. As a critical part of our functioning and thriving in society, mental health can be considered a natural extension and a pre-condition of physical and social health.
A very powerful way of starting a sentence in a compassionate voice is “I accept… (that I acted this way in this situation and I am able to forgive myself and learn from this, move forward)”. Not only that this way of looking at things feels actively comforting and supportive, but it also taps into a mindful observation of things as they are without self-judgement. And if you find it difficult to speak to yourself this way, pause and ask yourself: how can I talk to myself from the place of love, from my heart? Because compassion and compassionate journalling comes from our heart and helps us heal.