Wellness is first and foremost a choice to assume responsibility for the quality of your life. It begins with a conscious decision to shape a healthy lifestyle. Every time you make a decision it is either good for your health and moves you towards wellness or it's not good for you and moves you towards illness.

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Key Concept 2: Illness and Health are only the tip of an iceberg. To understand their causes you must look below the surface.

Icebergs reveal only about one-tenth of their mass above the water. Your current state of health, be it one of disease or vitality, is just like the tip of the iceberg. This is the apparent part - what shows. If you don't like it you can attempt to change it, do things to it, chisel away at an unwanted condition. But, whenever you knock some off, more of the same comes up to take its place.

To understand what creates and supports your current state of health, you have to look underwater.
The first level encountered below the waterline is the lifestyle/behavioural level – what you eat, how to use and exercise your body, how you relax and let go of stress, and how you safeguard yourself from the hazards around you.

Many people follow lifestyles that they know are destructive to their own well-being, to the people around them and to the planet. Yet many feel powerless to change the way they live. To understand, it is necessary to look still deeper, to the next cultural/psychological/motivational level. Here we find what moves us to lead the lifestyle we’ve chosen. We learn how our cultural norms and our families influence us in subtle yet powerful ways from a very early age. Investigating this level, we also can become conscious of any ongoing psychological payoffs we have that are based on early life experiences and, ultimately what their cost is to our physical and mental well-being.

Exploring down below the cultural/psychological/motivational level, there is the deepest spiritual/being/meaning level. It includes the mystical, mysterious, metaphysical, and everything else in the subconscious mind and concerns such issues as your reason for being, the meaning of life, and your place in the universe. How you address these questions, and the answers you choose underlie and permeate all levels above. The realm ultimately determines whether the tip of the iceberg, representing your state of health, will be one of disease or wellness.

1972, 1981, 2004 John W. Travis. From Wellness Workbook by John W. Travis, MD, and Regina Sara Ryan
www.wellnessworkbook.com