The Meaning of Total in Total Health
What is total? Total is all-inclusive. Total is global. Total involves all aspects. Here, total means ‘fully present in the eight parts of your being and your contexts’. Total includes all aspects of nature and human nature that affect feeling and being healthy. If it sounds mysterious, don’t worry. I’ll walk you through it.
Total means everything is there, with nothing left out. In popular press and common understanding, health involves food and fitness, but the truth is that while fitness and food are part of it, they’re only a small part of total health. Total includes what you can learn from using all of your senses and being to observe life, both within yourself and around you.
Total includes all of your nature: presence, life energy, inspired creativity, physical body and survival smarts. It also includes the bigger picture: your social, natural, planetary and ‘extraterrestrial’ (solar system, galaxy, cosmos) contexts. Total is the full, entire amount of something, and includes all your positive and negative feelings, all your thoughts and imaginings, and all your inner impulses and outer reactions.
Total means 100% and contains all opposites. Total includes life and death, pain and pleasure, and sickness and well-being. It embraces darkness and light, love and hate, and inside and outside. It spans silence and sound, nothing and everything, and emptiness and fulfillment. It encloses both depression and inspiration.
Total includes consciousness and energy; perception, interpretation and memory; thought, word, action and outcome. It’s the whole that includes what we ignore, what we learn and what we know.
Total means complete, and includes many levels. There’s space, time, energy and matter, and the energies of light, sound, feeling, smell and taste. Total material levels include electrons, protons, atoms, molecules, and macromolecules. Body levels include organelles, cells, tissues, glands and systems. Social system levels include individuals, families, communities and nations. Planet levels include sunlight, air, water, land and ecosystems. Levels beyond these include solar systems and galaxies. All of these affect health, and all do so in different ways.
Total includes being alone and being with others. By total health, I mean: addressing all of it. It involves both being and doing. It involves attention to all inner and outer events in life. It includes the heavenly bodies, the space within which they unfold, and the forces that create, maintain and move both.
Total health includes all that creates, maintains, damages and repairs. Since the truth is that EVERYTHING affects health, we must give EVERYTHING its due. Total health literally embraces all of everything.
To be totally healthy, you have to give each of the eight parts of total health the care and attention it needs. This might seem like a tall order, but it becomes easier once you know the simple basics that I’m beginning to share.
Until now, you’ve had no road map. Doctors and drug companies’ ads tell you to take more responsibility for your health. But disease management systems do not dispense knowledge of health care, and those who tell you to take a more active role in your health do not provide you with practical ways to do so. How will you give health its due without guidance? It’s not possible. You’ll get helpful guidance toward total health in my book, Total Sexy Health.
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