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When I lost my health, doing everything right, and by everything, I mean eating all of the ‘right’ foods and working out at least once a day, I realized everything right wasn’t right for me. No matter what anyone said, the best health plan didn’t pan out for me.
At the time, I had no idea how much of a blessing this was. It felt like a battle I had lost.
My body failed, and everything I knew about health was wrong. I was left with nothing.
But a few years into my healing journey, I started to realize it wasn’t necessarily what I was doing that was wrong. I had just failed to recognize how it was influencing my internal state.
I lived fixated on the external metrics of health. What I could count, measure, or time. It was always about what I did and never about how my body reacted to what I did.
It was always about doing more and attempting to arrive at some far-off destination.
But this was wrong. I was wrong. Arguably, the entire health space has it wrong.
It’s not about what you do. Health is about how your body reacts to what you do.
This understanding eliminates the idea that there is a to-do list or a perfect health plan that will fix you. Things aren’t good or bad, healthy or unhealthy; they can be either, depending on how your body reacts. How your body reacts is understood through the foundations of bioenergetics.
In this podcast, I introduce the study of bioenergetics and how it connects your entire lifestyle, proving that health is more than what you eat and how you move. Health is everything about your life, from the air you breathe to the relationships you interact with. Proving why even the best health plan might not work for you.
Everything may be separate, but it’s all connected, and we need to focus on that connectedness.
Make sure you listen to the podcast to transform your image of health. To stop fighting it and start living it.
The Best Health Plan For You
I repeatedly get asked to tell people exactly what they should do. “Give me a list.” Give me a meal plan.” Everyone wants the tangible steps that make health practical. I’m not opposed to a good practical list. Health requires action, but the list is only as good as the motive driving the action and how your body responds.
It’s hard to understand if you stand too close. We’re generally so focused on the external shell of our lives that we neglect to understand what is happening within us.
But health is within you, which requires you to zoom out and see that everything you encounter in life impacts your health. It’s not about having the best health plan. It’s about recognizing that health is so much more than a plan.
Health includes more than what you eat and how much you move. It is your life.
Health encompasses your entire life.
I don’t say that to scare you but to free you because it’s really not just about what you do. It’s how you live.
We’re far too quick to compartmentalize life into specific and separate segments. Your health, faith, and relationship segments may be separate on their own. Everything seems to live within its own box, but in reality, they’re all flowing together.
Of course, we don’t segment without reason. It’s natural as an act of control and to provide safety. It’s learned rather than designed, and in the end, it only keeps you from making the progress you’d like to see because nothing in life is segmented and separate.
Your entire life is interconnected.
If you want to get healthy, you have to see your whole life. And you have to see health in it all, not in specific segments. Health is in your relationships, in your career, in your morning routine, and in your extracurricular activities. It’s in (or out) of everything.
The Power of Health Essence
There is no best health plan that everyone follows because health isn’t really a plan. I’s a lifestyle that makes up what is known as your health essence.
Technically speaking, the word essence is defined as the intrinsic nature or indispensable quality of something, especially something abstract, that determines its character.
Your essence is a character trait. It’s a description, a foundation. It’s a defining word.
Such as freedom is the essence of democracy.
It’s not negotiable, but it helps shape every decision. It’s a pathway, part of you. And it’s how you shape your life.
Of course, not all things make up your essence, but I do believe health is one of them. For you to feel healthy, it must become part of you. It must be part of your essence.
When health becomes that, it’s no longer about working to achieve health but about living it.
It’s tough to explain and even more difficult to understand because it’s not necessarily an action. It just is.
It’s not doing things as much as how you do them. It’s a way of life more than a set of rules.
And the way of life is what shapes the outcome of your life.
That’s why I think this topic is so important. Your essence makes up you, and it takes away the chase of health and helps you live in it—not for it but through it—so you can fully live your life.
Creating a Health Essence
Understanding this transformed the way I healed. I went from working to fix my problems to understanding it wasn’t really my problems that needed to be fixed. My body was perfectly capable. It was about creating the right environment for my body to heal, which came from developing the right mindset around healing.
Sitting on the verge of a life-altering disease, I had to make the choice to stay stuck or to live. Honestly, the choice was easy. I think it is for most people who find themselves here.
I was faced with the realization that life isn’t about avoiding sickness. It’s about living. It’s not about chasing health but using health to live. And not living just to get by, but to completely shift what I was living for.
We often get this backward, and I think it stalls us out. We make health the purpose of life, but it was never intended to be that, so it can’t be that. Attempting to make it that is a dangerous game because health isn’t constant. It’s not guaranteed forever, which makes it a threat all in itself.
Health is not the purpose of life. Health is the tool to live life. When I started to see it that way, and when you see it that way, I hope you recognize it’s not a destination but how you live. It’s an essence—an energy—that supports your purpose.
I might be talking in circles, but it’s a big change that must be understood.
And if you can start to see it, to choose health and make it an essence more than a to-do list, I promise it changes everything about what you do. It changes the reaction of your biology.
Make sure you tune into this podcast to learn more about health essence and how to live in health instead of for it.
In the meantime, here are a few ways to understand your health essence.
6 Laws of Developing Health Essence
01. It’s A Choice
Health essence isn’t something you create. It’s a choice you make. It’s not about picking the perfect path, or controlling a situation, it’s just choosing to show up and live out health no matter where life has you. Health is a choice, and that choice is your essence.
02. It’s a Constant
Just as health essence is a choice, it’s also a constant. Unlike the external produce of ‘health,’ the essence of health does not change no matter what you are going through or the current situation of your day-to-day. Your essence is how you respond to what you do rather than changing you. This alone provides so much safety.
03. It’s Rooted In a Strong Sense of Self-Identity
Growing up, I believed that a strong sense of self-identity was selfish. But I’ve later learned a lack of identity is what enacts the selfish parts of us because, without a sense of self, you are constantly searching and thus worried about yourself. The view of the world becomes smaller as you become larger. It’s the opposite of what you would think. But a strong sense of self gives you the security and confidence to fully embrace life. To live, take risks, and thrive, not live in scarcity.
Health essence is born out of a strong self-identity.
04. It Shapes Your Daily Life
You have an essence you live out of—we all do. It may be out of fear or self-hate. But you are living out an essence, and that essence shapes your minute-by-minute decisions. It determines the consistent action you’ll stick with and powers the motivation behind what you do. Developing a health essence makes health simple because it’s not about working for it but using it to live.
05. It Creates Energy
Energy is one of the most supportive and safety factors determining the course of your biology. Most people are living out of a deficit of energy that sucks the life out of them and ignites a host of safety mechanisms that tend to derail their health. Not because you want it to but because that’s what happens when you live out of lack.
But health essence is its own form of energy. It’s a sense of safety that works to maintain and create energy in every life situation. It’s a shift from thinking you need to fix your body to recognize you’re not a body that needs fixed but filled.
06. It Creates Health Freedom and Flexibility
My favorite law of health essence is that it creates health freedom and flexibility because it rips away the plan, the counting, and the to-do list, proving health is not about checking off a list; it’s creating health in each moment and recognizing it flows throughout your entire life. Health essence allows you to show up each day and provide what you need because you’re aware of what you need, and in this, you can be flexible and capable of changing as your body changes.
This is health. It’s an essence.
Want to Develop Your Own Health Essence?
First, you have to admit no matter how much one claims to have the ‘best health plan,’ you must remember that doesn’t really exist. Health is more than a plan. It’s a lifestyle. Health is an essence.
That means living health is about creating this essence, making it part of you, and taking action without thinking or working. You just do it because it’s who you are. Of course, this still requires you to do something, but that something is within the scope of your entire life, not the segmented versions of health we’ve created.
This summer, I want to help you create a health essence. To live it.
Inside my NOURISH 30 Challenge, you will use the tools available to start creating health and live it out. The challenge is FREE!
