Healthy Living

Feed the body, feed the soul, feed the mind. For me, that's a good a motto as any to "healthy living".

The first one's easy, and not just because of modern people's preoccupation with health care and dieting. If you don't feed the body, you die--as simple as that. And in many ways, humanity's problems stem from this fact. What's poverty, really? It's when you can't feed your family, clothe your family, provide shelter for your family. Hunger is the first problem we must overcome before we can move on to the next.

Of course when I say feed the body, I really mean "a proper diet for the body", but that doesn't sound as catchy. Too much food can be as disastrous as too little. The body isn't a bank but more of an ecosystem: too much in one place disrupts the balance. And this concept is quite easy to understand under a modern paradigm: that's why we have all these dieting techniques, gyms to metabolize all those food we've eaten, and numerous drugs and vitamins and operations to right the wrongs imposed on our body.

Feed the soul is perhaps the most difficult to quantify. What is the soul? That one question will spawn too many books and has actually preoccupied humanity's history. Some people will claim it's religion but I won't limit it to that. I'd go with a more general point of view--it's connecting with humanity, with nature, with the cosmos. Feeding the soul isn't just about nurturing your faith by attending mass or reading the bible, but it could extend to other activities that goes beyond the self--volunteering your services to causes you believe in, participating in outreach programs, or simply meditating on the world around us.

Much like the body, there's such a thing as feeding our soul too much. Yet unlike food, you don't exactly see books and ads advocating "Exercise to cut down excess calories of faith!" or "Differentiate between good spirit and bad spirit!". I still think there's still balance to be maintained when it comes to spirit, however. Too little and people start questioning their self-worth. Too much and we lose focus on the things that matter. Fanatics and zealots are examples of people with too much "soul" but they're not the only ones. It could be a guilt-ridden philanthropist who devotes too much time on the needy than his family--or himself. It could be someone devoting too much time on someone else at the expense of their own physical limitations. It could even be someone who does nothing but meditate--to the point that he or she doesn't contribute to society or make new relationships. There's so many ways in which spiritual imbalance can occur yet society doesn't pay too much focus on that, limiting themselves to the needs of our mortal shells.

Addressing the needs of the soul, however, is something that I think comes naturally when we're done with the needs of the body. We're not aware of it but it's why we seek out relationships, participate in the community, or simply attempt to appease our conscience. I think many people live and die sustaining these two appetites. Which brings me to the third: feed the mind.

Now the mind is a complex thing, although it's less abstract than the soul. Many would think that the mind and the soul are one and the same but I beg to differ. The mind for me is how we think, how we develop, how we perceive the world and make sense of it. Sure, there's room for overlap with the soul (or is perhaps that when we nurture the soul, we are also inadvertently nurturing the mind?) but it is its own creature as well. Surely, we've all heard of brilliant and talented men and women who are geniuses in their own right but lack a certain contentment--perhaps a sign that they had nurtured their mind and not their soul. Perhaps an even better example would be intelligent people whose actions are untempered by morality or ethics--they possess the knowledge but not the wisdom.

Feeding the mind I think is as simple as learning. Read books, listen to advice from other people, satiate your curiosity, and learn to analyze and form your own conclusions. It's something some people take for granted yet it's there. But it's also something that not everyone has access to. People may possess the inquisitiveness to ask questions but they may not find the answers they are looking for. They are hindered by various factors, everything from a lack of resources (no money to pay for the books or a tuition) to social taboos (which happens in certain religions, where certain questions cannot be asked). Some are simply stifled or suppressed (in the case of parental figures determining the profession of their children or a governments practice of censorship or propaganda, or simply an institution's practice of influencing what one should know and what one shouldn't know). There's even situations when we simply don't want to learn or realize the truth, whether we don't want to be burdened by the responsibility of knowledge, or simply because ignorance is truly bliss. But for those who take the brave step, feeding the mind is something we must strive for, especially once the body and the soul are satiated.

Is there such a thing as feeding the mind too much? A century ago, many would probably have said yes, at a time when the current paradigm was that the human brain was a container and for every piece of knowledge we acquired, it was a space that another piece of information wouldn't be able to occupy. But we now know that the human mind works differently and that it is ever expanding and its current limits are still unknown. But in many ways, the limits of the previous paradigm still applies. One can't devote too much time in feeding the mind. It's necessary, of course, but time spent feeding the mind can come at the cost of feeding the body or more importantly, feeding the soul. There are those who simply strive to accumulate knowledge but for what good? Unless it has a purpose, whether practical or theological or philosophical, why bother? And there are those whose appetite for the mind has been displaced by ego, wherein they view themselves superior to the rest of humanity. Are they more learned? Perhaps. But a human who is smarter than another human being does not have the right to belittle other human beings, even if the latter is guilty of ignorance and stupidity (did we not all start out that way?).

Body, soul, and mind. Three aspects that we need to satiate and more importantly, find balance. We must remember that holistic health involves a lot of factors, and while everyone is interested in living a healthy life, they sometimes forget that there's more to living than simply addressing our material concerns.