Mind Body Spirit: An Introduction

June 23, 2007

My time spent working at the hospital was one of the most interesting and educational experiences of my life. It wouldn’t be a stretch to say that I learned more there about human nature, psychology, and humanity than anywhere else - including my 7 year stretch in school.

One of the things that I learned at the hospital was a perspective that we taught to patients called Mind Body Spirit. I thank my older (but not really wiser) friend Richard for showing me this approach. I’m not sure if that’s what he called it (or if it even had a name), but that’s what I’ve named what I’m about to share with you.

Introduction

The basic principle behind Mind Body Spirit is simple: the experience of being human can be divided into three broad categories - Mind, Body, and Spirit. If you were to illustrate the idea, it would look something like this:

Each aspect of our existence contributes something to our overall health and happiness. As you can hopefully see from the illustration, the idea is to end up somewhere in the yellow center section labeled “MBS”. This represents a person who has fully developed each area of their lives and - in theory - suggests a well-rounded, healthy existence.

Problems can arise when a person is more oriented toward one aspect of their lives and neglects another. For example, a person who focuses on the mind aspect of their life might be quite intellectually developed… but may be missing spiritual or physical attributes that hold them back. A person who finds themselves solely in the body sphere might be physically strong and healthy… but may find little value in life because of a lack of any spirituality.

There’s much more to discuss about each section. But since this is just an introduction (and I have four more posts planned to delve into each area in depth) I’ll give you a quick summary of what each area represents.

Mind

Mind represents just what you’d think it would - the human mind. A lot of diverse aspects of our lives fall under the mind category, including: mental health, intelligence and learning, emotions, outlooks, perceptions, behaviors, and the ways in which we bring these things together to process the world around us.

Body

Body represents all things physical and physiological. Medical conditions, healthy diet, exercise, and the way we take care of our physical bodies live here. Hygiene, sleep, medication, drugs, sex, and just about anything else of a physical nature makes up the body sphere.

Spirit

Spirit is admittedly the more difficult aspect of human existence to put specific labels on. Religion, morals, ethics, and everything having to do with the ways in which we connect ourselves the rest of the world make up spirit. Keep in mind here, spirit does not simply equal religion. I know quite a few people that I consider “spiritual” who aren’t necessarily religious. Since there are so many diverse approaches to spirituality, this sphere isn’t as easy to examine as the rest. But it is just as important and - in my opinion - the part of the human experience that gets neglected the most.

As you might have figured out already, a lot of these examples overlap. If you notice the purple, brown, and blue-green areas of the illustration above, you’ll see that the overlap applies to all three areas. As an example, think about “mental health” for a minute (which is a broad umbrella term on its own). It’s impossible to be mentally healthy if you’re not physically healthy as well. If your body isn’t getting the proper ingredients it needs to function, your mind will be less efficient. It’s also much more difficult to process the world around you (mind) if you’ve never explored your spiritual beliefs.

My plan, as I said before, is to explore each area in more detail in a future post. I’m sure this introduction has probably raised some questions or even suggested something that you don’t agree with. And that’s good! Part of the process that goes along with exploring the Mind Body Spirit idea is to question and think and analyze the areas you need to further invest in. Hopefully by the end of the series you’ll agree with me that these are important parts of our lives.

I’ve set up a special “permanent series” page for this exploration because, unlike a couple of my other series, these aren’t tied to any specific time of my life. I’ve also created a blank diagram like the one above that you can use to make notes and “plot” on. It’s quite an interesting experience when you sit down and try to figure out where you fall on vin diagram! But in case you want to print them out and use them along the way, here they are:

Stay tuned for the next post in the series that will deal with the Mind aspect.  And feel free to throw out an introductory questions, comments, or discussions in the comments below.  Just keep in mind that more details are coming.  You don’t think I’d put this up without any plans to elaborate, right?  That’d just be mean… haha!

This post is part of a series called “Mind Body Spirit“. Visit the main series page for more posts in a series.

Posted in Human Nature, Noteworthy, Series

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