Freedom Philosophy

I am back in session for graduate school focused for the next few months on Health Psychology. One of my goals for this course is to find something that I write on the grad forums that might be of value to a broader audience and post it here. This week none of my assigned responses seemed worth sharing. However, one of the topics that has come up frequently at this point has been how to integrate eastern and western approaches to health and healing.

A key concept related to that is “health as a continuum” that is far more than a two state affair of sickness and health but more a matter of degree. One of my classmates wrote that during her childhood when she was healthy no one ever questioned her level of health as if it were on a continuum. She was “not sick” so that’s what mattered. I wrote this response about taking health for granted.

Photo Taken on a Similar but Different Day than the Story

“For me a big part of exercise is putting myself into situations of calculated risk. A game of soccer has never had the same appeal to me as rockclimbing or a mountain descent on my bike. Every once in a long while I get injured and am usually quite surprised and even dumbfounded a little. I clipped a tree about 3 years ago on my snowboard just as I was setting up to drop off a small cliff. The tree threw me out of the jump and I just dropped like a stone into fortunately deep powder. While I didn’t break anything it really hurt, particularly the arm that caught the tree. I guess what I am getting at is that part of me also operates in a false state of denial. Regardless of our various involvement with risk, I think that an assumption of heath is the norm. After all, just seconds before I fell off that snowy ledge I was carving fluid turns through deep powder with an ear-to-ear grin.”

Counselling Study, Health, Wellness, & Nutrition, Winter Sports