Wellness has become a popular blanket term used to describe the word “health”. “Health” shares the same root as the word “holy”, “hello” and “whole” and originally it is about a sense of oneness. It even alludes to the notion of oneness with God, if you consider its association to the words “whole” and “holy”, so then you could say that being in a state of health meant you were at one with the divine. As a matter of interest, the word “disease” comes from two syllables “dis” meaning “not,” and the word “ease” from the Latin root “adjacent,” meaning to be next to or beside. Therefore the literal meaning of “disease” means not to be next to or beside, which is about separation. I think this is interesting because when you think about health and disease in our society, and oneness, we don’t think in terms of our relationship to each other but in physical symptoms. Wellness is about the quality of the relationship of feeling whole. It’s about developing a consciousness that seeks the qualities of oneness and releases the elements of separation.
This is where sustainable and non-sustainable values come in again. Since non-sustainable values are about being better than other people, they are separation consciousness behaviours and these are the types of behaviours, our stories, which get in the way of wellness. Our stories are so engrained that they have us repeating behavioural patterns, reinforcing our ignorance to recognise them and avoidance in dealing with them, what we refer to as the three poisons.
EAP offers a strategy to help overcome them. The first part of the program is about being honest; it gets you to ask yourself, “Where am I now?” to identify where you’re at in life. Secondly, to become better informed, we encourage you to think about what it would be like if you just kept the aspects of your life that served you, or took those things that didn’t and instead did them in a way that would really serve you. EAP gets you to imagine the reality of a life that is based on sustainable values, creating a gap between the reality and the imagination- a sort of continuum. Knowing you need change but not knowing how to make it happen is how we get stuck in the disease. People who are aware but unenlightened tend to keep reverting back to their old habits. The only way to become enlightened is to stay the witness and the observer of how your life turns up in relation to these things. Having someone tell you how to achieve your goals and force you to follow a strategy isn’t going to make sustainable changes. EAP is unique in the way that it brings people to the point where they can make a choice about what does and doesn’t serve them, so they can see for themselves how to bridge the gap between their current and imagined reality.
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