The Joy of Well-Being by Colleen and Jacob Wachob

Book Review of The Joy of Well-Being by Colleen and Jacob Wachob

Intentions help you see the big picture…. Practices ground you in the moment…. The secret is to develop the ability to listen to your body and to be intentional about incorporating well-being into your life…. We are mostly sedentary creatures…. Our front stoops and backyards are not spontaneous meeting places…. Having a sense of purpose and a sense of what makes your life meaningful is linked to better health and a longer life…. We know these things are bad: chronic stress, lack of sleep, financial insecurity, aimlessness, and loneliness. You are the one who has to live with the consequences of your health decisions, so you have to be the one to call the shots…. If you don’t have a diagnosis, it’s impossible to get help from medical doctors.

The nine chapters of the book are about learning how to get those answers and to achieve better results:

• What well-being looks like (it’s not the same as wellness)
• How to breathe and be mindful
• Sleep: A Vital sign
• Eat real food (not processed and packaged food)
• Just move it
• Stress
• Regenerate your brain cells
• Something Bigger than Ourselves

If your spiritual, physical, or emotional life is compromised, it creates a domino effect in the other areas…. A healthy change you make has to be a joyful one…. health is more than the absence of disease…. Maintaining mental health, whether it’s fending off anxiety and depression or just finding more pleasure in life, has never been more important.

Aside from just meeting our basic human needs, relationships are what bring us joy and meaning…. It’s not easy to set them as high priorities…. While purpose and spirituality play a part in our health and happiness, a lot is still unknown…. You can eat right, exercise, and do all those things, but if you don’t have a sense of purpose or a belief in something bigger than yourself, you will miss a critical part of well-being…. Money, power, pleasure, and fame are fleeting and unreliable. They also offer diminishing returns…. We are deeply connected on a cellular, vibrational, and spiritual level that we cannot see. But we have the ability to tap in transcendence…. We can experience that when we have a sense of oneness with others, when we develop another perspective than preoccupation with ourselves…. Although there is value in structure and in holding yourself accountable, the world is always changing, and we must be able to deal with that.

These random quotes offer some of the tone of the book, but they don’t explain the details. Although the authors are physical trainers, they clearly believe there is more to life than simply the physical manifestation of what our senses experience. We have to do more than just go through a routine, we have to learn how to experience joy in what we do and how we live.

For more information see MindBodyGreen.com.

This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.