Dr. Peter J. Weiss

Today I’d like to talk to you a lit­tle bit about total health — your mind, your body and your spirit.

You’re only one being. You’re not three sep­a­rate beings. You’re not a per­son with the mind, a per­son with the spirit and a per­son with the body — you’re just a per­son.

Body, mind and spirit are all inter­twined, and some­how we seem to have for­got­ten that in today’s day and age. We’ve got the doc­tors for the body, the psy­chol­o­gists and the psy­chi­a­trists for the mind, and the min­is­ters for the spirit.

But it’s really not that way. Everything’s con­nected. You’re just one per­son some­how with all of these things inter­mixed, and your total health is really just that — your total health.

So we can think of the mind, body and spirit as kind of sep­a­rate things, but also think of them as in a rela­tion­ship where they all affect each other. Some­times this seems like news to us.

A study is done and it says that med­i­ta­tion low­ers the blood pres­sure — so that work­ing on your emo­tions and your spirit can help your phys­i­cal body. That’s big news. Or vice versa.

They’ll show that exer­cise helps depres­sion, so going out there work­ing and doing some phys­i­cal work helps your emo­tions, and this is big news.

We’re con­stantly see­ing lit­tle tid­bits like this — a sci­en­tific study shows prayer does this, a sci­en­tific study shows med­i­ta­tion does that, a sci­en­tific study shows exer­cise helps with your emo­tions, a sci­en­tific study shows how you eat influ­ences your emo­tions. Well this shouldn’t be sur­pris­ing to us.

We don’t need to use sci­ence to dis­sect the com­plex rela­tion­ships between mind, body and spirit. We just need to under­stand that the rela­tion­ship is there and that it all mat­ters.

So if you do some­thing good for your mind, it’s good for your body and spirit. If you do some­thing good for your spirit, it’s good for your body and your mind. If you do some­thing good for your body, it’s good for your emo­tional health and good for your spir­i­tual health as well.

The prob­lem is, that if you do some­thing bad for one of those com­po­nents, it’s bad for the other com­po­nents as well.

So if your emo­tions are totally out of whack from the way that you’re feed­ing your emo­tional sys­tem, maybe on TV or the wrong kind of mag­a­zines, it’s going to affect your spir­i­tual life and it’s going to affect your body adversely too. If you’re feed­ing your body bad food, if you’re seden­tary and do not treat your body well, it’s going to affect your emo­tions and it’s going to affect your spir­i­tu­al­ity.

And if you’re not spir­i­tual, maybe you ought about think­ing about becom­ing spir­i­tual, because work­ing on your spir­i­tu­al­ity can affect your emo­tional state and your body in a pos­i­tive way.

So just accept that all of these things are con­nected. You don’t have to know how they’re con­nected.

We don’t need more sci­en­tific stud­ies to tell us this does that. We just need to accept that doing some­thing good for any part of the mind, the body or the spirit helps the other two parts as well and helps our total health. So work on your total health.