Spiritual wellness is the quality of being alive in a qualitative way. The spirit causes us to live, gives us vitality, mobility, purpose, and the desire to achieve the highest quality of living in the world. Spirit is central to the primary vision of life and worldview and thereby facilitates Hope.
Understanding of culture gives perspective and vision for life. Perspective and vision are facilitators of hope. When we have our identity in tact we have a belief in both the spirit and physical aspects of life. It’s our spirit that carries our identity because the Creator gave us our spirit, our identity, and no matter how we live our identity persists. As a people, we have a foundation of strength that comes from our creation story which existed from the beginning of time long before colonization and oppression. Our identity has persisted despite all that we have faced as a people. Our inherent values of kindness, caring, honesty and strength are within us when we come into this world.
Emotional wellness is nurtured by our Belonging within interdependent relationship with others and living in relation to creation, including beings in creation, and is at the heart level of our being. Within an Indigenous worldview, being rooted in family, community and within creation as extended family is the foundation of Belonging and relationships.
Our family is more than our biological family. It’s our extended family including all beings in Creation. Our language tells us that all living beings have a spirit, Creation is alive. Our community is about our story of the land, the stories our community holds about who we are as a people and how we live on the land in relationship with Creation. Our relationship with Creation is expressed through our Clan systems. The relationship we have with family and community are important for supporting us throughout the path of life we live. They are the source of wellness and help us always to find the answers we seek about life.
Mental wellness is the conscious and intelligent drive to know and activate our being and becoming. Having a reason for being gives Meaning to life. The mind operates in both a rational and intuitive capacity.
When we have a relationship with family and community we have an attitude toward living life to its fullest, living life motivated by our identity. Our spirit name, clan family and the land we come from and our language helps us to understand our roles, responsibilities, our unique traits, and characteristics… our life has purpose and we have a reason for being. Our cognitive thought and our spiritual thought, which we know as intuition, are critically important for understanding the meaning of our own life. When we weave the two together we have respect, an understanding about our own life. How do we blend our learning from fasting – where we pursue a spiritual understanding about our life, with what we have learned in school and with what our family teaches us about how to live life?
Physical wellness is that way of behaving and doing that actualizes the intention and desire of the spirit in the world. This and the knowledge that the spirit has something to do in the world generates a sense of Purpose, conscious of being part of something that is much greater than we are as an individual. The body is the most outer part of our being and is comprised of the most immediate behavioural aspects of our being.
As Indigenous people, our identity has persisted and so it is still intact. No matter how we live life or how we pray, we have a unique way of being, such as our laughter for example. Our laughter and humor help us not to take life too seriously. Laughter has helped us to cope with life and finding joy in life is foundational to a unique way of being. Way of doing is about the unique ways our culture helps us to live life, such as understanding that the earth is our mother and so we pick berries because we know they are medicine. Berries are the first food from our mother the earth and the berries are as important as a mother’s breast milk is to newborn life. Wholeness is knowing that our body is the home for our spirit and that our spirit, heart, and mind are all interconnected and that they all work inseparably.