.jpg)
It is vitally important in our day-to-day lives to have a relationship with our mental health. I often pose to my clientele that we begin our mental health journey from the day that we are born until the day that we die. Since this is the case, it is natural for us to not only be aware of it, but also prioritize the care of it. The stigma associated with caring for our mental health stems from the discomfort that it naturally produces for us from time to time given the circumstances of our lives, as well as many cultural rules and belief systems on how to address such concerns when and if they should arise. From the unique position that I have in my clientele's lives, one of the greatest stigmas stems from the label of mental health itself.
What I see happen so often is that we focus on our mental health as one piece that is broken and must therefore be fixed, rather than for what it is - a vital system that is part of the whole which will naturally have complications. A cultural insistence that we must somehow "fix" how we feel and think only serves to increase the stigma associated with what we naturally experience as humans in our private psychological selves. We certainly do not need barriers that stem from rigid, rule-based belief systems that suggest what we naturally experience as a human is somehow wrong or out of order. Most often our difficult thought and feeling content stems from issues related to things that matter to us. When we treat ourselves as if what we feel and think is wrong or broken, there is a fair assessment that can be made that we are being unfair toward ourselves and what we naturally experience as human beings.
Our toes have always been there with us along with our brains, and do not travel separately from one another. We are each a whole being. The idea that resolutions will only be found by fixing everything from our neckline up cripples our efforts to live a more fulfilled lifestyle. Focus and priority must be given to not only how we are feeling and thinking, but to how we are living and our relationship behaviorally to what we all naturally experience daily in our private psychological sense of selves. Our brains are not broken nor need to be fixed, and our lives are not exclusively lived in the domain of our private psychological experiences.
This May for mental health awareness month, I just want to encourage us all to look at our life for everything that it is and try to develop our relationships with the things we claim matter most to us. Get outside and experience the world for what it has to offer us. Focus on caring for the whole, while appreciating all the parts of what we are. Our brains have always been there with us as a part of the whole, and we must bring that part along for the ride with the whole and not let that single part dictate our life narrative in all we say and do. If you need us here at Mosaic Wellness, we are here for you and would be glad to listen and talk with you.