WHAT IS WELLNESS? (According to John W. Travis, MD, MPH)
Wellness is a choice—a decision you make to move toward optimal health.
Wellness is a way of life—a lifestyle you design to achieve your highest potential for wellbeing.
Wellness is a process—a developing awareness that there is no endpoint, but that health and happiness are possible in each moment, here and now.
Wellness is a balanced channeling of energy—energy received from the environment, transformed within you, and returned to affect the world around you.
Wellness is the integration of body, mind, and spirit—the appreciation that everything you do, and think, and feel, and believe has an impact on your state of health and the health of the world.
Wellness is the loving acceptance of yourself.
In the early 1970s John W. Travis, MD, MPH, was fulfilling his residency at John's Hopkins and working with the US Public Health Service. A protege of Dr. Lewis Robbins, creator of the Health Risk Appraisal (HRA), Dr. Travis worked on the earliest computerized HRAs, including one used by the CDC. But by the time he completed his residency, he had made a life-altering decision—rather than treating people as a physician he would dedicate his life to teaching people to be well.
Moving to Mill Valley, California, Dr. Travis opened the first wellness center in the United States in 1975, the Wellness Resource Center. A true wellness pioneer, Dr. Travis had developed a model for lifestyle change that focused on self-responsibility, and engaged the whole person—body, mind, emotions, and spirit. "Wellness" was a new term in American culture, and the new center attracted media attention, including Dan Rather at CBS, who featured the new "wellness center" on 60 Minutes.
As he continued to refine his work at the Center, he created the first wellness assessment, the Wellness Inventory, to use as the Center's primary client intake. He captured his philosophy in the now classic Wellness Workbook, which has been used by wellness and health promotion educators in undergraduate and graduate programs in universities for over 25 years.
Dr. Travis’ three key wellness concepts:
1. Wellness is a process, never a static state.
2. Illness and health are only the tip of an iceberg. To understand their causes, you must look below the surface.
3. We are all energy transformers, connected with the whole universe. All our life processes, including illness, depend on how we manage energy.
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