WELLNESS FROM WITHIN

We are slowly making sense of a global pandemic that has hit us with shock and awe. It resulted in an impact on many dimensions of our life that is unthinkable in recent times. ‘Wellness’ has become a household name connecting humanity beyond borders, colours and races. We are fighting an invisible enemy that has caused severe devastation to our friends and families across the globe. No family was an exception in this process, as some survived, some suffered through it, and some barely made it. Some felt lucky to have come out clean on the other side. The first two years of the Covid pandemic had posed a severe threat to our existence as scientists across the globe grappled with figuring a way out of this. All options were open on the table; antibiotics, antiviral drugs, vaccines and many more home remedies to help us boost the immune system to fight the enemy disguised as a living yet nonliving creature called a virus. As the vaccines came out, we had a hope of relief. We continue to ride wave after wave, boosting our capacity to swim across this tsunami flood that took the world by surprise. Though we are coming to terms with this pandemic, we haven’t fully recovered from it.

Everyday we can see in the far distant horizons of the sky the beautiful sunrise and sunset, which makes its splendid appearance without a change, but the uncertainty of our Wellness is evident. How do we regain our freedom to live healthy on our terms? Can we take charge of our Wellness that was hijacked in a flash of a moment? Or Was it a delusion that we always had control over our Wellness? Do we have the capacity to deal with such catastrophic risks to our Wellness? Can our health care systems handle such massive outbreaks in the future? Are there approaches that we could take to empower us from within to create and sustain Wellness? Where do we go from here?

The Covid pandemic has caused such great havoc to human Wellness, and a plethora of these questions still torment us. But there is a silent epidemic that has been in the making for a few decades now. The Virus does not cause this silent epidemic. It is caused by an invisible enemy that cannot be seen even with the most powerful microscopes but is deeply rooted in our microcosm; in our minds, in the form of choices that we make in our day-to-day life with regard to the way we eat, sleep, exercise and relate to each other. The patterns of habits ingrained in our subconscious play a vital role in the manifestation of these illnesses. The root cause is embedded in the Human Conscience. This silent epidemic is called NCDs or NonCommunicable Diseases (Diabetes, Cardiovascular disease and Cancer) and Mental Illness.The Covid pandemic had taken 6.25 million lives in the past two years, whereas the NCDs claim 40 million lives each year. We can imagine the scale of the threat we have been living with for many years now in the form of illness because of our lifestyles.

The reality that the Covid pandemic brought to light is not much about the threat we have from the microbes like viruses but the ability of our body and Mind to deal with such microbes now and in the future. It raised the question of preparedness as individuals and the strategy to handle inner enemies in our microcosm. It presents a concern about whether we are a slave to the destiny dictated by the microbes or do we have the innate potential to prepare our inner warfare to shoot down the enemy when it penetrates our systems and organs. The World Health Organization and other global medical research agencies have time and again clearly communicated that people with the weaker immune system, people who are suffering from Cardiovascular disease, Hypertension, Diabetes, Immune system disorders and people who have been addicted to tobacco and alcohol were highly susceptible to complications of Covid leading to death. There was a clear pattern of complications and deaths that are an outcome of Covid in individuals who were vulnerable to the disease because of preexisting conditions. These conditions mainly were NCDs which made them vulnerable to the complications of contagious illnesses like Covid. So, we see a double-edged sword stabbing human existence from all directions, the NCDs causing massive mayhem by predisposing individuals to pandemics like Covid and potentially any future outbreaks of other microbial infestations. We don’t need complex logic or mathematical theorems to prove that the root cause of NCDs is human ignorance and subconscious vices lurking in the corners of the human Mind. The threat from Covid may be gone soon, but the impending disatser from NCDs is here to stay unless we take concrete action.

We all start our journey in the mother’s womb as a single cell Zygote and it become this complex organism that performs various functions without much of our intervention. But with our faulty lifestyles and self destructive habits, we transform this human miracle into misery. Pursuing ultimate comforts in life, we have made phenomenal progress in the material world and translated them to make our life comfortable, convenient, and complacent. These innovations and technological leaps are so fast and massive that sometimes it feels like the evolution of machines and technology undermines human potential. Especially alarming is how we have rapidly increased the speed of computation to replace human intelligence with an artificial one. Even though we have been attaining many physical luxuries, we have been losing inner peace, serenity, and happiness, which directly impact many aspects of Wellness in our day-to-day lives. In the early stages of human evolution, the biggest threat was from contagious diseases and natural calamities. We have invented many methods of tackling these challenges with vaccines, antibiotics, modern medicine, and surgery. Even though we have made mind-blowing innovations in medical science, we have started to fall victim to the vices of the mind leading to NCDs, i.e. “lifestyle diseases.” We have begun to succumb to the selfdestructive patterns and illnesses that result from faulty lifestyles and an ignorant attitude toward our most precious resource: the body and mind. We have abused our greatest gift, ourselves. The current state of “Wellness” is a paradox. On one side, we have made many advancements in medical science. Still, we have utterly failed in simpler aspects of taking care of the mind and body. We cannot blame an outside agent or organism for our sickening state of well-being. We are reaping what we have sown. We have ignored and abused our health in the rat race of life. But with simple lifestyle changes, these lifestyle diseases can be prevented (and cured). Our thought processes which are completely off track from our natural state of well-being, are to be blamed. The choices that we make from the way we eat, what we eat, how we eat, how we exercise, how we rest, how we treat ourselves and how we treat others have brought us to this state.

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