Purpose and Meaning

communicating the importance of the spiritual component of H2F

I’ve been giving introduction briefs on all the wellness associated resources we have on our installation for incoming Soldiers for the past couple weeks, and it has gotten me thinking about the most succinct way to communicate how I conceive of holistic health and fitness (H2F). At this point, I’ve become fairly convinced that spiritual fitness is the foundation of optimal human performance, so long as you are measuring this performance on the broadest possible time scale.¹ In the H2F system we delineate five domains of strength/readiness to communicate how optimal health is the product of these interdependent factors and develop interventions targeting each. These five domains are sleep, nutrition, physical, mental, and spiritual. If you can understand what the spiritual domain is, then I believe you are in a much better position to achieve it.

Spiritual Readiness

Everyone has a purpose, even if they don’t know what that purpose is. You probably have more than one, in fact. If you want to understand what your purpose is, you must look within. Once you know what your purpose is, living a life that is consistent with that purpose will give your life meaning. This is the essence of spiritual readiness. If this seems too simple to be true, I agree, but it is the truth nevertheless. Many times in life if we dig deep and think clearly enough, we can see that the truth is simple. Simple does not mean easy however. Before we talk about the hard part, let me share a quick video to ward off criticism of the above formulation by any chagrined nihilists who may have stumbled upon my 'stack.

Mental Readiness (the hard part)

I’ve discussed Master Resiliency Training (MRT) and the positive psychology that this U.S. Army train-the-trainer program is based on, but since I have some new subscribers (and repetition is the key to adult learning) I’ll reiterate here how I conceive of positive psychology and the MRT framework. Basically, I consider positive psychology/MRT to be synonymous with the mental domain of strength in the H2F system. Your overall mental strength can be thought of as the product of six² interdependent domains of mental competence, namely, self-awareness, self-regulation, mental agility, understanding the (innate) character strengths of yourself and others, building connection, and optimism. Since I feel confident enough to highlight spiritual readiness as a priority, I’ll continue that trend and say that self-awareness represents an excellent priority for anyone hoping to enhance mental strength, as divining your purpose without well developed self-awareness competency is… prohibitively difficult.

Understanding Interdependence Requires RHB Dominance (I Think)

The way all of these things relate is not linear. To give you an example of how I flip flop on this stuff, I often tell people to prioritize sleep readiness first. After all, it is difficult to reflect deeply on what your purpose is in this world when you’re sleep deprived! Then again, can you fix your chronic sleep issues without being spiritually fit? If you’re not sleeping well while engaging in behaviors that make some people wonder how you can sleep at night, that represents quite the paradox, doesn’t it? It just goes to show that the earlier you get started with this stuff, the better. If you aren’t spiritually aligned and/or you are regularly engaging in behaviors that make you ethically numb (as is the norm in the U.S. Army), it can become very easy to unhook from this path.³

The Genius of Methodological Dualism

If you’ve noticed that I haven’t delved into where this subjective purpose you find within comes from, it is because I think it makes understanding the fundamental nature of how to walk the wellness path nearly impossible. The answers to those questions will be quite different for each individual, and delving into those values and preferences transitions us from the realm of “is” to the realm of “ought.” Just as we can thank David Hume for clarifying this for all of humanity in A Treatise On Human Nature (1739), we can thank Ludwig von Mises for recognizing that to understand complex social phenomena (such as economics), that looking under the hood causes more confusion than it resolves in Human Action (1949). When we’re trying to understand the motivations, intentions, and optimal path of a single individual these mechanisms become centrally important. For describing a process as it applies to all humans, it is folly.

The Wellness Path

Everyone who has achieved optimal spiritual readiness is de facto on the wellness path. If you know what your purpose is, then you will endeavor to live a life consistent with that purpose. As your strength increases across the interdependent domains of H2F, you become ever more aligned as your actions become increasingly purposeful and effective parallel to your increasing competence. Anyone on this path will have no doubt that their life has meaning. One purpose I see for myself in this world is trying to make stepping onto this path more alluring than any alternative. Perhaps I just want as much company as possible on my journey. Are you on the path? If not, why not? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

1. The entire life of the individual in question is the appropriate timescale in which to consider what constitutes truly optimal human performance in this case. To illustrate, consider the virtuoso musician or the professional athlete driven to excellence by, lets say, deep and profound emotional insecurity. While they may play at the highest venue or win an Olympic gold medal, these achievements will not sate their spiritual thirst. Often the achievement triggers recognition of this fact and earnest introspection which can produce spiritually enlightened human beings with unique and profound insights to share. Other times, not knowing how to handle the fact that all of their hard work wasn’t able to result in the outcome they truly desired leads to depression, drug abuse, and yes, even suicide.

2. I know what you’re thinking, another list, really? Yes, really. I don’t think of the domains of H2F and MRT as being the end-all-be-all of wellness as much as I think of them as a highly useful and nearly comprehensive manner of assigning language to real factors that exist in reality. These definitions are not all-inclusive, and there is considerable overlap (hence the reiteration that they are all interdependent). I find that specific definitions of various aspects of the whole facilitates ratiocination with respect to how the understand the big picture. Understanding the big picture makes it much easier to plan out an optimal path for any individual looking to deliberately emphasize personal wellness.

3. Any readers with a psychology background might have noticed that I just slipped in some language from the ACT model. I do this to demonstrate that these models are all attempting to help us interact with something that is real and true, even if using different language/models to make sense of it. The model is not reality, which again is why RHB dominance is key.