The Four Dimensions of Well Being

Most of my blog posts center around positive thinking or self-improvement. For a change, I wrote a post with tips on managing money. I was amazed to see the overwhelming response on this post. In just a few months, it became the popular post on the blog. My blog aims to provide material to help “charge your batteries”, so this post was somewhat out of place. I am no financial expert either, so I wasn’t sure what was going on here. I thought some more about it, I came up with the following possible answer:

As this picture shows, we are sum total of four distinct parts – Body, Mind, Heart, and Spirit and we need to continuously charge our batteries in these four areas. You can call them four dimensions of well-being.

• Physical well-being relates to our body, health, material comforts, and money.
• Mental well-being is about knowledge, thinking, and intellect.
• Social / Emotional well-being includes love, relationships, trust, family, and friends
• Spiritual well-being is about the meaning in life, purpose, values and religion

All the above are vital dimensions and we need to nurture each of them to achieve the right balance. If we ignore any one of these aspects, it will affect our happiness adversely. So far, the physical part was neglected in this blog, as it focused around mental, emotional, and spiritual well-being. The post on money management addressed this neglected area, and that may be the reason why people liked it so much.

So, I decided that there needs to be a better balance in my blog, hence in future you will see more posts on money and health matters. As a validation of this hypothesis, I came out with a follow up post on how to make money in stock markets, and as expected, it rose to top three posts in just one month. :)

Don't Break the Strings

Here is an inspiring story with the message that we should never break away from our roots as they keep us stable while we fly high.

A father and son are flying a kite.

After some time, the son observes "Dad. Because of the string the kite is not able to go any further higher."

Hearing this, the father smiles and breaks the string.

The kite does go higher initially just after the thread has been broken off; but shortly after that, it begins to go down and finally falls on the ground. The child is very dejected and sad.

The father sits next to him and calmly explains to him,

"Son, in life we reach a certain level of prosperity and then we feel that there are certain things in our life that are not letting us grow any further like our roots, home, family, culture or friendship. We might feel that we want to break free from those strings and attachments that we believe are stopping us from going higher.

But, remember the lesson from the kite. Going higher seems easier at first, but a little later it is difficult to stay up without the string.

Friends, family and our roots and culture are the things that help us stay stable at the heights that we have achieved.

If we try to break away from these strings, we may become like the kite."

न कोई उमंग है, न कोई तरंग है
मेरी ज़िन्दगी है क्या, एक कटी पतंग है।