The thirtieth revolution

[The essence of wellness; the essence of the revolutions; your own revolutions]

To recap: ‘The Revolutions’ (along with all the entries in this wellness calendar) has been devised to get you thinking (and feeling) in the hope that this might spur you on to take some kind of action that will change and ultimately improve the quality of your life, those around you, and society as a whole.

At Self Detective we are keen to stress that nothing we say is right or correct. It’s merely food for thought, a platform for people to take any information that’s relevant to them and interpret it, adapt it or reject it as they see fit.

With the thirtieth revolution, we are attempting to narrow down the very essence of the revolutions into an even shorter number of words in the hope that you will be tempted to do similarly, with your own personalised revolutions – tailored to your own specific needs, your own journey, etc., etc. It might be that what follows can act as a template for you to replicate using your own words. It might be that you take from it a list of revolutionary things to do. Or you may want to devise a checklist to keep you focused on a path (or maybe a thread) of your own making. Either way, here are the bare bones. If the revolutions are the essence of wellness, then let these be the essence of ‘The Revolutions’ (or ‘The Knowings,’ if you’d prefer).

We start with a knowing that has led us to opening our eyes to a new way of being.
We know we can trust ourselves and our amazing brain to understand ourselves.
We know that we have choices as to whether we go through life passively or actively, independently or by coercive means.
We know wellness is important to our lives and we know that we can improve our lives by picking up clues from internal and external sources to create life-changing and life-enhancing insights.
We know we can become wellness-focused if we turn our mind to it.
We know that the best way to future-proof the quality of our life is to become self-empowered and self-determined.
We know there are gaps in our knowing, which is useful to know. This is where self-directed learning comes into play.
We know (thanks to our knowing) that we can now follow threads of inquiry to further enhance our lives. To assist us on these missions, we know we will need certain skills and tools.
We know the importance of being safe and removing ourselves from hostilities if we want to protect ourselves and start to heal aspects of ourself that need addressing.
We know the process of change needed to recover from distress and how externalising the internal keeps us healthy, while being creative and expressive allows us to access our unconsciousness, which then opens up more doors of knowing.
We know the importance of self-identity and that we can always start again with a new or adapted persona if things aren’t going the way we hoped they would.
We know the importance of relationships, of making connections, and of love, in all its forms, just as we know how destructive the effects of lovelessness can be.
We know the danger of power, yet we also know how to overcome these dangers so that power can be a force for good if it’s shared and equally distributed.
We know that we ourselves can play an active part in our world by utilising some of the attributes of person-centredness: of making quality psychological contact with others, of being more authentic and less false, of prizing people and of being less thoughtless and more empathic.
We know we can make a difference to the lives of everyone we meet.
We know there is a mental health crisis that we can play a part in averting by using our attributes to become a facilitator of some sorts, such as setting up groups where people can work on their own un/wellness and be supported in doing so.
We know that people who give back to their communities tend to be happier for it.
We know what works in the wider world and what doesn’t.
We know our wellness is bound up with other people’s wellness. We know that universal wellness would benefit everyone.
We know that all of this knowing coupled with compassion can make a difference both to our existing world and the future world.
We know that shaping all of this knowing into our own propositions, into our own template, into our own things-to-do list will make the knowing more likely to be active, dynamic and meaningful.
We know that ultimately the revolution (our own revolution) is down to us. And it cannot be televised because it’s always live, alive and kicking.