Healthy. Happy. Whole.: A Health and Wellbeing Workbook

By Barbara A. Palmer

If you have a deep desire to grow your happiness and overall wellbeing, where would you start? You may be surprised to learn the best place to start is not where you expected but is easy to access.

Your journey to new levels of aliveness awaits you as you read this book and navigate twelve steps towards a greater mind-body connection and a

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trilogy Christian Publishing
• Release date: Feb 21, 2022
• ISBN: 9781685561246

Barbara A. Palmer

Barbara Palmer is the owner of BP Life Coaching Services, a certified life coach, certified health coach, certified brain injury specialist, a former allied health college program director and professor, and a registered occupational therapist with thirty-plus years of experience helping clients overcome various mental, emotional, and physical conditions. As a lay minister, she specializes in congregational health and community outreach. She has four children, thirteen grandchildren, three great-grandchildren, and resides in Houston, Texas.You may visit her website at https://www.barbarapalmerotr.com/

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Dedication

This workbook is dedicated to every person who wants to maximize their health and wellbeing in all areas of life while continually growing their knowledge and application of God’s Word and trust in the goodness of God and living by biblical principles. It is also dedicated to my children, Tanisha, Joe, Chanel, and Jalene, who tolerated me as I practiced using my knowledge and understanding of God’s Word and application of living by His principles as I raised them to be mindful of what they consumed physically, spiritually, and mentally because anything that affects how we think or feel also affects our health and wellbeing, and in all areas of life. I hope something that I shared and modeled as a mother has positively impacted you and the choices you make. It is my heart’s desire for you to live lives you truly love living and that you are healthy in every way that empowers you to fully enjoy the abundant lives God has given each of you.

Acknowledgments

It is with deep gratitude that this author gives thanks to my pastors, Joel and Victoria Osteen, for the example they are as leaders and trailblazers. They inspire me to pursue doing all that the Lord has planted in my heart to do. Thank you to Pastors Shirley and John Molina, who oversee the Lakewood Church Celebrate Recovery Ministry, for helping me heal and grow at a time when grief and loss of my mother sent me into an emotional and spiritual tailspin. Thank you to my brothers and sisters in Christ whom I served with in the Lakewood Stephens Ministry. Thank You, Lord, for my brothers and sisters in Christ who served alongside me in the Victors’ Ministry at the Abundant Living Faith Center in El Paso under Pastors Charles and Rochelle Nieman. Finally, thank you, Pastor Charles Nieman, as well as Ron and Carry Webb, for inspiring me to write and use the Victors’ curriculum to change the lives of youth and adults as a lay minister. That experience showed me beyond a shadow of doubt how powerful God’s word is to heal and change lives when rightly applied and bathed in prayer.

Foreword

As I grew up, I watched my parents, who both grew up on farms in Alabama and then relocated to Michigan, make choices about life, including what to eat and drink and how to manage life, relationships, and stress. My dad was a deacon for many years before becoming a pastor, and my mother supported him in his work in her own way, primarily via her cooking at home and for church meals while raising eight children. As Christians who loved the Lord Jesus and lived according to basic moral principles about how we are created by God to communicate with Him via prayer, know, and follow His word in how they interact with others, and in the choices we make; striving to live as peaceful, kind, and forgiving neighbors, who were quick to help others, slow to get angry, and quick to forgive. Although my parents were conservative about the consumption of alcohol and rarely drank any, except for an occasional serving of sherry on extremely rare special occasions, I noticed what seemed to me to be a discrepancy that I believe can be attributed to habits developed while growing up on the farms in Alabama, and to a lesser degree, their knowledge and understanding about factors that negatively impact health and wellbeing over time. I remember how they blessed whatever we ate or drank before meals. It was as though (in my mind) they were asking God to change (bless) the composition of the food, which was often rich in fat and high in salt, and the drinks were super sweet as in southern sweet tea sweet or Kool-Aid made with an inch or more of sugar at the bottom of the pitcher before adding the water and stirring until the sugar dissolved. Now, my mother was known for her cooking, and she put her foot in it (so to speak) on a regular basis. People would drive for miles and miles to enjoy some of the soul food she cooked for us. By the time we ate, we may not have been able to see the fat, taste the salt, or see the sugar anymore, but it was still there, and those ingredients eventually had an adverse effect on our health and wellbeing.

Another common occurrence was the practice of avoiding emotional conversations about problems or issues. It was as though the only legitimate issues were physical ones you could see. These days, there are commercials that remind us of all about the importance of mental and physical health. A lot has changed since my parents raised me. Now most people understand and accept that there is a dynamic relationship between the health of a person’s mind and body. What we think affects what we feel and what we feel affects what we do, including what we believe and what we eat and drink. In the Word of God in Hosea 4:6, God says that His people perish for lack of knowledge. In my observations, we may not perish in the sense of immediate death, but the quality of our lives may perish or diminish more and more over time when we operate in ways that are contrary to the way God created us to function.

My pastor sometimes says, Believe better, live better, believe the promises of God. I agree with that and believe that since our beliefs are based on what we have accepted as true, whether it is true or not, that living better starts with thinking better. In order to think better, we have to increase our understanding and awareness of how our thinking works and what it takes to renew our minds the way we are admonished to do in Paul’s epistles. The Word of God says that as a man thinks in his heart, so is he. This workbook is created to help the reader grow in their understanding and ability to adjust how they think and act in regards to their physical, mental, and spiritual health and wellbeing. The reader will be guided step by step to notice what they think, adjust what they think as they determine necessary, and make specific changes that are relevant to goals they want to set and achieve. Remember that faith without corresponding works is dead and ineffective. The intent of this workbook is for the reader to engage full-out and reach the end of the workbook with new insight, energy, joy, and wellbeing as they walk by faith in ways that honor God, their relationships, their body, their time, their will, and their purpose.

Preface

This workbook has been a work in progress for decades. It is representative of decades of owning, studying, and applying what has been learned from traditional, natural medicine, and preventive medicine resources, experience as a healthcare provider, the study and application of multiple translations of the Old and New Testaments of the Holy Bible, and books on prayer. It is also inspired by experiences in the promotion of community health education done in partnership with community organizations, a local university, and a group of five churches.

Introduction

This workbook is designed to engage the reader as a participant while providing you with knowledge and practice information that facilitate improved health and wellbeing in four spheres of life: mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual. There are nine chapters, and each chapter is designed to build you up and as a person created for greatness while strengthening the foundation of who you are as a child of God able to draw from that knowledge and understanding for your overall health and wellbeing.

The chapters are designed to be studied for approximately two hours each over the course of a two-week period, then repeated until the level of health and wellness desired is achieved and new healthier habits and routines are well established. However, you are encouraged to go at your own pace and repeat reading the chapters and engage in the provided activities as often as you feel is best. Each chapter focuses on providing you with information and then engages you in related activities to reinforce the benefit of recommended practices presented.

The reader (you) will be guided in setting SMART goals for himself or herself as a part of each chapter. SMART is an acronym used to guide you in setting goals that are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and timely. In other words, when you set SMART goals, you are guided to write clear goals that include measurable details that empower you to recognize when you are moving toward your goal and when something more is attained. You are encouraged to study the chapters in sequence because they build you up in a greater way as you understand principles taught in each chapter that connect to and act as a foundation to other principles presented in later chapters. Once you complete a chapter, feel free to use your work in it as a reference when you are completing work in later chapters, and apply your SMART goals to your everyday life.

You are encouraged to make this workbook a resource you continue to use intermittently as needed long after you complete it for the first time. During the first and last chapters of this workbook, you will have the opportunity to participate in a self-assessment and reassessment that will help you to have a good measure of where you are at the beginning and end after you complete the reading and activities of this workbook.

Chapter 1:

Workbook Overview

Healthy. Happy. Whole. topics are designed to improve your awareness of and ability to maximize:

Your personal identification: maximize your understanding of who you are as God’s idea and offspring. Maximize how you see yourself.

Your personal resources: become mindfully aware of the recourses you have to manage life and how and when to use them to overcome challenges and enjoy more of life.

Your personal responsibility: how you view your responsibility to your health and wellbeing.

What you really want and how it affects your health and wellbeing, and how to set SMART goals that have the power to continually improve your level of wellbeing.

Where you are now based on the results of your self-assessments.

How your perspective or perception of things affects your stress management.

How to set your mind and keep it set on