Purpose Prescription

Psychologist, best selling author and someone I refer to as ‘my teacher’ ~ Dr. Rick Hanson, outlines the 3 Components of Human Well-being as Safety, Satisfaction and Connection.

With a regular mindfulness practice we’re able to observe the measures of these components in our own lives. Once we have this habit of observing and noting these, we’re armed with the insights that can proceed choice/action.

Today I’m drawn to some wisdom by Rasmus Hougaard and Jacqueline Carter, who head up a marvellous Mindfulness endeavour known as ‘The Potential Project’. In their book, that helps leaders maintain a mindfulness practice, they point to PURPOSE and its beneficial outcomes for health.

Anything that will help me improve my levels of Safety, Satisfaction and Connection draws my intentional attention.

How SATISFIED we are has everything to do with purposeful living.

What I took from Hougaard and Carters’ writing on purpose will help me today…

Doctors agree (research by Kim, Strecher and Ryff: National Academy of Science, 2014) that people who follow purposeful lives are less prone to disease!

My own work in mindfulness teaching has often outlined that PURPOSE doesn’t have to be of monumental proportions. What’s important is that we are aware of the purpose in our daily lives - from knowing we need a glass or water and acting on that; to having an intention to significantly impact the well-being of others, with a kind act or listening ear.

As if nature rewards us for satisfying ourselves through purposeful acts, here it seems, she provides us with a free health insurance policy? A ‘Purpose Prescription’ for better health.

I’m off to take my son his vitamins (he left them here and has quite a regime he likes to uphold) - nice to know, its not just him that’s staying healthy, by my purposeful mothering act.