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A few years ago, I had the opportunity to work with a committee at the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health to help shape a framework for Whole Person Health. It was energizing for me—not only as a professional within the healthcare system, but also as someone who has long been a passionate user of holistic and natural health approaches in my own life.

For too long, Western healthcare has been organized around anatomy—fragmenting the body into hyper-specialties, increasing complexity, and often delivering suboptimal outcomes at high cost. But it is heartening to see new trends in modern healthcare, led by consumers: the rise of more holistic and functional health modalities that seek to connect across anatomies, and the growing focus on wellness and prevention factors such as nutrition, movement, and sleep.

But true whole health goes further. It also includes the mind and emotions. Traditions like Ayurveda have long recognized this interconnectedness. If you have ever taken an Ayurvedic test to identify your dosha, you would notice that it reflects not only your physical tendencies, but also emotional patterns, such as how you would respond to stress. We are only now probing these kinds of connections in modern healthcare...how stress can impact the gut, how trauma can manifest in the body.

The Whole Person Health framework goes even further. It expands our definition of health beyond the physical. It acknowledges that what may seem “external” to us—our communities, our environment, even the energy and the sense of faith that we bring into the world—ultimately shapes our well-being. Indeed, we are ultimately the recipients of all that we create and consume - for example, we are now learning how plastics can come back to harm our bodies.

Here is a framework, inspired by an implementation of Whole Person Health in the VA.

I learned of these interconnections experientially through my own long journey in conscious healing—one I share in UnMoored. I started with physical healing and quickly found the connection between stress and the body, with many severe ailments disappearing once I made the choice to de-stress. Then I felt the impact of nature on my body, feeling the healing vibrations flow through me. The lessons continued - the impact of emotions, mind, sex, relationships, finances, the environment, and then deeply, the impact of spiritual faith. This interconnectedness is now deeply within me, at the subconscious layer... an intuitive part of my daily existence.

It took me a long time to get here. I can understand how overwhelming it can feel just to look at all these dimensions! It is hard enough to juggle the daily demands of careers, families, friends and finances. Just maintaining physical health amist requires so much work-adding more dimensions can seem downright unrealistic. I would have felt the same way at the start of my journey.

What helped me was drawing on something unexpected: my corporate training in Continuous Improvement. I realized I unconsciously use it everywhere - even in my garden or my kitchen. And so when I started on my health and healing journey, I was unconsciously leaning on the same process, gathering data and connecting the dots across multiple dimensions. It was astonishing to see the impact of seemingly random connections!

I am happy to share my learnings, and help guide in your health journey. The first step is self- awareness and a willingness to ask questions and learn about yourself. I can help with this learning and gathering of information. Each person’s health wheel is different, even the goals for health may differ. You have to start by being kind to yourself, accepting what you find of yourself.

The next big idea is to not aim for perfection...not even in any one dimension. The approach is keep going around the wheel. You could be thriving in one dimension and struggling in another, but the goal is to keep moving across them, improving every time, each small improvement in one dimension helping to accelerate the improvement in the next. “Iterating”, as the corporate term goes, using principles from Lean thinking. Over time, it gets faster and easier as tangible results start pouring in, and ultimately, you can create meaningful, sustainable change.