Spirit

Wellness of the Soul

Wellness of the soul encompasses things we do not see, hear, touch, or communicate with through the means we are used to. To discuss what wellness of the soul consists of, we need to do our best to define the soul. Following Aristotle and Avicenna, St. Thomas Aquinas understood the soul as the first principle, or act, of the body. However, his theory required that, since the intellectual soul is capable of knowing all material things, and since in order to know a material thing there must be no material thing within it, the soul was definitely not corporeal (having, consisting of, or relating to a physical material body). Therefore, the soul had an operation separate from the body and therefore could subsist without the body. Furthermore, since the rational soul of human beings was subsistent and was not made up of matter and form, it could not be destroyed in any natural process. In order to completely believe there is a soul, there is an innate need to believe in the creator of the soul. Most religions of the world recognize the creator as God, Supreme Being, or as simply, the Creator.

Is it the Mind or the Soul?

In this section, we are talking about the wellness of the soul. This is not to be confused to with wellness of the mind. Wellness of the mind consists with our thoughts, and feelings that we have general capacity to control in our physical world. Wellness of the soul is dealing with the whispers, feelings, and the "gut" feelings we have that are not of our own making and seem to permeate our lives. Some people are more in tune with these feelings and notions while others are oblivious to these feelings as they are "in the world" so much, they do not understand or notice the gentle whispers of the soul. There are crossroads where the mind and the soul come close to one another. When we are in our "happy place" our "zone" or when relaxing, praying, or meditating deeply, we can cross form the conscious thought world to the world where the soul communicates with us. Some psychologists call this the super-conscious realm, where we are conscious of ourselves but also aware of another presence around us. It is almost like a window that we can’t quite see through, we know there is something there, but we just can't comprehend it with the senses that we have.

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