How to Use Your Past to Create a Future of Amazing Health and Vitality

Learn how to create your own personal health map. You’ll discover the triggers that negatively affect your health and the factors that make you feel amazing. Plus, it’s fun to do!

Every other Friday, I produce an online radio show that explores the body, mind and spirit connection. In last week’s episode of Dragon Spirit Radio, I shared 2 ways to use your past to not only change your current health, but also create a future of health and vitality.

One of the techniques involves mapping out your health across a timeline.  By doing this for both the “negative” and positive periods in your life, patterns start to emerge.  One thing to mentions is that the reason I put “negative” in quotes is because we often learn and grow from the dark periods in our lives so from a broader perspective, they’re actually quite positive!

Creating your own personal health map helps you identify triggers or precursors that negatively impact your health. Conversely, you can also see the positive factors that make you feel alive and thrive.

I just finished doing my “negative” health map and was quite surprised (but truthfully in my heart, it wasn’t a surprise) at what did emerge.  Here’s a look at it below.

What really jumped out at me was how closely the traumas in my life related to the health issues I experienced.  I know there’s a definite relationship between the two, but to see it mapped out almost one-to-one was really startling.

From my personal health map, I can see that stress at work and heartbreak have been my biggest triggers leading to health problems. I also see that the periods where I felt isolated and alone were precursors to illness. I haven’t mapped out my positive health map (where good things happened and I felt physically amazing), but off the top of my head, I can already spot the trends there. The times where I felt healthiest were when I was:

• Really hardcore into fitness (training in martial arts, bicycling across Canada, training for a triathlon)
• Socially active with lots of friends
• Loving my work

This exercise helps you to spot red flags well in advance. I can already see that although I feel physically fantastic, to continue doing so, I need to get out with friends more often.  I also see that for me, where I work and what I do for work are intrinsic to my health. I have to love what I do, which makes me even more determined to be successful as an entrepreneur.

I invite you to create your own personal health map to discover what your patterns are.  Here’s how:

1. Draw a horizontal line across a sheet of paper.
2. On one end, mark a zero for your birth. On the other end, mark your current age (or put “now” if you’re hiding your age!)
3. Plot any major health issues/accidents/crises across the timeline by age.
4. Next, mark the major traumatic events in your life as well as periods where you felt stressed or unhappy. You can also mark events that may not have been traumatic, but still were significant to you.
5. Take a look at the big picture and see what emerges.
6. Repeat steps 1 to 5 with the following difference: plot the periods where you experienced good health and mark the happy and positive events/influences in your life.

For more detailed instructions on creating your personal health map and to learn another way to use your past to create a healthy future, listen to the online recording of Dragon Spirit Radio.