Health is based on happiness - from hugging and clowning around to finding joy in family and friends, satisfaction in work, and ecstasy in nature and the arts.

Dr Patch Adams from "GESUNDHEIT!

Nature tops the list of potent tranquilizers and stress reducers.

The mere sound of moving water has been shown to lower blood pressure.

Art, nature and imagination are fundamental to health care. ..So much healing goes on through their influence - on both care-giver and patien t- that it is important to include these great medicines at the core of our medical work.

Art has a great power to uplift, communicate, enhance understanding, educate, and impart beauty.

Nature, the attending physician, will help us explore beauty and inspiration....Often I have gone outside with a psychotic person and hugged a tree for a long time or rolled down a hill.

Nature tops the list of potent traquilizers and stress reducers.

Dr Patch Adam

Imagination

...no universe is more vast than the imagination. Three thousand million years of computer design could not begin to contain or simulate imagination. Everbody can stimulate imagination; it exists in every person. Like the physical body, imagination can become flabby if it is not exercised and appreciated.

Below are some ideas on "Imagination Keep Fit"

A glorious sense of wonder through contemplation and study of nature, humanity, the arts and life itself.

Curiosity about everything and everyone.

Exploration of all areas of interest, however briefly, and saying yes at every opportunity offered.

Sharing ideas with every available person and studying ideas very different from one's own

Develop enormous sense of play and improvisation, with huge quantities of goal-free experimentation

Tinkering in every artistic medium

Restructuring of thought; time away from rehashing problems , worry , fear , and doubt.

Imagination gymnastics , such as picturing the world where chlorophyll is some coler other than green ... maybe thirty different shades.

Restructuring one's life towards happiness

Rebuilding Self, Family, Community, World.

The most distressing health problem for many people is the combination of boredom , and fear, and loneliness .

Our health is damaged most by loneliness and lovelessness .

If relationships with our families, friends, and ourselves are not going well, no amount of physical health can compensate .

Huge numbers of physically healthy people lead miserable lives .

Conversely, if relationships to family, friends, and self are strong and sustaining, then even a dying person can enjoy the bliss of community.

The key to a happy life

The most revolutionary act anyone can commit is to be happy.

I refer not to a moment of joy during one of life's peak experiences but to a basic pattern of enduring happiness.

It takes no greater effort to be happy everyday than to be miserable.

Each of us chooses the background hues of his or her own portrait.

A person can choose to be happy or miserable.

Unfortunately, a paradigm of suffering and unhappiness seems to have dominated human awareness during the last 5000 years, with the basic, underlying feeling that life is a struggle.

However this could change and happiness could become the foundation from which life is launched.

We can choose a paradigm of happiness in which all our thoughts, feelings, and actions are infused with joy.............

Happiness

I am interested in happiness because I am a physician.....Psychiatry is the science of the mind , but I have been unable to find even one paragraph devoted to happiness in psychiatric textbooks. And I never hear medical professionals prescribing happiness to the mentally unhealthy, which, to me, means all who are unhappy. Journal ads promoting tranquillisers and "talk therapies" are merely helping patients cope with their problems.

Only a paradigm of pain would accept such Lilliputian goals.

Friends or playmates

The most Important ingredient in my personal recipe for happiness is my friends.

Everybody needs friends or playmates with whom to have fun.

In the pain paradigm , folks often say they are lucky to have a few friends.

For the happy , however , every living soul has that potential.

Hobbies

Hobbies are also a key to a happy life; very simply, they are organised happiness, a personal decision to explore some particular aspect of life.

Hobbies provide outlets for wonder and curiosity for our creative selves.

In the paradigm of happiness, all of life's interests - including work and family - become hobbies.

Joy and beauty.

It takes great effort to reject joy and beauty; it is not a passive act.

With all the potential for happiness in this world, it is astonishing that people are so bored and lonely.

I do not intend to trivialise sadness or anxiety but simply to say that we choose these ways of life.

People who feel sad tend to blame external events over which they have no control.This is irresponsible. Such individuals become accomplices to the paradigm of pain when they sing out the "script" of victim.

Yes, the terrible things that happen are painful. Choosing to give up, however, is what makes these experiences continue to wound us.

Dr Patch Adams

Healthcare is at a crisis, just as family life and community are in crisis .

We don't want to be a Band Aid for the ailing health care ; we want to change the system ,

to bring about a peaceful revolution .

Dr Patch Adams from "GESUNDHEIT!"

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