6th Sunday in Ordinary time – Year B
“Of course I want to! Be cured” (Mk 1:40-45):
Effect of Encounter with Jesus – holistic wellbeing
Here is a one-line summary of my reflection: The result of an authentic encounter with Jesus is a holistic wellbeing!
For my PhD work, I sampled some 25 young people in Nairobi, taught them an ancient method of prayer: the Jesus Prayer. They practiced it individually and in groups for 10 weeks. At the end of that period, I interviewed ten of the participants and collected the journal-entries of ten others, while all participants took a battery of psychological tests. One of the findings that emerged from the interviews and journal entries is that the practice of the Jesus Prayer is associated with transformation at three levels: at the level of the individual self in terms of greater self-awareness […]
Wellbeing
Lecture 4: Wellbeing: Subjective, Psychological & Social
In the recent years, positive psychology has begun to explore wellbeing and happiness in the parlance of Greek philosophical terminology of hedonia and eudaimonia (Deci & Ryan, 2008). While hedonia refers to those aspects of wellbeing that arises from pleasure oriented activities, eudaimonia refers to fulfilment of our potential as human beings. Furthermore, positive psychology literature makes some distinction between psychological wellbeing, social wellbeing, and emotional wellbeing (Keyes & Lopez, 2002).
Subjective Wellbeing: Diener (1984) has been consistent in the use of the term Subjective Well-Being, to include individual happiness, presence of positive affect, and absence of negative affect. Subjective well-being is an individual experience, which excludes objective conditions like health, comfort, virtue and wealth. In some literature the terms subjective wellbeing and emotional wellbeing are used synonymously (Snyder & Lopez, 2007).
Satisfaction with Life Scale examines Subjective Wellbeing.
Psychological Wellbeing: Ryff and colleagues have been critical of identifying psychological health with subjective […]
Lecture 6: Psycho-Social Substrates of Wellbeing
Positive psychology makes a distinction between subjective wellbeing, social wellbeing and psychological wellbeing. The literature of positive psychology makes use of different terminologies to name positive affective states and some of them are not yet clarified. For instance, there is a confusion of terms – what Seligman (2002, p.115) prefers to call ‘gratification’, Csikszentmihalyi (2002) calls ‘enjoyment’. These confusions suggest that psychological understanding of affective states is still a work in progress (Kristjánsson, 2010). On the other hand, the complexity of terminology goes to show that pleasure, happiness and wellbeing lies in a spectrum of psycho-social states with a varying degree of valence.
Pleasure
Positive psychology suggests that pleasure (largely understood as hedonia) is not negative in itself. It has a limitation insofar as exaggerations are concerned. The exaggeration in intensity could lead to euphoria, and the exaggeration in frequency and duration could lead to habituation. Subsequently, the state of euphoria could […]