Unveiling Your Holistic Intelligence

A new measure of health

If you’ve been following my work for awhile, you’ve likely already heard the term “Holistic Intelligence”, but since Becoming Whole was born, 9 months ago, I haven’t really told you what Holistic Intelligence is, how to assess your HQ and what you can do to optimize it.

So this is going to be a fun one!

We have all heard of the intelligence quotient (IQ)- a measure of our intellect. And in more recent years, many of us have become familiar with the emotional quotient (EQ), a measure of our emotional fluency. In my work, both of these forms of intelligence play an important role in holistic health. The IQ reveals information about our relationship with the mental quadrant of health and the EQ does the same for our relationship with the emotional quadrant. From my perspective, the mental and emotional quadrants are two very distinct aspects of our health, and understanding the distinction between them is critical. You can read more about this in The Difference Between Mental and Emotional Health.

In my work, the mental quadrant of health is the home of our thoughts and beliefs about ourselves, our health and the world around us. Our mindset plays an important role in healing. This is where we use the placebo effect as a therapeutic tool to support the health outcomes we want. This is where neuroscience shines and Bruce Lipton’s, Biology of Belief plays a huge role in our wellbeing.

In contrast, the emotional quadrant of health is the home of our feelings. In other words, this is where a chemical messenger binds to a receptor and brings about an emotional state. In the emotional quadrant of health, we must feel it to heal it. Our emotions are quite different from our thoughts and so healing looks quite different here.

But this is still only 50% of the whole. The physical and spiritual quadrants of health also hold unique forms of intelligence, and the way we balance our awareness and attention throughout all four of these quadrants says a lot about our intelligence, as it relates to health.

Ultimately, wellbeing is balance and our state of health reveals how balanced we are. Holistic Intelligence is a measure of balance across the four quadrants- physical, mental, emotional and spiritual of our health.

Unlike IQ and EQ, Holistic Intelligence (HQ) does not compartmentalize your intelligence to a single quadrant. It measures the whole of you.

First let me say that within you exists the most sophisticated healing system ever created. No laboratory could design it, no corporation could patent it, and no artificial technology could replicate its intelligence, and no scoring system can assess it! Deep within the technology of humanity, we know how to restore balance when we lose our way. But in order to restore balance, we first must become aware that we are out of balance, and we must understand the nature of the imbalances that impact our health.

This is why I created the HQ assessment- a scoring system for Holistic Intelligence- not to guilt you or shame you, or give you more data to justify the relentless pursuit of self improvement. I created the HQ assessment to help you become aware of where imbalance exists so that you can take both active and passive action, to restore balance and wellbeing.

While I do define wellbeing as a state where our awareness and efforts are balanced across the physical, mental, emotional and spiritual quadrants of ourselves, my definition assumes that we find that balance through the contrast of the experience of imbalance. Rarely does the pendulum remain still in the center. It swings back and forth, and as we experience the discomfort of the poles we find our way back to wellbeing. Because of this, I see dis-ease as a compass- a gift that helps us find the way when we’ve lost our balance.

When it comes to Holistic Intelligence, we all have imbalances, because even if we’ve found a way to sustain balance within ourselves, we are all connected to a healthcare paradigm that is grossly out of balance. The system itself over-emphasizes the physical quadrant of health, completely neglects the spiritual quadrant and blends the mental and emotional quadrants into one oversimplified blob that can only be nurtured with talk therapy and pharmaceuticals. I’ll save my commentary on systemic imbalances for a future piece because it’s more important to me that you walk away from this piece feeling empowered and inspired to take care of your health.

But the takeaway is this, if you complete the HQ assessment (that I’m going to share below), and your score is low, it’s not a BAD thing. It’s simply a reflection that in this moment your scales are tipped in one direction or the other. This is not unhealthy- it’s part of nature. The macrocosm doesn’t value the equinoxes more than the solstices- but when she reaches a solstice she knows it’s time to come back to the center. This is the mentality I invite you to approach your HQ from.

Most of us feel more connected to or familiar with 1 or more quadrants of our health. This can mean that when we’re out of balance, the quadrant we’re most in touch with is where the symptoms show up. But it can also means that we are simply more aware of ourselves in that quadrant and/or have more resources to tend to our complaints when they express in that quadrant. With that said, dis-ease can also present in the quadrants that we’re neglecting, so restoring balance requires quite a bit of self awareness and attention to the nuances.

For example, when I practiced medicine in a conventional primary care clinic, most of my patients were extremely connected to the physical quadrant of their health. Many of them only came in for care when they had physical symptoms. In some cases these patients really learned to optimize their physical health, but their mental, emotional or spiritual health was suffering. Their marriages were falling apart and their lives were void of meaning- but their cholesterol levels were perfect. This is not the kind of wellbeing I want for you.

In my private practice today, I work with a lot of individuals that are very comfortable with themselves spiritually. Some of them are highly intuitive, channels or mediums. They score very high in the emotional and spiritual quadrants but their bodies are screaming for attention. They are overweight, their blood sugars are not well managed and many of them have pain in their bodies. This is also not an expression of wellbeing.

My goal for my clients is that they can bring enough fluency to each of the four quadrants that they are able to maintain balance and stay out of the conventional healthcare system as much as possible. This is preventative medicine.

When there is imbalance across the four quadrants and your HQ is low, you might experience:

• Physical symptoms that persist and/or diagnoses that are resistant to treatment

• Mental patterns that keep you stuck in the same cycles, a highly critical mind or a mental health diagnosis

• Emotional reactions that feel beyond your control

• Spiritual disconnection, a lack of meaning, or a sense of powerlessness in your life

• It often feels like life is happening to us and we’re victims of a fate we don’t recall choosing

Understanding your Holistic Intelligence can really empower you to take control of your health and your life. When you know where imbalance exists you can tend to it before it becomes physical illness, self-sabotaging thoughts, emotional patterns and undesirable life circumstances. The Holistic Intelligence Method™ is the approach I use in my practice to help restore balance across the four quadrants.

In this piece I’m going to …

(1) give you access to a free tool I created that I have not shared publicly yet, so that you can get your Holistic Intelligence (HQ) score and assess yourself. It will give you an overall score, as well as a breakdown for each quadrant. Once you have your results, you can return to this post for a deeper understanding of the assessment and you can expect a series of articles in the next few weeks with more detailed guidance based on your personalized results.

(2) Invite you to join me for a live class on April 30th at 12pm EST/9am PST. This class is free for all paying subscribers. Free subscribers are welcome to sign up HERE.