The bonsai is a work of art that continually grows and evolves. With its gnarled trunk and gently curving boughs, this humble specimen offers wisdom on wellness. Just as the bonsai requires nurturing to thrive, so do one’s attitudes and approaches to wellness.
To live a healthy, purpose-filled life, one must allow wellness to permeate every dimension of being, harnessing energy from within to flourish in pursuit of one’s goals. Truly being well, said Krista Dhruv, Gettysburg College’s executive director of Counseling and Wellness Services, is an intentional, continually evolving process—just like cultivating a bonsai.
Support through change
Generations ago, wellness was defined as the absence of disease and the ability to provide financial security and stability for oneself or a person’s family. One’s virtues outweighed personal health, according to Prof. Jim Downs, the Gilder Lehrman-National Endowment for the Humanities Chair of Civil War Era Studies and History.
“People seemed to be more invested in their moral character than their physical health and well-being,” said Downs, who has spent more than two decades researching medicine and public health history. “Many attributed sickness to a punishment for falling out of God’s light and favor.”
During the late 20th century, society’s contemporary interpretation of wellness developed, but what constituted wellness was narrow, Downs added. Despite divergent viewpoints, many began embracing conversations around wellness, including Gettysburg College. When the College’s Health Center was built in 1959, then known as the Sieber-Fisher Infirmary, trustees Dr. Paul R. Sieber, Class of 1907, and Dr. Nelson F. Fisher, Class of 1918, led the College’s Infirmary Committee at a critical point in history after an influenza outbreak five years prior. Together, they aimed to raise funds for an on-campus facility to promote health and wellness among Gettysburg’s student population.
Today, as part of its efforts to develop a culture of belonging and wellness—one of the Four Areas of Focus identified in its Strategic Direction launched a year ago—the College focuses on developing the whole student through the Gettysburg Approach, which includes fostering whole-person foundational health and well-being, promoting habits to succeed on campus and throughout life. This holistic approach to wellness resonates with Dr. Greg Natello ’76, who has passionately taken the same approach to his vocation in health care.
“Your body’s biological systems work together like a symphony in perfect harmony,” said Natello, a board-certified internal medicine and cardiovascular disease physician and an integrative-functional medicine certified practitioner. “When one is off-balance, the symphony is out of tune.”
This concept of harmony is a familiar refrain in 21st-century approaches to wellness, which are continually being redefined in response to events affecting our global community. Members of Gen Z and Gen Alpha (those born from 2010 to the present) live in a world besieged by school shootings, hyperpolarizing politics, racial inequality, climate change, and social media’s 24/7 news cycle. In 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic swept around the world, additional emotional and mental health challenges emerged, especially for students navigating virtual academic and social experiences.
“This younger generation of students recognizes that a life well-lived is multifaceted,” said Dhruv. “They appreciate the impact of race, socioeconomic status, or a community in a food desert. The conversation has moved beyond simply physical health. Students are talking more about these different aspects of their lives as having an impact on their well-being.”
In 2022, to address these student needs, the College established the Wellness Advisory Committee and seven dimensions of wellness to guide their work—community, cultural, emotional, financial, intellectual, physical, and social wellness. Early feedback has indicated that actively engaging with each dimension, including during dedicated wellness weeks on campus with student-led programming, leads to positive growth.
“Using language that resonated with students—such as mental wellness, social wellness, and physical wellness—as well as reflective activities created student engagement opportunities that were well-received,” said Director of Residence Life and First-Year Programs Danielle Phillips, who co-leads the committee with Dhruv. “It assisted them in reflecting on their own wellness and connecting them to campus or community resources.”
Supporting Residential Education, Counseling and Wellness, Campus Safety, and additional campus offices, the Center for Student Success was also designed to focus on the whole student.
“The Center for Student Success supports student wellness in many ways, particularly by extending invitations to meet with students whom we learn may be having a tough time and then connecting them to appropriate resources across campus,” said Keira Kant ’95, dean of the Center for Student Success. “Our goal is to help students break barriers to their ability to thrive. Getting them to the right resources is a big part of that work.”
The ‘secret sauce’
Throughout his career, Natello, who completed his internal medicine residency at the Cleveland Clinic, has upheld a patient-centered focus on health and well-being. Attributing his Gettysburg education to helping him attain a 30,000-foot view of medicine, he’s devoted much of his life’s work to shifting the focus of health care from superficially band-aiding tip-of-the-iceberg symptoms to addressing underlying causes and contributory factors of chronic diseases by taking a systems biology integrative approach.
“The secret sauce is those things shown to dramatically promote health, individually and, most powerfully, together,” said Natello.
“(Wellness connects with) the human need to feel valued by, and add value to, self and others.”
– Eloísa Gordon-Mora
Gettysburg College Chief Diversity Officer
From quality dietary patterns, joyful movement like exercise, and sleep to how one mitigates stress, cultivates relationships, builds community, approaches spirituality, and practices gratitude, one’s choices, decisions, and actions culminate in vibrant health, resilience, and well-being, Natello added. That vibrancy translates to improved productivity, reduced risk for epidemic and progressively younger age-onset chronic diseases, opportunities to better manage and reverse chronic diseases, and a longer, joy-filled life span.
In the study of subjective well-being, Psychology Prof. Brian Meier concurred that a solid social support system of friends, relatives, and others whom individuals can turn to in good times and in bad can sustain positive energy.
“More social support generally means more subjective well-being,” he said. “Other predictors of positive wellness include engaging in challenging activities that we are skilled at, expressing gratitude, being fully present in the moment, helping others, and being exposed to things like nature and exercise.”
With nearly 90% of all students participating each semester in Gettysburg’s extensive intramural, club sports, and campus recreation programs, which are ranked No. 1 by the Princeton Review, the College is an active campus, both physically and intellectually.
“Campus recreation participation leads to lifelong friendships, healthy behaviors, and improved well-being for life,” added Director of Campus Recreation and Wellness Annette Hunt-Shepherd.
For alumni throughout the Gettysburg Network, this principle of social support permeates their personal and professional lives. For Kevin J. Smith ’89, a lost wallet personally delivered to his home within moments after discovering it was missing inspired him to “pay it forward” and create the nonprofit organization Kindness Worldwide. A broad Kindness Week commemoration last November celebrated the unifying and regenerative characteristics of kindness. Individuals, organizations, groups, and academic institutions such as Gettysburg College stepped up to promote kindness through volunteerism, charity, and going the extra mile for others.
While Smith, founder and executive vice president/wealth management of Smith Wealth Advisory Group of Janney Montgomery Scott LLC, advises his clients in financial wellness, he also helps them understand and appreciate the true meaning of wealth—enjoying the riches of life itself.
Finding healing in connections
Belonging is essential for human beings; it requires the need to reflect wellness, said Chief Diversity Officer Eloísa Gordon-Mora. Participating in a community—or multiple communities—affirms one’s multiple identities as expressed through race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, age, religious beliefs, and other qualities.
“[Wellness connects with] the human need to feel valued by, and add value to, self and others,” explained Gordon-Mora, who is currently developing the College’s first diversity, equity, and inclusion strategic plan. “Consequently, for us at Gettysburg College, this means the need to concretely create the conditions, spaces, and learning opportunities for our different communities to experience mattering and belonging—in other words, wellness.”
From physical fitness and wellness education to Musselman Library’s quiet study carrels and the newly created Donna Jean Brogan Center for Quantitative Learning, which has whiteboards for walls, students at Gettysburg can invest their energy into all dimensions of wellness thanks to these intentional spaces and opportunities across campus.
Caden Simons ’24 discovered this sense of mattering and belonging through a volunteer opportunity at Gettysburg’s Counseling and Wellness Center. In this role, Simons leverages his prior experience as a crisis counselor for the Crisis Text Line in New York to help Gettysburg’s counselors share information about the center and its resources, as well as foster conversations on campus. This work has led to growth in his understanding of mental health and wellness.
“I’ll get messages [from people I’ve helped] that tell me, ‘Thanks for being a good human being,’” said Simons, a psychology and health sciences double major with a pre-med track. “I feel like that feedback helps me work through my own stuff because I’m helping them with something that hurts them but has hurt me in the past, so it’s like we’re working on it together.”
For Corey Heyman ’13, fostering respect and building community is at the heart of her business, Coco Market. Based in Delray Beach, Florida, this free monthly wellness market unites people across the South Florida region. Together, they support local businesses and connect with neighbors in the greater wellness community, including yoga instructors, holistic healing practitioners, and healthy food professionals.
“To get everyone back together [following the COVID-19 pandemic] has been healing for Delray Beach,” she said. “It has brought happiness, joy, and connection that is important for mental health.”
While Heyman initially struggled with her sense of identity and belonging, it was thanks to the support from her counselor and professors at Gettysburg that she learned to take care of herself. Embracing work-life harmony and identifying the areas of your life worthy of devoting your focus and energy—just as the bonsai brings plant and pot together—she believes one needs to “feed yourself properly and nurture your relationships” to foster the harmony that promotes a consistent flow of energy to all parts of life.
“Your choices today are consequential for your lifetime,” Natello said. “Health is your greatest wealth. Without it, you can’t take care of yourself or those who depend on you, nor in the tradition of Gettysburg College, ‘Do Great Work.’”
by Michael Vyskocil
Posted: 02/14/24