Introduction
The vigorous, the healthy, and the happy survive and multiply.
- Charles Darwin
Welcome to HumanaNatura’s Personal Health Program.
Our Personal Health Program is designed to help you understand and explore the science and power of your natural health, and to achieve progressive new levels of personal fitness and natural well-being, now and throughout your life.
You can follow the HumanaNatura Personal Health Program online, or download or print summary, condensed, or full workbook versions of the program on the HumanaNatura Personal Health Program page of our website.
The scope and focus of HumanaNatura’s program for individuals spans five core areas. In this program, we will cover the following topics: 1) what natural health is, 2) the essential natural health techniques and their rationale, 3) the process by which natural human health is achieved initially and then increased over time, 4) common misconceptions about our natural health, and 5) important issues and ideas you may encounter while pursuing natural health and health-based life over time.
When you have finished the HumanaNatura Personal Health Program, you will have a complete and powerful system to pursue progressive levels of natural health and well-being in your life, throughout your life, and to foster new health and vitality in the lives of others.
HumanaNatura’s seven-part program
In keeping with our core focus areas for the program, there are seven sections to the HumanaNatura Personal Health Program:
- Introduction – the goals, scope, and structure of the program
- Natural Health – why abundant health is everywhere and hard to see
- Our Past – how we came to be who we are, and naturally healthy
- Natural Eating – the essentials of natural diet, our health’s foundation
- Natural Exercise – efficiently ensuring lifelong natural conditioning
- Natural Living – bringing natural health to the totality of our lives
- Our Future – enriching life through community health promotion
As you can see, each section of the program builds on the one before it, beginning with natural health ideas and principles, moving on to HumanaNatura’s foundational natural health practices, and progressing to the challenges of ongoing health-promoting learning and action in our lives and society.
Because of this progression, we recommend that you follow the HumanaNatura Personal Health Program and implement our natural health techniques in the order presented, for optimal learning and to help ensure sustained success and progress over time.
Although systematic in its approach, this program is highly individualized in practice. With HumanaNatura, our pursuit of natural health is a scientifically-informed and yet creative personal practice, one of continually seeking new states of health and natural harmony in our lives and the world.
Cultivating a new health perspective
In keeping with this important goal of ongoing personal health progress, a critical first milestone in the HumanaNatura Personal Health Program is cultivation of an expanded health perspective, one that reflects a new appreciation of the nature and natural drivers of all states of health.
While there are many steps we can and might take to increase our health and quality of life over time, all of these measures can be reduced productively to two critical and interacting categories of health promoters. One of these two categories is health awareness, by which we simply mean information or understanding that can enable various states of health and life. Today, modern science offers us the opportunity to greatly expand our health awareness, including new understanding of its natural origins and evolutionary processes, and the resulting states of health available to us.
The second set of health drivers is practical health action toward improved health itself. This category of health drivers allows us to use and test health information and realize available states of health. Health action also can afford us expanded life experiences and circularly lead to new learning and health awareness. In the modern industrialized and democratic world, we are of course increasingly free to pursue new health actions and even health-based life itself.
Together, these two drivers of our health, awareness and action, interact to determine our understanding and realization of our health. With increasing heath awareness and new action aimed at progressive health, both of which are now possible in unprecedented ways in our time, we can reliably improve our health and quality of life. Without expanding awareness and action, however, our health and well-being are likely to stagnate or decline, or to improve only haphazardly and unintentionally.
On this important point, we also want to underscore that once these two health drivers pass a critical threshold or gateway state – as is now possible with the use of modern science and amidst much of contemporary life – they can combine or interact to foster a fundamentally new, transformative, and far more dynamic state of health and quality of life. This new state is no longer marked by a specific condition of health or fitness, but rather by one where conscious, self-motivating, and ongoing learning and action toward progressive health and well-being is made possible and then realized. As suggested, because our modern civilization and science is sufficiently advanced, it can be demonstrated that this new state of human health and life is now available to us. HumanaNatura calls this new natural health condition progressive health-based life and this is the essence of what we will help you to achieve in this program.
In total, these insights offer an entirely new modern health perspective. This perspective recasts our health as an understandable natural phenomenon. It sees our health as a product of evolution and natural selection, and thus containing both specific natural requirements and ongoing opportunities for further cultivation and progression. This perspective allows our health to be viewed as part of a larger class of evolving natural phenomena and subject to similar inherent dynamics (if you are technically-minded, these natural dynamics include: emergence, self-organization, feedback, oscillation, network effects, and phase transformation).
This new modern health perspective also sees our human condition as primarily limited by health information and our ability and incentives to use this information. Finally, it realizes that once these two limitations are surpassed, our human health and life potential can become liberated in a profound and unprecedented new way. In practice, this means acquiring a new ability to influence the interactive physiological, psychological, and environmental processes within and around us that determine our health, well-being, and quality of life.
As suggested, these natural processes can cause our individual and collective health and life to reduce and regress, hold relatively constant or move in recurring patterns and within set limits, or advance without discernible limit, depending on how they are understood and cultivated.
Our progressive approach to health
In the seven sections of our Personal Health Program, HumanaNatura will help you to better appreciate and practically pursue our new open-ended potential for natural health and quality of life, and to experience for yourself the extraordinary power of the new science and practice of progressive health-based living.
After steps to restore the often misunderstood or under-appreciated natural foundations of our health through HumanaNatura’s initial techniques, our quest for health increasingly becomes a highly personalized movement toward ever-newer states of health awareness and realized quality of life. This awareness includes both new scientific knowledge and new self-awareness, information that together allow us to progressively envision and more directly create healthier and enhanced life for ourselves (and then to promote it in others, directly and indirectly further fostering our health).
In the HumanaNatura system, as we use health science and new awareness to creatively explore how we can become healthier, the unique nature of our personal health and the universal nature of all health are progressively revealed to us in newer and fuller ways. The ultimate drivers of our health potential – awareness and action – unite to create a new, more natural, and open-ended approach to modern life, one that occurs on fully modern terms and encourages and benefits from its thoughtful exploration.
To create conditions for new and then self-progressing states of health and vitality in your life, HumanaNatura’s Personal Health Program involves five graduated steps:
- Step One: Health awareness
Our program begins by first ensuring an essential level of natural health awareness, grounding you in our emerging scientific understanding of nature, natural human life, and natural human health. This early and ongoing part of the program – and the focus of the Natural Health and Our Past sections – is designed to re-orient you in essential ways and foster sustained new health learning and action in your life. Our attention to health awareness intended to help you explore your health and to see your life from a specific new viewpoint: through the critical science-based lens of your original natural health and the essential facts of our earlier human life in nature.
- Step Two: Natural Eating
With growing new natural health awareness, we next leverage the rapid health enhancement and personal empowerment that come from HumanaNatura’s first natural health technique, Natural Eating, to demonstrate to you the power of the emerging scientific ideas about our natural human health that we have introduced. In practice, the Natural Eating section of the program will likely have a substantial impact on your personal health and fitness, and create new momentum to further explore your health and the HumanaNatura system.
- Step Three: Natural Exercise
After Natural Eating comes HumanaNatura’s second natural health technique, Natural Exercise. This essential section of the program accelerates our progression toward fuller expressions of our health, by allowing you to achieve natural conditioning. As you will discover, the technique of Natural Exercise brings important physiological and psychological benefits to our lives and provides new life experiences and personal learnings regarding our health and natural human life. Combined with Natural Eating, Natural Exercise lays a lasting foundation for us to consider and pursue progressive natural health across the totality of our lives.
- Step Four: Natural Living
The foundational techniques of Natural Eating and Natural Exercise strengthen and prepare us for HumanaNatura’s third natural health technique – the far-reaching, open-ended, and often life-altering process of health-realization and self-development that we simply call Natural Living. In the Natural Living section of the program, we discuss central ideas for creating vital and fulfilling modern life, and introduce HumanaNatura’s ten dimensions of natural living. We also discuss the important science-based practice of creating, implementing, and regularly refining a Natural Life Plan, leading us more directly to progressive personal states of health, natural harmony, and quality of life.
- Step Five: Natural Communities
To fulfill HumanaNatura’s ten dimensions of natural living, the technique of Natural Living ultimately progresses to include the promotion of new health and health awareness in others, our communities, and global society – which in total we call the work of Natural Communities. This fourth HumanaNatura technique is introduced in the Our Future section of the program, where we discuss the need and many opportunities to promote progressive health in the world around us. The technique focuses us on essential work to eliminate shared health limiters and create new health enablers, steps that often require collective action and social investments of time and resources. In this way, the outward focus of Natural Communities helps us to improve the external conditions that shape our long-term health, while immediately allowing us to fulfill key aspects of our health that require cooperative relationships and collective endeavor with others.
As we suggested before, a critical idea to keep in mind as you begin the HumanaNatura Personal Health Program, to help you succeed and progress as rapidly and steadily as possible, is that health awareness and health actions are closely linked and complementary states. In practice, however, this means that the reality of pursuing your natural health, and the new personal orientation and life patterns this pursuit may engender in you, may be very different than you realize at first and even after pursuing new health for a time.
In using the HumanaNatura system, you will soon learn that progressive health-based life proves a surprising and liberating new approach to contemporary life for us all. It again and again offers new and unexpected outlooks on our health potential, ourselves, and the world, even for people who are familiar with modern science or who are health-oriented already. For this reason, we would challenge you to work to sustain and progress your natural health practice over time – holding gains and always seeking new health – with the knowledge that new health is always possible and dependent on new personal insights and actions waiting for us.
If you have questions or need support or guidance while following HumanaNatura’s Personal Health Program and using our natural health techniques, please contact us at any time. Online natural health counseling, mentoring, and discussions are all critical parts of HumanaNatura’s mission, and are always free, personal, and confidential.
The entire HumanaNatura community wishes you success and new positive experiences as you begin our Personal Health Program. We encourage you to have high expectations, for yourself and us, and to pursue and expect transformative changes in your health and quality of life through the HumanaNatura system.
Important Note:
Before beginning the Natural Eating and Natural Exercise sections of the HumanaNatura program, please review your plans with your physician or other health care professional qualified to assess your readiness for these changes.
While the principles and techniques that follow are designed to promote natural human health, you may have a medical condition that requires an alternative approach. Every person is unique and only a trained health care professional can help you make this assessment.
In addition, please be aware that the walking, hiking, and callisthenic exercises in this program are physically demanding and involve inherent risks of injury. If you are not experienced in these exercise practices, you should seek the guidance a qualified exercise trainer or coach to introduce the exercise program to you.
Please take personal responsibility for checking with your health care provider to assess your readiness to begin the Natural Eating and Natural Exercise sections of the HumanaNatura program, and for obtaining the needed support before beginning the exercise portions of the program in particular.
References & Additional Reading:
Please see the References: Personal Health Program posting in our Articles Library.