Natural Health
I don’t think we have to assert any particular uniqueness of man, or separateness from the rest of nature, in order to find value in life. Personally, I find it more agreeable to think that man is a part of nature than that he is apart from or above it.
- Herbert Simon
To begin our exploration of the HumanaNatura system and its goal of progressive natural health, we will first clarify what our natural health is, discuss the state of human health in and before our time, and familiarize you with important personal challenges and opportunities we all have when working to improve our health, well-being, and quality of life in our time.
We would like to start our discussion by exploring the idea that abundant, vibrant natural health is both all around us and not all around us, everywhere and almost nowhere. Do these ideas seem in conflict?
The riddle of natural health
This seeming contradiction forms the riddle of natural health in our time, and from civilized times before ours, a riddle that has escaped or confounded thoughtful and health-minded people for centuries. In this program, with the essential aid of contemporary science, we will solve this riddle with you, and help you to use the solution to create remarkable new health and vitality in your life.
In we look at the world, we can see that significant and obvious shortfalls in the health and well-being of people are everywhere around us today. At the same time, robust and even remarkable examples of natural health in our midst too, as are what turn out to be relatively straightforward opportunities for much higher levels of human health and well-being. But these higher states of health and untapped opportunities for new health are often much less obvious to us than the seemingly broader condition of reduced health. For these reasons, the reality of our natural health amid modern life really does present itself as a riddle of sorts.
In practice, seeing our true potential for natural health and well-being proves surprisingly difficult for people today, and sometimes even difficult to accept once we finally do see it. This is in part because of natural limits on our perspective and frames of reference, and in part because of the strong force of our history, culture, and social environment. Both facts underscore the natural cycle of health awareness and health action we discussed before, one that can bind us to specific levels of health and life. Only now – and only through the persistent and often intuition-upsetting process of modern scientific advancement – are previously unseen and quite significant natural opportunities for increased human health and quality of life newly apparent to us.
These science-based opportunities for new health takes the form of a natural health paradigm that is elegantly simple once understood, but that has existed for thousands of years as an obscured and waiting potential or hidden truth within us. This truth about our natural life and health leads to a series of fresh and interconnected insights, from our time in history, and immediately moves us to new understandings and expressions of our health and quality of life potential. These insights greatly increase our ability to achieve for new levels of personal health and natural harmony, and far more compelling forms of collective life together as well.
Inherited definitions of health
The modern English word health is derived, or rather naturally evolved, from older languages. In its present and earlier forms, as in many other languages, health refers to the concept of wholeness or soundness of being. Such definitions hardly can come as a surprise. In one sense, we all know health, especially when we perceive health or possess it ourselves. Intuitively and almost universally, we think of health as a completeness in body and mind, as the foundation of human life and happiness, and very often experience our health as a central concern in our lives.
In another very real sense, though, most of us do not understand our health well at all. By this, we mean knowing our health’s origin and principal mechanisms, and how living things that are healthy come to be and can remain this way over time. Health, in its essence, is often a vague and uncertain state for us. We can see this fact of human life today when we are asked to examine our understanding of our health. Frequently, we find that our knowledge of our health proves more superficial than we had realized. This lack of clear understanding often unconsciously causes the subject of our health to inspire feelings of uncertainty, uneasiness, anxiety, and even helplessness.
For this reason, our health is often an unclear and elusive phenomenon for most of us in modern times, as it was with people before our time. Our health comes and goes in the lives of people, sometimes predictably, as a consequence of actions known intuitively to be harmful to us and unhealthy, or as a part of the generally accepted but often equally unexamined process of human aging. Our health can also depart from our lives seemingly illogically and even capriciously, as unfortunate twists of fate and without obvious patterns of cause and effect.
In all these cases, our direct experience of health gives us very little insight into health’s underlying nature and deeper principles, let alone offer guidance on how our health and well-being might be reliably maintained and even progressively enhanced over the course of our lives. To underscore this important point, it may be helpful for your learning to stop reading and take a moment to define health for yourself, in as precise terms as you can, before continuing with our discussion.
Reflecting and compounding our common lack of health understanding – especially from the perspective of natural health practitioners and the high levels of lifelong health we create for ourselves – is the fact that the vast majority of us today have remarkably low expectations for our personal health and well-being. While this may be gradually changing, there is a general and quite entrenched modern bias to expect low and transitory health in our lives, and even a persistent ethos that approaches our health with cynicism and conspicuous indifference. Many of us assume our health will decline after adolescence and that we will need significant medical intervention to maintain our health throughout adulthood.
In their own ways, each of these outlooks on our health reflects and often works to needlessly limit our personal and general levels of health and quality of life. This important theme of low health expectations or awareness and poor health-promoting action is one we have discussed already and will return to throughout the program. It is itself a condition of reduced health and key source of personal limitation that we will help you to actively eliminate.
New ideas about health
We can see signs of our low general health awareness and limited state of health when we begin to engage others on the topic of health promotion. This can include encouraging people to pursue a deeper understanding of their health or to have higher expectations for their personal well-being and quality of life.
In conversations with people around the world, HumanaNatura practitioners and advocates often encounter strong objections and frequent expressions of uncertainty and disbelief when we advance broader and decidedly unfamiliar ideas about our health and its natural advancement. Pointed ambivalence or dismissiveness typically emerges when we suggest that our health is a natural process of self-fulfillment and involves all aspects of our lives. And we find few people initially receptive to the idea that our health is the realization and advancement of what and who we are as living beings, or that healthy living inevitably is a barrier-breaking and open-ended process.
For perspective, it is worth pointing out that when we think about the health of other species – say of pets, livestock, or domesticated plants – our attitudes are very different and our implicit ideas about health are much closer to the ones just mentioned. We of course first want these living entities to be free of disease, just as when we think about our own health. But as often, when we consider our health-related goals for other species in our care, we find that we seek much more than this. When we express our health goals for these living entities, we generally want them to be fully alive and actualized to the greatest extent possible.
In this way, we encourage these non-human forms of life to be big and strong, cute and cuddly, or vibrant and colorful, at all times and throughout their normal lifespan – in accordance with their nature and in ways that imply the active realization or fulfillment of this nature. Very often, we even want the animals and plants in our lives to be an idealization of what they are as living beings, and to achieve the full potential we know their particular species is capable of becoming.
Thus, in the case of plants and animals at least, and perhaps with human children in our care too, our implicit definition of health is very different than ones we often have for adult human life and for our own lives. In these cases, our conception of health often approaches new ideas of health as an natural, active, flourishing, and self-fulfilling state. We also often see health here as a state that can and should be maintained throughout most of life.
Perhaps then, for modern adult people, for each of us individually and for all of us as a species, the idea that our human health is an active, multi-faceted, and lifelong state is a viable proposition too. As we will next discuss, this notion is strongly supported by new scientific evidence that humans are a natural species and that our health is a natural and progressive process.