Natural Living
Biological life is an automatic process, as long as we take care of the needs of the body. But to live…is by no means something that will happen by itself. In fact everything conspires against it. If we don’t take charge of its direction, our life will be controlled from outside.
- Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
After working to bring our health to more natural and optimal levels through the HumanaNatura techniques of Natural Eating and Natural Exercise, we soon reach a point where our personal fitness and physiological health are greatly improved.
Our bodies have become leaner, stronger, and more naturally conditioned. Chronic ailments and symptoms of reduced health often have disappeared from our lives. Our fitness and physical stamina often are so greatly increased that we now clearly and outwardly share in the universal health and fitness of other natural organisms. Even living amidst modern society and its general condition of what we have called social health, we nevertheless increasingly possess the pervasive but seemingly elusive state of health experienced by the rest of nature.
Importantly, just as our physical and physiological health has improved, we often have been cognitively and emotionally strengthened and conditioned as well, through the challenges and effects of sustained Natural Eating and Natural Exercise. Our mental functioning, memory, and attention are usually noticeably improved. Our emotions are generally calmed and more centered between limiting extremes, and we often discover a new ability to observe and choose among our natural range of human emotions.
In a similar way, our personal outlooks, attitudes, and beliefs frequently have been changed by our natural health efforts as well. They have been informed and often enlarged by our fuller consideration of our natural past and evolving human place in the natural world. They also have often been changed by the many practical considerations and personal experiences contained in our new natural health practices. We regularly have new, more compelling, and increasingly health-oriented goals, priorities, and aspirations emerging in our lives.
Given these changes, at this stage in the renewal and conscious development of our natural health, we not only look differently but often have begun to look at the world differently, with new perspectives on ourselves and the people and human systems around us. Renewing and often unexpected natural impulses toward healthy life and natural well-being may have awakened in us, engendering greater awareness of the many opportunities we have amidst modern life for new health and well-being, and even for new human flourishing.
For HumanaNatura, our own personal experience of this resurgence of our natural health – in body, mind, and spirit – and our finding within ourselves new receptiveness for new personal narratives and health-based life more generally, after a period of Natural Eating and Natural Exercise, is perhaps the most important milestone in the HumanaNatura Personal Health Program.
This new state of health awareness opens and points the way to critical additional dimensions of health and well-being available to us. It begins to reveal the true, progressive, and ultimately open-ended essence of all natural life and health. This new awareness open us, not just to the potential for greater levels of outward health and inner well-being, but to new and as yet unimagined expressions of human life more generally, in our time and for the future.
In this and the next section of the program, entitled Natural Living and Our Future, we will explore this new and more advanced stage in the discovery and development of our natural health. This new exploration of our health begins from our realization and increasing appreciation that our health extends beyond physical and biological functioning, and ultimately encompasses all areas of our life and even all areas of our communities and society today. As we suggested before, this understanding involves greater appreciation that our natural health is both lifelong and life-wide.
The discussion that follows is intended primarily for people experiencing resurgent natural health through the foundational techniques of Natural Eating and Natural Exercise in the HumanaNatura natural health system. It will introduce what may be provocative new ideas about our health, but again ones based entirely on emerging health science. Our discussion will include guidance in our third and critically-important natural health technique that we call Natural Living and encourage through the creation and implementation of a personal Natural Life Plan. Natural Life Plans both inform and develop from our evolving natural health practice and creative application of HumanaNatura’s ten dimensions of natural living, which we will discuss in detail.
Together, the general technique of Natural Living and the specific practice of creating and acting on a Natural Life Plan aim at helping us to more fully envision and deliberately pursue the many progressive health and quality of life opportunities that new health awareness creates for us in modern life. This quest for greater personal health ultimately leads to consider and act in the health-influencing world beyond us, culminating in the fourth HumanaNatura technique of Natural Communities, which we discuss in the final section of the program.
Outer health meets inner health
Based the experiences of HumanaNatura natural health practitioners, we know that most of us strive for a time to understand or put into words our changing health awareness and growing new life perspectives, as we gradually move to states of increased natural health and personal harmony through the techniques of Natural Eating and Natural Exercise.
The personal or inner changes we undergo, as we transition to more natural states of life and health, can be as profound as and are subtly analogous to the important physical or outer changes we achieve as we become healthier. As we have suggested, the transition to natural health amidst modern life can challenge personal beliefs and assumptions, alter our priorities and goals, change and recast important relationships, and compel us to question many aspects of our lives and the social world around us. Since this intermediary or transitional state may describe your life right now as you progress in the HumanaNatura system, this important period of personal change deserves some discussion before we continue.
One way of thinking about the changes in our personal perspective and outlook, as we achieve more informed control and increasing levels of natural health in our lives, is that we reduce common beliefs of pervasive personal insecurity and environmental scarcity. As we all know, these thoughts and their accompanying emotions besiege many people in the modern world – and usually irrationally and ironically, since our general objective state is one of greatly heightened security and general affluence and opportunity (in the developed world and on average at least). This restrictive outlook and sense of limitation of course frequently pervaded the lives of civilized people before our time as well, but this occurred when sufficient security and affluence, and understanding and opportunity to seek progressive health and vitality, were realistically far less certain qualities of human existence.
The modern persistence of beliefs and feelings of scarcity and insecurity in the midst of today’s relative affluence, opportunity, and safety suggests a principal cause other than our average external circumstances. For HumanaNatura, this condition is ultimately rooted in the fact of reduced health and unnatural human life, at both the individual and societal levels. Studies of this phenomenon suggest that it is in fact caused by unhealthy and unnatural distortions of both our internal personal states and our external social conditions.
At a personal level, irrational beliefs in insecurity and scarcity amid peace and prosperity have been shown to stem from habituated patterns of thinking and feeling within a frame of chronically inaccurate and pessimistic perceptions of the world. Analysis of the onset of this process of perceptual distortion and habituated irrationality – conducted in the fields of cognitive-behavioral psychology and neuroscience – has identified a number of causes, spanning the gamut of innate personality and circuitry, early environmental influences, and later life stressors. In the end, especially from an evolutionary perspective, these factors appear to be aspects of poor general adaption in the course of life outside of the narrow confines of our natural niche, resulting in a personal stance of reduced natural health, autonomy, and vitality.
These findings suggest that external conditions play a strong role in irrational and life-limiting patterns of personal cognition, and emerging research has identified the specific factors of excessive human competition and material inequality, amidst affluence and security, as playing dominant roles in promoting these unhealthy personal conditions (and reducing health, happiness, and longevity generally). Some scientists now hypothesize that these two factors supernormally heighten differences in perceived status between people and unnaturally elevate human feelings of inferiority and anxiety, resulting in widespread neurotic and unhealthy behaviors. As we will discuss later in the program and as you may sense intuitively, a key result of unchecked modern competition and inequality is an unhealthy and unsatisfying narrowing of our personal focus in response to heightened status-seeking behaviors and perceptions – regressively and paradoxically leading to feelings of insecurity and want amidst the relative safety and affluence of our time. These findings have critically important implications for both the techniques of Natural Living and Natural Communities, and we will discuss them in more detail shortly.
The accuracy and power of these ideas are therefore strongly suggested when our personal focus and orientation is shifted and these feelings substantially abate, even in otherwise identical social conditions. In particular, as we are increasingly informed by and benefit from new attention on our health and well-being, our personal outlook and sense of abundance and opportunity are greatly changed and expanded. We begin to see for ourselves that widespread human feelings of dependency and personal limitation, in our time and perhaps before too, are principally symptoms of reduced natural health and human estrangement from our natural conditions and sources of vitality and fulfillment. We gradually learn that feelings of scarcity and alienation today are not primarily due to general limits on our personal freedom or material holdings, but rather our personal and social preoccupations and the resulting life structures and social systems they engender. After all, significant constraints and subsistence living were dominant features of our long and generally satisfying human life in wild nature.
You may be in the process of exploring and personally validating these idea right now, as disempowering personal feelings leave you and new life opportunities appear amidst your resurgent natural health and more health-informed perspectives – even amidst the fact (and perhaps creative tension) of nearly identical external circumstances. As we suggested, it is quite common to work for a time to fully appreciate and comprehend these critical and quite significant changes underway in our lives for ourselves. This process is a sign of growth and reflects our increasing transition to health-based life.
Your exploration and searching signals an important personal change from conditions of social health to progressive natural health, a change that is of course occurring in the context of a modern world still largely tethered to our past and unconsciously enshrouded in its many irrational and unhealthy traditions, beliefs, and priorities.
First steps toward Natural Living
With our increasing natural health, and with growing new awareness of our essential quality of life requirements and how they might be more optimally fulfilled, we thus typically and increasingly gain new practical control and freedom in our lives.
We achieve and benefit from an increasing sense of the many options immediately around us for healthier and more fulfilling life. We find a new ability to better articulate and pursue our health goals and life aims, and a new resourcefulness to do so in more direct, effective, and sustaining ways. In this process of both progressively seeing and seeking our opportunities for healthier life, we take our first personal steps in what HumanaNatura calls the technique of Natural Living.
In this process, our resurgent health and increasing understanding often makes the world in general and people in particular less threatening and stressful to us. We often begin to perceive the world around us less in terms of obstacles or constraints on our lives, and more filled with vast opportunities for new personal growth and harmony, for ourselves and others. In this essential change in the condition of our life, we become aware that our human requirements for vitality and fulfillment are closely linked to our natural desire for emotional harmony and logical order. By this, we mean our often unnamed wish to be aligned with or true to our health, our destiny, others around us, essential principles, and the totality of nature itself. In this growing awareness, we soon may see that opportunities for progressive harmony with our health and optimal life surround us in nearly every moment of our lives and in every choice we make or face.
As suggested before, these changes in our orientation can be surprising and even unsettling at first, but the combined effect of our increasing health and the new perspectives it affords us is a compounding and ultimately liberating one. Through the progressive achievement of new levels of health awareness and personal states of health, we gradually recast quality of life in terms of our health itself – as informed, principled, individualized, and progressive natural life lived for its own sake.
In achieving this important change in our orientation, we grow less bound to the evolved and sometimes quite arbitrary norms and standards of our particular culture (standards, patterns and life goals often rooted in and evolved from conditions of less healthy and less scientifically-aware life). We come to realize that these externally-imposed patterns and goals, in addition to being difficult to pursue or attain, are often far less fulfilling to us than the new personal goals that naturally emerge as we begin the progressive and open-ended pursuit of health-based life. After all, the existing patterns of life around us are largely inherited and, as we will discuss, were only partly evolved to ensure or promote our health.
With this critical and practical shift to a more health-based orientation and daily life, one that we will encourage and inform in the remainder of the program, achieving vital and fulfilling life becomes a far easier task and more certain endeavor. With new curiosity and openness, and new use of modern scientific knowledge, growing natural health possibilities soon permeate our lives, and opportunities for greater personal and collective health gradually but steadily reveal themselves to us.
Though we may not realize this at first, simply by exploring the science of our natural health and committing to continually pursue our immediate opportunities for progressive well-being and quality of life – which is the essence of Natural Living – our lives take on a new, far more adaptive, and naturally open-ended structure. This new transformed life is strangely more complete and open-ended, more challenging and satisfying, and even freer amidst the seeming constraint of its overarching goal. In it, our life becomes pattered on the process of all life.
In this way, our renewing natural health at once offers us a fresh and transformed, and yet ancient human experience, a modern and informed returning to our essential human place in nature in a very intuitive and satisfying way. Though this transformation is based on the analytics of modern science, it nevertheless encourages and enables more creative and spirited life in us, today and for the future.
Gone or fading perhaps, at this stage in our transition to more advanced states of natural health, are received or self-created beliefs that may have limited our health or distorted us as people. As suggested, these beliefs and assumptions involve who and what we are, how we should think and act, and what we should value and pursue with our lives. In their place, we find in us something ancient and wise, and fresh and probing for new life.
Living in a vast natural world and an advanced technological civilization, we find ourselves.
Natural living defined
As suggested before, it is from this new state of enhanced and more natural personal health that we find the strength, the natural curiosity, and the compelling motivation to begin to explore Natural Living, the third technique in the HumanaNatura natural health system.
For HumanaNatura, Natural Living is easily defined and uncomplicated in principle. Natural Living is simply the conscious, practical, and progressive restructuring of our daily lives and life aims for increased health and well-being, beyond the time we spend eating and exercising.
We should point out that HumanaNatura’s use of the word “natural” to describe this restructuring process is again intentional and consistent with our earlier discussions. As was the case with our Natural Eating and Natural Exercise techniques, Natural Living is ultimately a process of using modern science to bring essential but lost or latent health-promoting aspects of earlier human life in nature into our lives today. It is equally one of using contemporary science to create a process that helps to optimize our quality of life and natural harmony today, once we have become adequately re-grounded in critical health-promoting aspects of our earlier human life in wild nature.
As we have discussed, although this technique is scientifically-based, the practice of Natural Living itself is very much a creative and highly personalized one as well. Natural Living invokes and fosters new considerations and emotions in us. It encourages ongoing health-seeking action that increasingly makes our lives more vital, deliberately-chosen, and progressive. Natural Living harnesses and integrates our rational and emotional centers to foster and build ever healthier, more conscious, and more compelling life.
In the HumanaNatura system, Natural Living is a continuation and expansion of the exploration of our natural health, reconnection to our past, and seeking of new health opportunities that we began through Natural Eating and Natural Exercise. Now, however, we will bring this same science-based and health-seeking approach to the totality of our lives.
While it is true that we might stop in our progression to greater health and quality of life with our new approaches to diet or exercise – or at any other point in time or with any particular step toward new personal health and understanding – we would of course resign ourselves to lower states of individual health and awareness, and likely to a lesser quality of life, than we are capable.
In this important sense, the technique of Natural Living is as big as we are, or as big as we might someday be. It is an open-ended challenge to use our increasing natural health to explore and become all that we can be through an ongoing and progressive quest for new personal health and vitality. Natural Living is our search for the vital and practical next step we might and then must take to be healthier and more vital – in our lives, across our lives, and throughout our lives.
Let us then embark together on this essential new exploration of natural life together, starting today and with the discussion that follows. As you may have guessed and soon will see, the technique of Natural Living is a journey that again begins with our natural past and asks us to re-examine and re-imagine, through the evolving lens of science and with the light of our human imagination, what it might mean to be even healthier and more fit in our lives today.