Creating Natural Life Plans
Earlier in this section of the program, we encouraged you to spend some time listing the most and least healthy aspects of your life today, especially in areas outside of your current eating and exercise practices.
Although unguided self-analysis of this kind can be inexact and even uncomfortable at first, we suggested that the assignment would provide a preview of the technique of Natural Living and help to make our discussion of its foundational ideas more concrete. As you perhaps learned during the exercise and then saw during our discussion of HumanaNatura’s ten dimensions, the technique of Natural Living involves cultivating an ongoing and attentive sense of our personal sources of health and vitality, and equally, the key limits on our well-being and quality of life at each point in time.
In many years of practice, we have found that the simplest way to begin to develop this important new personal health awareness and potential for action is, simply, to begin – via the tangible and perhaps uncertain challenge of making an initial lists of our current natural health enablers and limiters.
Revisiting our health landscape
At this point in the program, it will be useful for you to return to your initial lists of health enablers and limiters, and to examine how your early self-assessment aligns with our discussion of Natural Living, HumanaNatura’s ten dimensions, and our general model stressing the importance of emphasizing more intelligent and progressive “beta-cycle” behaviors in our lives and groups.
In particular, we would encourage you to consider whether our discussion has prompted new insights in you and now compels you to change, change the order of, or expand your initial assessment of your health landscape (your lists of you key current health enablers and health limiters).
As we have discussed, our health landscape involves the external conditions and social influences of our lives, but also extends to our internal state and the patterns of thinking and action that result from our dominant beliefs. Though all of these areas are essential aspects of our health landscape, considerable research suggests that our beliefs often prove most central to our natural health and quality of life, and are often both more powerful and less known to us than we may at first realize (and can be either accurate or inaccurate, rational or irrational, and health-enabling or health limiting).
As we introduced before, the pragmatic and often self-challenging process of seeking to better see and improve our health landscape – and then of helping others and even whole communities to do this – is a critical part of the technique of Natural Living and an essential practice in seeking progressive personal health. Often, as we begin this work, we only partially and even only minimally grasp the full contours and significance of our health landscape. The fact of a limited objective understanding of our health landscape is a common condition of life today, as was in all times before ours, underscoring our enormous shared opportunity for greater health and quality of life waiting in new health awareness.
Because our health landscape is a complex and open-ended natural phenomenon, none of us can of course ever fully know our true health and life potential at any point in time. There is only what we do know and can act on today, to provide benefit and learning, so that we can know and act again tomorrow. As we have discussed in the program, this essential fact of human life and health underscores the necessarily pragmatic and progressive nature of Natural Living, and the natural processes that underlie all evolving life.
As you consider HumanaNatura’s ten dimensions of natural or beta-cycle living, and explore your health landscape and opportunities for progressive health in your life, HumanaNatura’s variation on the well-known “Wheel of Life” exercise of popular psychology can be an excellent tool to help you better assess your personal health landscape. The Wheel of Life exercise involves using HumanaNatura’s ten dimensions to help you build new awareness of your health landscape as it is today and to encourage creative thinking about your most compelling personal health opportunities.
To do this exercise, which we call seeing our Health Wheel, simply list out HumanaNatura’s ten dimensions of natural living, and then give yourself a 1-5 score (1=low, 5=high) for your current alignment with each natural health dimension. Then, write down what changes are most needed in your life to raise your score in any dimension that is below a score of four today.
If you want to better visualize your self-assessment, to see the relative smoothness or bumpiness of your Health Wheel, lightly draw a ten-spoke wheel. Then, label each spoke with the name of a dimension, and shade in the length of each spoke to reflect your 1-5 scores (beginning at the hub and with higher scores getting a proportionately longer shaded spoke). A pre-formatted Health Wheel diagram is available on the HumanaNatura website – go to the Natural Living Worksheets page in the Resources section of our website.
To supplement informal reflection on your health landscape and the more formal health awareness exercise of creating a Health Wheel, engaging in health-related discussions with others can be another useful way to help us to more clearly see and gain new perspective on our key internal and external health enablers and limiters. Discussions with others can include informal conversations with people around you, or phone calls or emails with people who know you well who are not close physically.
Discussions with others can also take the form of writing to HumanaNatura’s natural health support staff, and seeking mentoring relationships with HumanaNatura members and others using our natural health system. If you would like to complete a detailed self-analysis of your health landscape, HumanaNatura also offers a comprehensive Natural Health Assessment tool on our website, covering fifty health and well-being areas related to modern Natural Living.
Each of these methods, whether you use them now or over time, can help you to master the essential Natural Living practice of regularly assessing our health landscape – the first step in our seven-step process for creating and acting on a Natural Life Plan. All of these sources of personal health information can also provide added motivation and new ideas for creative action, as we progressively map and master the critical topography formed by the high and low points of our current health, well-being, adaptiveness, and quality of life.
Your first natural life plan
We will now help you to use your growing health awareness to step forward into the first of what may be many new states of increased natural health in your life. We will do this by guiding you to develop and then implement your own initial Natural Life Plan.
Your first Natural Life Plan, like subsequent plans that can and should regularly follow, will describe how you will practically act on the facts of your health landscape to achieve greater health and well-being in your life in the short to mid-term. As we have discussed, acting pragmatically and continually toward progressive health and quality of life is the essence of Natural Living and health-based life itself. The development and implementation of a Natural Life Plan is intended to augment and build upon the essential HumanaNatura techniques of Natural Eating and Natural Exercise.
As we suggested before, your initial Natural Life Planning session may be somewhat uncertain and feel imprecise. For this reason, we would encourage you to approach your first planning session principally as a learning opportunity and not with the goal of producing a comprehensive and lasting document. This approach, in fact, is the correct one in creating any and all Natural Life Plans, however many times we may revise and refine them. All Natural Life Plans begin from a set level of personal health awareness, but their formulation and implementation inevitably are sources of new awareness (as is all other new learning in our lives), allowing and naturally encouraging their progressive evolution.
With this idea of an initial focus on learning in mind, we would also again encourage you not to make any major life changes based on your first Natural Life Plan, or even during the first few iterations of your Natural Life Plan. Instead, we would recommend your principal attention on clearly and immediately beneficial items, and incremental and directional steps you can take quite rapidly – within your life as it is structured today – especially ones that offer useful feedback on your early health landscape assessment and resulting plan content.
In keeping with our earlier discussion of HumanaNatura’s basic health-promotion philosophy and the many advantages of pragmatism and sustained progressivity in the pursuit of health-based life, it is essential to keep in mind that HumanaNatura advocates a process of gradual, continual, and compounding change to realize new states of personal health. In this way, attentiveness and learning are naturally fostered in our lives, providing important benefits in themselves and improving our general capacity for progressive and productive action. This essential approach allows assumptions to be surfaced and quickly tested, options and ideas progressively explored, and learning incorporated into our Natural Life Plans over time. Transformative and even revolutionary change in our lives is realized, but through sure-footed, fairly rapid, and compounding steps, rather untested and ill-considered moves. As we stressed before the HumanaNatura system advocates change modeled on natural evolution’s (and science’s) process of persistence and accumulated bits of learning and information, and by tested and validated moves, rather than by risky or reactive actions or precarious leaps.
As mentioned earlier in this section of the program, since there is always the potential for unexpected learning amidst the practice of Natural Living, this implies a corresponding potential for misperception and miscalculation in our natural health efforts at each point in time. Because of this, in addition to always treating our Natural Life Plans as living documents and subject to ongoing change, we recommend that you start the process of Natural Living with humility and care. This includes acknowledging and even embracing natural uncertainty as we approach the far-ranging and ultimately open-ended endeavor that is progressively healthier life today.
Seven steps to progressive health
Developing your own initial Natural Life Plan, and then making subsequent plan revisions as your natural health practice develops, involves seven essential, complementary, and sequential steps.
These seven steps are: 1) assessing our health landscape, 2) envisioning more optimal life, 3) describing our life as it is today, 4) formulating our needed Natural Life Plan, 5) reviewing our Natural Life Plan, 6) implementing our Natural Life Plan, and 7) evaluating our actions and their impacts on our health and quality of life. Based on the planning, actions, and evaluations included in these seven steps, the full process of Natural Living is repeated periodically, and even frequently at first, to improve and gradually accelerate our movement toward ever-healthier and higher quality life.
In this spirit of continuous learning and improvement, HumanaNatura encourages you to update your Natural Life Plan at least monthly as you begin the process of Natural Living and benefit from the learning and new perspectives that inevitably come as we begin to explore and alter our health landscape. After your Natural Life Planning efforts become clearer and better established, we then recommend that you reassess your health landscape and update your Natural Life Plan at least twice yearly.
HumanaNatura, in fact, encourages even our most experienced and committed practitioners to review their Natural Life Plans twice each year, using each the natural balance and moderation of each solar equinox as a reminder of this essential practice within the technique of Natural Living and our overall natural health system.
As an important complement to this goal of continuous learning and action and the practice of regularly updating our Natural Life Plans, to help ensure success and progress over time, we would also underscore another practice mentioned before – the importance of focusing on rapid change whenever possible. Practically, focusing on steps that can be made rapidly encourages smaller and surer actions, fosters regular learning and new plan ideas, and promotes success in goal completion and plan momentum. Psychologically, as discussed earlier, rapid change importantly leverages our brain’s natural tendency to habituate to our surroundings and derive pleasure from our daily habits (whether habits are old or relatively new, and healthy or unhealthy).
Rapid change also assists plan success by providing rapid counterbalancing benefits to match the immediate costs or disruptions that can come with change, thereby helping health-based feel as progressive as it is in fact. The combined effect of rapid change is to create newer and healthier states that are almost immediately pleasurable and beneficial, and thus place relatively high barriers to regression to old patterns of thought, feeling, perception, and action as they are achieved. The approach, and its important empirically-demonstrated advantages, underscores our natural need for healthy harmony and rhythm amidst growth and movement in our lives.
With these preliminaries, we would like you to complete your first Natural Life Plan using the seven steps that follow. To help you in this process, a Natural Life Plan worksheet is available on the HumanaNatura website – go to the Natural Living Worksheets page in the Resources section of our website.
- Assess your health landscape – begin with your initial assessment of your top three health enablers and limiters, or start fresh. Use HumanaNatura’s ten dimensions of natural living, discussions with others, and our Natural Health Assessment tool to expand your perspective on how you might live (think, feel, perceive, and act) more healthfully. Create a comprehensive and prioritized list of the things that today most promote and limit your health and well-being. Items can range from your eating and exercise patterns to those aspects of your life currently aligned and misaligned with our ten dimensions and model emphasizing beta-cycle life. Live with your list for a time as we have suggested, discuss it with people you trust to provide reliable and confidential feedback, and adjust your list whenever you need to, so that it reflects your current health landscape as accurately, completely, and concisely as possible. Be sure to give yourself credit for the things in your life that are health-promoting already, but work to ensure openness and even curiosity about HumanaNatura’s idea of the inevitability of new steps we can always take to make our lives healthier, at all times and from each point in our life.
- Envision more optimal life – looking beyond your assessment of your current health landscape, the next step in creating or revising your Natural Life Plan is attentively and creatively envisioning healthier and more optimal life. To be motivating and respond to your specific life potential, your vision of healthier life should be crafted in very personal and positive terms. Your goal in this step is to create a full and compelling vision for yourself living in future conditions of robust personal health and natural harmony. This vision can be in paragraph or narrative form, be a bulleted or numbered list, and/or be pictorial or visual, as long as the vision is clear, specific, and compelling to you. When you are done, you should have a fairly complete and personally inspiring vision of the healthier and more optimal life you ultimately want for yourself. Importantly, your personal vision can and should be thought of and composed in the present tense, describing a reality that exists (if in the future). Crafting your vision in the present tense can be powerful way of both imagining and motivating yourself to move or live into that reality. Your envisioned life should contain all of the critical features that you aspire to in the spirit of new health, progressivity, and natural harmony in your life. Anything you wish to include in your vision can be incorporated. This might involve your work, relationships, and personal behaviors and attitudes – whatever you believe you need to live vitally and optimally, and as long as the items describe an overall state that you are personally committed to pursuing with your life. As a test of commitment, and to probe and better clarify your vision, you might ask “why” you want each particular item in your vision. You may find that some items in your initial vision ultimately are surface conditions of more essential ideals that invoke even deeper commitments in you. You can learn from this questioning and adjust your vision as needed to reflect these deeper aims as you become aware of them. In other cases, items in your vision will simply be what you want, and true motivators and foundations in themselves. When you are done your visioning session, you will have a succinct but encompassing portrait of the life you would like to lead, with all of its key elements included and sufficiently described. As with your landscape assessment, live with your vision for a time, and remain ready to update and refine it whenever you feel the need or realize states of new health awareness.
- Describe your life today – once your life vision is in reasonably good shape, remembering that our personal visions are alive and changing as we live and change, the next step in creating or updating your Natural Life Plan is to describe your life as it is today. This description should be in an equally clear and similar format as your personal vision. It should also include all or many of the most important health enablers and limiters from your health landscape assessment. The goal is to produce a current life description in a format that parallels your personal vision – whether in either paragraph, bulleted, and/or pictorial form – in a way that is clear to you, in the present tense, and forming an accurate, reasonably complete, but still concise description of your life as it is today. In many cases, you will find a strong correspondence between the elements of your personal vision and life description, between what you want to create in your life to make it healthier and the facts of your life as it is today. Sometimes, there will be elements that appear in one but not the other in a sensible way. Other times, however, you will see one or more omissions or differences in the content of your personal vision or current life description that compel you to go back and edit one or both of them so that they achieve a satisfying level of completeness. When you are done, you should have a solid and reasonably objective description of your life today. Most important of course is to highlight those things that most enable your health and quality of life, and that most hold you back from these goals.
- Formulate your Natural Life Plan – the advantage of having a rough (but not forced) alignment of the elements in your personal vision for Natural Living and your current life description is that it can make planning your Natural Living actions easier. For example, if your vision is to spend twenty hours a week in a particular activity and today you spend five hours each week, it is often a fairly simple process to plan steps to close this gap between your reality today and envisioned life. At the same time, it is usually unrealistic to expect a perfect correspondence between the items in your personal vision and life description. Almost inevitably, there will be items that you need or want to start or stop in your life, or others which will not obviously align. And while the items of your vision and description may not perfectly correspond to one another, sometimes they are related in the sense that stopping old behaviors can create time to start new ones. Regardless of how well the elements of your personal vision and current life description align, an action plan needs to ensue at this point of planning process. This action plan should pragmatically, creatively, and realistically close the gaps between what we have in our life today and want for our life in the future. We would add that this emphasis on creatively-planned ways to close the gaps with our vision is not accidental. As we have discussed already, the movement toward healthier and more optimal life is never formulaic or arrived at by rote or thoughtless activity. Robust, progressive Natural Living is in essence an increasingly attentive movement toward more intelligent, adaptive, and dynamic personal states – and one of using or applying the insights of science and our experience in progressive and creative expressions in our lives. Natural Living circularly seeks and is driven by life that is actively and consciously created, health and quality of life seeking, and continually validated and information-creating as we proceed. Natural Living is life informed by science and approached as art, to invoke the words of the writer and life coach Robert Fritz (from whose work this process is partially adapted). Subject to this rule of attentiveness, almost any action can be included in your action plan that seeks to close the gap between your life and vision. Actions might include changes in your eating and exercise practices, steps to better fulfill HumanaNatura’s ten dimensions of natural living, work on patterns of behavior and belief that limit natural harmony and quality of life, development of new relationships and skills, and other personalized actions that help you better realize and live out your progressive visions of health-based life. In considering this potential range of actions, we would again underscore that the HumanaNatura system encourages small, rapidly-implemented, and progressively advancing steps that are used to provide learning and feedback on, and allow regular refinement of, your personal vision and life description.
- Refine your Natural Life Plan –when you are done your action planning, it is essential that you take at least some time to review and refine your plan before implementing it. This may mean spending some time away from your plan to garner fresh perspective on it, or reviewing the plan with a confidant for the same purpose. Other options for plan refinement include considering it against our ten dimensions of natural living, our seven lessons of modern life, or our triad of natural human fulfillment (engagement, endeavor, relationships). Take enough time to review and refine your plan so that it is clear and you develop a deep commitment to implement it, but not so much time that you lose interest or motivation to act in the new ways it specifies. In practice, each version of your Natural Life Plan will include perhaps five to fifteen key actions of varying scope and level of priority. Actions must then be edited as needed so that they are each expressed as goals or outcomes and in ways that are SMART (Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Realistic, and Time-Specified), and so that they clearly and directly lead from the key facts of your life description toward realization of the major elements of your personal vision. When considering the appropriate timing of your individual actions – in keeping with our recommendations of regular updates to our Natural Living assessments and plans, and focus on small compelling steps that can be implemented rapidly – we have found that the best Natural Life Plans usually involve a mix or portfolio of actions of different timeframes that work toward our vision in a graduated or progressive way. This approach fosters a guiding sense of planned change and encourages overlapping reviews and adjustments across multiple visioning and planning sessions. To achieve this outcome, we encourage you to organize your actions from small to large steps in a plan that has items relatively evenly balanced between the actions you will complete in: a) one month or less, b) one to twelve months, and c) more than twelve months (with the completion date for each item specified within these three categories). Assuming you will limit your Natural Living actions in the first month (in your initial plan) to incremental changes that provide rapid feedback and learning, extra attention should be initially placed on the items in your one month category. This will help you to test not only the strength of your action plan, but the also the content of your personal vision and life description, and will help you to quickly refine and reliably improve your first Natural Life Plan. If you find that your plans lack balance across the three general time categories, this is usually a sign that added refinement is needed – bolstering our planned short, middle, or longer term actions – and ensuring that our plan is centered between our need for both tactical action and strategic aiming toward our personal vision.
- Implement your Natural Life Plan – all of our efforts at assessing, visioning, and planning must eventually lead to tangible action toward our personal vision of healthier and higher quality life, and thus to practical results and useful learning in our lives. If you have established an action plan that has actions balanced over the three timeframes as we have suggested – including smaller, incremental steps early in your plan to give you immediate feedback and inform the longer-term steps you have planned for the future – implementing your initial action plan is made much easier and also quickly generates learning and new health awareness. Similarly, if our actions are consistently written in a SMART way, it should be quite clear what we need to do and when, and if and at what point we have succeeded, helping us to improve our skills and information for future planning sessions. If some of your actions do not have this SMART quality, consider revising your action plan right away, and even your life description and personal vision as needed, to make your essential Natural Living actions as clear and specific as possible. To optimize your progress, your Natural Life Plan should concisely, transparently, and measurably state what you want to create, where you are today, and the specific steps you will take over time to make your vision reality. Please also pay special attention to how much of your action plan involves steps that you have direct control over. Involving others in your Natural Life Plan can be quite desirable, for them and you, but you must ultimately own all the actions in your plan and be ready to formulate contingency steps if help does not materialize as planned or hoped. When implementing initial actions, we recommend that you set or schedule specific time each day to work on your plan actions, as well as time each week to assess your progress and make adjustments as needed. Implementing Natural Life Plans with others can also be a great way to help ensure success, and to get useful support and feedback, as is simply sharing some or all of your plan with people close to you. In the end, however, if you are committed to your plan and it is clear and realistic, you will simply need to find the time and will to act as you want. This may mean stopping certain behaviors immediately and completely. It may mean watching for and overriding unhealthy, irrational or limiting patterns of thinking whenever they surface. Or it may involve beginning new behaviors or making new investments in your future. To aid you in various forms of health and future-oriented action, it can be helpful to become more sensitized to how you spend your time, dividing it into time that is goal-directed and health-promoting, and time that is not. We cannot of course spend all our time in future focus, and need healthy and enriching present-oriented activities to be at our best. But you may surprise yourself at the amount of time we can liberate for new future focus and health-based action, simply by looking for and transforming habituated uses of your time that are unhealthy, inconsequential, or self-limiting. Based on research in this area, common forms of low-quality and limiting uses of our time include 1) obsessive thought and action related to negative past experiences, 2) immersion in irrational feelings of weakness and resulting behaviors, including passivity, 3) regular lapses into routinized behaviors that are not attentively and consciously chosen, 4) other uses of our time that is not productive or health-promoting.
- Evaluate your actions and impacts – as suggested before, one thing we can be certain of is that our personal visions and life descriptions will never be perfect, and that our resulting action plans will always be imprecise and often will not proceed exactly as expected. The task of Natural Living is to live forward into the future more optimally at each point in time, rather than to work single-mindedly toward an unchangeable vision of perfect life. Since we can never know the future, inevitably we must plan and act and learn, and then plan and act and learn again. This iterative process is inherent in natural and progressive life itself, and reveals the close relationship we have discussed between our health awareness and realizable states of health. The alternative to progressive life, inevitably, is to operate without our actions directed at a consciously-chosen and evolving vision, to live without emphasis on attentiveness or openness to new learning in daily life, or simply to neglect our open-ended potential for healthier and more compelling life. In studies of people who are highly fulfilled and deeply engaged in their lives, researchers normally find that people with these qualities have clear personal visions, goals, and plans, but also that they remain open to change and experience. As we have discussed, they thus achieve fulfillment in part from the intrinsically satisfying nature of this mode of life, and in part from some amount of successful growth toward their chosen life aims and improvements in their life quality. Invariably, they realize some but not all of what they seek, but enjoy the pursuit of their goals and of course often achieve far more than people who do not live in this more active and engaged way. In practice, even partial success in our Natural Life Plans – as long as our actions are persistent, focused, and allowed to engender learning-rich and life-advancing progressions – is generally more than sufficient accomplishment to produce fulfilling present states and transformative long-term change in our lives (as it is in our communities). For this reason, the technique of Natural Living relies first on learning and persistence, and only secondarily on precision and mastery. With these important ideas in mind, when you are ready (but no later than one month while you first begin the practice of Natural Living and no less than twice a year thereafter), you should candidly evaluate your progress against your initial or current Natural Life Plan. This evaluation should involve a patient and thoughtful assessment of both successes and shortcomings in your actions, and the strength of your personal vision and current life description. If you have been successful with your planned actions and feel confident in your life vision, a more ambitious plan or a more ambitious timetable for your actions might be in order. If not, this is an ideal time to re-assess the completeness and accuracy of your personal vision and life description, and the reasonableness and timing of your action plan. In this evaluation, please keep in mind that we easily can become wedded to or insufficiently questioning of our vision, description, and action plan, and it is essential to watch for and overcome this natural tendency. To progress our Natural Life Plan and fulfill the spirit of Natural Living, we must remain honest with ourselves and open to change in visions and plans. To aid in this, you may want to again use a trusted friend or mentor to help in your plan evaluation. Always, our goal in Natural Living is both action and learning, together resulting in self-sustaining and progressive movement and improvement in our lives. This may mean recognizing that some changes in our lives can occur quickly, while other outcomes may take time and considerable effort to realize. It may mean remaining cognizant to the idea that some changes may not be possible in our lives at a particular point in time, or require a different approach than we first imagined. A commitment to both action and learning also means a receptiveness to change our personal visions and needed actions as we grow in our health over time. When you have completed your first or a subsequent Natural Life Plan evaluation, repeat the six steps above to formulate and implement a new Natural Life Plan – re-visiting your health landscape and revising your personal vision, life description, and action plan as needed.
Beginning from our ten dimensions of natural living and emphasis on promoting more advantageous beta-cycle conditions in our lives and social environment, this seven-step process for creating and implementing a Natural Life Plan forms a powerful, natural, and fully modern approach to health and life enhancement. By incorporating this specific process, adapted from cognitive-behavioral psychology, the HumanaNatura technique of Natural Living offers a complete and open-ended system for personal development, one that you can begin to use today and continue throughout your life.
From its scientific foundation and with this repeating structure, the HumanaNatura technique of Natural Living sets us on a deliberate, creative, and increasing path to progressively healthier and more compelling life, over the course of our lives and across their full scope. Natural Living eventually works to bring new self-enriching health and quality of life to our communities and global society, as our personal steps toward healthier life influence others and as Natural Living’s essential recommendations and method naturally lead us to act on the social health around us – in the fourth HumanaNatura technique of Natural Communities.
As you may sense already, and will soon learn in developing your own personalized vision and plan for healthier life, the process of planning for and pursuing new quality of life in this way is both simple and far from simple. Natural Living is a technique, after all, that leads us to consider and pursue our lifelong and life-wide possibilities for progressively greater health and natural harmony. Natural Living challenges us to turn a health-based vision of life into our personal reality, and then to evolve our life vision as our personal health landscape changes and improves. And Natural Living – through its self-correcting process of pragmatic and compounding action and learning – quickly accelerates in its scope and reach, leading to startling and even revolutionary change in our lives.
While it is accurate to say that the seven steps of developing and implementing a Natural Life Plan are easy to follow, especially after some modest initial learning, the practice of Natural Living is far richer and more comprehensive in practice than these simple steps might initially suggest. Natural Living involves and enables a commitment to regularly examine our lives, and to insist on, search for, and act toward ever more optimal and progressive states of health, well-being, and quality of life.
Natural Living is thus a new model for modern life, one that is unexpectedly powerful and unprecedented in our history. Aided by modern health science, this progressive technique for healthier living leads us to the informed use and retraining of our natural emotional and problem-solving intelligences, and our natural intuition and creativity, to create and foster new and more adaptive life. In practice, the technique of Natural Living proves as remarkable and potent in its daily use as it is in its gradual but transformative and far-reaching impacts in our lives over time.
In this new human age of advanced technology, expanding scientific knowledge, and unprecedented new human freedom and security, Natural Living asks us to consider what we most need and want, and what we are most willing to pursue and set aside, to advance our well-being and quality of life. Natural Living asks us to be engaged and passionate, informed and creative, and pragmatic and decisive in our lives – progressively seeing and seeking what is most essential to be healthier and more alive in our lives. Natural Living fosters and requires lasting personal honesty, self-awareness, commitment, and learning. It even cultivates a new modern intuition, one that continually seeks to look within and beyond our lives, as we may be in any place and time, toward what we might one day become.
Before continuing with the HumanaNatura Personal Health Program, we would encourage you to develop and begin to implement your initial Natural Life Plan, if you have not done so already, using the ten dimensions of natural living and seven-step process we have introduced.
Though this task may be uncertain and challenging at first, and our resulting plans are sure to be imperfect and require ongoing revision, the process of creating our first Natural Life Plan is an essential HumanaNatura milestone. It begins us on an entirely new modern personal path of open-ended learning and well-being, and forms the gateway to modern health-based life itself.