From the introduction…

All for one

Health is indivisible.

Wendell Berry
1934 –

As the song goes, “you don’t know what you’ve got ‘till it’s gone” and for me that something was the air in my lungs, my breath, my life force, my prana, my vital energy. I was only 8 years old at the time and without warning, a vicious asthma attack brought me to my knees. My body revolted, my diaphragm convulsed and my mind lurched into panic. And the harder I tried to regain my equanimity, the worse it got.

Fortunately, Mom was there to ease my fears. She helped me slow down, relax, suck on the inhaler, and after a few terrifying moments, my breath returned. I was shaken but OK, for the moment at least. But in another sense, I really wasn’t OK at all. My childhood was marked by a series of nagging physical afflictions, almost certainly stress related, probably intergenerational. The asthma was bad enough, but I also suffered digestive troubles, allergies, and a host of skin problems. Overall, my physical vitality was tenuous, even on the good days. I tried to keep up with my friends on the athletic field, but I was always last in every event, always the weakest and the lamest. In today’s language, I might well have been labeled as a case of “failure to thrive.” I was a poor animal and I knew it.

But Mom understood my plight and tried every remedy in sight, finally enrolling me in a swimming class, where I floundered once again. Last place in every race, I dog-paddled my way across the pool, doing my best, dominated by the healthy swimmers. I was routinely lapped, even in short races, and it all felt like one more hopeless effort. But Mom and I persisted and as the months passed my physical systems began moving in the right direction; I could almost feel the integration of organs and tissues coming together for a single purpose. I never won any races, but over the next few years, my asthma disappeared, my digestive problems abated, and by the time I graduated from high school, I was as fit and healthy as anyone in my class; I even became a starter on the varsity water polo team. To my young mind, the experience was a kind of miracle. No longer ashamed of my body and my performance, I began to feel a sense of pride and competence.

Not surprisingly, I also became fascinated with the human body and movement. I journeyed the world of martial art and trained with some incredible teachers in both karate and aikido. I immersed myself in the rock climbing scene in Yosemite and discovered what my body was really capable of. As an undergraduate at Stanford, I enrolled in the program on human biology and discovered a fascinating world of evolution, neurobiology, and powerful explanations about why our bodies and behavior are the way they are. I even traveled to Africa to learn about indigenous people and our ancestral environment.

After graduation, I continued my explorations, reading deeply about the body and the natural world, seeking out workshops and teachers across the spectrum: athletic trainers, biologists, massage therapists, physicians, and physical therapists. I even organized workshops from scratch, testing out ideas for an ideal training experience: what worked and just as often, what didn’t. Playing with my own experiential designs, I made all the usual blunders and invented a few new ones as well. But I also got a few things right.

Along the way, I began to notice something curious; many of the teachers and professionals I listened to were talking outside their official job descriptions. I heard coaches talking like therapists, teachers talking like neuroscientists, therapists talking about the role of the body in mental health, personal trainers talking like anthropologists, and physicians talking about the social and ecological determinants of health. And to top it off, a new wave of Paleo-oriented trainers was talking about the importance of human evolution and our ancestry as hunters and gatherers.

In the process, I began to see that conventional disciplinary boundaries didn’t really count for much and that everyone was reaching for something bigger. In fact, everyone seemed to have a common, overlapping interest in the welfare of the human animal. I began to see an emerging confluence of attention, with everyone pointed in roughly the same direction.

This growing sense of unity has become all the more apparent with modern discoveries in the world of neuroscience and human biology. As is becoming clear, all of us–no matter our specific job descriptions–are working with the human nervous system and in particular, neuroplasticity. In fact, the primary educational and training challenge is really the same across all disciplines: creating and delivering quality experiential repetitions of the skill or capability in question. In this sense, there’s little conceptual difference between teaching mathematics and coaching power lifting, between learning science and the humanities, between academic performance and performance on the athletic field. Coaches, teachers, trainers, even therapists: all of us are doing essentially the same thing–nurturing and honoring the human animal with high quality life experiences.

As the years passed, I naturally began to question the entire notion of disciplinary boundaries, especially as they’re applied to the human experience. As I came to see it, modern divisions between health, training, and education disciplines resemble the arbitrary geographic boundaries between nations, states, and counties. That is, the lines are gerrymandered and manipulated for convenience, not by virtue of any underlying ecological or biological foundation. In fact, the common divisions are often distracting and counterproductive; a straight line drawn across a living bioregion is just as absurd as a straight line drawn across the human body or the human experience.

Unfortunately, cultural habit dies hard. In today’s marketplace, we make dozens of unnecessary distinctions between coaches and teachers, between education and training, between physical and academic education. Every specialization lays claim to its own territory and each has its own knowledge base, journals, conferences and best practices, but along the way we’ve lost sight of the essential, unifying principles that drive human learning across all domains.

It’s sometimes said that when it comes to exploring the world around us, there are really only two intellectual styles: splitters make distinctions, but lumpers see commonalities. Splitters look for territory and are quick to enforce boundaries, but lumpers look for common themes and unifying principles. In this light, it’s easy to see that modern society is dominated by splitters, specialists who claim to know everything about one increasingly narrow aspect of reality. Overwhelmed by the rising tide of information in every field, we survive by narrowing our focus, but when splitters don’t talk to one another, our entire knowledge ecosystem begins to disintegrate and confusion reigns.

Going further, we might well say that modern Western culture is addicted to splitting and specialization, to knowing more and more about less and less. Some would even go so far as to say that relentless splitting is a form of violence against the natural world and in turn, a recipe for anxiety, frustration and despair. But the human animal has a deep psycho-spiritual craving for unity; we long for wholeness and coherence. We want our bodies, our communities, and our planet to come together into some kind of integrated experience, some kind of singular effort and process. We’re quick to point fingers and weapons at other people and groups, but deep down, we really want to be one with the world and with each other.

All of which brings us around to some nagging questions: What exactly is the work of teachers, coaches, trainers, and therapists in today’s world? Are we still performing our familiar roles, working the various niches that society has created for us? Or are we being drawn into something altogether different? In a “normal,” soon-to-be bygone era, we knew our identity and our job descriptions: coaches worked with athletes, teachers worked with students, and therapists worked with anyone who was suffering. It was all distinct, clear, and differentiated. Everyone understood their territory, their methods, and their duties.

But today, in our emerging “post-normal era,” everything will soon be up for grabs. Chaos is about to hit the fan and specializations, especially as they relate to the welfare of the human animal, are going to become increasingly fuzzy, maybe even irrelevant. The lines will blur, pigeon-holes will dissolve, and people will be forced to take on unfamiliar tasks and roles. Increasingly, teachers, coaches, trainers and therapists will be called upon to do things they’re not really trained to do.

In short, our world is about to become increasingly incoherent and challenging. Not only is our biosphere in great peril, so too is our democracy, and maybe even our humanity itself. And while turmoil is now inevitable, it’s also an opportunity for a new way of working, a new way of relating to the human animal and to ourselves. In other words, the time has come for a true multi-disciplinary flexibility. Teachers, coaches, trainers, and therapists will need a more holistic set of capabilities. We need to get to the heart of humanity and the core experience of what it means to be a human animal. It’s no longer enough to camp out in isolated professional categories; now is the time to be bigger.