going long
“Your self does not end where your flesh ends, but suffuses and blends with the world, including other beings.”
Sandra Blakeslee and Matthew Blakeslee The Body Has a Mind of Its Own
New big game
In the modern Paleo world we spend a lot of time talking about our heritage as hunters and gatherers. We like to imagine ourselves chasing down animals and picking out roots, nuts and berries for our daily fare. Much has changed in the modern world of course, but in spite of all the differences, our bodies are substantially the same as they’ve always been…
Your life is the medium
We are delusional. As trainers, coaches and medical professionals, we give our patients and clients neat, rational prescriptions for getting in shape or treating their various afflictions. We tell them to do so many reps or miles at such-and-such an interval ...
Falling short
“Lack of awareness of the basic unity of organism and environment is a serious and dangerous hallucination.” ~ Alan Watts
What do you see when you look at a human body? If you’re typically modern, you see a stand-alone organism that stops at the outer layer of its skin. You see an individual.
Wising up
“The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.” ~Isaac Asimov
By this point in the game almost everyone in the Paleo world is familiar with the idea of mismatch (Or, to dress it up in sexy academic language, “the evolutionary discordance hypothesis.”)
Genius or bozo?
Life is short, the Art is long, opportunity fleeting, experience delusive, judgment difficult. ~ Hippocrates
In 1983, American psychologist Howard Gardner famously speculated that people have more than on kind of intelligence.
Blinded by walls
Have you ever been part of a great human migration, a diaspora?
As you ponder this question, you might ask yourself about the great migrations of human history: our epic journeys out of Africa, emigrations out of Europe to the New World or the countless displacements of people fleeing war and environmental catastrophe ...
Re-wilding our language
Every now and then a word creeps into our language and begins to replicate like a fungus, invading every available corner of our consciousness. The word takes on a life of its own and begins to infect our conversations and weaken our powers. One such word is wellness ...
Habitat is tissue
A human being is part of the whole... He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest - a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us ...
Bigger picture
“Doc, there’s more to life than health.” The simple statement put the doctor back on his heels; he’d never really looked at things quite this way. He’d been giving his patient the standard boilerplate advice to lose weight, get more exercise, eat more vegetables and all the rest ...
To or from? that is the question
Life can be pulled by goals just as surely as it can be pushed by drives.
~ Viktor Frankl
As so often happens, the Onion puts its finger on the pulse of American culture, even in the world of health and fitness ...
New year, new program
Have you heard about the hot new fitness program that’s poised to sweep the nation in 2015? This one will just blow you away. It’s better than Zumba, Pilates, TRX, Taebo, Viper, ultra-marathons, the Navy Seals workout and the Race Across America ...
We need to talk...
Hey you! Put down that device and listen up. I have something to say and I need your complete attention. This is your body speaking. Remember me? I’m the one that keeps you alive. I’m the one that makes it all happen for you ...
This just in!
Attention health and fitness consumers! Medical scientists from Stanford University have just announced the groundbreaking discovery that there is no fountain of youth, no way to turn back the clock and no way to prevent the aging of the human body ...
Good news situation
The future begins today. ~ Wayne Gerard Trotman
As the seasons change and the days get shorter, the darkness creeps in and reminds us that there’s another shadow looming over our lives, an ominous story of environmental and social apocalypse.
Experience or catastrophe
With all the noise about the new information economy, the digital revolution and the potential of “big data,” it’s easy to assume that these things are somehow important and necessary. The media is in a feeding frenzy and venture capitalists are lining up to put money in the pockets of anyone with a new, disruptive technology ...
All together now
Do you ever feel like you’re going to pieces? Disintegrated and fragmented, as if the various forces within your body are pulling your life in wildly different directions? Of course you do. We all do ...
Embrace the mystery
This week brings another wave of books, research reports and expert interviews about our crushing epidemic of lifestyle disease; another round of mind-numbing statistics of human bodies degenerating before our eyes, another call for action in the face of what is beginning to look like a global pandemic of misery ...
Turn out the light
We can only imagine the night on the African grassland, a million years ago. With no light pollution to obscure the sky above, we had a perfectly clear view deep into the heart of the cosmos ...