There’s a lot of hand-wringing going on these days about the epidemic of “lifestyle diseases.” You know the list: obesity, diabetes, heart disease and by some accounts, depression and neurological disorders ...

Beauty soon grows familiar to the lover, Fades in his eye, and palls upon the sense.  ~ Joseph Addison, Cato, A Tragedy (1713)

What’s the most familiar object in your universe? Hint: It’s not your smart phone. It’s not your running shoes. It’s not your favorite coffee cup.

As we all know, humanity is experiencing a planet-wide wave of lifestyle diseases such as obesity, diabetes, heart disease, depression, and neurological disorders. There’s a lot of hand-wringing going on, but the epidemics only seem to be getting worse ...

Everyone wants integration, but there are lots of ways to go about it. Here are a few examples, all constructed as spokes on a bicycle wheel. Each speaks to unity in the art of living. The yin-yang mandala is the all-time classic. Opposite forces are interconnected and interdependent ...

Please allow me to introduce myself.

I was born about 2 minutes ago into the wild, mosaic grassland of East Africa. I am, of course, entirely naked. My skin is soft, my senses are untrained and my limbs are nearly useless. I am, to put it in the most elemental terms, some 7 or 8  pounds of high-quality protein, protein that is craved by a wide range of predators and carnivores that prowl nearby ...

Everything in excess is opposed by nature.  ~ Hippocrates

Sometimes it seems that the health and fitness industry is hell-bent on turning itself into a cartoon. Every weight-loss and athletic training program is declared to be “the ultimate.” Outrageous claims are everywhere and extremism is the order of the day ...

In a world gone mad with exercise machines and high-tech strap-ons, we might well wonder what, if anything, the body might still be capable of doing on its own. The answer is “quite a bit.” All we really need is a couple of bodies, some gravity and imagination ...

We’ve been raised from birth to believe in the power of labor to transform ourselves and better our worlds. We’re taught to strive and push and extend ourselves from cradle to grave in everything from athletics to business ...

As we grind our way through another American football season, millions of sports fans will dig in and prepare to go the distance. They’ll get themselves a new flat panel display, make sure the batteries in the remote are all charged up, download a schedule of all the big games and lay in a copious supply of edible, food-like substances ...

It seems that maybe we’ve lost track, or maybe we've forgotten. We’re up to our neck in journal articles, presentations and analysis. We’ve discussed our concerns about health and the body until we’re blue in the face ...

As we all know, outdoor exercise is the way to go. Not only does it feel really good, a growing body of research now demonstrates a powerful link between outdoor experience and improved human health. The "green exercise" movement is really taking off ...

The world cannot be governed without juggling.  ~John Selden

This one will pump you! Get two medicine balls, light to medium weight ...

Our goal should be to live life in radical amazement... to get up in the morning and look at the world in a way that takes nothing for granted. Everything is phenomenal; everything is incredible; never treat life casually. To be spiritual is to be amazed ...

In the world of modern Paleo publications, the market is dominated by two basic categories. On one hand are the academic research papers–important, but narrow and often excruciatingly dull. On the other,  we have the diet books–important, but increasingly redundant ...

For the purist, the ideal meditation experience is simple: shine the light of your attention on your breath and keep it there. When your attention wanders, bring it back onto the breath-target with compassion and without judgment ...

Back in my college days I was, like many of my peers, a confused and restless animal. Books and civilized rituals weren’t feeding my body or my spirit, so I began to seek out nature. At the time, the enterprise sounded like a great idea, but unfortunately, I didn’t really have the slightest idea of what I was getting into ...

It’s a trick question of course. After all, most of us think we know how big we are. We may well think of ourselves as too big or too small in some dimension or other, but we still have a pretty good sense of the size of our physical selves ...