The 7 Pillars of Health: The Keys to Lifelong Wellness, Happiness and Longevity
Imagine a 29-year-old woman named Emma. She has a stressful job and puts great expectations on herself to excel at her work and to maintain her figure. Emma works hard at looking good—she regularly goes to the gym, doing high-impact classes and weight training. Her diet is strict; she eats on the go often because her days are full. She unwinds in the evenings by drinking a glass of wine and scrolling through social media, which often means she goes to bed a little later than she’d like and gets less sleep.
When she looks in the mirror, she is extremely hard on her body and makes herself better…at everything. She seems to be in good health to everyone around her, but inside, Emma feels terrible. She experiences chronic neck and joint pain, sleep disturbances, irregular and painful menses, depression, and frequently experiences a disrupted gut. Emma has taken the journey to learn that trying to be an ideal “image of health” (appearing toned and fit on the outside) is not necessarily the best formula for actual health and the experience of well-being (feeling good in body, mind, and spirit).
Emma is just another client I meet. Her kind of living is a fruit of our modern culture and the upbringing from society. Just by looking at her, you can tell that her world is not exactly like her ancestors’ world. Alas, health can no longer be taken as something of a given, quite certainly for most of us, at the least with the increasing environmental and cultural stressors that include all those things: pollution and soil depletion, long hours spent working, economic hardship and daily movement reduced markedly in its amount. To live in the West is to embrace a practice of inner health, not only about looking good but also feeling good.
Unfortunately, so many of the examples we are exposed to today of fit and svelte bodies carry within them individuals who look terrific yet feel terrible. In many of our work together in the health and wellness industry, we seem to be reaching far beyond simple models of nutrition and exercise to really get people to a place of actual vitality. What is most needed is a model that goes beyond simple measures of body shape and cardiovascular function and penetrates deeper into true health at the most fundamental levels. A model that is simple yet easy to understand and yet honors the amazing complexity of us as one-of-a-kind people with one-of-a-kind needs, minds, and bodies.
#The Seven Pillars Model of Health and Wellness
The Seven Pillars of Health model was born out of my decades of studies in the field of holistic health. It was my desire to find some synthesis of the incredibly wise and effective traditions that came from China and India, the basis of Eastern medicine, with the scientific method of the West. I felt an imperative need to look at everything through both lenses of ancestry and the latest breakthroughs in health science, asking the question, “Where are we going?
¬ It is a holistic model of health that aims to offer a clear map that guides us through the confusion of modern life and its challenges to a lived experience of aliveness, deep health, and vitality. It gives a much clearer picture of what health really is-to have a body that has life and energy in it and a mind and soul that are awake, connected, and fulfilled.
I have noted that if applied intelligently and consistently, the sick regaining lost health and the well reaching new, extraordinary levels of vitality and life.
#Pillar 1: The Mind and Emotions
In a holistic view of health, we have to consider the multi-dimensional nature of human beings. We are so much more than our physical, mechanical, or material nature as pumps, pipes, bones, and muscles. Our thoughts and emotions play profoundly powerful roles in our body and our health in general. This inside world of belief and emotion greatly dictates what goes on in our outer body and the activity of our body.
Considering that, it is no wonder why we started with this first of the seven Pillars of Health. Our mind is the home of our thoughts and, therefore, our beliefs. A thought that is repeated often enough and then held as true becomes a belief. In the space of our mind, we hold all the information about who we are… and who we are not. Basically, our constructed personality finds itself rooted in our mind. If we took away your mind, who would you be? That is the part of you that chooses to identify with a set of beliefs: a specific religion, race, a health practice, or philosophy, etc. And if you are still alive, then you have been served relatively well by these beliefs.
The question to ask though is: Are the beliefs you hold serving your health and vitality in a way that is ever more alive and exuberant? However, everything which takes form among the activity systems connected up within our bodies springs immediately from choices we make as bases drawn from the ground of our belief and thought. These choices might readily propel our bodies straight into states of distress, as well as disease, and they might propel our bodies straight into states of blissfulness and health. Our choices about where we live and who we live with, our vocations and avocations, our communities, our religions and diet, our exercise and sleep habits, are all a product of our mind’s beliefs and emotional proclivities.
A person who chooses smoking cigarettes, heavy drinking, a sedentary life, and sleeping only four hours a day is going to have an experience of health distinctly different from that of somebody who consciously chooses not to do those things. And every time we believe that something is true, reinforcing or challenging that belief thereby generates, in turn, a corresponding emotional charge. We may be offended or insulted by a condemning judgment, or we may feel validated and satisfied with an approving judgment.
In either case, as a gesture of defiance or allegiance to the beliefs we espouse, we have an emotional reaction—most often anger or elation—an emotional state that we ourselves are accountable for, since we ourselves created it within ourselves according to our beliefs.
Our emotions are great influencers of our health. They are very intimately linked to our hormonal system and autonomic nervous systems; and since these two regulatory systems affect almost every body function, including the health and well-being of our brain, then it is crucial that we get a handle on our emotional state. For example, if we are consistently feeling anger, fear, anxiety, or worry, then it is consistently causing our body to release stress hormones and keep us locked in fight-or-flight mode, which, over time, causes our adrenal glands to burn out, which affects nearly every system and process in the body negatively in some way. Consequently, happiness and joy release cascades of feel-good neurotransmitters and have even been shown to upregulate genes that enhance longevity and healthy body functioning. Healing the emotional patterns we create and the underlying beliefs that cause them is common sense; they must be very important to real health and energy at the deepest levels.
And because any charge will point in the direction of some underlying assumption, it forms one of the foundational Pillars of Health.
Any strong emotional charge becomes an obvious flag indicating what unconscious belief to look for. As you witness an intense emotional response-for example, anger-just pay attention to what seems to be driving the experience inside. Avoid placing all the responsibility out there externalized and instead ask what belief of mine is coming under attack, and what makes this provocation compel me to build the emotion anger?
Another way of saying this is to ask yourself the question, “What have I assumed as true, and why is it that my ego wants this ‘truth’?” That’s basic to freeing you from this tyranny of limited belief. When you can learn to cherish this emotional charge as this portal into your own self, then you are at liberty to see this triggering event as nothing but a mere messenger carrying a sacred message for you.
The key to everything I am saying about this first Pillar of Health is that: Thoughts, when repeated often enough, become beliefs. Beliefs are like electrical charges and trigger emotions. They can stop our normal functioning and set up the inside environment so that pain, disease, and great suffering can develop. And, vice versa, positive emotions tend to support health and wellness on many levels.
By paying attention to these body messages of pain and disease, and by understanding the roots of suffering, we can unwind this process. Is there an emotional root to the pain, suffering, or disease? (Hint: if you are unsure, answer “yes” here). What is the belief that is generating the emotion? What ideas or thoughts are creating and holding the beliefs in place? And the great final question is: In what way does this serve you?
Take-Aways on How the Mind and Emotions Affect Your Health
+ Emotions drive very strong influences on your physiology and brain health.
+ Your physical pain and discomfort are the doorways into getting a better understanding of what is deeper inside you in the form of emotions and beliefs.
+ The changing of your beliefs changes your health and your life.
#Pillar 2: Breathing
If we rate the Seven Pillars of Health on the frequency that they are present in our life, it is understandable that thoughts would come first, with an average of about 70,000 thoughts arriving in our mind per day. We might think to put respiration in second position, with an average of about 26,000 breaths entering and leaving our body every day.
A healthy relationship with the air you breathe and how you breathe represents a very direct pathway into either life or illness. Breathing clean air is such a no-brainer recommendation it’s almost ridiculous to enumerate as one of the Pillars of Health, and yet it’s actually quite hard to do so for most people. The outside air in cities is usually polluted with thousands of different chemicals, and unfortunately our indoor air is usually worse with off-gassing from our carpets, furniture, paint, and cleaning products. Unless you have an effective air filtration system indoors, it is always best to keep windows open and allow air to circulate; this also includes your car, office, and any other contained environment. If air pollution is bad where you live, it may be a good idea to consider moving. I would not suggest that a fish continue to swim in a polluted pond if it had the choice to swim to a clean one.
#The Three Keys to Breath
Breathing in physiological perspective: there are three primary considerations for ideal respiration for optimal health and vitality:
+ We should breathe through our nose (which is ideal) instead of through our mouth
+ We should breathe with the diaphragm; that is, we should breathe into our abdomen, stomach, and intestinal area rather than our upper chest
+ The rate we breathe (slower is ideal) If we abuse our nervous system, our autonomic nervous system, the oxygen/carbon dioxide balance in our bodies, our cranial shape, the health of our brain, or our posture, it is going to suffer the ill effects from a malfunctioning one of these three systems. That is inevitable because of changed tight muscles, painful and deteriorating joints, sub-functioning organs, adverse posture, and sick neural body tissue.
As a matter of fact, I cannot think of any physical attribute of the human body which, directly or indirectly, is not affected by bad breathing-and therefore improved by good breathing-it’s all a matter of degree.
The more you breathe through your mouth, the more you’ll suffer from bad oral health and encourage the above symptoms. The more you breathe in your chest rather than your abdomen and intestinal area, the poorer your digestion and detoxification will be. The more quickly you breathe, the greater the imbalance in your autonomic nervous system will be. Let’s take a deeper look at how to dial in this Pillar of Health.
Respirations: By Breathing into Your Nose The desire by your body to continue living is by any standards extremely high. Anyone deprived of air will try desperately with his last breaths to open up airflow that might be possible, such as cutting off a limb or so. Such a force of breathing impulse there is that even with hardly any obstruction to the breathing airflow, the body could still manage to cope in that situation. People who are not able to breathe through their nose due to blockage or chronic congestion are compelled to breathe through their mouth. Chronic mouth breathing is highly damaging to most aspects of our physiology and especially to our body alignment.
A very interesting study on posture and nasal breathing was conducted on rhesus monkeys. The nostrils of the monkey were plugged in so that it was made to breathe by its mouth. Within a matter of minutes, all the monkeys projected their head forward and rounded the upper back and so provided themselves with an opening of their pharynx through which they could easily let the air into their lungs. In this instance, the whole bodily attitude of the monkey was given up to easy breathing. This postural distortion, left uncorrected, would certainly eventually result in an increased likelihood of pain and dysfunction, lower health and wellness, and alter the physiology of the monkey over time.
#Breathing with Your Diaphragm
The process tends to include fairly predictable sequences of painful trigger points, neck tension, and poor postural alignment of the spine and shoulder complex when individuals frequently assume the inverted breathing pattern or the chest-breathing pattern. In addition, the reduced action of the diaphragm in its downward thrust on the abdominal cavity deprives the organs contained therein of the rhythmic pumping they require for optimal health. Typically, this results in discomfort in the gastrointestinal system associated with increased susceptibility to infection, poor digestive mechanics, stasis of essential fluids, and functional weakness in the muscles that support the low back and pelvis.
#Slow Breathing
The primary result of chronic over-breathing or hyperventilation syndrome is a change in the concentration of oxygen and carbon dioxide. It is an epidemic in industrialized cultures due to our stress levels, having far-reaching and dramatic effects on our physiology and health. It is not more oxygen but the retraining of our tolerance for CO2 that we need in our culture of efficiency and fast-paced living. Enough CO2 is required to allow for optimal balance of the autonomic nervous system and to allow for healthy cellular metabolism—and most of us are starving for it.
#Pillar #3: Hydration
Rightly near the top of the list of essential nutrients to the body is water. As 60% or more of our body is comprised of water, we are irrevocably bound to water as a source for our continued health and well-being. For these reasons proper hydration is the third Pillar of Health.
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Dehydration will compromise all the body systems. Mild dehydration will show severe depletion of the body’s ability to perform right. Dark urine and dry mouth are often cited as early signs of dehydration; however, this is an indicator that the body has already made strong adaptive changes due to lowered water levels, and urgent rehydration is needed.
The best indicator of the body’s desire to drink more water is the all too muted sign of thirst in so many people. In the chronically dehydrated individual, it is necessary first to recover sensitivity to changes in the body’s internal hydration level in order to effectively manage one’s own hydration needs. No less challenging is the time required to fully hydrate the body at the cellular level. This can take up to a week or more of dedicated application of hydrating agents like fresh water and fresh juices from fruits and vegetables and the avoidance of dehydrating agents, such as soda, sugar-containing beverages, coffee, and alcohol of all kinds, in order to be able to replenish entirely optimal water levels in all bodily systems.
Mineral depletion often accompanies dehydration. Rehydration must use spring water or other water that has sufficient dissolved mineral content. In using filtered water instead of spring water, adding salt or liquid mineral supplements will help in ensuring that water is well utilized in the body.
#Some signs you need to increase your mineralized water uptake include:
Sugar cravings
Salt cravings
Feeling tired
For necessity, needing to drink several glasses of water all at once
Sleep disturbance; falling asleep, waking in night or early in morning
Tension, anxiety, nervousness, or panic
I encourage all of my clients to be in the habit of drinking a few glasses of high-quality spring or filtered water each morning after awakening. This will decrease nocturnal water loss, especially in mouth breathers. Water may also be consumed 20 minutes before meals to help stimulate the digestive processes and provide adequate fluids for saliva and stomach acid to do their work. In some cases, it is also necessary to drink water at frequent intervals throughout the day to rehydrate and ensure adequate cellular hydration.
Another step toward good hydration is avoiding any foods, drinks, or substances that dehydrate. Any food, drink, or substance that contains alcohol, coffee or caffeine, sugars, and sodium will all function to squeeze out the water from your body. High-protein diets, dried or dehydrated foods, and too much fiber in vegetables all pull fluids from the body into the intestinal tract to help break them down. But most of these also dehydrate you-just like exposure to toxic chemicals, poisons, and those medications and supplements that require water as a carrier in the detoxification process.
#Ways to Improve Your Hydration
+ Drink two glasses of water each day upon rising.
+ It may take some time to rehydrate at the cellular level. Make good hydration a habit every day.
+ Your water should be free of toxins and have a healthy dissolved mineral content.
+ You need to learn how to listen to the body’s hydration cues.
#Pillar #4: Food and Eating
This is the Pillar of Health that I most commonly see that health-conscious people pay exclusive attention to, as if this alone is the key to good health. For good reason, too; I have seen some of the most dramatic shifts in health and vitality through modification of food choices and eating behaviors. At the same time, it has also been the pillar which many people get overly attached to and lose themselves in the minutiae of, neglecting many of the other Pillar of Health and Wellness that I have outlined in this article.
#Beyond the Basics: Eating Hygiene
The basic rules here are simple: Eat high-quality, ideally organic, unprocessed food and intuitively listen to your body’s needs.
Obviously, the foods that we eat are incredibly important to our nutrition; however, the way in which we eat them is perhaps even more so. “Eating hygiene” is the term used to encompass the process of taking food into our body. The preparation of our mind, and therefore our digestive organs, is extreme importance in the successful digestion and assimilation of nutrients we take in. It enables our gut and our cells to know what is in store for them through the engagement of all our senses in the discovery of the food items placed in our visual, olfactory, and gustatory presence.
Creating a quiet, distraction-free place to sit or lounge, slowly eating your food, chewing it properly, and paying attention to the sensations the food offers is just as important for health and proper digestion as the nutritional content of the food itself. Even with the most nutrient-dense diet, most people are robbed of these nutrients because they are simply not breaking down their food enough, and thus cannot assimilate the nourishment since they are not feeding themselves properly through the way they are eating. This person shoveling in their food while watching a screen and stressed about deadlines to be met will be grossly ill-equipped to address the incoming nutrition and may well end up relieving a high percentage of its beneficial nutrients directly into the toilet!
#The Three Keys to Food
Assuming we have fired up our digestive fire and that the food we consume is indeed being absorbed into our body, there are three major areas of consideration with regard to the foods you eat:
+ Food quality
+ Proportions of food
+ Quantities and frequencies of foods
These three core areas must be addressed before any other supplements or specific nutrients are even considered alongside this Pillar of Health.
#Eating Good-Quality Foods
In the last century, the quality of food has been drastically compromised. The last few decades have witnessed a precipitous decline in the degree of soil depletion and reliance on factory farming and industrial agriculture, thereby significantly reducing nutrient availability in our foods. And the quality of proteins, fats, and carbohydrates is dropping dramatically. Concomitantly, the levels of agrochemicals, hormones, and chemical fertilizers being sprayed onto and into our foods have steadily increased to maintain growth in the sub-optimal environments in which plants and animals are being raised.
#Tips for Choosing High Quality Food
To get the best food, we must take the initiative to learn about the practices surrounding the raising of our food.
+ Read labels and know what ingredients are in your food. The fewer ingredients, the better. If it sounds like some chemical, preservative, or synthetic ingredient in any way, then it likely is, and probably should be avoided.
+ Get to know your local farmers and ask the vendors at your local farmer’s markets what they do and how they produce their foods.
+ Buy organic, biodynamic, and natural whenever you can. Natural, however, is not a regulated term and often means little. If you want assurance that your food is pesticide-free, chemical-free, and without added hormones, seek out organic or biodynamic.
+ Locate the freshest, closest food. Nutrient levels decline gradually once food has been harvested, so the sooner you can eat it, the better.
#Tips to Tune into Your Body’s Signals
#Listening to your body with food is key to support this Pillar of Health.
+ Believe in your taste buds and your intuitive desire for food.
+ Develop your palate and your sense of smell.
+ Become more aware of your gut when you’re eating and post-meal.
+ Pay attention to your mood, energy levels, and level of fullness an hour after eating.
This will significantly help you in the taste satisfaction, your relationship with food, and your perception of your body’s needs and response to the food you eat. If something makes you feel bad or negatively affects any of the above measures, you may want to steer clear of it.
Another thing to think about would be to invest a little more in your food. This will allow you to increase your own energy through increased nutrition of your food and help contribute to the cultural shift of sustainable, intelligent farming that’s making great food accessible to everyone.
#Get the Right Ratios
Food proportions, particularly in terms of macronutrients – that is to say, fats, proteins, and carbohydrates – represent the critical second consideration under the fourth Pillar of Health. And an innate ability that most of us have lost is how to balance macronutrients, one meal to another, day to another, and season to season.
In the pre-agricultural times, our genetic ancestry combined with the availability of food in our lived environment would have largely instructed the way we eat. For example, an Inuit from the arctic region would have had a diet that was meat- and fat-dominant both out of necessity and availability. It has been shown that the typical macronutrient profile for these people is about 90% protein and fat and 10% carbohydrate. Contrast this with the inland aboriginal peoples of Australia; the hot desert conditions had them eating around only 30% fat and protein and 70% carbohydrate. Each population group studied around the world has differing macronutrient proportions that are dependent upon season, climate, availability, genetics, and activity levels.
The genetic lineage you have been handed will definitely have a carryover effect into your biochemical needs for nutrient intake. Your optimum ratio of macronutrients will also change based on the weather, your mood, and your activity level. When you experiment and learn to tune into your body’s intuitive signals, you will soon find what your unique personal needs are.
#Key Take-aways on Macronutrients
+ Your body is unique and your needs for food are unique.
+ Macronutrient ratios will vary at each meal depending on your activity level, your genetics, and seasonality.
#Eating the Right Amount of Food for You
The third of the three considerations is how much we eat. People, in the not-too-distant past, were concerned with how to get enough food. Today, people have to learn how to eat in moderation. And within the context of how much we are eating is how often we are eating—how many meals we have during the day and how many hours lie between these meals.
This focus on calories and the associated implicit message that food was somehow only fuel led to the development of many simplifications in relation to the goal of food, fertile ground from which most of the weight-loss diets emerged. These diets, which build upon calorie-restrictive premises, have been found, over time, to be ineffective for most and catastrophically damaging to the health and vibrancy of millions of followers.
And we’ll eat in accord with messages from our body when we see food as not just energy, but as building blocks of nutrition and life forces for the body, and when we have the listening tools to hear when our body’s requirements for these are being met. This may not come in the form of a hunger signal but in the form of subtle, inexplicable emotional arousal, mental fatigue or lack of clarity, agitation, low energy, or a myriad other personal signs that our nutrient and life force needs are not being met.
Adequate satisfaction of the body as to the degree to which it is receiving the nutrients and life forces from the food it intakes is critical for vitality. Having the fuel available to sustain a high-stress or rejuvenation phase, by eating every three to four hours, and listening to the subtle signals of the body that tell us when nutrients are required, is a wise path for all wanting to feel more aliveness. This return to a more intuitive approach to eating will lay the foundation from which greater states of sustained vitality can be promoted. Fasting, cleanses, and other detoxifying techniques are useful tools, but without a solid foundation of health to build on, they could hurt instead of help.
Our diet is probably one of the most intimate relationships with ourselves we will ever have. What’s more intimate than taking something from the outside world, bringing it into our body, and making ourselves out of it? I have learned that how we relate to eating becomes a beautiful mirror reflecting how we relate with ourselves.
#Hints at Intuitive Eating
+ Eat as frequently, and only as much, as your body requires. If you’re in a renovation phase, eat every three to four hours.
+ Discover your body’s signs of nutrient craving and fullness.
#Pillar #5: Movement
Humans are, without a shadow of a doubt, the masters of the movement kingdom. Our ability to dominate spinal rotatory movement enabled us to achieve acrobatic and endurance skills far more advanced than what is seen within our planet. Witnessing our high fliers flip, twist, sprint, leap, fight, and play is testimony of our variety mastery in the movement arena.
Our woefully insufficient mainstream movement culture is primarily focused around exercise in order to alter body shape, either to lower body fat, increase muscle definition, and/or mass. This narrow focus on aesthetics rather than function of the body is no different to me than the purchase of a $500,000 sports car and using it to parade around city streets. We harbor within us the single greatest single piece of biological architecture in the known universe, and to value this only for its looks is a most lamentable debasement of life’s supreme achievement. Yet, yes, the human body is that impressive-but too often, this Pillar of Health passes unnoticed.
Movement is the expressed art of life. Our form has evolved through desire and selective pressures over many eons of time to arrive at the pinnacle of current potential. Life seeks to constantly express itself and this potential in ever more effective forms of movement—movement that is inspired by our desire for safety, food, play, creativity, reproduction, and self-knowing.
All biological organisms have a nature to respond and adapt to the stressors or stimuli of their environment. Simple example- maybe doing an arm curl with a heavy weight. It is at that point in time that we are stimulating the biceps muscle to become stronger, and therefore, there is inspiration for growth. No load- no inspiration for growth. In fact, since the maintenance of muscle mass is a drain on your body’s energy, the muscle will actually atrophy in order to conserve energy—it is adapted toward atrophy rather than toward growth. According to this, to effectively take part in movement activities to enhance our physicality we must provide stressors or stimuli or load to all of the diverse abilities of the body in a manner that creates growth or, at minimum, preservative.
#Intelligent Movement Development
Bio-motor abilities these diverse abilities are termed by prominent Russian athletic coach Tudor Bompa. The eight bio-motor abilities are power, speed, endurance, strength, coordination, agility, balance, and flexibility/mobility. All of which we want to develop within the fifth Pillar of Health. Growth for each of these bio-motor abilities needs to be effectively stimulated, and this requires that we have great variety in our movement approach. Simply running on a treadmill or lifting a few weights in a gymnasium falls dramatically short of fulfilling the potential of human movement capacity, as does a once a week class of the latest exercise craze, no matter how complex or complete it is advertised as. Only by mindful movement with sufficient variety in our lives can we really come to understand the fourth Pillar of Health and prevent atrophy of our muscles and the decline in their various abilities.
Understanding our ancestral patterning of movement provides us with an enormous amount of knowledge about how to structure our modern approach towards movement. Appreciating this concept is recognizing that we reside within a body created in an environment far less advanced than our modern society. Chairs, pavement, stairs, and cars all contribute to this trend to minimize mobility. Sitting in a chair instead of squatting destroys flexibility and posture. Walking on smooth pavement rather than jagged rocky terrain severely detracts from your sense of balance and coordination. Walking up stairs rather than climbing trees, or a ravine, removes one of the challenges to our strength and power. Riding in cars instead of walking or running removes an opportunity to develop our speed and endurance.
Our modern life has left us bereft of all the wonderful built-in opportunities to continually hone our bodies into functional and capable movement vessels. The more we modernize our lives, the more we will find a need to consciously pay attention to the fifth Pillar of Health and supplement our movement. Our sedentary lives are killing us, according to studies on sitting, arguing that sitting could be more lethal than smoking for overall health. While excessive movement can be just as problematic with the stress from too much exercise can and will result in infinite numbers of chronic conditions.
Finding that balance between doing and non-doing, teaching your body to listen to needs and wants of it, and developing a respectful, ancestrally-based movement approach will yield an excellent foundation from which your body will be able to function well into advanced age. The effort to find everyday moments to be active in settings that, to the best of their abilities, mimic our natural environments, in ways we are built to move, has been a lovely fit to most aspects of modern life for me. Moving rather than sitting, walking instead of driving, and moving through nature rather than the urban environment, as well as new and challenging ways of moving rather than habitual ones, will give your body the kinetic nourishment it craves.
#Ways to Move More Wisely and More Frequently
#Seek opportunities to move in varied ways and environments.
+ Challenge your body just enough to cause a response without breaking down the body.
+ Walk more. Squat more. More movements in nature.
#Pillar #6: Sleep and Waking Cycles—Circadian Rhythm
The rhythmic movement of the Earth, rotating on its axis and its wobbly progression around the sun, has been a constant influence for this planet and life flourishing here for billions of years. A huge contrast from daylight and warmth to the closeness of nighttime with darkness and coolness-instill, most of us underestimate dramatically how much this impacts our biology and physiology.
The human animal clearly exhibits many characteristics that mark it as diurnal, or day animal, rather than nocturnal, or night time; even less so crepuscular, meaning twilight time. The eyes are simply built to see best in daylight, and photosensitivity within our skin provokes hormonal responses within our bodies to increase our wakefulness at the sight of light. Before the advent of electricity and artificial lighting, sunrise was the time when humans arose from their slumber and sunset was the signal for us to settle in for rest; and this has been going on for millions of years for humans and our immediate ancestors. To know what ideal sleep and waking patterns would be like for you, simply imagine if you were without electricity for a month. What would your cycle align with?
Sleep loss is a real issue. Lifestyles designed to push the wakefulness of our lives to be as productive as possible devastate our health. Sleep is a more restorative state than we can find, and our best anti-inflammatory agent. Our modern lives, fueled by stimulants and electricity, give us the illusion that we can easily be awake longer; but the hidden cost is one that I doubt you would knowingly pay.
It’s not just about getting enough sleep – it’s more to do with aligning ourselves to the most primal rhythms we’re exposed to on this earth: hours of light and hours of darkness. We can use this to sensibly adjust to the much more subtle ultradian rhythms that take place during that time. We are familiar with the fact that at night we pass through different stages of sleep, ranging from REM sleep to very deep sleep without dreams. These stages occur four or more times in a single night. Similarly, while awake, we pass through cycles of wakefulness itself, as in the traditions of the East and in the modern science of the rhythms of hormones, as well as by the observation of levels of activity of people.
Our lives, both waking and sleeping, are the rhythmic symphony, or dance, in which we develop our four movements over the daily cycle of wake time, action, slowing down, and rest, moving through the year by the four seasons of Summer, Fall, Winter, and Spring. All life on the planet exposed to the sun will do the same dance. Of course, humans are one of the few that often defy this powerful influence on our physiology to great detriment to our health and vitality.
#Ways in which our circadian dance is compromised include the following:
+ Regimented work hours
+ Screens and artificial lighting—think cell phones, computers, TVs, electronic devices, and lighting of any kind
+ Stimulants and depressants like coffee, tea, drugs, and pharmaceuticals
+ Travel to different time zones
+ Irregular daily patterns of sleep, eating, and movement
The rewards we reap by marking our time to this rhythm are impossible to count up, as they spill over into every pore of our physiology. Of the benefits it confers, the most direct probably will be to our delicate balance of hormones. A disruption in the rhythm of cortisol our awakening hormone underlies many stress and hormonal disorders, and its association with the sun and light is well established. It could lead back to some soothing of the chaos many live with in our hormonal profiles. All of these-hunger, energy, healing response, power of digestive capacity, sex drive, exercise ability, sociality, mood, cognitive functions, creativity, and mental acuity-are directly correlated to the balance of our hormonal system.
It is also generally accepted that we need around eight hours of sleep at minimum per night. More during the winter months, less during the summer months. Getting to bed before 10:30pm and waking as close to dawn as possible is another good guiding principle about the sixth Pillar of Health. As our peak cortisol levels are within 30 minutes of waking, it would also make sense to eliminate the snooze button. Indeed, the surest way to recover your rhythm is to give up using alarms and learn how to wake at the same time each day. This ideal wake-up time is that hour of darkness just before the return of light – usually 30 to 40 minutes before dawn.
Rather than just stomping the steps in time with the music of life, if we can feel the rhythm and move our very self to the subtlety of the very cunning complexity and constant change of the beat, we’ll regain instinctual knowing of when to eat, sleep, play, work, and create. Developing your “ear” and your intuitive “feeling” for these rhythms will serve you much more deeply than simply following the rules being offered to you from some external source.
#Tips to Improve Sleep and Align with Natural Rhythms
+ Set your daily rhythm to synchronize with the sun, waking with the sun and getting up when you wake up.
+ Let your waking rhythm track with your natural flow, honoring downturns in energy.
+ Sleep as much as you need to.
+ You probably need more sleep than you are getting.
Pillar #7: Connection
Humans are incredibly social animals. We need connection to others with their touch, support, collaboration, and assistance for our survival and ability to thrive. A most basic example is how babies will suffer greatly, and even die, from a lack of touch. All humans tend to gather in family groups and historically we lived in close-knit villages or tribes. Our need for closeness to members of our family, immediate and extended is common to all races and groups of humans. In isolation people tend to fare poorly; in fact, isolation (solitary confinement) is one of the greatest punishments used in penal systems for truant prisoners. Among the extreme measures used to punish people, there is also forced exile – being made to leave one’s native land to settle elsewhere.
Ideally, relationship with other individuals is something to which we are born: there is the relationship with mother, father, or siblings and as the person grows, he learns how to relate to his pets or neighbors. Once we begin to school, we learn to connect with our peers, authority figures, and so on. We learn to settle our place in the village and to develop our unique gifts and personality in resonance or contrast with those connections we feel.
Rarely is this true for us in our modern world, and thus this critical Pillar of Health is all too seldom prized. Our bond to each phase is all too often cut or only partially formed. We may be severed from family at birth, from community and society, and even from a sense of belonging in the world. We can start by connecting anew with ourselves. We can go from feeling alienated to integrated.
These connections are necessary to our survival and our health. We need to have connections in order to get food and a roof. Connections allow us to learn, grow, and be challenged. They teach us how to be independent and capable. And perhaps, more importantly than any of these things, this Pillar of Health offers us the chance to begin knowing ourselves more deeply through our experiences of others.
Connections are like living organisms. They require attention and care every day. Whether this bond is to your spiritual way, your community, your family, or to yourself, time and attention are those nutrients needed by these organisms to thrive. Learn to feel your vulnerability, discover those moments of discomfort and challenge, and find the strength to reach out when your needs are not being met-this is an overwhelmingly important part of building connection. Above all, we’ve got more strength through our presence, manifesting our respect, and showing appreciation to give us a chance to bond with all aspects of our reality.
In light of oneness, this illusion of separation offers us the chance to reassociate with all the “other” parts of ourselves. To me, we are a gigantic mirror that has been shattered into infinite pieces. Connection is the journey of self-realization. It starts when one recognizes individual pieces, sees themselves in the image of the other, and then goes about puzzling ourself back together in a way that fits absolutely perfectly.
Connection concerns not only our relationship and intimacy with the people in our families and communities but also our relationship to our small self and to the greater Self. We are every cell, branch, leaf, creature, fellow, and being inextricably linked and inseparable from the land we come from, the planet we share, and the cosmos we traverse. We most certainly are a part of existence, and to me existence is a perfect tapestry of infinite woven threads, one of which is you and one of which is me—and without us the tapestry would, quite simply, no longer be whole or complete. Connection is a reality that we have denied ourselves in order to rediscover it in every interaction.
#Ways to Improve Your Connections
#Connections require nurturing.
+ Know you are connected to yourself, your family, your community, this earth, and all that is.
+ You find the connection between self and other in the bridge.
Environment You Live In
I have learned for many years from holistic health’s pursuit andstudy. It has led me on a journey of understanding for which I am forever grateful. It goes on and unfolds itself in myriad layers of intermingled simplification and complexity, much like the Seven Pillars Model of Health and Wellness just discussed. What I have seen so far is this: The environment we live in—you can call it circumstance or from choice—will inevitably affect our health for better or for worse. In health, the truth that I’ve discovered is that if we, to the best of our ability, claim responsibility for the environment in which we exist, then we’re able to purposefully direct the course of our health. You see, it really does come down to you and the choices you make from moment to moment.