Jan 24th, 2010 by David in News and Updates
Hi all. I haven’t posted on here for quite awhile, and somehow the blog got hacked and a bunch of things moved around. Hopefully everything is back to its proper location, but if you see anything out of place or any text mysteriously missing, please let me know.
I hope to be a little more regular in adding to this blog as things settle down for me.
Fitness is defined in evolutionary biology as the “fit” between organism and environment, and is ostensibly about the physical body, physical health, and the organism’s ability to survive physically in the natural environment. But modern humans no longer have to adapt their bodies to survive physically in the natural environment; instead, they adapt the environment to fit them. Thus the survival and evolutionary pressures are eased, and cultural pressures take greater precedence. High heels rather than sensible footwear. Thin bellies rather than a good layer of fat to insulate against freezing temperatures. Huge biceps rather than functional strength.
It’s artificial, of course, a graft onto the natural. It could be argued that this is only an extension of what’s been done in indigenous cultures—after all, natives pierced and tattooed themselves, wore jewelry, rubbed themselves with oil, wore face and body paint, had outrageous hairstyles—just like modern humans. But they still had to answer to survival pressures. We don’t.
So here’s the dilemma. If fitness is “blending with what is,” but “what is” is not what has been or what should be, and moreover, “what is” does not practically lead somewhere useful, then what do we do? How do we find a context, a reason, a motivation for doing things with my body that does not need to be done? How, in other words, do we avoid the trap of modern fitness, which is to train for purposes that have been invented?
I don’t believe it’s possible. Read the full post
This is a fascinating technique that I stumbled across a few years ago and have never really used, but I was reminded of it recently.
Serge Kahili King, a Caucasian teacher of Huna, presented it in his book Urban Shaman:
Repatterning
A long time ago, so long that I can’t remember the source, I learned that if you stub your toe, all you have to do is repeat the same action several times, without quite stubbing your toe again, and the pain will go away. I used that a lot unthinkingly, but in later years I studied the process in detail and began teaching it in my courses, suggesting that the students try out variations. The concept I developed was that by re-creating the pattern and changing the ending, you were, in effect, giving the ku [subconscious] a new memory of the event, requiring the ku to change the body state in conformity to the new version of what happened. The sooner you could do this after the event, the sooner the body would get back into harmony.
What the students did amazed and delighted me.
A man in California, one week after the training, was in his backyard building a fence. At one point he smashed his thumb hard with a hammer and then pulled the hammer back prior to dropping it and following the normal routine of jumping up and down while squeezing his thumb and cussing. At the high point of his swing away from his thumb he remembered my lesson about repeating the pattern and changing the ending, so he followed through with his swing without quite touching his thumb. He repeated that action about seventeen more times. By then his thumb barely tingled and he went on with his work. When he was through he looked at this thumb and there was neither bruising nor swelling nor pain.
A medical doctor in Texas reported that he was chopping up lettuce for salad with a knife and sliced deep into a finger. Professionally he knew it would require several stitches, but he decided to try out my crazy idea anyway. After a few repetitive passes with the knife his finger stopped bleeding and the pain went away so he forgot about it and finished the salad. Three days later he remembered the accident and looked at his finger. There was no sign it had been cut.
Read the full post
Read this article about an exciting new fitness system coming into existence, based on natural/primitive human body dynamics.
Our workouts are domesticated, while the world out there is still plenty wild. In a pinch, can a man put gym-generated biceps and tank-tread abs to any real use? Could it be that our treadmill-running, elliptical-gliding, well-oiled Cybex world has turned us into show dogs who can’t hold our own in the hunt?
“I meet men all the time who can bench 400 pounds but can’t climb up through a window to pull someone from a burning building,” Le Corre says. “I know guys who can run marathons but can’t sprint to anyone’s rescue unless they put their shoes on first. Lots of swimmers do laps every day but can’t dive deep enough to save a friend, or know how to carry him over rocks and out of the surf.”
… “Being fit isn’t about being able to lift a steel bar or finish an Ironman,” Le Corre says … “It’s about rediscovering our biological nature and releasing the wild human animal inside.”
The founder, Erwan Le Corre, has a website at movnat.com.
Jun 3rd, 2009 by Pathfinder in Society
Welcome to our new contributing author, Pathfinder. See a short bio of Pathfinder on the About page.
Being a modern alternative medicine practitioner in modern day America, one of the biggest challenges you face is that ultimately what is at the root of what is wrong with almost all of your patients is that they are overworked, over-stressed, over-tired, have a poor diet, and under exercise. And worst of all it’s not their fault. Essentially, most people’s bodies are falling apart in one way or another because of one simple thing: MODERN CIVILIZATION.
What we are facing is that ultimately, we as a species have spent tens of thousands of years as bipedal hunter-gatherers and perhaps ten-thousand years as an agrarian based civilization. It is only in the last 100 years, that our society has transformed to such a degree that what our bodies do every day is completely different from what we are designed to do. Consider what most of us do every day: We sit. We sit in front of computers, we sit in vehicles, we sit in front of televisions, we sit in vehicles. Even manual labor jobs, such as construction or farming involve heavy machinery that requires sitting, and even if they don’t they require a repetitive action over and over that ultimately damages the body. Read the full post
Having established a certain degree of grounding in our experience of our own health, it’s worth it to start exploring goals.
I’d like to set the bar sky-high by looking at a few accounts of, for lack of a better term, superhuman feats.
Ernest Thompson Seton, in Gospel of the Redman, wrote,
The most famous runner of ancient Greece was Pheidippides, whose record run from Athens to Sparta was 140 miles in 36 hours. Among our Indians, such a feat would have been considered very second-rate. In 1882, at Fort Ellice, I saw a young Cree who, on foot, had just brought in despatches from Fort Qu’Appelle (125 miles away) in 25 hours. It created almost no comment. I heard little from the traders but cool remarks like, “A good boy”, “pretty good run”. It was obviously a very usual exploit, among Indians.
The two Indian runners, Thomas Zafiro and Leonicio San Miguel, ran 62 1/2 miles, i.e. from Pachuca to Mexico City, in 9 hours, 37 minutes, November 8, 1926, according to the El Paso Times, February 14, 1932. This was 9 1/4 minutes to the mile.
The Zunis have a race called, “Kicked Stick.” In this, the contestants each kick a stick before them as they run. Dr. F. W. Hodge tells me that there is a record of 20 miles covered in 2 hours by one of the kickers.
The Tarahumare mail carrier runs 70 miles a day, every day in the week, carrying a heavy mailbag, and he doesn’t know that he is doing an exploit. In addition, we are told: “The Tarahumare mail carrier from Chihuahua to Batopiles, Mexico, runs regularly more than 500 miles a week; a Hopi messenger has been known to run 120 miles in 15 hours.”
The Arizona Indians are known to run down deer by sheer endurance, and every student of Southwestern history will remember that Coronado’s mounted men were unable to overtake the natives when in the hill country, such was their speed and activity on foot.
The importance of rooting in the body can’t be understated. All of the methods I’ve described to establish a baseline of body and health awareness are not only to gather data, but to acquaint one’s own consciousness with the lived experience of inhabiting and using a body and being a physically alive being in the corporeal world. For civilized people this is a simple and fundamental thing that’s nevertheless very easily overlooked. The ease with which many of us get basic physical survival needs met, and the ease with which we can dissociate into altered states thanks to the abundance of music, television, movies, etc. in our lives, tends to enhance the illusion that we are, physically, just machines whose functioning needs to be maintained. But the closer we get to our biological, animal selves, the more it expands into a living complexity.
Living as we do in such ease, surrounded by the marvels of modern technology sustaining our lives, it can seem like chaos to descend into corporeality. It can feel unfamiliar, crazy, like there are too many details to manage, and that it would be so much easier just to let those details be, and return to the realm of the gods where food comes from boxes and love from a television screen. In such apparent chaos, more refined methods and strategies have to be used in order to maintain balance in our descent into embodiment.
In fact, often the methods and strategies that work best are those that take advantage of the natural things the body does to maintain balance—the cycles, rhythms, actions and responses that occur naturally in the body.
The simplest and most obvious of these, and therefore one of the most emphasized in older practices of yoga and qigong, is the breath. Read the full post
Jun 2nd, 2009 by David in Diet and Digestion
People who do-it-yourself with their health often put much of their emphasis on diet, possibly because it is in part the most obvious thing you can control. There really is a lot that can be affected by your food choices and many other factors involving how and when you eat, and why. But digestion is really much more than just choosing what foods to put into your mouth.
Digestion is the central pillar of our biological existence. We were born with certain characteristics determined by genes and ancestry, shaped by influences in our environment; but it’s the constant intake, processing, and excretion of substances that allows us to continue to exist moment by moment. Thus, in these terms, digestion encompasses everything that flows through the body. That list includes, but is not limited to: Read the full post
So now what? How do we start the process of adjusting to a wider world of climatic forces? In this post I outline a way to orient yourself toward that, which I’m currently using myself. It’s an experiment in progress.
Opening that door and stepping out into the elements is, in many ways, like a car shifting into a higher gear. Things move faster, and more energy is being moved through the system — both the environment, and your own physiology. So it takes a different level of dynamic equilibrium to maintain your balance in the midst of these increased forces.
To achieve equilibrium under these circumstances, two things are required: Available energy, and the integrity of the organism. Read the full post
Here’s a podcast about improving your vision, integrated with rewilding games, from Willem Larsen.
In this seemingly tangential podcast, I further explain the use of the sensory tune-up game, and talk about how every game we play has both diagnostic and therapeutic properties. I speak a little bit of the history of Vision Therapy, the improvement of eyesight without corrective lenses, tell my own story of recent radical vision improvement, and offer up a method for those living in a similar context as myself; i.e. improving their health, changing their lifestyle, gaining self-clarity.
Listen to the podcast at The College of Mythic Cartography.