Health Beyond Civilization

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.

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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.

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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.

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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:

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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.

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duplex divx download 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.

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The Body Scan discussed in the previous post is one way of establishing a baseline. Its advantages are that it connects you intimately with the moment-to-moment experience of your physical being, exactly as it is. It trains the mind and builds concentration power. It helps to seat you more comfortably in your body.

The potential drawback is that, like all mindfulness techniques, it runs the risk of building a body of experience without a mental framework with which to understand that experience. You can meditate or pay attention all you want, but these activities need context to be meaningful.

The context is your own life: Your activities, your interests, your behavior, your character, your idiosyncrasies and quirks, your goals and your life purpose. A practice such as the body scan temporarily removes you from the flow of all those details because they can be distracting to the experience of your being in the moment, and for that reason it’s very valuable. It’s also valuable to be able to reintegrate that awareness into the chaos of life.

How is this relevant to health? As I will say again and again, what I’m trying to do is endorse a concept of health as more than not being sick, more than a vague sense of being well, more than having good blood pressure or having a good body-mass ratio. Health is quality of life. To know how to improve your quality of life, you first have to know what

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your quality of life is right now. That includes attention to the physical and the nonphysical aspects of your life.

The Body Scan helps you build a base awareness of your physical body. But there are ways to go farther, or to approach it from other angles.

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This post is about hypoglycemia, but it may also be useful for those who have other blood sugar disorders such as diabetes. And given the state of affairs in the developed world, what with the heavily sugared diet, I think almost everyone is at risk for blood sugar disorders.

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I have hypoglycemia, a pre-diabetic condition that mandates that I avoid refined carbohydrates, including sugars, starches, and grains such as rice or bread. If I don’t, I very quickly notice it: My energy drops precipitously, I feel dangerously drowsy, and I start getting a pounding headache. If it gets bad, I’ll throw up or even pass out (but I’ve learned enough not to let that happen!).

Hypoglycemia is “hypo” (low) “glycemia” (blood sugar). Blood sugar, or glucose in the bloodstream, is a primary energy source to cells throughout the body. We get it from carbohydrates, roughly broken down into “refined” carbs (white rice, white flour products, white sugar) or “simple” carbs (usually, fruits), and from “complex” carbs (the many types of vegetables). Simple/refined carbs go more quickly to the blood and so give a quick jolt. Complex carbs break down more slowly. Generally, the sweeter it tastes, the quicker it goes to the bloodstream.

Diabetes is hyperglycemia; it happens when, for whatever reason, there’s too much sugar in the blood. Hypoglycemia is opposite, but related; basically both indicate that the body has trouble regulating and distributing energy, usually because there’s some kind of underlying energetic deficiency, which can be caused or aggravated by poor diet (and usually is, with diabetes).

I had always eaten lots of rice and pasta. Things started going awry during my first summer at Teaching Drum in 2000. Higher quantities of sugar were eaten there as part of a food addiction cycle that I’ve written about elsewhere. Then one day we were all fasting for the entire day in preparation for a sweat lodge ceremony that evening, and as the day went on I felt more and more horrible as my blood sugar plummeted. I was barely able to stumble my way the half-mile down the trail to where the van was parked, and the ride in to the house was very difficult because every bump on the dirt road threatened to make me puke.

When I finally got to the house, everyone else left for the sweat, and I staggered into the house, opened up a can of tomato soup, ate a little, lay down, and passed out. When I woke up I felt tons better.

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The Beijing Olympics are in full swing, and Michael Phelps is getting a lot of hype as the greatest Olympian ever, i.e. having won the most career gold medals, as well as shattering a lot of world records for speed. Seeing the attention paid to Olympic sports and herculean athletic feats, and to Tiger Woods’ recent epic tournament win among other things, gives me pause for thought.

Sometimes I compare myself with those athletes and it makes me feel, not inadequate, but profoundly puzzled. I look at the statistics on growing obesity and health problems on the one hand, and the massive adulation (and salaries) given to sports figures on the other, and it makes me think something is not quite right.

Part of the problem, I believe, is that virtually all of the modern sports do not even touch on the basic philosophy of living life, much less achieve the complete integration and unity of physical activity with living life that should be the foundation of a healthy human being’s relationship with body and nature. Take Olympic swimming as an example. These are essentially very simple races, back and forth in a straight line, in predefined distances. You can train for that, sure, and practice over and over again, expecting the same basic conditions every time. You can become great at it, compete with other athletes who have trained for the exact same circumstances, and win handily over them multiple times in a week to be called one of the greatest athletes ever.

I don’t mean to demean Phelps’ achievements, or Tiger Woods’ achievements, or Lance Armstrong’s achievements; they are remarkable feats. What I do want to do is question the frame.

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When it comes to wilderness skills, or even just being outdoors, some things are just assumed. If you go hiking, mountaineering, or camping; if you sign up for a course on survival skills or foraging wild herbs; if you go tracking deer or wolves; then there’s a good chance you’ll get dirty, cold, wet, and tired. It kind of comes with the territory — it’s a no-brainer. It’s the first step that’s so obvious that no one ever talks about it: In order to enjoy and learn from the wild, you have to take a step outside.

But because it’s so obvious, that transition from indoor to outdoor becomes overlooked as a category of study in and of itself. Often this doesn’t matter for people who are predisposed to enjoy those activities; they whiz right through and are playing in the dirt before you can sneeze.

For the rest of us, though, it can be of some value to walk through that step over the threshold a bit more carefully. If we’re stepping from a closed space to an open environment, and especially if we’re used to spending 90% of our time in the closed space, then there are many things that influence us that we’re not used to, from physical sensations of weather and dirt to mental changes like the fact that there’s just more space.

In this post I’ll be examining the effects of weather and climate on that first step over the threshold.

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