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By Mark Lundegren

Breaking the cycle is a phrase used to describe personal challenges and journeys of various sorts.  It is the goal of people across a range of pursuits.  This includes natural health practitioners, who seek to break limiting cycles that inhibit our health and vitality.

You may have heard others talk about “breaking cycles” before.  A common use is in addiction counseling, describing the prospect of triumph over a physical or psychological dependency.  This use is actually quite close to how HumanaNatura uses the phrase, which we do within a general health practice called natural living.  What is different is that, in natural living, we attempt to break not a single cycle or instance of addiction, but a series of personal and cultural limitations – in an ongoing, life-long, and individualized movement toward our full potential for health.

Another common use of the phrase, breaking the cycle, is within eastern religious traditions, where it refers to a mystical experience, our release from the circular bondage of karma.  The word karma describes the cycle of action in the world, and breaking this cycle – to achieve awareness apart from the world of action – is the focus of many eastern traditions.  In the practice of natural living, natural health practitioners don’t use the phrase to describe a mystical experience, though we often refer transcendental ones, so there is again similarity.  If this seems confusing or contradictory, I’ll explain.

For HumanaNatura and natural health practitioners, breaking cycles is the process of our transitioning from unhealthy but familiar and persistent habits to new, more natural, and beneficial physiological patterns, through practical changes in our daily lives.  But because this pursuit of new health almost always involves basic personal issues and choices, what might start as a practical endeavor often transcends to a spiritual one.  Health-promoting changes, in single instances or as they compound over time, work to alter our values, perspective, and even identity as people.  I’ll come back to this aspect of cycle breaking a little later.

To shed light on the cycle-breaking of natural health practitioners, engaged in natural living, let’s explore one very practical and then some more transcendental ways in which you can break limiting cycles through your own pursuit of natural health.  Our goal in this exploration is to give you ideas you can use right away to see and then live beyond persistent, limiting cycles in your life, now and over time.

The Original Cycle

For HumanaNatura, our original use of the phrase, breaking the cycle, was in the context of restoring our diet to a more natural one. Here, breaking the cycle refers to gaining freedom from harmful, but pleasurable and therefore self-perpetuating cycles of unnatural food consumption, especially from carbohydrate-rich junk foods that have become an all too prevalent part of our modern diets.

Carbohydrate-rich diets of course have dominated in society for many centuries, since the advent of agriculture at the dawn of civilization.  In recent decades, however, this trend has accelerated with the industrialization of our food supply and as we have become wealthier and as eating has become progressively viewed as a source of entertainment.  Whether we would prefer it or not, attacking carbohydrate-rich diets and eating as entertainment are the humble starting points from where most of us begin our journey to higher and more natural states of health.  It is unfortunately also where some of us end our quest for health too, so strong are the pressures and pleasures of our time.

Strange as this may sound, we learn early on in our exploration of our natural health that carbohydrate-rich foods actually make us hungry. This increased hunger usually takes a few hours to occur and, since people often spend their lives eating frequent meals of carbohydrate-rich foods, the connection is usually not made between their frequent eating, their frequently returning and pressing hunger, and the foods they eat.

As a consequence, many of us spend our days and lives cycling between meals, alternately consuming excesses of carbohydrates in our meals, whether large and small ones, and later experiencing urgent food cravings for still more carbohydrates. Since these foods are sweet and pleasurable to eat, we generally take this eating cycle as natural and inevitable, as the way people normally are, when the opposite is actually true.   After all, carbohydrate-rich food is only a small part of a natural human diet, exclusively in the form of fruit, and people in nature often ate far less frequently than today.

In our physiology, this health-limiting and self-perpetuating carbohydrate cycle is rooted in an imbalance in our blood sugar. As you may know already, the rapid infusion of sugars that comes from eating carbohydrate-rich meals causes our bodies to respond with high amounts of the chemical insulin to process this sugar. Rapidly heightened insulin levels, in turn, depress our natural blood sugars.  Lowered blood sugars make us then feel sluggish or restless, and trigger cravings for more sugars – we feel hungry again.  And so we cycle and cycle each day.

If the only effect of our carbohydrate cycle was increased food consumption, of frequent and comfortable eating, it might not be cause for alarm. It would be a small deception, we would be only slightly diminished through this dependency, and probably it would be an untroubling boon for food producers and advertising executives.  Unfortunately, the carbohydrate cycle has many negative and far-reaching implications for our health and well-being.  Only the most obvious examples are the widespread obesity and other direct effects of chronic insulin overproduction we see in the world today.

In fact, the carbohydrate-rich food cycle distorts our natural human biochemistry and significantly reduces our health below natural levels.  It creates multiple, cascading chemical reactions in our bodies that promote the familiar diseases of modernity – diabetes, circulatory impairment, and cancers –reducing the quality and length of our lives.  The carbohydrate cycle also perpetuates a chronic sense of psychological dependence in our daily lives that is equally unnatural and unhealthy.  Many of us spend our days pre-occupied with our need for food and the logistics of frequent eating – to the point of distracting us from needed longer-term focus on important issues in our lives, and even diminishing our natural sense of human freedom and autonomy.

Our heath and even our experience of daily life are very different on a natural diet, one free of unnatural and disproportionate amounts of carbohydrate foods and in harmony with the way human eating once occurred in wild nature, before settled, civilized, and now industrial life.   With a natural diet, we rarely if ever experience urgent food cravings, and are far more apt to eat out of need than want.  On a natural diet, we do not cycle from meal to meal, and find that high levels of energy and attention are easy to maintain between our meals. We normally eat less frequently and particularly at times of our choosing, rather than as a reaction to feelings of hunger or physical discomfort.

On a natural diet, we even eat less food overall and can go long periods of time without eating, if need be, without compromising our sense of physical or psychological composure. We enjoy feelings of emotional balance and mental clarity throughout the day, literally creating a natural high for ourselves.  As a result, we feel freer and more natural and grounded as people – less in need of food urgently or as recreation, and more in control of our bodies, priorities, and lives.  

Through this change in the way we eat, we break a cycle and create a pattern of eating that directly promotes our health and well-being.  In doing this, and seeing the many benefits that come from this change, we then begin to see more around us that is just as limiting, unnatural, persistent, and cyclical as our earlier approach to food.

Breaking Other Cycles

The often transformational changes in our health and experience of life, which can come from the simple transition to a natural diet, are often unexpected and a source of learning and inspiration for us.  With clear impacts from simple dietary changes comes a dawning personal realization that other aspects of our lives may be equally unhealthy, habitual and cyclical, and limiting to us.  We may also realize that many limiting dimensions of our lives are ones we can change though new priorities and personal choices.

In this growing awareness of familiar but limiting cycles in our lives, practical consideration of our requirements for health transcends to create new feelings and invoke the spirituality of our natural well-being, as I suggested before.  What appears quite simple – eating naturally – becomes a larger and instructive process, rich with possibilities for us.  From our breaking of comforting but unnatural food cycles, our new diet and way of eating become a catalyst and metaphor, encouraging and allowing us to pursue and overcome other cycles of limiting beliefs and behavior in our lives.

As I mentioned earlier, HumanaNatura refers to this breaking of unhealthy and often unconscious cycles in our lives, and their replacement with healthy, consciously-chosen, and often equally self-reinforcing patterns, as the practice of natural living.  Natural living begins with and is enabled by both natural diet and natural exercise, but its scope is much larger than this.  Natural living is an ongoing exploration and restructuring of our daily lives for increased health, vitality, and well-being, in the fullest sense of these words.  Natural living takes on different and highly individualized expressions for each of us, but its direction is always the same:  toward freedom from personal limitation, toward greater understanding and new growth, toward our health and full potential for vital life.

Through the conscious and consciousness-raising practice of natural living – looking for and living beyond our own health-limiting behaviors and attitudes – our individual breaking of cycles can occur in many ways and at many different levels. Some cycle-breaking may be less significant and life-altering, while the overcoming of other cycles can substantially impact our lives, values, and priorities. Very often, such breakthroughs involve the very difficult task of confronting socially-imposed norms that are familiar and even revered, but detrimental to our health and well-being, and to our freedom to be natural and ourselves. 

These many possible constraints on our health can include patterns in our daily life and work, our values and longer-term personal goals, the way we view and relate to others, and how we think about and accept society as it is today.  As a learning opportunity, I would encourage you right now to identify the three least healthy aspects of your life as it is today, leaving aside your diet and exercise patterns for now.  This short list should just take a minute or two for you to formulate and will give you insight as you consider the practical, individualized, and life-long nature of natural living.

A foundational issue in this process of cycle-breaking is our own willingness and courage to confront ourselves, our values and beliefs, and especially the choices we make each day (really each minute) of our lives.  Most of us of want to believe that we and our choices are rational and optimal, that there is an inevitability to our lives, and that we are generally making the most of the life circumstances we have been given or have created ourselves. But this is usually not the case, and never completely so.  After all, what person do you know that cannot improve at least one important aspect of their lives?

The truth of our human condition is that most of us have not chosen the majority our values, beliefs, and behaviors. We each have been pre-scripted to varying degrees by our basic nature, by our nurturing and early experiences, by society generally, and by the horizons of our unique life situations specifically. Some of this may be positive and beneficial to us.  But without a deliberate assessment and an openness to change, few of our behaviors are made truly conscious and self-affirmed as optimal and healthy. Unless we take control of our lives in this way, we very likely remain caught in a web of unconscious and limiting cycles that we simply cannot see or sense.  We are controlled by cycles, habits, and norms around and within us, and are not the in-control people we want to be.

In my work as a health advocate and counselor, I have found that natural living’s core approach of evaluating our beliefs and behaviors against the standard of our health can greatly accelerate the process of self-examination and more optimal choice in our lives.  I have written about this elsewhere and believe the approach of health-directed and health-affirming choice is a powerful alternative to traditional counseling practices.  The approach of natural living is much less likely to leave us in idiosyncratic but not self-optimizing exploration and change.  Natural living and the quest for health leads directly to persistent cycles and patterns, and motivates us to transcend them.

The iterative path of personal discovery that is natural living, which concurrently encourages us to work to more deeply understand our own individual definition of and potential for health, allows us to often quickly discover much that is unhealthy in our lives, areas we are hard-pressed to justify if we are honest with ourselves.  With these insights, and the standard of our health as our guide, practitioners can achieve transformative new steps to personal vitality, to lives of perpetual and accelerating cycle breaking, to more energized lives of ever increasing health.

Unlike mystics seeking nirvana but in many ways like people struggling with obvious dependencies, those of us pursuing natural health are and must be realists and practical people.  Even the ideal of our health is a practical and worldly challenge, not just at the start and intermediate phases but throughout our lives.  Coupling new and clearer standards of natural health and well-being to our basic human desire for personal development, HumanaNatura and the task of natural living offer a more effective way to catalyze both immediate and long-lasting insight and personal change.

And yet, there is always a transcendental dimension to our health and to all cycle breaking.  There always remains more that we can see and be, here in this world while we are alive.  There remains always greater health, vitality, creativity, openness – greater human life, if we have the strength. 

And with our health, there is always strength, always the potential for new freedom from the cycles that bind us.

Mark Lundegren is the founder of HumanaNatura.

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By Mark Lundegren

I’m glad this article’s title got your attention.  It’s a topic that has mine too, and it’s one I hope I can inspire you to act on, beginning today.

Whether you are new to HumanaNatura or a long-time community member, I would like to make a modest but important proposal to you: that you begin to think about natural health and the mission of HumanaNatura as “ahead to nature.”

You may wonder why I have proposed this turn of phase to frame the pursuit of natural health and as the mission of our community.  As far as mission statements go, anyone can see that it’s much too short.  Mission statements are normally longer, meandering along a bit and then ending brightly.  Ahead to nature is so short – too short. 

But “ahead to nature” is the essence of what the HumanaNatura community and the challenge of natural health are all about.  Just as importantly, these three words also plainly underscore something that HumanaNatura and natural health in the modern world are decidedly not about, namely, going back to nature.

Back to nature is a gentle, familiar old phrase, isn’t it?  It’s easygoing and inoffensive, pleasant and nostalgic.  Everyone wants to go back to somewhere in some way, after all.  No doubt you’ve heard the expression used many times.  In my role organizing HumanaNatura, I hear “back to nature” a great deal.  In fact, I hear it used to describe HumanaNatura quite often.  And each time I hear this phrase ascribed to our community, I cringe just a bit inside.  After all, HumanaNatura is not about going back at all.

Which brings me back to my proposal for you to think about, and ideally act on, the idea of “ahead to nature.”

Looking Back, Moving Ahead

For the record, it is true that HumanaNatura looks back to some extent.  Our approach begins with the science of our pre-historic past and earlier life in nature, which we use to achieve a greater understanding of our health and human nature.  This backward look is, in part, how we derive the core HumanaNatura principles of natural diet, natural exercise, and natural living. 

Thanks to the unique lens of modern science, as opposed to direct experience or intuition, people of our time are now able to examine our past more critically and completely than ever before.  We can see ourselves with fresh eyes, so to speak, and more fully and accurately.  What we see is a species that is entirely new in many ways.  This new science of ourselves includes a clearer portrait of the way we once lived in the past, the foundations of our natural health that lie in this past, and their important consequences and implications for our well-being today in the modern world – again, all of this new knowledge that was essentially unknown to people a generation or two ago.

So, in one sense, HumanaNatura does go back to nature, back to our pre-historical and pre-civilized human past in nature. But this backward look is only a means to understand as deeply as we can the past that lives in us today and, especially, new possibilities for the future we will inhabit tomorrow.  I should add that, when looking back, we realize almost immediately that the way we have come through our distant and most recent past is unlikely to be the way we will want to proceed as we go forward.

Embracing the idea of back to nature, for more than obtaining these lessons for our present and future may be the greatest mistake we could as people today – except perhaps, as we will discuss, being careless with or indifferent to our health and future altogether. 

To advocate going back implies that we could go or should want to go back to an earlier time or way of life. These ideas seem sadly mixed with feelings of despair and resignation, rather than the inquisitiveness that is our natural condition as people and a clear sign of true human health.

Getting Past Our Past

For those of you beginning from a point of view predisposed to a journey back to nature, I personally share your longing for a closer relationship with the natural world, including natural people. 

For me, the idea that back to nature might extricate our planet from the strangle of modern industrial sprawl and consumerism is very appealing.  Its logic is compelling and the solution so seemingly obvious – simply remove the problem we all see so plainly.  Like you, perhaps, I look out on the subdivided land and want to see it united it again.  Like you, I see people atomized by modernity and estranged from one another by the competitive ethos of our time, and want to replace these facts with supportive communities dedicated to our individual well-being.

But, as any physician might tell you, sometimes there is more to a problem than what you see and feel.  What is obvious and manifested may be only part of a pathology, and thereby there is often the potential to do more harm than good by treating symptoms alone.  Imagine, for a moment, the deliberate dismantling of our industrial society today and an organized movement backward to even a slightly earlier way of life. The romantic in me is ready to sign up and fall in line.  But the realist asks: how would such a process of dismantling be organized?  What would be dismantled first?  Who would be the first to dismantle? And what would happen if many did dismantle but some did not?

Alternatively, we might examine our world history for epochs that appear from the vantage of the early 21^st century to be healthier and more desirable than today and then work collectively to rebuild back to them. This form of going back might be more tenable, since people could better develop a vision or object for their efforts, rather than simply retracing our historical development to an uncertain (or perhaps all too certain) horizon or stopping point.  This second way of going or remaining back is of course the basis of many religious sects in the world today, harkening and even codifying an earlier time to sustain an older way of life.  These ways are typically in distant but clear orbits around and through modern population centers.

But, even in the case of rebuilding to a past epoch, which epoch would be judged most desirable and rebuildable? And what part of our history, in whatever time we might choose, is not imbedded with the inevitable errors and injustices of our past, and with the obvious inevitability of historical decline? We should remind ourselves that the forces of history have destroyed all prior times. No epoch has been able to maintain itself indefinitely in the face of time, which is to say in the face of nature.  All prior human epochs have passed in either painstakingly slow or breathtakingly sudden deaths.  The only unchanging fact of history and pre-history so far is – change.

The Choices We Make Today

Avenues or proposals for going back to nature, or to any other place in times past, lead to these types of outcomes.  Going back is a path of existential vacuums, isolation and stagnation, and impossible dead ends.  It does not reliably lead to new and more open relationships with nature and ourselves, which we seek today.  Back does not take us to the health and vitality of the original and forward-facing natural life of our ancestors, the life we seek to recapture and transfigure in our time through HumanaNatura.

Proposals to move back come to us imbued with a type of weakness and an unintentional but implicit ethos of withdrawal.  They do not spring from our natural human desire for growth and discovery, our instinct to abandon a tract of land or sea once overworked and too familiar.  Perhaps ideas of moving back can be seen as coming from a love of the surface nature, but not from an appreciation of its depths, its inexhaustible depths, and a love of the unknown in nature that lies before us at all times.

The method of HumanaNatura is to instead imagine the possibility of a new and more vital and desirable way of life than has come before us, one that transcends the imperfections and limitations of our past and own times.   From this possibility, we then look for what we can practically act on today.  We look at what is inherently compelling and healthier to us today.  We make choices and create new life each day, and then let these choices and creations frame and form our tomorrow. 

Before you dismiss this approach as idealistic (it is, of course, but not worthy of immediate dismissal), consider the many choices you are making in your life right now, and the many alternatives you may be overlooking, unconsciously choosing not to chose.  How have you structured your day, today?  Is it optimal?  Is it inspiring? Is it the best possible use of your time?  Are there superior and more interesting choices in front of you, or next to you, that deserve your attention?  Imagine making just a few of these superior choices each day.  In a short time, this would become dozens of new and better choices in your life, and then thousands of more optimal choices over the next few years.  Imagine the impact in your life, and in the lives of those you touch, of such a path of new choices.

Now, imagine millions of people similarly making more optimal choices in the way they live each day – millions of people choosing health, choosing nature, choosing community, choosing growth and discovery, in countless ways over the next few decades.  Suddenly, our idealism and future focus seems more plausible and change achievable.  In truth, a new future would and can begin to emerge from our time, a more optimal future and an unprecedented future too.  This future would also be a living one and not frozen in time, a future capable of change and improvement, and therefore a natural and sustainable future.

It is also important to consider the risks for our future today.  HumanaNatura and other alternative living movements exist because of our modern need to more consciously shape our individual lives and communities, enabled by the modern possibility that we might and can in fact shape our future for the first time in history.  In HumanaNatura’s case, we promote a post-modern future informed by a new understanding of nature itself, our human place in nature, and our requirements for greater health and well-being.  Our community seeks a decidedly different future path, challenging us all to consider the prevailing direction of our time and the limits of passive acceptance of what time will bring.

If science has brought us great benefits and the potential for new understanding to modern life, it has brought with them equally great risks – to the environment, communities, and individuals.  All around us, substantial and far-reaching threats loom, threats that the future will be much less desirable than our past and present if we are not careful and creative in our time. 

Examples of this are as close as any day’s headlines in the industrial world.  Our personal and collective actions and choices count now as they never have before.  When we move, the ground shudders.  When we extend our arm, a tree falls or a river is polluted.  The stakes are ever and ever higher, in this modern technological world of ours, this world of today that will not go back.

Natural Living: A Path Ahead

It is against this backdrop of great opportunities and risks that the HumanaNatura community calls on us all to move ahead to nature.  Not back to nature.  And not away from nature.  Ahead, to nature.  We believe that ahead and to nature are where a better future lies, where a more sustainable and beneficial human future lies, even where new and higher forms of human life lies.

If we must go forward, and if we must exercise great care in going forward, we are fortunate to have our past to learn from.  We all can ask important questions of our history and pre-history, and hear back much that is intelligent and compelling. The many, very fruitful lessons that come from this line of inquiry, for those of us associated with HumanaNatura, are embodied in the phrase, ahead to nature, and are the day-to-day work that we call “natural living. “

Natural living begins with a re-envisioning of ourselves and our future in new ways, ones more closely, more deliberately, and more practically linked to our natural health and natural human desire for growth and well-being.  Natural living then is the daily practice of living in ever more naturally, healthfully, beneficially, and in harmony with our vision, knowing that our vision will evolve as we grow and change.  Natural living is a practical and lifelong process of making our visions of health and well-being our reality, and through our choices and actions, the world’s reality.

Guided Tour To Tomorrow

So then, where does natural living take us?  Where does building on an increased understanding of our health and an attitude of “ahead to nature” lead?   It leads into the unknown and the future, of course, as ancient people once knowingly faced ahead in nature (and as we do inevitably).  This time, though, it is with the gifts of greater understanding and advanced technology to serve us in our quest. 

If this answer is less than satisfying, if you would like a clearer picture of a future predicated on human health and wellness, perhaps you are still thinking that back is a tenable and safer bet.  Or than standing pat and waiting is an option, and not simply an inactive form of moving back.  In any case, consider again the risks of inaction, and then the lost opportunities and less inspired lives we will most certainly live if we wait for certainty before moving forward with needed changes in our lives and communities.

Between our desire for certainty and the risks of inaction, we each can seek new meaning and vision in the world around us, and re-prioritize our goals for the future. Imbedded in the idea of ahead to nature is the proposition that our natural health is a ready guide and reliable standard for us today. Is this really such an uncertain proposal?  Doesn’t our health, forged over billions of years in countless settings, contain the deepest wisdom that is available to us as people?  And doesn’t the standard of greater health stand in stark contrast and chart a far preferable course than the aimlessness that is so much of our modernity today?

Ahead to nature, a new and broad-based dedication to our natural health and to the primacy of human well being, also involves another form of wisdom – that of having many people work towards a common goal over time, in a loose and decentralized global network of local activity.  With this approach, learning and successful innovation sharing can occur quickly, allowing for rapid adjustment, refinement, and progress. Where we might lack certainty today, we may take small steps and make needed corrections along the way.

HumanaNatura has suggested a number of principles that are likely to be useful to people seeking a healthier and more vital future. These principles of natural living include:

• Empowerment – securing the ability to create and maintain what we create
• Growth – an ethos that encourages continual learning and development
• Cooperation – life in caring relationships and supportive communities
• Freedom – physical and spiritual access to vital, creative life
• Nature – connection to our natural health and wild nature

Reflecting on these principles, perhaps you will begin to see their inner logic and potential to drive new direction in your life. Perhaps they will influence the small and not so small choices you will next make, even ones you will make today.  What different directions these principles immediately create for most of us, through the new discussions and decisions they prompt and promote in our lives.

The principles of natural living point to an alternative future emphasizing universal health and vitality, learning and discovery, a new human openness, and life in search of transformation, all in a way that is possible but not yet imagined and pursued by the majority of people today. As principles only, of course, they require action to be made real and to catalyze meaningful and lasting change in our lives and the world.  Perhaps this is where you fit in, perhaps where your special contribution to the future lies.

“Ahead to nature” may or may not be your personal vision for the future, but it is a compelling one, and I hope you will consider it.  Ahead to nature is at least a worthy alternative to what is around us, given what is at stake in our lives and the world today.  In our hands is the potential for new and unprecedented human development, in this unprecedented time in our history, and the equally great risks that passivity and indifference offer us alongside this potential.

Living with an ethos of ahead to nature, you will be better able to reflect on the type of future you would like to be part of, and the future you are inevitably helping to create through each of your individual choices and actions, now and in every day during your time among us.

With ahead to nature, you will understand the goals and aspirations of the many people associated with HumanaNatura, our many members and friends alike.  You will know what is in our hearts, and perhaps in your own.

Mark Lundegren is the founder of HumanaNatura.

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By Mark Lundegren

There comes a time, in the life of every person pursuing natural health and well-being, when we literally awaken one day to our health.   I’d like to talk with you about this experience, even if it is hard to describe, so you can look for it and know what it is when it happens in your life.

Waking to our health is an intimate and personal experience, unique and special for each of us in when and how it occurs, and thus one that is difficult to describe as I said. But like our emerging from physiological sleep, our waking to health also has a commonality across people.  It is something we can and should discuss, and is an important milestone we come upon along the path to greater health and well-being.

As the phrase suggests, awakening to our health involves a sudden insight or experience, one including a realization that permanently alters our perspective on our health, ourselves, and the world.  It is the personal recognition of a gateway we are entering or have crossed, leading to a new phase of our lives.  With this insight, we look at our life and health with new eyes and new sensitivity.  We grasp a simpler and deeper meaning of what it is to be healthy.  We understand, for the first time, the living or lived reality of our health and what we are seeking to create in our lives, as we pursue the path of our health and well-being. 

Our sudden waking to our health is almost always a memorable event in our lives, one that is easily recalled and often still affects us even years after it occurs. In discussing the experience with others, people describe it as a vivid and unexpected new outlook or perception, a simple and clearer comprehension of the complex idea of healthy life that had been developing in them but was still not fully composed.  I have heard others refer to their waking as a more complete understanding of the new life they want and are creating with their health.

When we awaken to health, the nature of the path we are pursuing and its practical consequences for us appear to us intensely and intimately.   We understand health in a new, more forceful, and far more concrete way.  We can see and feel how our health is driving choices in our lives and how these choices are converging, into a new state of life for us and more than simply an abstract idea or goal.  We often can see forward into this new life we are creating for ourselves, see more tangibly this life on a day-to-day basis, and see the critical steps we must ensure we take or the obstacles we must overcome to get to this new life.  And we can often better perceive how we are perceived, how the force of healthy change has or will affect the people around us.

After waking to our health, our motivation toward and feelings about health are changed.  We see our health forming a spiritual center in our lives, increasing and informing our personal strength, and giving our lives heightened intensity, purpose, meaning, and even humanity. Health and well-being become more than simply attributes of our lives, more than lifestyle choices.  Health becomes the practical means to a new and higher way of living.  Our health becomes our means and our end.

My Awakening One Day

I awoke to my health one day several years ago, but can remember the experience as if it were yesterday.  I was lying in bed early on a Saturday morning, the first rays of a spring day touching the trees outside my window, the birds singing.  I remember gazing up at the light, starting to think about the day ahead, and then a sudden new thought coming, one that held my attention and would not let go.

My waking to health forced me to sit up and take in the experience over several minutes. I remember consciously exploring as much of this insight as I could at the time and that it was an interconnected collage of feelings, images, and thoughts.  When the experienced passed, I was myself again and not myself.  I was left with new ideas and outlooks to contemplate and a need to clarify for myself the many ideas and images imbedded in this experience. 

For me, as I suggested already, my waking to health was a new understanding of the physical and personal reality of enhanced health, and the true nature of a life of sustained commitment to health and well-being. It was a new emotional appreciation of the simple reality of our health and healthy life, coming on the heels of many choices I had made and was making at that time in my life – which were compounding and unfolding in ways I had not fully appreciated.  My awakening was a palpable, poignant realization of what I was really doing with my life, as my life evolved into a quest for greater health.  I found myself face-to-face with something and someone familiar and yet strangely new – my future life and myself in that life.

That morning, for the first time, I truly appreciated what I was doing with my life in my pursuit of new health and well-being.  I realized then that my pursuit of health had substantially impacted me and my relationships with others already, closing some very specific and familiar doors and possibilities that had been open to me, and closing off certain relationships from my past, while presenting new opportunities and new relationships, most that I had not imagined before and was now just beginning to fully appreciate for their intricacy and power.

In my case, I had not made any significant decisions on the eve of my waking to health. In fact, the prior week had been a fairly ordinary one, to the extent that any week is ordinary when we are consciously seeking progressive well-being in our lives and with our time.  But my awaking had been preceded by a number of interconnected decisions and choices, some small and easily made, and others not so small and some quite difficult, over the course of several months.

I was at a much higher level of fitness than ever before in my life, even though I was in my early forties and even after having spent years seeking more optimal health in various traditional and alternative ways. I had been following for a time what would later become the HumanaNatura diet and exercise programs, and had made changes in my personal life that brought me closer to the goals of what I would later term natural living.

That spring morning, I saw clearly and felt tangibly that I was becoming a new person, and a different person. I understood how I was moving into a broader and less certain personal space, a real space and not a hypothetical or conceptual one, a living space in the world, rich in the possibilities and limitations that the world creates in any life.  I also saw that my life was becoming materially different and that many of the changes I was making were permanent and irrevocable.   I even sensed in new ways how the people around me were perceiving me, how they felt about the many changes I was making.  I was different in their eyes, and I now saw that more plainly.  Some people were clearly moving away from me, others toward me and some with a speed and with expectations I was not sure I could live up to.

The reality and consequences of specific decisions I had made in the prior year, based on my new understanding of natural health and desire for a more natural life, confronted me that morning in an acute and potent way. In that time, I had relocated to a smaller city and separated from several close friends and my long-term companion.  I had made a number of smaller personal changes in my life too, ones that seemed incremental at the time and I had not thought much about.  In turn, had gradually begun to migrate towards new friendships and uses of my time that were more health focused, a task made easier by my relocation and new distance from friends who were less health-oriented.

Looking back, I really had started over, re-grounding myself in important ways and beginning the task of creating a more deliberate and healthier life, but I had not fully appreciated this and certainly had not thought through the combined impact of the many changes I was making.   I had felt hopeful in this process, especially because by health and fitness were greatly improved, but also somewhat disconnected from changing events in my life and relativistic about many of my choices. 

My awaking to health that morning gave me new perspective and an added ability to look ahead and better sense my future.  It certainly gave me a more holistic view of my actions and a new and more grounded view of what was fairly radical personal change (if seemingly incremental and measured at any particular point).

A Needed New Perspective

In the immediacy of our lives, as in my case, it is easy to think and talk about health in an abstract way, or as a set of ideas and goals only. It is even often fairly straightforward to make a great many incremental decisions in favor of our health and healthier life: eating one food instead of another, exercising more or differently, going to a new place or taking on a new activity rather than a familiar one, or spending time with one person and not another.

Without the unique perspective that comes from waking to our health, such choices may be very discrete and lack true cohesiveness.  We may lack an intuitive feel and tangible sense of how small but sustained decisions and choices compound and come together in our lives, into a whole far greater than its parts. We may not fully appreciate just how far interconnected, health-focused changes can carry us over time, even in the short period of several months. We easily can fail to connect the dots and not understand the new and larger patterns emerging in our lives, not see them concretely and for what they really are.

On the spring morning when I woke up to my health, I suddenly saw health less in terms of physiology and statistic and more as a tangible way of living, one that was emerging in my life and making me other than as I was or as many are around me. I saw how natural health had begun to insist that I become a stronger, more insightful and compassionate, and more complete person – someone I had always wanted to be and had previously wanted others in my life to be for me.  My health was moving me into new places and into new places in me, challenging and remaking me, while giving me the strength to endure and manage this change.

Since the day when I woke to health, I have wavered far less on my path to health but have also been far less romantic or esoteric about what healthy life is.  I remain aware of how my life has changed and continues to change in very practical ways as I pursue specific goals related to my health and life, and I better remember that I am now different – from how I once was and from how many people are today. I have used the memory of my waking to become transformed and to transform my own thinking about health and what it means to be well.  And I have remained more aware of the perceptions of people who know me, their range and evolution of feelings about my pursuit and now advocacy of health practices (from frequent skepticism and curiosity to new acceptance and even attentiveness), and how this can enable and limit opportunities for them and me.

Today, remembering my own life before and after my awakening to health, I am less likely to take my health for granted or to minimize or understate the work that it is for us all to uncover our health.  I have a better perspective on the choices I have made and the things I have given up to get to where I am, and the persistence and non-conformity these things require (and thus the uneasiness and fear they can engender too). I see natural diet and exercise differently too, as important but smaller matters in our lives, techniques that facilitate our health but ones that are relatively modest pursuits and even self-limiting, without the redefinition and expansion of our concept of health that is the essence of HumanaNatura’s focus on natural living.

Your Own Awakening

Perhaps you too have already awoken to your health, and now see yourself and your pursuit of health in a new, fuller, and more personalized way. Perhaps your experience was like mine – a sudden seeing of your actions in a new light and in their totality – or maybe it was a different experience. Others have described their waking as emerging from the dream around them,  dawn after a long night closed off from the real world, and being suddenly untangled from a limiting web of commitments and relationships.

But maybe you are still waiting for your awakening to health. If that is where you are today, take heart. Be hopeful and be persistent in your quest for health and new well-being. Focus for now and have the courage to act on the everyday matters that form the foundation of our natural health and future well-being.  Have faith that in time you will gain the new perspective on your changing life that our waking to health is, a perspective that requires change before it can be realized.  And be comforted with the idea that your wakening is likely not something you can force or rush.

In a day, or a month, or a year, maybe on a spring morning with the light just in the trees, you will awaken to your health too. You will have a new, more expansive, and more intimate perspective on your health, your life, and our world.

Then and now, we will be waiting to hear about and encourage your own awakening to your health.

Mark Lundegren is the founder of HumanaNatura.

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