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By Mark Lundegren

If you are willing, I would like to spend a few minutes with you looking into the future, into your future in particular, and your place and future health in it.

As you have probably noticed before, whenever we talk or think about things in the future, it is inevitably with some time horizon in mind, whether this horizon is expressly stated, or left unsaid or even unnoticed.  When we say we have some errands to run, for example, we are probably thinking two or three hours into the future.  When we think that we or someone else needs to make changes to our lives, our time horizon may be in weeks or months, or years.

Depending on the topic, our future time horizon may be very short, perhaps just a few minutes or even only a few seconds.  Or our horizon may be very long, perhaps hundreds or millions of years, especially when the topic is an abstract one.  Our human minds are quite powerful and capable of embracing both expansive and minute frames of reference.

Today, I would like to help you to see, as clearly and carefully as you can, the time horizon that underlies your ideas about your health and that you are using to influence your future health.  Let’s call this exercise together, “seeing your health horizon.”

Our Naturally Near Horizon

Whenever we seek to balance the demands and immediacy of the present with goals for the future and their more intangible nature, it is very easy for us to end up with a less than ideal timeframe, or time or health horizon, especially one that is overly and undesirably biased to the present and to ourselves as we are today.  While this is a fact of life, rooted in the demands of our original life in nature, it is also a limitation that we can better understand and at least partially overcome, with many benefits to our life and health over time. 

You might be tempted to think that it is fairly easy to catch ourselves in a misalignment of our short and long-term goals and actions, and to adjust our frame of reference, our health horizon in this case, to make it more optimal.  It is true that we can do this, but it usually entails more work and more expansive self-awareness than we may intuitively realize.  We should recognize that all of us are fighting against our basic nature, to some degree, whenever we seek to optimize our health horizon in a more objective sense – and we can and should derive a sense of both humility and new opportunity from this recognition. 

We are evolved by wild nature, after all, to function in wild nature.  Ten thousand years of settled life have done little to change this long fact, one that is at least a billion years old (or one hundred thousand times the duration of settled human life).  In our lives today, our evolved nature may mean powerful natural biases and shortcomings in our time or health horizon that we must confront, especially as we seek to optimize our health and lives in the complex new setting of industrial society (roughly one hundred years old or 0.0001% of our history) and increased individual longevity.  So often, we are overly and unconsciously biased to the short-term and to the present, forgetting our past and inadequately attending to the now far more certain condition that is our future.  We perhaps have longer-term goals but often can fail to adequately focus on them each day, or we really may be immersed in the present and have not carefully considered our future or assume it will be much like today.

Two examples will help to make clearer this natural bias of ours toward the short-term, especially as regards our health.  One example is the very common case where we have sound and realistic long-term health goals, all the right ideas, but poor to non-existent fulfillment of these goals day-by-day.  Something always seems to come up, or is brought up, to prevent us from working on our health.  As the days combine to form months and then years, a consistent pattern of inattention to our long-term health emerges in our lives – and we may only partially see this pattern and really need new perspective and motivation to change.  Good intentions alone, of course, only rarely lead to good health over time.

Another example of having too short a health horizon occurs when we successfully adopt health practices, but see them without a long-term or broader context.  In this case, we may view our health in a way that is biased to the moment and the particulars of our circumstances, even as a set of urgent activities to be completed at all costs.  We often can see this variation on a short health horizon take the form of our having rigid ideas about our health or our being dogmatic with others about specific health practices and lifestyle choices.  In this overly myopic focus on specific elements of our health, we may fail to see new and more open-ended dimensions of our health, perhaps jeopardize long-term relationships with others that are essential to our health over time, and even miss important opportunities to advance the health of other people and improve the quality of our communities (and thus support for our health).

Sustained and optimal health enhancement, of course, inevitably involves a health horizon somewhat longer than these two intentionally extreme examples, or more precisely, creating a health horizon that consciously integrates short, medium, and long-term perspectives.  It is really only by mastering all three timeframes – by having a balanced set of personal goals and actions for short, medium, and long-term future – that we can optimize our health horizon and use it to drive sustained progress towards the higher states of health that are available to us.

Why is this?  Because short-term success is always essential to tangible progression of our health at any point in time, as well as to high motivation to pursue our health, while long-term goals are equally important to inform and inspire our present actions, and to make our health plans true plans and not just a static set of practices.  Mid-term goals thus form a bridge of sorts between what we must do today, and perhaps every day, and what new things we must eventually do to become what we want to be and shape our future health and life. 

For example, suppose we want to be optimally healthy and well throughout our lives and enjoy a long and robust elderhood that includes teaching and frequent wilderness experiences with others.  Such mid and long-term objectives beg shorter term goals and actions to make the future more tangible, give us feedback and allow us to revise our plans, and make our plans more likely to become our result.  Consideration of the near and more distant future requires us to articulate what we will do today, this week and month (diet, exercise, etc.) to advance to our personal vision, and to think about larger changes we must make over the next year or more (changing jobs or locations, education and personal development, new relationships, etc.) to better position ourselves to realize our aims.

Seeing Your Own Health Horizon

So, with this background as perspective, are your ready to view your own health horizon?  I will warn you up front, it may not be elegant the first time you do.  But seeing our health horizon is important, an inevitable first step to optimizing it, so let’s take a deep breath together and have a look at this key feature of our personal landscape.

To see your health horizon today, I want you to do an exercise over the next few minutes.  The scope of the exercise is to list your primary health and well-being goals, whether on a sheet of paper or in word processing or spreadsheet program.  Start by brainstorming and free associating, writing whatever comes to mind without editing for a few minutes, the key health outcomes you want to achieve in your life.  When you feel you have made a good start, go ahead and have look at your list, and add to and edit it as needed. 

When you have a good rough list, next try to get the list down (or up) to the ten or twelve things you most want for your health, or that you want to accomplish in the realm of your health and wellness.  Keep any extra goals in an “other” category so you can come back to them later.  When you are done, you’ll know it.  You will look at the list and say, “this is what I want, ideally.”  Your list might involve weight loss, physical fitness, relationships, stress, occupation, location, really whatever it is you want to enhance the health and well-being of your life.  It may include some items that seem a real stretch today too.  All are fine, as long as they are real priorities for you and your list is not overly long.

When you have your health wish list in reasonably good shape, knowing you can come back to it whenever you want, go back to your list again and put one of the following numbers next to each entry, corresponding to when you realistically will act on or accomplish the health goal or priority: “1” for action or completion in the next one to three months, “3” for action or completion in the next three to six months, “6” for action of completion in the next six to twelve months, and “12+” for action or completion in the next year or more.

Now, have a look at the numbers you wrote down.  Ideally, you should have a nearly equal number of items for the one, three, six and twelve-plus month categories, but as I warned you this may not be the case the first time through.  Often, as we consciously look at our health horizon for the first time, we may see a bunching up or clustering of our goals in either the near, mid, or long-term.  This is very common and nothing to worry about, since you now have new information you can use to adjust and optimize your horizon to make it the way you really want it to be.  Two common patterns are a clustering of goals in the long-term and in the short-term.  Long-term clustering suggests the archetype we discussed already of good intentions but less than stellar execution day-by-day.  Short-term clustering suggests the other archetype, excessive pragmatism and the potential of health myopia, and an opportunity to recast our health (and perhaps our life) from a familiar and comforting routine to a more open-ended progression that continually challenges us to discover our health and life in new ways.

I should note that a common question is why 12+ months is considered long-term.  It is possible that some actions or goals that fall into this category may feel more mid-term to you.  My experience is that we want the center of our health horizon to be squarely in the realm of actions we will take in the year ahead, with some short-term actions to show ourselves we are serious and build momentum, some actions requiring changes and experiments over the next few months, and then some long-term actions teed up for once we get past the hump and likely learnings of the next six to twelve months.  You may well find that we often do not act directly on goals that are more than a year away, but there are exceptions of course.  If you want to adjust your categories, feel free to do so.  The goal here is self-awareness and a more balanced and informed action plan aimed at sustained and progressive health in our lives.

Because of its simplicity, the health horizon exercise is a great tool to help you better see your personal time horizon with regards to your health, and to evaluate or formulate your actions and plans against what may be a more ideal timeframe.  You can of course also add in goals from other areas or dimensions of your life and thus have a single list of actions and plans for yourself – see the HumanaNatura article, Bending A Spoke Into Your Hub, for a list of other life dimensions.  Questions to ask, in reviewing any and all of your goals and plans, include: Do I have the right number of goals, neither too many nor too few?  Are my goals really what I want, are they compelling and heartfelt?  Are my goals realistic for their time periods, neither too easy nor too difficult?  And do I have a good mix of goals for each time period of the exercise?  If your answer is “no” to any of these questions, or if you are not sure, definitely spend some more time, now or in the next week, refining your list and the scope and timing of your goals and actions.

As you begin to perceive and reflect on your health horizon today, you almost immediately will begin to envision what a more ideal and balanced personal health horizon might look like for you.  Our minds are funny like that.  Though they are naturally biased to and preoccupied with the present and our present circumstances, our minds will work more optimally and quite diligently for us to examine and improve our plans – once we reframe issues in ways that make such natural human calculating more objectively and ideally focused (the importance of consciously framing issues is an extremely important point, perhaps the most important of our discussion today and one that has many applications in our lives). 

With your health horizon reframed and made more explicit, you will likely begin to naturally and perhaps surprisingly consider and re-consider the objectives and goals you now have, how your actions today serve and do not serve them, the time horizon implicit in your life and in your current uses of your time, and the alternatives you might have for the future. 

Moving Up And Over Our Horizon

I would encourage you to come back to your goals worksheet over the next month, and then again at least twice a year, so that you are always actively aware of and managing your time and health horizon.  Naturally, as we complete or implement today’s short and mid-term goals, we learn and grow from these experience, and new ideas and challenges inevitably surface.  Our set of goals and priorities can and should always be in motion, reflecting the healthy tension between reality and ideality that our open-ended life as thinking, forward-looking humans is inevitably.

Today, and over time, I would encourage you to see and define your own health horizon, especially through the timing implicit in your own goals and action plans (and to make your goals and plans more explicit in the process).  You may be surprised at what you find in this process, especially over time. You may discover opportunities to see and adjust your health and life horizon in new ways, to add new goals and work around barriers to them in more creative ways, and to find an ideal balance between the near and far, all combining to bring new and greater health, growth, and fulfillment to your life.

As you better see, understand, and then actively shape your personal horizon, you may find that your vision, your health, and your life are all brought into greater focus and better integrated to form the unique whole that you are, and that you can envision and become in time.

Mark Lundegren is the founder of HumanaNatura.

Tell others about HumanaNatura…encourage modern natural life & health!

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By Mark Lundegren

If you are new to HumanaNatura and curious about the benefits of our scientifically-based natural health program, I want to propose a fairly simple, but potentially life-changing next step for you. 

I want you to drop, right now, and give us thirty.

Do you know what I mean by this?  Are you sure?  In the United States, where I live, this expression will have an immediate and all-too-clear meaning, even as I intend a different one with it.  In other parts of the world, the expression may not be as clear, but this has the advantage of not requiring you to learn a new meaning for an otherwise familiar phrase.

Drop What And Give What?

Though I can’t be sure how you initially reacted to my suggestion, what I am certain of is that it can be the difference between the life you live today and a life you might want much more and can soon have.  My request may be the beginning of a new way for you, a way to a new and fuller life that waits for you in the exploration of your natural health.

As you might have guessed, the image I hoped would come to mind with my proposal to “drop and give us thirty” was of a drillmaster at a military boot camp.  Perhaps you can picture the image now:  a tall figure with pressed fatigues, granite faced and crew cut, steel-eyed, a ton of attitude, shouting at a new recruit to drop and give him thirty push-ups.

It’s a funny image for me, partly because I am not especially militaristic as health advocates go, and partly because I don’t think it is important that you to do a lot of push-ups (though at least some each week is desirable).  In truth, the image of the drillmaster first came to me because I catch myself asking people for something very similar to this all the time, if in a softer tone. 

Though I am soft-spoken, the really funny part is that I ask for more than a few push-ups.  Despite my civilian tone, the scope of my request and the goals I have in mind for you are much larger than the drillmaster’s.  Instead of asking you for thirty push-ups, after all, which is a simple enough request once we are in shape, I want thirty days from you.   That’s right, thirty days, and beginning right now.

HumanaNatura and I want you to use the next month to explore our natural health program, which is always free and without obligation, and to experience for yourself the differences this approach to daily life can begin to make for you personally.   Instead of a body and mind conditioned for war and hardship, of course, we offer and want you to become better conditioned for life – and for a new, healthier, and much larger life at that. 

A few push-ups might suddenly seem like a smaller and easier request.  I know I really am more demanding the drillmaster in many ways.   And I know, unlike a military recruit awaiting orders, that you are likely busy with your life and have many pressing demands on your time.  But I hope you will consider that the drillmaster’s request, though it might be smaller and easier, might also offer smaller benefits and opportunities for you too, and lead to much less challenging and interesting life outcomes over time.

So, will you consider my thirty day proposal?  I do realize that a day is more than a push-up, and that thirty days is a serious stretch of time to ask from anyone.  The HumanaNatura program, and your own underlying and perhaps untapped natural health, had better have a lot to offer, which is in fact the case. 

Just as importantly, I also understand that I ask for thirty days in a world where our health is both a frequent and frequently frustrating topic, one with many competing ideas and voices clamoring for your attention, and so much poor health and false hope.  Do you ever wonder why this is?  In a few words, it is because our world is one where our natural health is still a relatively misunderstood topic, and thereby a topic that is heavily misguided and even exploited, an area of life where few people can claim true mastery. 

Our Health Today In Context

If you are regularly exposed to our modern mass media, as most of us are, you know the enormous numbers of offers for health information, diet plans, exercise programs, gadgetry, and pills and miracle cures we all receive. 

You know that we are encouraged to eat differently, to exercise in new and more exciting ways, to take supplements, to watch the newest spokesmodels, to listen to motivational lectures, and, almost always, to buy things.  In truth, HumanaNatura and I will do some of this, but we will never ask you to buy anything, since nothing need be bought to explore and realize our underlying natural health.  We really just need new ideas, directions, and who charges for directions?

With our modern mass media and modern health spectacle as our almost universal background today, we all come to the subject of our health with a high degree of caution and skepticism, and frankly, we should be skeptical of our current state of health.  The truth is that many of the people around us are quite unhealthy in our time, and all of us are often poorly-served in this critical area of life by both governments and businesses. 

Even many people working in the natural health sector itself do not yet understand the true scientific foundations of our health and well-being, as you will learn through HumanaNatura’s simple and easily-employed formula for the reliable advancement of our health.  And even fewer of us yet see that our personal health is a public or social good, a condition of individual life that either benefits or harms us all as it is increased or decreased. 

In my role as a natural health advocate and the founder of HumanaNatura, I face this confusing health landscape of our time every day, just like you.  And I work with skeptical, but health-curious and health-hopeful people every day.  With people who are perhaps much like you too.  Many initially assume HumanaNatura is trying to sell them something, so conditioned are we all now to expect this whenever we see anything remotely associated with our health and well-being. 

As I said, HumanaNatura has nothing for sale.  We are a cooperative, not-for-profit organization, working to promote health in people and communities, rich and poor, around the world.  And we are an organization that views our health as far too important to be relegated to self-serving commercial organizations, or to nearsighted and preoccupied public officials – in other words, to people who may be unhealthy or at least not as health-seeking as we need to be right now in this dawning scientific and global age.

When people realize that HumanaNatura is a cooperative organization that uses science to promote greater health, that we are non-commercial and our information is free, most generally become less guarded, but only somewhat so.  I mean, there still has to be a catch, right?  There must be a product or service offer coming.  Or we must have esoteric principles or a crazy philosophy hiding beneath our seeming advocacy of scientific method. 

HumanaNatura can’t be that straightforward, can it?

The HumanaNatura Approach

As I suggested before, you are right to ask what sort of people would give valuable health information away for free, and whether the information is credible and truly rooted in the latest science. 

HumanaNatura’s answer:  we are a global community of practitioners who have restored our natural health, using remarkably simple and progressive techniques derived from modern science, and who now wish this same transformative change for others and in our society generally.

Perhaps with your guard lowered just a bit, you might now browse HumanaNatura’s natural health program and try our online health quiz and assessment tool.  I only half-jokingly imagine this might be with your fingers light on your keyboard and your body in a defensive posture – so you are ready to click away, just in case something “typical” happens: a pop-up, a password or credit card request, or an idea that is simply not rooted in logic. 

But nothing like this will happen at HumanaNatura.  You can relax and be confident on our website, and become more informed through it.  And you can leave and return to our community whenever you want. 

As you and others gain a basic understand the HumanaNatura program, quite often our skepticism returns and even finds new footing.  With a quick survey of our ideas about natural health and quality of life enhancement, several common objections sometimes come:

• This approach won’t work – it is too simple. 

• Your three steps can’t be the path to optimal health – they are very different from ones I or others have already about natural health. 

• HumanaNatura’s ideas are very different from what most people are saying about our health and natural health.

I might rest our case with that last objection, since the fact is that most people today are not especially healthy, but I also understand it can seem there is power in numbers.

As a health advocate, I have learned over time not to feed these objections with extended explanations of our ideas and scientific principles.  Long, involved explanations can be like swatting at bees, and no one benefits from this. 

The simple, quiet truth is that true, scientifically-based natural human health is a revelation in today’s generally unhealthy world – in a world that has been unhealthy and operating below its potential for a very long time.  The truth is that the pursuit of natural health is based on and involves progressing in an ancient way of human living, a way of life that involves and is accessed via new knowledge, long buried and only just unearthed by modern science. 

As an ancient way of living, and as only newly regained human knowledge, it is inevitable that our natural health is misunderstood today and will remain this way for some time.  It is equally inevitable that our natural health will be revolutionary and transformative to people and society, as our understanding of our natural health improves and as our health improves from this new understanding. 

And our natural health will be looked down upon and derided by many people, for a good deal of time to come, by people who lack and have lived without this knowledge, and without their natural health, for so long.  In the end, I have learned that our natural health simply has to be experienced to be believed, to be embraced, and to be truly understood. 

Which brings us back to my earlier proposal – that you drop, right now, and give us thirty days. 

Why Thirty Days And Why Now?

I hadn’t forgotten about my potentially life-changing request to you, in case you did.  If you are especially skeptical, but genuinely health-curious and hopeful, I will just highlight two words and encourage you to stop reading – “thirty days” – nothing less, and nothing more. 

If my proposal seems too difficult, then I will even narrow my request and ask you to follow the HumanaNatura diet only for thirty days, only our natural eating program and nothing else.  No push-ups or walks in wild nature, or extra time with health-oriented friends, at least for now.  I will leave and trust you to assess your ideas, and ours, about the transformative potential of our underlying natural health and well-being.

However you take it up, my thirty-day proposal does come with two conditions, but only two.  The first is is that you get your physician’s consent to begin the HumanaNatura program.  Our program for natural eating, and natural exercise if you decide to try it as well, is a simple but still significant change for most people, more than people generally realize, and it is worth weighing this change against any medical conditions you might have.

My second condition is that you follow the HumanaNatura program faithfully, especially the diet – 100%, full on, with little or no cheating during the thirty days.  Just as our imaginary drillmaster wants good, clean push-ups from his recruits, I want good, clean natural eating from you for the entire thirty-day trial period. 

Your commitment is not just to give the HumanaNatura program a fair test, which we do want you to do.  It is also because of the often remarkably fine line that exists between conditions that foster or fail to foster progress toward more natural states of health.  Often, even small amount of unnatural food can inhibit the substantial health progress you should expect from our program, especially in the first thirty days.

HumanaNatura very much wants you to cross that line, to experience and achieve more natural health as quickly as possible, so you will understand the power of our ideas and the potential for still greater health waiting in other aspects of your life.  After all, while critically important, a natural diet and natural exercise are only the beginning of our natural health, not its end. 

We’re Waiting

If you have come to the HumanaNatura community for the first time, perhaps at the suggestion of a friend, we promise you will not find strict drillmasters, pushy spokesmodels, or products or services of any kind for sale.  We ask only that you holster your skepticism, just long enough to give our diet program a fair trial. 

We are confident you will discover that much more waits for you in your health, and you will gain new openness to your natural health and the caring community of practitioners that is HumanaNatura – people who genuinely want you to discover what they have about our natural health.

So, if you will lower your guard to HumanaNatura and open yourself up to the possibility of new health and vitality in your life, in the days and weeks ahead, we will ask only one thing of you – to drop and give us thirty, right now.

We’ll be here in a month, and during the month, waiting for you.

Mark Lundegren is the founder of HumanaNatura.

Tell others about HumanaNatura…encourage modern natural life & health!

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By Mark Lundegren

I’d like to have a conversation with you, one-on-one.  I want this to be a private talk just between us, one that can be as short or as long as it needs to be.

The conversation I have in mind is about your health.  I know you are interested in your health or you wouldn’t be reading this.  You may, in fact, already be well along the path to greater health and might want our conversation to be a true dialogue.  That would be fine with me.  I would enjoy sharing perspectives.

Not that I know you, but I have concerns about your health, especially about your idea of what your health is.  In the world today, the nature of our health and the truth of our natural health is still deeply misunderstood, buried under so much history and misconception, and so often miscommunicated when it is glimpsed.

Maybe this is not the case with you, but maybe it is, and maybe it is still with me.  Certainly many people we both know misunderstand their health – people who are not especially interested in their health, for example, and even people we know who consider themselves healthy or health-oriented.

Getting Past Labels

I was in a natural foods store the other day and was reminded of this idea of our health being still generally misunderstood, even by health conscious people.  Almost every health food store on our planet provides an obvious, telling, and compelling example of this misunderstanding.  It occurs simply in the way the people there define and use the term “natural foods.”  It’s an easy example, but a revealing one too.  For many people, natural foods means foods found in nature, especially plant foods in their unadulterated and unprocessed state. 

This common way of thinking leads to the idea that if a food is found in nature, and is not poisonous, it’s probably alright to eat.  Perhaps even that it’s desirable to eat, and may contain health-bestowing properties not found in regular foods.  At least, the thinking goes, if it’s natural, it’s no worse than harmless and perhaps beneficial.  The things that end up, and do not end up, in people’s bodies with this way of thinking.  When I walk through so-called health and natural foods stores, I marvel at the vast range of foods, powders, and pills, many of them quite unnatural (to humans as food) and most superfluous to our health, if not unhealthy in themselves.

For the HumanaNatura community, as you may already know, a natural food means, and only means, a food that humans once ate in wild nature, before the outbreak of civilization. To many people I speak with, this definition at first sounds similar or identical to the health food store one, but it is actually quite different and reflects a different understanding of our human nature and requirements for health.  It is a definition that leads to a different way of eating, and ultimately to very different levels of health and even potential ways of life. 

Which brings me back to our conversation about health, about your health.

Me Only More So

The really big point I want to make, the misunderstanding about health I am most concerned with, has to do with seeing our health not just incorrectly but in an incremental way.  This type of thinking is everywhere, even in you and me.  We can encounter it all the time when friends and acquaintances talk to us about our health.  The perspective I have in mind can be summed up succinctly, with the following expression: “me, only more so.”

I think or hear something along the lines of this expression when I work with people just starting down the path of natural health.  Worse, I hear it from or think it of people who may be stuck in their quest for greater health, stuck in the pursuit of what might be only pseudo-health.  They are apt to say or unconsciously assume something like “me, only more so” when describing their health goals or what they think is involved in the quest for greater health.

Both if us can easily spot this way of thinking: a fervent pre-occupation with food and eating, with body weight and other physiological metrics, and especially with exercise.  If I hear that someone did 100 sit-ups, I may wonder if 80 sit-ups and an extra minute of reflection would have been healthier and time better spent in the long run.  By this, I mean that many perspectives on our health are possible, perspectives that are available to us all if we take the time and are open to them.

In the spirit of full disclosure, I should say that am very careful about what I eat, and I walk and workout for an hour or two most days. Most people would describe me as very disciplined in my diet and exercise, and my body as well proportioned given my middle age.  Others have used the term “paleo-lean” to describe the body type you achieve on the HumanaNatura natural health program, and this probably describes my appearance reasonably well.

But all that – the eating, the walking, the sit-ups, the physical appearance – really is not natural health, and I want to make sure you understand this.  These things are just a means to or a consequence of health.  They are a beginning and the surface of our health.  Correct eating and exercise are a foundation and gateway, but are not the totality of what is involved in being healthy and well. 

It is true that natural diet and exercise can keep us alive longer.  They almost always help us live more clearly, intensely, and emphatically.  Importantly, they also help to motivate us to explore and grow in our lives and communities, but this growth and exploration almost inevitably is into areas beyond diet and exercise, if we allow it to be.  In this sense, diet and exercise prepare us for and may lead us to a healthy life, but are only a part and a beginning of this life.

Me Only Much More

So, to prompt you to respond and draw you more deeply into our conversation, I’d like you to consider different thinking about your health and our natural health.  I’d like you to think of it, not as “me, only more so,” but instead as “me, only much more.”  This idea goes to the heart of what HumanaNatura calls “natural living,” a way of life that begins in earnest the day we understand, practice patiently and deliberately, and then look beyond natural diet and exercise – to what else might be involved in our health and well-being.

“Me, only much more” is a simple turn of my original phrase, but it is a change that is remarkably important.  It calls us to new perspectives on our health and selves, on what we are and can be.  My hope is that it opens you to new possibilities in your life, even to new lives and new forms of life, much in the way that HumanaNatura’s redefinition of natural foods opens people up to new understandings of what our natural health might really be.  This gently turned phrase simplifies and perhaps clarifies what is natural and most healthy in us, new growth and unexpected discovery (the surest hallmarks of healthy life).

When we think, “me, only much more,” it implies there is more to our health than we realize, now and at any moment, and more to both you and me than we can realize at any given time too.  It implies there are always new choices and directions for us, new ideas and new human naturalness waiting inside us, or around us, to be discovered and pursued with our lives, throughout our lives.

Natural living, embodied in “me, only much more,” challenges us to re-think our present health and state of life, our future possibilities as we see them today, even to begin life again with a new sense of purpose and place in nature, to move forward more urgently and patiently, whole and free and human.

Let me pause in our conversation to let you reflect and respond – by wishing you health, in the truest and fullest sense you can discover and create in your life, and the lives of those around you.

Mark Lundegren is the founder of HumanaNatura.

Tell others about HumanaNatura…encourage modern natural life & health!

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By Mark Lundegren

As you read this, the equinox may be fast approaching.  Maybe the equinox has already arrived and is with you now.  Or perhaps the equinox has passed and left you wondering if you observed its passing with the right amount of attentiveness.

Whatever your current situation, I would like to encourage you to pay attention to the equinoxes when they come.  They are an important part of the rhythm of nature on our planet, and integral to the interplay of earth and sun.  For me, each equinox is a poignant time, an opportunity to reflect and plan in my life, and especially to promote greater balance in the things I do.

Understanding the Equinox

As you probably know, twice in the year, just after the halfway points of March and September, the earth reaches a halfway point of its own and strikes a special balance with the sun.  At this time of equinox, the sun’s light of day and the starlit darkness of night, a spectacle of other and more distant suns, are equal in length and therefore balanced, wherever you are on this usually slightly imbalanced planet. 

At each equinox, the upper and lower hemispheres of our earth are united, both turned to the sun in equal measure.  Importantly, I will suggest this balancing occurs and is true in other ways too.  At the equinox, there even is a general balancing of the earth and many of the processes of life on our earth.  At the equinox, our own divided selves can more easily be made united and balanced too, in a way that is quite like that of our earth’s balancing against the sun.

You may remember from school that our planet’s axis is tilted a bit in its orbital plane around the sun.  In late July, the northern hemisphere is angled in toward the sun, and the southern hemisphere away, causing summer and winter.  In December, the earth’s tilt is the opposite relative to the sun, with the southern pole leaning into its warm rays.  This switches the seasons for the northern and southern hemispheres, and completes and continues the long seasonal rhythm of our planet.

In March and September, by contrast, there is a meeting of these two extremes in their middle, when both poles are parallel to the sun and aligned with the path of the earth’s orbit.  As our earth follows its elliptical orbit, its tilt inevitably reaches a middle point, even if for only a moment, where neither pole is tilted toward or away from the sun.  This is the equinox, the earth at its middle point in relation to the sun. 

At each equinox, the tilted axis of our comparatively small planet is momentarily and for a general time in greater harmony with our giant sun, with the southern and northern hemispheres of our earth exposed to the sun equally – hence the Latin name equinox, meaning equal night.  If you think of the sun against one side of your face, with your head tilted forward or backward slightly relative to your body, this is exactly the position of the earth at the equinox.

At the equinoxes – vernal (spring) and autumnal (fall) – the earth is physically balanced in a way that is unique in the year, and in subtle ways we often fail to appreciate and certainly do not fully understand.  Every young scientist knows, for example, that you can balance a hen’s egg on end right at the equinox (for about ten minutes around the exact time of the alignment) and at no other time in the year.  The equinox is truly a time of balance, in ways we scarcely can imagine but can sense and feel nonetheless.

A worthy line of questions, for those of us interested in nature and the connection our health to nature: what else around us is re-balanced in the bi-annual event of the equinox?  What other things are aligned and made whole again, or triggered in new beginnings, during the special time of equinox?

We of course can only begin to know, young or old, scientist or not. But we should begin, and beginning in our own lives.

Life at the Equinox

To be attentive beneath the earth’s balancing light and darkness certainly hints at a greater and overall balancing of the world around us.  At the equinox, the excesses of summer and winter, physical and emotional, seem and really are gone.  Midway between these more extreme times, there is a subtle stillness and general pausing in the movement of year, life, and earth.

Our climate is generally more balanced at equinox, wherever we are, with the prospect of better or worse weather often held in abeyance for a time.  And the pace of life – of all life and not just human life – is more measured too.  Gone, but perhaps remembered and foreshadowed in places, are the withdrawal of winter and the frenzy of summer. 

There is of course continued and even an increasing sort of activity at each equinox, but of a more focused sort, as there is in all moments of balance.  This activity is the preparation for coming summer or winter, or for a new phase of life, human or not.  But even this perennial activity seems uniquely and specially balanced at the equinox, neither as frantic as it will be nor as subdued as it was.  Life and living planet around us does seem to have one side fully in sun and active, and one in night and reposed, together imbuing balance.  In this time of general balance, I will suggest, there is opportunity for our health and renewal.

If you watch people, it is clear we are often more balanced at and around each equinox.  Gone from us are the excesses of our own summers and warm emotions, and our winters and cool reasonings.  Our two human hemispheres are like those of our earth, more united and one.  We, like all nature around us, reach a keener and more even state at the equinox.  We are neither there nor there, but here finally.  We are more ourselves, more whole and potentially more present in the world and our own lives.

In each of us, as in nature, there is the same still pause before the coming ascent or descent of our own self with the season.   We need only look to find it and to take advantage of this time.  It is in this pause in the world, and in our selves and lives, at each equinox, that there is opportunity – for renewal and measure, for new personal balance, and for planning and carrying our re-balanced self into the months ahead.

Health at the Equinox

Our opportunity for renewal and discovery at each equinox is ultimately an opportunity for new personal growth and greater health in our lives.  It is an opportunity to live more deliberately, to live more deeply and naturally, and to seek and sustain life that more perennial and in deeper rhythm and balance with the world. 

Here are questions worth considering in the next equinox, in the next balancing of light and life and spheres, which may help you reflect on your life and better prepare for and make the most of the months ahead:

·         Is your diet, the daily foundation of our health, in balance this equinox?  Have you broken the vicious, more extreme cycles of health-reducing foods that are all around us in modern civilization?  Do you have the needed momentum to maintain a truly natural and health optimizing diet throughout the coming summer or winter, both with their challenges, until you reach the next equinox?  How much of your diet today and your diet to be in the new season is natural – raw vegetables, fruits, meats, and nuts?  How balanced is your diet across these natural human foods?

·         Are your activity patterns in balance, amidst the balancing of movement and activity that is around you now?  Are you free from stress and do you enjoy your work and balance it against the rest of your life?  Do you walk each day, alone or with friends, stepping into and exploring yourself and the natural world around you, whenever and wherever you walk?  Have you discovered and embraced the simple, lasting human joy that it is to be out of doors, under sky and in nature, witnessing living and non-living things?  Are you equally as relaxed and confident and self-possessed in your steps as nature is, in each of its parts and in its totality? 

·         In this time of balance, have you strengthened and stretched and balanced your own body and self?  Have you made your body and spirit poised and welcoming, like the equinox, through the simple fine-tuning, strengthening, and stretching of daily calisthenics?  What ten minutes of activity each day might be less important and even imbalancing, but still keeps you from the poise and equanimity that calisthenics inevitably bring to us?

·         In your life, are you as natural and balanced as a person as you can be, in harmony with and welcoming others?  Is the natural pull toward balance that is all around you at this time of equinox a pleasure or a lesson?  Are you creating a strong, balanced human life of close friends and openness in your relationships? Are you direct and even in your emotions and expressions, poised and balancing in your actions toward others, curious and seeking both sides in your thoughts, and one with the completeness of self that all these things represent?

At this equinox, and at the equinoxes to come in your life, I invite you to pause in the great pausing of things that occurs at this time, to balance in the wider balancing of things, large and small, that happens twice each year.  I invite you into the equal light and darkness, the even sunlight and starlight.  I invite you out into this special time in the natural world, in the solar year, and in our common human life on earth. 

I invite you out in health, and into everything this small word can mean in our lives and the world. 

I invite you into equinox.

Mark Lundegren is the founder of HumanaNatura.

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By Mark Lundegren

If you are reading this, you may be interested in the benefits of a natural health lifestyle and a natural diet in particular.  Perhaps you are working to reduce your weight, to improve your physical conditioning or appearance, or simply want to optimize your health and well-being in general.

Almost always, achieving these goals of personal improvement will involve breaking out of one or more unhealthy cycles of behavior or thinking within us, cycles which can be hard to see clearly and overcome on our own.

Fortunately, many other people have come before you in this process and are here to help now.  The HumanaNatura community is comprised of people like you who have worked to break free of unhealthy and limiting cycles in their lives and to renew themselves with more natural and healthy cycles that foster personal health and well-being.  In truth, each of us has learned about natural health from other people and is happy to repay the favor by helping you.

The title of this particular article may have caught your eye because hunger is a pervasive force in your life, as it is for many people today.  If this describes you, and if your health is less than ideal and you recognize the need for personal change, I would encourage you to read on.

To set the stage for significant and lasting health improvements in your life, let’s start with a discussion of hunger and then talk about habit.  As we’ll see, the two topics are closely related.  They actually are the key ingredients of all unhealthy cycles of behavior, cycles that reduce our personal vitality and the quality of our life, if we do not attend to them and replace them with healthy behaviors and ways of thinking.

In our discussion of hunger, we’ll focus on the hunger for food, since this is often most relevant for people first coming to HumanaNatura, but I will also point out that hunger can take many forms and is similar in process and effect in each case.  As I will explain, most of our urgent and persistent hungers are an unnatural feeling that works to pull us from our health, to self-perpetuate, and thereby to create the unhealthy cycles I spoke of, cycles we must inevitably break to restore our health.

Understanding Hunger

As this article’s title suggests, our feelings of hunger are not a simple thing, and are best not taken at face value.  Feelings of hunger can be hard to examine, and to understand when we do try to look at them, and often we do not try.  Adding to this, our feelings of hunger are often tied up with and perhaps obscured by patterns of habit that are equally hard to see and sort through.  Our personal health often suffers substantially because of this confusion about our hunger, and its sources and influences, far more than you might imagine. 

As we begin to think about and examine our hunger, we realize that people use this word to describe several different feelings or states of being.  We are apt to lump these feelings or states together, because they share a common label and because they do have some general similarities.  We are thus apt to treat various hungers in our lives identically, unless we examine and gain new perspective on them. 

A quick dictionary check will reveal at least three meanings for the word hunger: 1) a desire or need for food, 2) discomfort or pain caused by a prolonged lack of food, and 3) a strong desire or craving.  You may want to read over and think about these different definitions for a moment.  What different feelings this one word describes – from the desire to act on a physiological fact of existence, our natural need to eat, all the way to the pains of starvation and strong emotional fixations.

In the interest of your long-term personal health, and from the point of view of someone who enjoys natural health today (and wishes it for you), I would like to make a very important suggestion.  Beginning from this point, I would like you begin to separate in your mind these very different meanings of the word hunger.  My experience is that the sooner you do this, the sooner you are apt to have new insights into and experiences of your own hungers, and how they influence the broader patterns of health in your life.

In the HumanaNatura library, there is an article entitled “Breaking the Cycle.”  The article describes the very different physical and psychological states we arrive at once we break the cycle of unnatural food consumption and move to a natural human diet.  This change in us then becomes a metaphor for breaking other, non-dietary cycles (or hungers) in our lives that reduce our natural health and limit us as people.

Speaking for myself and many others in the HumanaNatura community, the transformation that comes from a natural diet really is as profound and life-changing as I have suggested.  A natural diet gives us a new body, new levels of physical and emotional energy, and – importantly for our discussion today – new perspectives on our hunger, or should I say, hungers.  One thing we soon discover when eating naturally is that people living on a natural diet rarely have urgent feelings of hunger for food.  Does that surprise you?  Imagine how easy it would be to eat correctly if you were not always hungry, not always craving certain foods, ones that are pleasurable but unhealthy.

As people return and adjust to a natural diet, we find we are able to go extended periods of time without eating if need be.  We experience dietary hunger as a simple and even pleasurable need for food, and not a discomfort, a gentle tug from our body, a subtle reminder, “I should eat at some point.”  When we experience dietary hunger more intensely than this, absent extreme physical activity or a prolonged period without eating, natural health practitioners know that we are getting into other definitions of the word hunger – into cravings and desires, or the pull of old and unhealthy habits.  Perhaps we have eaten an unnatural meal in the past day, and have activated an unhealthy eating cycle (physiologically or psychologically).

If you question whether you can experience this same dramatic reduction in daily hunger yourself, or that you can learn to better differentiate and better understand your hungers, I would encourage you to find out for yourself.  All you need to do is follow the HumanaNatura natural diet for thirty days.  It is free, and a very easy and satisfying way of eating.  It is, after all, our natural human diet.  It does require a commitment to change, but that is why you are here and reading this – right?

So you know what to expect on the HumanaNatura diet, the first 30 days of natural eating will proceed something like this: 1) you will have a couple of days of hard transition as your blood sugar levels stabilize and return to natural levels – eat as much as you want during this time, as long as the food is allowed on the HumanaNatura plan, 2) after the first two days, you will start to feel better, even much or unexpectedly better, but, 3) you will also go through a couple of weeks of ‘mourning’ the loss of your typical foods (you might ask yourself at this point, is this hunger or habit?).  During these two weeks, and the two weeks that follow, you must stay 100% on the HumanaNatura diet to give it a fair trial, and to see if your patterns and feelings of hunger really do change for the better.

Once on a natural diet, the urgency of your hunger will in fact gradually begin to diminish.  And then it will then change, replaced by something that will be new to you.  You will begin to experience what is a very old and natural outlook on food (and perhaps not just on food).  Your hunger will feel good.  Your life will feel good.  You will begin to look at the world and yourself from the standpoint of your natural health and natural human well-being.  You will begin to feel more in control, of your eating and of other aspects of your life, and far less subject to cravings and impulses of all kinds.  Related to these feelings of health, you will also likely experience significant weight loss and increased physical health in the first thirty days of natural eating, to bring us back to why you may be reading this article in the first place.

As you return to and then maintain a natural diet, you will begin to feel the more natural, subtle experience of our physiological hunger that I have described, and learn how it contrasts with earlier patterns of dietary hunger in your life.  You may then begin to have insights into other categories of hunger in your life, and gradually gain the ability to break these hungers into ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’ categories, or ‘healthy’ and ‘unhealthy’ ones.  With improved health, you likely will also begin to understand that you have much greater control of your hungers, and other feelings as well, more than you might realize today.

Understanding Habit

In discovering and better understanding our hungers and feelings in this way, including their relative health and naturalness, we inevitably become conscious that many of our unhealthy hungers are tied to one or more habits, circular patterns of responding to urgent or pressing cravings or desires.  These habits, and their companion hungers, typically form mildly pleasurable but ultimately unsatisfying, and often patently unhealthy, cycles in our lives.

Few people would argue against the idea that we can become victims of bad habits, and that these habits can be strangely comforting, even as they are unhealthy and often personally limiting.  But this common thinking is very close to the idea that our normal human condition is to be a victim, of one habit of another, that we are doomed to live amidst unnatural and unhealthy habits.  Many people consciously or unconsciously feel this way, and I would encourage you to consider this feeling if and as it appears in word or deed in your life. 

To support my proposition that self-defeating or self-victimizing thinking is widespread, habitual even, let me simply ask: how many of us really take the time to examine our habits and life patterns, and consciously chose the habits we want and those we want to break? 

Perhaps people feel unable or unwilling to look at themselves and their behavior in this way or doubt or rationalize that they could significantly change their lives by what they might find.  This way (habit) of thinking is unfortunate because it is almost always incorrect and an error in judgment.  People who do go through a process of self-examination, in fact, almost routinely have important insights and make positive change in their lives, often far exceeding their initial expectations. 

Apathy and resignation are easy but ultimately irrational and self-restricting approaches to life, ones that reflect reduced health and that may fuel many health-reducing cycles in turn.  After all, we are all enormously changeable and adaptable as people, able to make new connections in ourselves and in the world throughout our lives, and rarely make use of all our given or nascent capabilities.  Each of us is capable of great heights and depths in our lives, depending on our outlook and willingness to confront and cultivate ourselves.

This process of examining our habits and consciously building our lives for increased health and connection to nature and the world is what HumanaNatura calls natural living.  Unlike a natural diet, which is fairly straightforward in principle and practice, even if the first thirty days involve new learning, natural living is an iterative and lifelong process.  In natural living, we go back to our lives again and again, over the full course of our lives, deepening our perspective on our habits and outlooks, and consciously increasing behaviors and attitudes that foster our health.  Our goal and the result of this practice is often a compounding cycle of increasing, rather than decreasing, natural health and personal vitality as we age and mature. 

Though natural living is a gradual and lifelong process, it can also produce sudden insights and rapid positive changes in our lives.  And it is a practice that all of us can begin immediately, from wherever we are in our lives and at any age.  You can literally begin natural living right this minute if you want, even if you have not yet started a natural diet.  To do this, take a few minutes to list out the top two or three reasons you are not actively examining all of your habits and taking immediate action on the worst, unhealthiest of them, and what these most unhealthy habits of yours are.  I’m serious – what today is most keeping you from healthier and more fulfilling life?  I know you know the answer, but will you admit it to yourself and put it into words?

Once you and all of us commit and begin to examine our unhealthy and limiting habits, we often immediately realize that we are also looking at our most insatiable or least examined hungers too.  These hungers are often equally health-reducing and personally limiting, and may live simply to enable and perpetuate our habits.  You might thus begin to think about your hungers and habits together, as tandem phenomena.  As habitual feelings, on one hand, and resulting or enabling thoughts and actions, on the other.  This is usually true when we talk about those all hungers that are more than the gentle tug that is our natural human physiology and psychology –cravings for wealth and power over others, the longing for luxury and repose, the desire for fame and notoriety, and impulse for indiscriminate sex.  All of these hungers are usually unnatural, unhealthy, and only limited expressions of our full human and personal potential.

If you think about it, this close relationship between our habits and hungers should not be surprising.  It may even seem obvious that our hungers drive our habits, and that a change in our hungers can affect our habits.  Perhaps less obvious is to see and experience that our habits often drive our hungers too, and that a change in our habits can affect our hungers.  I’ve suggested already that this is true with the way we eat.  You may find it is true in many domains of your life.  You may find that new patterns of more natural and healthy living insulate you from and dampen many of the common hungers of modern and traditional life, both rampant in our often unnatural and unhealthy society today.

When we increase our ability to examine our hungers and see our habits, their connection and impact on us become much clearer, and they are thus often both weakened.  Often, our habits and hungers become less urgent and compelling in our new awareness of them.  Perhaps you experience strong cravings in your life today, whether for foods, companionship, excitement, status, or material comfort.  Or perhaps your cravings are more spiritual – for solace or connection or truth.  If either case, I expect much of your thinking and behavior revolves around these strong feelings, and that your behaviors and perspective will change as you examine the most urgent of your desires and cravings.

As we begin to understand our hungers and habits, we inevitably learn much about ourselves and the ways we live, and do not live, in the world.  We may find that some of our hungers and habits are senseless and unsatisfying, and simply familiar and persistent patterns of ours, and the result of unconscious living.  In finding this, we can begin to release the grip of hunger and habit on us – an act that both requires and engenders new health and personal vitality. 

Some unhealthy and limiting hungers are obvious and can be fairly easy to recognize when they occur, even if they may be hard to eliminate and their companion habits are hard to change.  On the other hand, examining our habits can be a far more subtle exploration, a path that forces us to make conscious what is often unconscious today, to see what we do not see.  It is true that some of our habits are familiar to us and to those who know us.  These more obvious habits are often the easier to examine and act on, and are often most closely link to clear and frequent hungers in our lives.  This is where we must begin our practice of natural living.

In our practice, we eventually face the more difficult task to examine subtler habits, both in and around us.  As the common expressions go, we often have trouble seeing the air we are breathing or the water we are swimming in.  Our less obvious habits, and the less obvious hungers they often are linked to, can challenge us to see deeply into our social context and culture, and their subtle but often not insignificant influences on us.  As importantly, finding deeper and hidden habits and patterns, if we judge them unhealthy and limiting, can challenge us to make quite significant and even far-reaching changes in our lives, changes that may take years to realize fully, and that may be counter-cultural and force a realignment of our social relationships.

These more subtle habits can include the broadest outlines of our lives today in modernity, our patterns and structure of daily life, the values and aims we keep within us, the judgments we make about ourselves and others, and the things we consciously or unconsciously hold as non-negotiable.  You might respond that these are the habits that define and form us as people.  And you would be right, but they are still habits, and like the hungers that may define us today, are not above examination and judgment.  Even our most subtle habits are often deeply circular and unhealthy in their essence, creating and feeding on unconscious hungers within us – making us who we are perhaps, but not always who we might be.

Our Hungry Habits

Whatever the time in your life, or whatever the time in the day, the force of many hungers and habits likely are a large or at least substantial part of your life, some of them healthy and enlarging you, others unhealthy and limiting.  It is in the nature of our human condition, in modern times, that our health and growth require our examination of self and environment, and our making of conscious choice in how we will live.

The alternative to conscious choice is to yield to the force of habit and custom, and to allow unhealthy hungers to gain or continue their power over us and our natural health.  Such hungers and habits can develop and persist in us and alter us, physically and emotionally, and usually unconsciously, and change the course of our life.  Perhaps you have begun to see this, and already have started to question some of your hungers and habits, and this explains your own quest for new health and vitality in your life. 

It is easy to blame the outside world for this situation.  You might think about the thousands of messages that influence us every day, from commercial advertising to the advice and comments of people around us.  And there are many more and far more subtle influences in our environment too, ones that drive and foster our hungers and habits.  The general script of life today perhaps alters us far more deeply and unconsciously than advertisement and the remarks of friends and acquaintances, leading us from our natural health and more conscious and principled life, simply in the interests of our times.  But ultimately, each of has the power to full back, to reflect and to choose, to use our natural human intelligence to examine and correct our thinking and behavior, and to seize our lifelong potential for greater personal health and vitality.

In small and not so small steps, you can begin to examine and challenge the force of hunger and habit in your life.  You can live today with a deeper sense of yourself, and in new and more personally fulfilling ways.  This is the challenge of natural health and the task of natural living, in our time and in our lives as they are.  We are not (or need not be) victims – we are intelligent human animals.  We can choose to control our life and pursue our own health.  We can choose to live creatively and to grow as people.  We can examine and re-make our hungers and habits, and not be held and limited by them. 

Beginning maybe with the new and quite tangible experience of altered physiological hunger that comes from a natural diet, you can begin to see your desires, cravings, and thoughts in a new, larger, and more natural light.  You can begin to gain the power of perspective on your habits and behaviors, and use the knowledge that higher states of health and life are available to us, at all times in all human life.  And with this perspective and knowledge, let your own natural momentum return to you and help you to move in new, healthier, and more affirming ways.

Once you begin to see your natural self and health for what they really – steady and secure, timeless and curious, and always only gently tugging – the world is again new, we are again free in our health, and everything is possible.

Mark Lundegren is the founder of HumanaNatura.

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By Mark Lundegren

This article may be well-timed or slightly out of synch, depending on the time of year you read it.  Perhaps because you or another chose the article, one of the two solstices that occur each year, everywhere in the world, is approaching or has arrived. 

In either case, if you are interested in the solstices, I would encourage you to not just think and talk about them, but to actively participate in the solstices as well.  By this, I mean for you to explore the emotions the solstices bring when they come to us, and when we come to them.  I would even encourage you to use the solstices as opportunities for expression and celebration of your life and health, each time they arrive.

If my call to expression and celebration at the solstices was unexpected and has caught you by surprise, I’ll explain my thinking.  Solstice rituals have fallen out of favor, after all, or have changed dramatically from their original shape. Often, in fact, it is not new expression and celebration we need, but new forms and focuses for celebrations already around us.

Many people no longer think of the solstices as important milestones in the year and do not see the rhythm of the sun as an inextricable part of the rhythm of nature and human life.  As we’ve become increasingly estranged from nature – in our climate-controlled, always on and online, 24/7 world – we find it increasingly easy to overlook or pay little attention to the sun, including its ancient rhythm and solstices.  But the sun is more important than we may realize.  The sun’s life is integral to our life, and its rhythms to our own.

From the new human world and confines of virtual life, we almost inevitably fail to recognize that the solstices are auspicious, poignant times of the year.  That the solstices are obvious and natural points for human ritual and celebration, even for individual and community renewal and thanksgiving in our common life on earth.  So we generally fail to attend to the solstices as we should, or mark them in odd, unhealthy, and superficial ways, none in keeping with nature and natural human life, the two very different moods of the solstices, and the dramatic stopping of sun that takes place at each solstice.

The original meaning of the word solstice is, in fact, the stopping of the sun, either in its slow decent toward the equator in the fall or in its ascent toward the pole in the spring.  This stopping of the sun occurs twice each year, on or about December twenty-first and June twenty-first.  Depending on the hemisphere you live in, these dates are the winter and summer solstices, or the reverse.

If there were no solstices, if the sun did not stop twice each year as it does, presumably our sun would continue on its path downward or upward in the sky and eventually leave the day in darkness or make a night of ever constant light.  Certain ancient people seemed have had real concern that a flight of the sun from the sky might actually happen and devised rituals around each solstice to help the sun come to rest, to solstice, and to turn back in its natural path. 

As strange and antiquated as this may sound to us today, most ancient people at least monitored the sun closely, presumably including for signs of deviation, and most celebrated at its twice-yearly stopping.  It is a curious frame of mind that we really cannot fully appreciate today, especially as we pay less and less attention to the natural world and forget what ancient life must have been like, which was inevitably under the sun.  In earlier times, people hunted and farmed and migrated with the sun.  Life was framed by the sun and its movements, and the sun even gave human life a reverent quality.  The sun was a seeming sign of our importance and favored status in the great and otherwise impenetrable mystery of the cosmos.

Modern people know the sun will stop, of course, and have evolved to live beyond these irrational fears.  And yet these ancient rituals live on, however transfigured they may be from their original form, and from their original goal of stopping the sun or rejoicing in its stopping.  I assume you have been to a New Year or Midsummer festival at some point, and understand that these are a remnant, however faded and threadbare, of these earlier rituals of sun-stopping and of human rejoicing in the this stopping of our sun .

In our newer, scientific knowledge that the sun will stop, regardless of what rituals we hold and when we hold them, modern people dismiss or pay little mind to each solstice.  We think little or ambivalently of them, and thereby we miss two natural occasions for celebration and deeper connection to nature and our natural health each year.  As moderns, or perhaps only as post-moderns, we have a new opportunity to use the solstices in ritual and celebration of human life in nature.  We can stop with the sun and celebrate our health and the vitality of our lives, free of fear and uneasiness, and free of indifference, toward our ever moving sun in our ever mysterious universe. 

Though we now correctly know we cannot control or influence the sun, we are apt to make the opposite mistake and incorrectly conclude that the sun no longer controls or influences us, that we are independent of it.  We commit a new and equally important error in doing this.  As a consequence of this modern error, we become indifferent to our sun and its true nature and to our nature generally, to the reality that there is a giant star dwelling in our midst, a star that is the source of our lives.  We often instead settle for the less than sublime and incomplete conclusion that the sun is an inanimate object, a ball of fusing gas perhaps, comprehensible and categorized – even as it remains, in truth and as it is experienced, incomprehensible and beyond all human category and description.

In adopting a modern and superficial view of the sun, intentionally or not, we lose an essential human quality and part of our natural human connection to the world.  We lose our ability to experience awe and reverence in and for the world, for our sun, and for ourselves, all ancient parts of our humanity and still requirements for wisdom and true emotional health today.  If work to we re-awaken our capacity for emotion toward and spirituality in the natural world, we learn the truth of this earlier blindness.  The world is remade for us and experienced in new and deeper ways.  The sun and the cosmos return to us with unexpected mystery and complexity. 

Once nature regained in this way, it is an easier step to again see the sun as a magical entity, as it once was viewed, rather than as an inanimate one, even if it is no longer tenable to us as a personified entity as it once was.  In truth, our sun and nature are larger than both our ancient and modern views.  However imperfect, our ancient perspective holds a compelling and important counterpoint to the hasty, artificial, and unbalanced outlook of the modern mind.  The ancient view contains a truth and begs us to synthesize it with the modern outlook and the truth of science, in a new outlook on and opening to life in nature.

If the sun is tenable to moderns as a ball of gas, it is only so to the extent we forget that this ball of fusing gas is magically aglow under its own enormous size and weight, ten thousand times the volume of our earth and many billions that of our individual lives.  And thus, it is godlike.  And the sun it not just godlike in its enormity, it is mysterious and inexplicable too, like an ancient god, today and at the end of all science and inquiry.  Our sun’s origin, and thus ours, is as uncertain as the universe’s origin and ultimate beginning.  In this mystery, this uncertainty, the sun is again ancient, the creator and sustainer of life on earth, and of each of us.  And its perennial rhythms become again the rhythms of our world, of earth and water and sky.  The sun’s rhythms become our perennial rhythms too, even if many today fail to see them as such and even if they know that our sun, one day, will stop in an absolute and final solstice.

If you spend a good deal of time outdoors, you likely feel the influence of the sun very strongly, in a way that all people once did but that many people no longer do.  You know that we all dwell inescapably in its rhythm of light, heat, wind, weather, and emotion throughout the year, all a consequence of the giant star at our center and the slightly tilted axis of our little planet moving around it.

You know this rhythm of our sun is a part of you as much as you are a part of it.  You know that the changing light and seasons are a song of many voices, a dance of many movements, and not a single thing.  The sun affects us and the environment around us in ways we see plainly and yet can never understand fully.  You know too that the solstices are the apogees of this great song of light and dance of darkness, this long progression of life and death, and of rebirth.

Wherever you are, I call you out into nature in celebration at the next solstice.  I call you out of virtual reality to rejoice in natural reality, today, even if the solstice is a time away.  I call you out of doors and away from windows, out into nature and the changing light, out beneath the giant sun, changing and unchanging, stopping and never stopping, the source of the rhythm and flow of life all around you.

If the next solstice marks the coming winter where you are, seize the last remnants of summer in the air, before the autumn is gone and summer has become memory only.  Extend yourself, your body and spirit, in an outstretching of renewal at the winter solstice, in an outstretching to the promise of spring, to the promise of new life that lies past autumn’s end and dwells in every living heart.  Stretch out, I say, today and into the tomorrow.

If the coming solstice is the dawn of summer where you are, instead of outstretching, I call you into circles.  Dance around in summer’s promise, arms about you and holding those around you.  Celebrate and sing high of summer’s high return.  Dance in the height of the year and with the height of the sun in your limbs.  Celebrate with open hearts and feeling for new joy.  Rejoice with the final uplifting of spring in your step and with the warmth of coming summer days and nights in your eyes. 

Dance, with the hope and kindness that is our highest human nature, at the height of the year, with nature’s song of life filling our ears, its rhythms perpetually formed and reformed by the radiant, everlasting star, magically aglow at our center.

Mark Lundegren is the founder of HumanaNatura.

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