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By Mark Lundegren

I would like to have a conversation with you about sex – that is, our human sexuality. 

You may think this subject has been covered sufficiently elsewhere, or uncovered all too sufficiently everywhere and often far too scandalously.  From my perspective, though, there are pressing signs around us that our sexuality still manages to be widely misunderstood and insufficiently covered, or uncovered.  I just want to make sure you are not confused by all this confusion concerning our own sexuality.

We live in a time when there is more openness about sex than ever before, at least in modern times.  We need only turn to any of our major media outlets – print, radio, television, web – to see this truth continuously and sometimes graphically underscored.  Our media and commercial society seem bent on using our new sexual openness to titillate us at every opportunity with implicit and explicit appeals to our sexual instincts.  This is manipulative and antisocial of course, though we all see through and turn away from such crassness whenever we encounter it (and yet curiously, it continues). 

Today, we are also often encouraged, for a variety of reasons and sometimes for truly questionable ones, to treat the sexual taboos of our past as antiquated, as repressive and a sign of oppressive culture, and as irrelevant in the modern world and our life in it.  Seemingly, almost anything goes for some of us when it comes to sex.  The thinking is that if sex can be made safe and between adults, it can and should be unrestrained and shameless.  Nothing should stand in the way of our happiness, even perhaps happiness itself.

This general unmasking of our sexual urges and modern attempts at their manipulation should be contradictory, the former trend undermining the latter.  But sex somehow manages to retain much of its earlier mysteriousness and, in truth, sexual appeals are frequently and quite successfully used to influence our perspective and behavior.  This must owe at least in part to a continued misunderstanding of our own sexuality, despite all the recent openness, and to the fact that our sexuality is a far more potent and pervasive force in our lives than most of us realize.  Human sexuality, before and after our new openness, is always about more than the simple physical act of sex and reproduction (the making of babies was its original function, in case this was unclear from our modern coverage).

All might be well and good with the modern transfiguration of our sexuality, an unmitigated positive development for more open life and human liberation, were it not for two worrying phenomena of our modern sexual landscape.  One is the now ubiquitous commercial offers of sexual assistance in our media – though not on par its propensity for sexual encouragement – including medicines, powders, pills, stimulants, and therapies to relieve us of poor sexual performance or weak sex drives.  This fact suggests that many of us have trouble with one of our most basic and vital natural drives, which should be troubling to us all and a sign of lowered general health.

A second and still more disturbing phenomenon is the increasingly poor state of affairs between women and men today, which is a hushed undercurrent beneath the gratuitous and often quite unhealthy sexual hype of our time.  This obvious decline in our sexual health is evidenced not just by the precipitous fall in birth rates and the instability of marriage in the modern world, it is also apparent in the rise of single and often sexless life, as well as the very high levels of sexual dissatisfaction among people today.  Our dissatisfaction may be due to new and unnatural sexual expectations, our common but often unspoken and now quite taboo sexlessness, and because we are often apt to relieve our sexual frustrations in ways that are themselves ultimately frustrating.

For me, and maybe for you too, these signs of our times are a reminder that our human sexuality is indeed a powerful and pervasive force in our lives, and an important component and barometer of our overall health and well-being.  In this article, I will suggest that we and our sexuality require more than freedom from restraint and titillation, and especially more than safe shamelessness, if we are to live in a healthy and fulfilled way.  Our sexuality is mysterious in both its natural lure and consummation.  It is an imperative of nature and of our human nature, one larger than our individual selves and personal ideologies.  In truth, we misconstrue and abstract our human sexuality, and natural human life and ourselves, when we attempt to demystify our sexuality and ask it to become a fixture or tool of modern life.

In an important sense, our clear signs of both earlier and modern sexual misunderstanding and dysfunction are obvious and urgent symptoms of reduced human health, and signal our urgent need to consider and move to new forms of sexual health.  For me, they are signs that we need to begin to see and understand our sexual health naturally, perhaps for the first time.

Our Natural Sexuality

Before we continue, we should stop for a reminder of what sex is, and is not, for humans in nature.  As I quipped before, sex is of course how human adults make human children, an often overlooked and inconvenient or incidental detail amidst all the sexual ideology and propaganda of our time.  But sex is ultimately about natural selection and creating a new generation of healthy babies – ones likely to prosper and reproduce themselves in a range of natural human conditions, whether life in cooperative communities, in competitive civilization, and even in conditions of brutality and hardship. 

Because of selection forces at work on us, many of our sexual preferences and behaviors, not so coincidentally, are closely correlated with the successful production of babies, especially babies who in turn are apt to produce babies.  This is why, controversially for many today, youthfulness is favored in women and maturity in men – both are signs of peak fertility (at least in traditional patriarchal society).  By fertility, I do not mean sexual prowess, an easy confusion to have in our times, but simply the propensity to make successful babies.  Not surprisingly, women of all ages seek to look younger and most men are content to be slightly aged and world-worn (why wrinkles are sexy for men and not for women) – a phenomenon that is unlikely simply a cultural stereotype as some would have us believe.

Importantly, human sex is also more than about babies themselves.  It is also part of natural human bonding and love.  It is about the emotions that allow couples to create and maintain families to care for their members, and that help families combine to form intermarrying and supportive communities (forms of human organization which ultimately promote and are reinforced by successful babyhood and reproductive adulthood).  In humans, sexual intimacy keeps women and men, and families and communities, together for the long and even intergenerational process required for optimal human child-raising, in a way that does not occur, and need not occur, in most other species.  Because of our requirement for protracted child rearing, humans have been selected to be especially prolific both sexually and emotionally, as are many other advanced primates and apes.  Our pronounced sexuality and companion capacity for love are, in fact, inseparable parts of our humanness.  It is how we create and maintain human order in the world.

On the other hand, while sex is used to naturally define and deepen human relationships, in nature at least sex is not a sport, except in its denigration and conditions of reduced community health.  In nature, however prolific we may be sexually, sex is also not an instrument of commerce or a product feature, despite its reciprocal nature.  Sex and our sexual partners have relevance in nature, and in life today still, requiring and engendering some of our strongest human emotions, emotions strong enough to form self-sustaining families and communities amidst the challenges of nature.  When we have sex as an act of bonding and commitment, as a way of fostering healthy coupling and intimacy, and of creating the emotional conditions for making babies, our sexual relationships are far more apt to be healthy and fulfilling.

When we see sex regarded in modern times as sport or commerce, or in earlier times as something that was unhealthy and taboo (which remains part of its appeal to some today), a central dimension of our sexuality has been lost.  That something is sex’s natural connection to promoting healthy human life.  As such, when the health-promoting function of sex is misunderstood or disregarded, we should expect chronic human sexual dysfunction to ensue, as we see today and can see during much of our civilized history.  We should anticipate feelings of sexual frustration and emotional despondency, for sex itself to become denigrated and even perverted, whenever our connection to our natural human sexuality is lost.

Three Levels Of Sexuality

As I have suggested, great sex, in our times and in all times, begins from a natural and healthy perspective on our sexuality, and from our health generally.  This involves maintaining both our natural physical health, as well as our natural connection to the human emotions that support and are reinforced in healthy human sexual coupling. 

With modern methods of birth control, and our modern freedom and cultural encouragement to think of sex apart from our natural health and social emotions, it is easy to forget this.  It is easy for sex to be reduced to sport or commerce, for sex to be alienated from our underlying needs for natural health and natural life.  It is easy for sex to be about individuals, rather than couples and families.  And it is easy for sex to take place without the requirement or prospect of human love and bonding, which also occurred in nature but not amidst our healthiest conditions.

Many psychologists designate three levels of human sexuality, each a stage in our sexual and emotional maturation as people.  The first is sex with oneself, the physical relieving of our sexual urges on our own, a topic I will not cover today and around which much of our contemporary pornographic industry has been built.  The second level of human sexuality is to relieve our sexual urges with or through another person.  This form of sex is thus physically different than the first, but is still essentially the same emotionally, in that it is about reducing physical and sexual tension rather than increasing commitment and true coupling.  In this form of sex, the other person is an object for our sexual gratification, rather than for our love and adoration, just as we are for them.

It is only in the third expression of human sexuality that our sexuality finds its full, emotionally engaged, and most healthy and life-promoting form.  This is when sex is used to communicate our love for another person, when sex is aimed primarily at the other person’s feelings and pleasure, and not simply our own, when sex is used amidst the emotions of commitment and intimacy, when sex is accompanied by bonding and committed coupling.  In this sense, this third level of sex is an act of self-transcendence, and people often speak of it as the exploration a deeper aspect of themselves and higher state of relations between people.  This is a higher domain of our sexuality, above the simple relief of physical urges, and where true sexual love resides.  Unfortunately, it is often not the dominant form of human sexual behavior and encouragement we are apt to find in our media or among modern people today.

Great Sex for Couples

As with other species, sexual dysfunction was unlikely a significant part of our long human life in wild nature, but it is a persistent fact in society today, just as it was in pre-modern societies that preceded ours.  In both cases, this is the inevitable result of unnatural general patterns of human living, and of reduced human health and well-being.  We can know this because a return to natural health and more natural life, including the cultivation of our natural emotions, reduces sexual dysfunction and restores healthy, emotionally engaging and fulfilling, sexuality.

Helping people of both sexes reconnect to our natural physical and emotional health is of course the underlying work of HumanaNatura.  Through a natural diet and natural exercise, and by adopting our core principles of natural living, adults of all ages can achieve and maintain natural levels of health throughout their lives, including their natural sexual health.

In thinking about optimizing our health, especially as it relates to our human sexuality, health can be seen naively as a physical state only.  Common forms of this misunderstanding view health as freedom from disease and especially as ensuring that we are physically fit and have sexy body (paying no attention to the health and sexuality of our mind and heart).  With our natural health, we generally have these natural physical characteristics of healthy life, but our health and sexual health require much more than this as I have suggested already.

When we are healthy, we are also in touch with our natural emotions and greater need for and sense of well-being.  We naturally seek and promote caring, cooperative relationships in our lives.  We pursue and foster interdependence and community with others.  We pursue growth for ourselves and nurture it around us.  We have and are great friends, family, and intimates.  This is our natural human condition, even if it seems somehow strange to people living amidst modern society and its many unnatural imperatives and patterns of life.  In our natural health, we are also capable of and inclined toward intense sexual love – deep, intimate, and loving sexual relationships that both foster and reflect our growth as people.

If you want a relationship that includes great sex, consider the idea that great sex comes from great living – from living in a way that is consistent with your natural health, your natural emotions, and your natural human sexuality.  The foundation of our natural sexuality is both our physiological and emotional health.  All of us can and should ensure our physiological health, so we are sexually attractive to others and can be sexually active when we need or want to be, throughout our lives, in the context of a healthy sexual relationship.  But this idea of a healthy relationship implies that the foundation of our health must extend to our emotional health as well, to our examining and cultivating our natural social emotions so they are accessible to ourselves and others, and so that we can live in emotionally engaged and committed relationships.

Once our natural physical and emotional health is attended to, natural human sexuality is next about selecting a great partner.  This is a complicated and mysterious human endeavor in practice, but one that can be simplified into a two-step process, even if both steps are a bit amorphous and entirely in the realm of emotion and feeling.  While a simplification of the natural process of human coupling, we can see that when people often leave out one or both of these critical steps, their sexual relationships inevitably suffer in important and unhealthy ways.  The first step to healthy coupling is assuring sexual attraction between two people.  This is of course something that is very elemental, something that I will not attempt to describe here.  Strong sexual attraction is always in the first-person, and is either there or not.  We simply can’t pretend our way through this part of natural partnering and expect a healthy and fulfilling result over time.

We sometimes hear people talk about their connecting with another person sexually within the first few seconds of meeting them – of their both having strong sexual feelings and mutual arousal almost immediately after meeting.  Such encounters are often described with the metaphors of fire, sparks, and fireworks.  We all have these feelings at one time or another.  They are a magical dimension of our natural sexuality, of natural human life and human experience, and are an essential part of natural selection in humans.  In seeking a partner, please do look for this magical connection.  Wait for it and don’t settle for less.  If it is not there, be kind but keep looking for this special chemistry between two people.  Such feelings of spontaneous and mutual arousal are supremely healthy, and the beginning and an essential part of healthy sexual love.

Past cultures often proscribed the search for these strong mutual feelings of attraction and sought their repression, for women and men.  Through arranged marriages and other significant restraints on natural human bonding, both sexes were encouraged to be far less discriminating in this more spontaneous aspect of their partnering.  This was a mistake, and still is today.  Our primitive feelings of sexual arousal are a natural and essential part of happy coupling and part of the foundation for caring and attentive families.  The often antagonistic history of sexual love in civilization, in and out of our literature, is in part testimony to the danger of suppressing or being untrue to our natural sexual feelings toward others.

Today, our past and long history of unhealthy sexual repression is why the topic of sexual taboos and rules is so taboo and so often seen as repressive.  We often are reacting to centuries of sexual tyranny, but thereby may make a mistake in coupling of a different kind.  So often, we overlook the second and equally important step in successful partnering, which occurs after natural, mutual, and spontaneous sexual arousal is apparent and certain.

This second part of natural human partnering and sexuality, also often frequently and historically overlooked, is assuring sustained emotional compatibility after the first rush of mutual sexual arousal.  True compatibility between people takes much longer to confirm – weeks and months, rather than seconds and minutes – but is an equally magical feeling and experience, and the other essential step in our natural selection of a sexual partner.  As in the case of mutual arousal, as humans, we must look for compatibility.  It is also a primal phenomenon, and it is either there or it is not. 

Plato suggested that compatibility involved equality, and this may be true, whether of intelligence or aptitudes, or other personal qualities, or some combination of them all.  In any case, we naturally know compatibility and are evolved to sense it in our relationships with others, even if it takes time to gain this knowledge.  In coupling, we must wait for compatibility and ensure it is clearly there before we partner with another person.  We must not settle for less than true compatibility if we want natural and healthy coupling.  We must be kind and keep looking if compatibility is not there, no matter how strong and seemingly enduring our arousal is.  Such compatibility is just as essential a part of sexual love.  It is a prerequisite to sustained human commitment and intimacy, and is what sustains relationships through the inevitable peaks and valleys of physical arousal and circumstances.

Most past cultures prevented immediate sexual activity between people so inclined, because they instinctively knew, or selection forces intervened to assert, that such compatibility was an essential part of healthy human sexuality and strong families and communities.  However strong mutual arousal was, or however they might have downplayed such arousal, many cultures have understood that incompatibility would make for a long and poorer life, not just for the couple and their children, but for the extended families on both sides as well.  Other societies from our past downplayed even the importance of compatibility, making for widespread loveless coupling or unstable coupling, which may have produced babies but not happy relations for women and men, and thus unlikely an optimal family environment for their children.

Today, we often do not wait to test for compatibility – we enter relationships based only on mutual arousal and only superficial knowledge of the other person, or perhaps worse, we enter relationships with nether arousal not the assurance of compatibility.  The results, our modern sexual statistics and state of affairs, speak for themselves.  Always, we must have both arousal and compatibility for successful coupling, ensuring that the conditions for strong relationships and mature love, for intimacy and the full depth of our natural human emotions, are present in and encouraged by one another.  Without this, all human coupling is less than ideal, less than fully natural and healthy.

Sexual Assistance

As I noted before, our often unnatural approach to sex and life more generally, in our time and before our time, has led to fairly widespread sexual dysfunction in the modern world.  This has, in turn, produced a vast “sexual assistance” industry, some of it well-intentioned, but much of it exploitative and self-serving.  Our modern sex industry is engendered by and even perpetuates compromised sexual health, and reflects our low general awareness of what sexual health and human fulfillment entail and how they can be reliably pursued. 

Our sexual assistance industry includes providers of medicines, therapies, pornographic materials, and even surrogate partners.  This industry often reduces sex to a sport or hobby, typically treats sex as a commodity or commercial service, and thereby works to turn people into the equivalent of sex machines (sexbots, in the parlance of technoculture today).  In its extreme, the modern sex industry is the last bastion of human slavery, as children and woman especially are sold or stolen into this industry and then smuggled throughout the world to work as prostitutes. 

The totality of this sexual enterprise inevitably robs us all of the natural richness, openness, and health that is our natural sexuality.  It distracts us from our potential for the deeper and truly liberated individual life waiting for us in the requisites and practice of mature human sexual love.  It is an industry that certainly is oblivious to and would be undermined by the two requirements for healthy sexual partnering we have discussed.

As I write this, one of American’s largest and wealthiest corporations is running a series of television commercials for sex pills that, for me, are extremely offensive and unhealthy in their portrayal of our human sexuality.  These pills create the appearance of male sexual arousal, but in the genitalia only, without the necessity of the natural emotions that accompany and intensify physical arousal, and which both humanize and make more mysterious and intimate human sex itself.  The characters in the commercials are mannequin-like and remote, reflecting at best the surface of natural people and our natural sexuality, and at worst encouraging sexuality attitudes that are only abstract approximations of real human life and our natural emotional complexity. 

Needless to say, these commercials are deeply revealing about the commercialization of sex in our time, and our often jaded and ambivalent modern feelings about our sexuality, despite the seeming liberation and openness of sex in our time.  Coming from a major corporation of the world’s largest industrial country, the commercials also show just how unfettered sex assistance and sexploitation now is, and how unseemly and fettering to us they both remain.  But it most importantly belies a basic misunderstanding, and perpetuates a basic misrepresentation, of what healthy and satisfying human sexuality entails, of what healthy and satisfying sexual relationships between people are like in reality.

Restoring our natural health and well-being, including the pursuit and encouragement of healthy and emotionally rich sexual relationships, is of course the first and final natural remedy for sexual dysfunction.  If you are experiencing sexual problems, at any age, please see your physician.  It is likely a symptom of reduced overall health, perhaps a result of chronic stress and earlier health choices, and is usually treatable through lifestyle changes and supportive dialogue.

Sex In Your Relationships

If you or others around you are in a sexual relationship today, much of this discussion needs to be taken in the context of these existing relationships.  Once coupling occurs, we must all of course actively manage our sexual relationship – as we would any other family relationship or intimate friendship – and yet in ways that are unique too, owing to the much stronger emotions involved in sex and the greater natural intimacy of sexual coupling.  As I have suggested, our society does not always make managing our sexual relationships easy and, owing to our general misunderstanding of healthy human sexuality, our family and friends are not always especially helpful and instructive in making the most of our coupling.

I once heard sexual love described in a way that was immediately appealing to me, and that remains this way today, after many years.  Sexual love was said to involve three things: passion, intimacy, and commitment.  We have discussed the importance of ensuring passion and intimacy already, and might next turn to specific techniques for managing a healthy sexual relationship.  But in many ways, it is instead this third facet of sexual love, commitment, that is most next needed.  The solutions to any relationship’s many potential challenges can probably always be found within the couple, when both people are committed to the relationship and to ensuring that it is and remains a passionate and intimate one.  Commitment is a natural part of human sexuality, even if we were committed to more than one partner at times in our natural history, and the foundation for the healthy management of all our intimate and family relationships.  Without commitment, we really do not have sexual live – we do not have the foundation for healthy families and communities.  Our passion and intimacy are made more fleeting and ephemeral, less likely to endure and mature into true human love.

Perhaps you or your partner needs or wants to change aspects of your sexual relationship as it is today.  Candid, open dialogue about our sexuality and intimate feelings can take time to develop in a relationship, if it was not there from the start, and is almost always worth the effort it requires of us.  To encourage or promote this dialogue, perhaps this idea of the relationship needing equal parts passion, intimacy, and commitment is a way to frame needed discussion and then to promote mutual action to improve the relationship.  If the issues or concerns lie in one of these areas, they are likely easier to address than in cases where issues appear in more than one of the three areas.  In the end, you may decide to use a family counselor to help move this dialogue forward, and again is likely worth the effort.

Your own sexual relationship may have begun without the two-step process I have described, but this does not mean that you cannot go through it now with one another, if you are willing to make the effort and modify the process a bit with the luxury of hindsight (and also recognizing that you each may not fully appreciate the totality of one another today, especially as you have grown and changed over time).  Assuming you are both following a natural health program, you should be naturally attractive to one another and physiologically ready for sex.  Perhaps there is something you or your partner can do, or stop doing, that would make sexual arousal stronger.  Often, this is in the realm of promoting better emotional compatibility, but not always.  Again, patient and committed dialogue will likely bring you both closer together and closer to the truth.

If you have pre-teenage children or young teenagers, assuring adequate and healthy sexual dialogue may be equally difficult but is also equally worthwhile.  Young people today, even young children, are exposed to enormous amounts of sexual content and sexual misinformation – some of it implicit and thus likely misunderstood or accepted on its face – much more than parents may realize or want to believe.  You can counter this trend of our time by helping your children form a healthy natural outlook on life, on their relationships with others, and on our natural human sexuality and its place in our lives.  If your children are old enough, and certainly no later than the first onset of puberty, open and caring discussion with them about sex is needed, both for information sharing and to enable ongoing discussions as their sexual feelings increase.  Perhaps the themes of this article and several follow-up conversations are the right next step if you have children in your care.

However easy or difficult the subject of sex is for you today, it is a natural one and a critical part of fostering healthy individual and family life.  It is an area where we need to ensure clarity and understanding, for ourselves and those we love and care for, if we are to live truly healthy and open lives.  Though our sexuality is today and has been manipulated in the past in important ways, a return to thinking of sex in terms of natural life yields a basic new appreciation of our sexuality, its natural requirements and its natural place in the healthy individual and community. 

Returning to nature and natural thinking, as in so many other areas of our health, demystifies our sexually, even as it preserves and even deepens the mystery that is our natural human condition.

Mark Lundegren is the founder of HumanaNatura.

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By Mark Lundegren

As part of HumanaNatura’s article series on the tools of personal empowerment, I’d like to introduce you to the technique of mapping time.

Mapping time is a fairly simple process that can provide rich insights into the underlying structure of our daily lives.  It can reveal how well this often unconscious or only semi-conscious structure of time allocations aligns with our values, priorities, and goals. 

As a true form of mapping, time maps can help us better see and understand the overall landscape and contours of our lives, as well as new opportunities for exploration and change.  These opportunities include our potential to makes new choices and alter our uses of our time each day, to more effectively and directly create and live the life we want. 

The overall process of personal empowerment, when pursued in the context of optimizing the health of our lives, is the essence of what HumanaNatura calls natural living.  For more on this topic, see the article, “Understanding Personal Empowerment,” in the HumanaNatura library or review the Natural Living section of the HumanaNatura natural health program.

The goal of natural living is to remove conditioned, irrational, and unconscious cycles of health-reducing behavior and thinking from our lives, and to replace them with new personal patterns, ones of our own choosing that more directly align with and foster our natural requirements for health and well-being.  In this sense, natural living is the pursuit of our health in a broader sense – to include opportunities for new personal growth and freedom in our lives.

Clearly irrational and unhealthy cycles in our lives, ones that do not serve us in our pursuit of growth and freedom, include drug dependencies, a variety of psychological addictions and fixations, dysfunctional relationships and habits, obviously unhealthy attitudes and life choices, and other patterns of behavior or thinking that quickly come to mind and are difficult to explain against the standard of our health.

Other cycles that compromise our health and well-being, that limit our growth and freedom, can be much deeper, more pervasive, or far subtler presences in our lives.  These cycles can be harder to see and examine, and in the end, break. Here, the use of personal empowerment tools and the conscious practice of natural living can greatly aid us in the process of self-examination and conscious choice.  Together, they can open new possibilities even in seemingly intractable areas of our lives and create profound and lasting positive change for us and those around us.

Mapping Our Own Time

Among the many self-empowerment techniques available to us through modern psychology, mapping time is one of the simplest and, because of its simplicity, one of the more useful and powerful.  It is a great tool for people just beginning the task of personal discovery and transformation that is natural living.

To dispel any sense of mystery about this tool, mapping time is just what the name implies:  periodically listing out, or mapping, how we spend our time in a typical day or week. With commitment and practice, the results can be quite revealing, making us far more conscious of our behavior patterns and their implicit priorities.  Mapping our time can reveal low-value uses of our time and recast other uses in a new light, helping us discover and change areas of our lives that do not align with our values and goals, and quest for greater health.

An easy way to begin mapping your time is to pick a few upcoming days, especially ones that should be typical for you, and plan in advance to keep track of how you spend your time on each of these days.  Some of us have more varied schedules and will need a higher number of days to create a composite map of a typical day.  Others have more regularized schedules and even one or two days may suffice to create a representative mapping of our time.  If this is you, be sure to consider and map your weekday versus weekend patterns, so you have enough information to create an accurate portrait of how you spend your time in total.

Whichever personal schedule best describes your life today, a good way to map each day is in 15-minute intervals.  It strikes a good balance between too much and too little information.  In this approach, you will set out to account for all 24 hours of each day in quarter-hour blocks, using pen and paper or a spreadsheet.  Your map should include the time you spend sleeping, eating, doing chores, socializing with friends, working, commuting, doing hobbies, in leisure, and whatever other activities occur in your day.

The goal in mapping time in this way is to capture the entirety of how you spend your day.  At least every hour or two during the day, except when sleeping, carefully note how each 15 minutes interval was spent.  If you do more than one thing in an interval, capture the key two or three items for later review.  Try to use identical categories for recurring items so you can more easily add up the time devoted to them later.  By the end of the day, or by the beginning of the next, you should have a complete map of how you spent the day, in ninety-six 15-minute intervals.

Once you have a mapping of one or more representative days, and may have insights just from scanning the list of entries.  In this direction, the next step is to carefully categorize your time allocations, so you can see more clearly the patterns of how you spent your time on the days tracked.  In categorizing your time allocations, it’s important to make sure you have enough categories (typically 7-10) to capture the breadth and diversity of your major daily activities, but not so many categories (more than 15 as a general rule) that you cannot see the key patterns emerging from your time map.

We all have a certain amount of incidental activities that cross many of our time intervals and do not fit well into a major category – phone calls, rest breaks, hallway conversations, whatever.  You will need to consider if these activities can be allocated into one or more common categories.  You can and usually do have a miscellaneous category, but we often get better insights if we explore and categorize if we can what is in our miscellaneous category, especially if it spans more than 30 minutes of a typical day.

Once you work through this categorization process, which may take a bit of time and prove iterative, you should arrive at a relatively short list of categories and, by adding up the time spent in each, a clear sense of how you allocate your time across each category in a typical twenty-four hour day.  Many people like to create a pie chart of their time as a visual aid, drawing out their activity categories and the percentages of time allocated to each category.

A reminder to be sure you have mapped representative days, or a mix of days that are representative in total, and that weekend time is included too.  If you have very different weekday and weekend patterns, as many people do, you can decide if you want separate maps for each pattern or to weight and proportion your time into a single map that represents a typical week.

If your days are especially diverse, an alternative is to map an entire representative week, perhaps in 30-minute intervals to cut down on the amount of work to create your map, and then proceed with categorization as I described.

“As Is” Versus “To Be” Time

With your first time map in hand, with a list or graph of your categories and time allocation percentages of how you spend your time today, you can begin the processes of examining, and ultimately re-mapping, your time. 

In this part of the time mapping exercise, you must be honest but compassionate with yourself.  Your map is a rough representation of your life and use of your time today.  If you are like the rest of us, after the first time through you probably are looking at a mix of intended and unintended time allocations, some familiar uses of your time and some that may be surprising or revealing to you in some way. 

Begin by asking yourself if you like the way you are allocating your time.  What areas to you like the most and the least?  What areas are healthy and unhealthy, desirable and undesirable, important and unimportant?  What areas would you most like to change?  How well is your time allocated in ways that are consciously-chosen, in a way that is satisfying as you reflect on your map?  If you are like most of us, you will see several areas where you want to take immediate action, especially when just beginning the work of self-examination and conscious living.

As you continue your review of your time map, focus in on blocks of time you would like to change the most, first and above all others. Is some of this time you want to change but feel you cannot today?  Perhaps there others blocks that you want to change and know you can, even right away.  Give yourself time to think carefully about your map, what it reveals about how you spend your time and what you most want to change and can change.  Review your map in several sittings over the course of a week or more if you want to.  Spend quiet time alone or in dialogue with close friends to help get a full perspective on your time map and the categories of your activities.  If you feel the need, seek the input of a counselor or coach.

Extra effort evaluating our time maps is usually a worthwhile investment, in that the insights we have from them and the commitment to action we develop may become much deeper than with a shorter review.  Often, however, even during the process of mapping our time itself, we can have personal insights and find compelling motivation to act to change our time allocations right away.   

Ultimately, where you need to end up is with a “to be” map for your time in the immediate future, and perhaps one for the longer-term too.  Your “to be” map is a chosen and more ideal re-weighting of your time allocation in each of your categories, and may involve time in an entirely new category.  It is usually helpful to list out your categories, with your current and planned time allocations, to use as a reference when planning and monitoring change.

The final step in time mapping is planning and monitoring actions to re-allocate our time.  Though you may have already made immediate changes in your time allocation based on the previous steps, I would encourage you to create a formal plan of action to achieve the time reweighting you want.  Often, the act of planning leads to new insights and helps you see opportunities to move to your new time allocation more quickly or creatively.

There are different approaches to action planning to re-map our time.  One is to formulate a “realistic” new time allocation and then plan concrete steps to implement change in our lives to arrive at this allocation, listing out specifically what we will do less of and more of to achieve our planned time reallocation.  Action plans often include specific actions or goals for 1, 3, 6, and 12+ months.  Many successful action plans also focus in on no more than 2-3 high priority actions, whether for right away or a defined time period.  And our best goals are usually SMART (specific, measurable, actionable, realistic, and time-bound).

An alternative approach to re-mapping and planning is to formulate a truly “idealistic” time allocation.  This types of time map tends to be a bit higher level and more aspirational, but can help us more clearly articulate our deepest and innermost values and wishes.  If we use this approach, it is best to work carefully through the multi-stage planning process I described before, planning out immediate and achievable goals for the above time intervals, and consciously leaving others that are not immediately actionable in our 12+ month time period or in a “parking lot” for reconsideration.  In planning for our long-term ideal, it is important that we not lose sight of the short-term, and change we can make immediately or soon, so that we achieve early gains and learning, and build momentum and greater clarity for the long-term.

Either approach to action planning can work fine, especially if you commit to repeat this exercise periodically.  It is probably always unrealistic to think that we will completely illuminate our uses of time and envision our ideal time allocation the first time we map our time, or plan all of the right steps in our initial action plan.  More likely, our ideal life vision and plan will emerge and take shape over time, changing and maturing as we grow and work to re-make our lives healthier and freer, and have fresh insights into how we spend our time and what we really want.

My Own Mapping

As an example of this exercise in practice, I can relate my own experiences of mapping time.  When I first began my time mapping, I almost immediately discovered something about myself that I knew and yet didn’t fully appreciate.  This insight dawned on me and became quite tangible over the course of several days, and led me to make a near immediate and quite positive change in my life.

In my first time map, what I noticed was that I spent a great deal of my waking time (well over 25% including weekends) in what I characterized then as “recreation.”  We all know and most of us have some amount of this time in our lives.  It includes our many common forms of leisure – various pleasant, semi-satisfying but usually not skilled activities we may do alone, or with friends and family, to pass time and amuse ourselves. Recreation is usually not goal-oriented activity, other than filling time and escaping boredom or stress.  Some amount of recreation, some empty and unpointed time, is of course inevitable and healthy in any life.

But we all also know that recreational activities can sometimes be trivial activities, and even self-trivializing ones.  Recreation involves activity that is meaningless and often quite predictable – time that does not engage or require us, time when we escape from rather than face into our lives and need for action in them.  In an affluent society especially, recreational time can grow to fill large tracts of our time and places in our lives.  It can preoccupy and lessen us in what are often empty and meaningless uses of time.  When excessive, this “down time” often and unconsciously keeps us from more important activities we may consciously struggle to find time for.

While pleasant, recreation is also rarely fulfilling and we may even seek more recreation from the low feelings of fulfillment it engenders, leading to a downward spiral of health and vibrancy in our lives.  Recreational activities can involve unhealthy content as well, compounding the problem of excessive and compounding leisure.  In truth, we can easily and unwittingly become locked into vicious and quite irrational cycles of recreation and leisure, consuming our time and creating barriers to a more engaged and engaging life, just as we can with many other behaviors that make sense only in small or infrequent amounts. 

Excesses of time thus wasted (relative to the standard to pursuing our goals) inevitably give our lives a bittersweet, aimless quality, one that is familiar and widespread in contemporary society, and that we may be enmeshed in ourselves without realizing or attending to it.  With excessive leisure and other empty habits, we may sense in our own thoughts that we have reached a plateau in our lives, that we are not growing and developing as we once did – and as we always can and should, if our goal is healthy and vital life.

In my case, over the course of several weeks, I was able to re-map my time, consciously reducing my “recreational” category from 25% to about 5% of my waking hours and increasing time spent on activities more closely aligned with my values and goals, and especially my health.  For me, these new activities were part of a quite specific and gradually evolving personal action plan: experimenting with healthier forms of eating and exercise, beginning educational rather than party vacations, more time reading, improving my work skills, and developing a more health-oriented circle of friends.  Although it took time and was a struggle at first, my life changed significantly and quickly in both day-to-day feel and overall speed and direction.  I had a fairly big pay-off from re-mapping my time.

The impact of these early changes, and the sense of empowerment and focus they brought to me, was significant and unexpected.  I began to change in ways that was noticeable to others, and soon needed to further clarify my ideal time map and refine my long-term goals.  After about nine months, I again consciously mapped my time and planned a further re-allocation to better create the life I wanted for myself, to be more fully the person I wanted to be. It was, in fact, in this second re-mapping, right on the heels of an archeological learning vacation in Greece, that the idea of HumanaNatura was born. 

I now formally map my time about once a year, but make informal assessments of my use of time quite often, even daily, and always find fresh insights and areas for change.  It may interest you to know that the number of my activity categories has declined as I have gradually created greater focus in my life and use of my time.  Today, I have only five categories, leaving aside sleeping and a small amount of miscellaneous time: 1) learning & teaching, 2) health advocacy, 3) hiking and exercise, 4) building and community development, and 5) supporting friends and family. 

Through much greater, but only gradually developed, awareness of both my values and time allocations, my life is now much simpler and more focused in many ways, but also richer too and quite broad enough.  I allocate my time where it most counts, to me and to the things I want.  You may find this happens to you too, even if your ultimate categories are quite different than mine.  We are all fingerprints, with the same basic shape but endless and intricate variation as we examine ourselves more closely.

With this simple technique of mapping time available, and now I hope demystified, perhaps you too will be able to map and re-map your time to create the more ideal daily life and long-term personal direction you want.  Perhaps you will have immediate insights you can act on, some “ah-ha” moments, setting up positive change in your life and building momentum for ongoing, iterative, and healthy change throughout your life. 

In time, and after mapping your time a few times, perhaps you will achieve a surprising new life that is healthier, growing and freer, more satisfying and fulfilling, and a better expression of who you really are.

Mark Lundegren is the founder of HumanaNatura.

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By Mark Lundegren

I’d like to spend a few minutes discussing spokes and hubs, and the wheels they so often combine to form.  In the context of our exploration of natural health, I’d like to focus on one wheel in particular, a wheel that comes to us from contemporary psychology and personal development counseling.  The wheel I refer to is known as the Wheel of Life.

The Wheel of Life, a somewhat weighty phrase, is probably familiar to you.  It has several uses and meanings, depending on context.  A common use of the phrase is as a metaphor to describe our human interconnectedness.  Another is to use the phrase to describe the gradual passing of people and time, and the common thread of milestones that occur and re-occur in our lives.  The idea of the Wheel of Life also arises in various east Asian religions and philosophical schools.

For our discussion, my use of the phrase, Wheel of Life, will have a specific meaning.  When I use this phrase, I intend to describe a particular and widely used tool of modern psychology and development counseling that carries this name.  Like other tools psychologists and counselors use, the Wheel of Life is an exercise designed to aid self-examination and promote new and more powerful personal choices in our lives.

Empowering ourselves through self-examination and new conscious choice is integral to HumanaNatura and the practice we call Natural Living.  If you want to acquaint yourself with some of the key ideas and goals of personal development, you can review another article in the HumanaNatura library, entitled “Understanding Personal Empowerment”.  You may also wish to read the Natural Living section of the HumanaNatura natural health program, if you have not already.

If you familiar with the Wheel of Life exercise already, my title may have given you a strong hint about where I am going in this article.  By the time we are through, I will describe the traditional Wheel of Life tool, so you are able to use it on your own.  I will also suggest an alternative approach to the exercise that I encourage you to consider.

Introducing The Wheel of Life

As I mentioned, the Wheel of Life exercise is an important tool in the personal development field.  It is one that I have used successfully in my own life and in my work as a natural health counselor and teacher.  There are a number of variations on the basic Wheel of Life tool, and you can find free information on these variations via a web search. 

While we will discuss how the Wheel of Life tool works, I want to underscore upfront that I believe the Wheel of Life exercise, as it is typically presented and used, can be improved upon with great additional benefit.  The improvement I have in mind involves using the Wheel of Life tool specifically within the context of Natural Living as mentioned above.  The essence of this change is to let the categories of our life wheel become grounded in and informed by new awareness of our potential to restore our natural health and well-being, and the transformational life changes that can come from this regrounding in our health.

While there are alternative versions of the Wheel of Life tool, it is usually structured as a three or four-part exercise that begins with the following eight categories, arranged on paper or a web page as spokes of a wheel (or as a pie chart with eight equal-sized sections):

1. Surroundings
2. Career
3. Money
4. Health
5. Friends & family
6. Romance & intimacy
7. Personal growth
8. Fun & recreation

An important early point is that the order of the eight categories or spokes is not intended to imply relative significance, but the overall set of categories is quite important.  Many psychologists view these eight categories as essential dimensions of a balanced and fulfilling life today.  For this reason, these specific categories are almost always included in the Wheel of Life exercise.  If you would like, take a few minutes to review the list and consider what is included in each category.

At a personal level, you might feel comfortable with the list of categories as is and be willing to move ahead with the exercise.  I should point out that some people take issue with the importance of one or more of the eight categories.  Or they may view the eight categories as lacking in some way and feel that that one or more additional categories are needed.  As an example, a category called “citizenship” is a potential addition people have pointed out to me.  Reconsidering the categories of the Wheel of Life tool leads to a more general discussion of the orientation and assumptions of its creators, an important topic that I will come back to.

For now, if you feel strongly that alternative categories or spokes should be substituted or added, my advice would be to add new spokes instead of eliminating these basic categories, since they have been proven to be important in practice and are based on cross-cultural research regarding successful achievement of life balance.  In truth, for the Wheel of Life exercise to be effective, the wheel categories need only reasonably and concisely describe the essential attributes or dimensions you feel are critical to achieving a full and balanced life.

I should add that the Wheel of Life categories also do not imply we should devote equal or a specific amount of time and effort in each area.  The categories of the wheel are intended to help us examine important aspects of human life in general and thereby promote balance in our life in particular.  The categories of the wheel help us consider if we are fulfilled or pursuing fulfillment across the totality of our lives.  But how much time and attention we devote across our life wheel is our decision. 

Whatever wheel categories you choose, one thing that does not change is how the Wheel of Life tool is used.  We use the wheel to measure our own life, our own balance and fulfillment, based on our expectations and perceptions in each of the wheel’s categories.  In other words, the focus of the Wheel of Life exercise is always personal, our responses individualized and particular to our own circumstances.  With the Wheel of Life, there is only one  “right answer” to the categories: our most honest answer.  In this way, we arrive at a life wheel that is truly ours, one based on how we see our life today along the spokes of our wheel.

Ultimately, we are the measure of our own life and of course know our life, our aspirations, and our true feelings of fulfillment in a way that no one else can.  We thus can and must take responsibility for our wheel and our lives if we are to learn to guide ourselves in new and more fulfilling ways.

Using The Wheel of Life

Making use of the Wheel of Life tool is fairly straightforward but does require that we first ensure a setting and outlook that is conducive to success.  So, you will first need to find or create a calm personal time when you can go through the exercise without distractions or interruptions.  In this time, you will simply use pen and paper to list out the eight (or more) categories or spokes of your wheel.  Then, with the issues and demands of the day on hold for a while, you will evaluate your present life situation by scoring yourself on how well you feel you are doing in each category of the wheel. 

As mentioned before, this scoring must always be a candid personal assessment of our life, one based on our own inner sense of fulfillment in each spoke of the wheel.  It is essential that you are completely honest with yourself in your scoring, or you risk making the exercise less effective than it can be.  With this in mind, in the quiet time you have created for the exercise, carefully and thoughtfully give yourself a 1 to 5 score for each category of the wheel.- where 1 means you feel low levels of fulfillment in the area today, 3 means you are fairly fulfilled, and 5 means you feel highly fulfilled in a category.

In practice, our initial scoring often happens quite quickly, and then we begin to reflect on and consider our initial scores.  Often, we find we need to go around the wheel a few times, in our initial sitting and then again later, until we achieve 1 to 5 scorings we are fully comfortable and emotionally satisfied with.  This need for reflection and iteration, and our focus on our emotions and emotional satisfaction in the scoring process, is very important.  We may think many things, but what we feel is what we feel, especially once we have uncovered and given new form to our emotions through this exercise (including allowing our assessments to incubate and become tested in time).

As we consider and reconsider our scoring, we should make full and even courageous use of our own inner feelings in this process, paying special attention to those emotional judgments that stay with us over time.  Similarly, we must resist the temptation to use external standards to assess the categories of our lives, while recognizing that our inner feelings and external environment are interconnected.  Always, it is the steady voice in our heart, and not the often shifting voices in our head, that best judge our fulfillment along the spokes of our life wheel.

Though we live in a time that values statistics and benchmarks, the use of our true feelings is the only reliable way we can ground our wheel in reality, in our authentic personal reality, and allow the wheel to help us make more fulfilling choices over time.  In examining our life wheel and scoring our categories, we must speak to ourselves with our own voice and from our emotional and spiritual center.  If we distort our scoring with external standards, or otherwise mask or turn away from our true feelings, then our life wheel is not really ours and it cannot help us pursue the life we really want.

To help visualize and reflect more deeply on your Wheel of Life scoring, it is important that you take the time to draw out your wheel.  To do this, lightly draw spokes radiating out from a central point, one spoke for each category of your wheel and with the spokes evenly spaced around the central point.  Next, label each spoke with the category name.  Then shade in each spoke of your wheel based on your score (1=a little shading of the spoke near the center point, 3=a half shaded spoke, 5=a fully shaded spoke).  When you are done, you will most likely have a wheel that looks like it has spokes of different lengths.

Sketching the Wheel of Life tool and shading in our initial scores for each category is a way of visualizing and evaluating the wheel of our life more deeply.  Our sketch works to activate our self and emotions more broadly, and often allows us to reconsider our scores from a different vantage point.  Sketching lets us see concretely the shape of our wheel, the shape we have initially drawn to describe our life today. It also allows us to consider what spokes most urgently need to lengthen to allow us to have a more fulfilling life in each area of our wheel, and thereby a more balanced life too.

In sketching our life wheel, some of us may initially find that we have a wheel that is very regular, very smooth and balanced, with short, medium, or long spokes of all about the same length.  More likely, our initial wheel may be more irregular, with spokes that are longer in some areas and shorter in others.  Often, once we see our shaded in spokes, we may have new perspectives on the category scores and may make changes to our scoring to reflect this.  It is important to make these changes and adjustments as they occur to us, and to change them again if we must, as long as we remain focused on how we really feel and are honest with ourselves. 

If we are embarrassed or troubled by our initial life wheel, that is fine since it is only a starting point.  After all, only we need see our life wheel and know the truth of how we feel.  On the other hand, think of the great gift it is to be able to be honest with ourselves and to be clear on the areas of our lives we most need to work at.  In the end, it is a better and more powerful choice to have strong and honest feelings, rather than cheat with our wheel and repress how we truly feel for the sake of appearances, even to ourselves.  In repressing our truest feelings, we of course also repress our potential for insight, action, and positive change.  We limit our power to create new direction in our lives when we lie to ourselves.

Dynamics Of The Wheel

From this description of the Wheel of Life exercise, you may already see some of the dynamics of the Wheel of Life tool.  One is that different people can give different scores to their categories despite being in similar circumstances.  Or that the reverse can be true – people can give similar scores to one or more of their spokes despite very different life circumstances .  As a common example, one person might have just a few friends but feel quite fulfilled in this area, while another person might feel unfulfilled with the same number and quality of friendships.  Each person’s life wheel should be as individualized as a fingerprint, reflecting the uniqueness of our individual feelings and aspirations at the time we complete the exercise.  In the end, each spoke of our life wheel emanates from and provides insights into our own self and the emotions that underlie us, whatever our life circumstances may be.

Another dynamic of the Wheel of Life is the potential and even the likelihood that our personal wheel will change in shape over time, with the potential for different length spokes each time we do the exercise.  This changing of our wheel over time is almost inevitable – as we grow and mature, have new experiences and priorities, face change, and develop new expectations for what fulfillment feels like in different areas of our lives.  We might feel fulfilled with our romantic dimension at one point in our life, for example, but later feel unfulfilled with a similar level of romance and intimacy.  Fulfillment is always a function of where and who we are – and where and who we want to be – now, in our lives.  The Wheel of Life thus always reflects a particular stage of our life, maturation, and personal development.  It is always a representation of the distinct emotions and sense of who we are at any time and place, and in any phase in our life.

A third dynamic of the Wheel of Life exercise is that we may find that our categories or spokes are quite interconnected.  Movement in one area of our wheel and life very often leads to movements and impacts in other areas, an important life lesson for us all.  A change in our surroundings, for example, may change the amount of money in our lives, or the amount of money we feel we need to be fulfilled, or the scope of friendship and family around us.  For this reason, it is worthwhile to come back to and reconsider our life wheel periodically, while always pursuing opportunities to lengthen multiple spokes of our wheel in a single sustained effort.

A final dynamic I’ll mention is the need to look at the relative length of our spokes in context.  As mentioned before, by its own nature, the Wheel of Life exercise implies that balance, and balance across specific areas of our lives, is important to personal fulfillment, to achieving the good life.  In this sense, uneven spokes imply a bumpy ride and are seen as less than ideal, while more even spokes suggest a smoother ride and thereby a more desirable life.  But the length of our spokes matters too.

While research suggests that life balance is associated with achieving a greater overall sense of personal fulfillment, objections can be raised about the idea of seeking balance at all costs, of avoiding bumpiness altogether and not “going for length” when we know we should.  Often, during the course of our lives, we may consciously choose to forgo fulfillment in one or more areas of our life to pursue longer-term goals and live a more engaging life overall.  We accept some bumps, in other words, as the price of our being on a more inspiring road or a path leading to a cherished future destination.

Sometimes, we may even accept added bumpiness during extended portions of our lives for these same reasons.  If this bumpiness reflects conscious and enlarging personal choices, this may well be a worthy burden for us to carry.  But often, we may find on reflection that there is simply unnecessary bumpiness in our lives, that there are areas we should attend to and where just a bit of extra tending will allow us to let us smooth out our ride, as we pursue our longer-term goals. 

After all, if one dimension of our life wheel is less important to us than others, it should be easier to achieve fulfillment in it.  Often, the truth is that we may be neglecting key aspects of our life in an imbalanced personal strategy.  If this is our situation, we owe it to ourselves and those in our life to attend to the totality of our life, smoothing unnecessary bumpiness and hardship.  With a more balanced life, we may well find we are able to move more quickly toward our desired destinations, or even that we can see these destinations more clearly.

The Wheel In Practice

My own experience is that few of us ever have a truly even and long set of spokes in our life wheel, or a perfectly smooth ride in our lives, for very long.  A certain amount change – a portion of bumpiness, imbalance, and re-truing – is just part of being alive in the dynamic world we live in. 

At the same time, I have found that most of us can smooth out our bumpiness and get our life wheels to spin both faster and more evenly, creating very different lives for ourselves over time, by attending to our need for balance and fulfillment in the areas highlighted by the Wheel of Life tool.  We are generally able to see beyond our immediate circumstances and act with an eye to the longer-term, especially when we have opportunities for reflection and the force of fresh insights from exercises such as the Wheel of Life.  We better understand and can reduce our short-term bumpiness, while laying a track toward new goals, simply by being clearer on where we are and most want to go in our lives.

Even if our life remains a “work in progress” throughout our lives, the Wheel of Life exercise is a powerful tool for making the scope of this life work easier to visualize and complete.  I have personally seen the Wheel of Life tool help people come to terms with their lives in fundamentally new ways.  Our visualized life wheel helps us see more plainly the strengths and imbalances in our lives, and it motivates us to map new personal strategies to improve our lives.  Seeing our life wheel allows us to evaluate our short and long spokes and the bumpiness in our lives.  It helps us assess which areas with short spokes are the price of pursuing a higher life over time, and which short spokes are simply unpleasant, unnecessary and ready for attention.

The Wheel of Life exercise ends as it begins, with pen and paper and quiet personal time.  Our final step is to write out what we want our life to be like in each of the areas of our wheel – describing to ourselves what fulfillment (a score of 5) looks like for each spoke of our life.  We then describe as accurately and honestly as we can where we are today, and list out what we must do to bridge the gaps between today and our fulfillment.  This process of planning may involve an extended period of reflection, with much writing and re-writing over several sittings, to reach a satisfying stopping point.   I should say resting point, since our fulfillment is a moving target and there will be a need to repeat our planning in time, especially as we achieve the goals we set for ourselves today and begin to see tomorrow differently.

To start with a blank sheet of paper and a pen, and to end with a vision and plan for change in our lives, in many or all of the key areas of our lives, is a genuinely inspiring experience, as you might imagine. Visualizing our life wheel can help us see our lives in new and more expansive ways, better connect with our underlying values and deepest feelings, and clarify and better pursue our most highest priorities. 

The Wheel of Life exercise also can help us examine how our current patterns of behavior and belief move us, and do not move us, to the fuller life we want.  In the end, the Wheel of Life is a simple, durable tool, one we can return to again and again, especially at important times in our lives when we need a good talk with ourselves and fresh direction for our future.

Health As Our Hub

I’d like to continue our exploration of the Wheel of Life tool with an alternative and slightly deeper perspective on it, looking at the exercise from the viewpoint of a natural health practitioner (defined here as a person committed to Natural Living – to exploring natural health in all areas of one’s life).  This alternative view is not intended to diminish the importance of the Wheel of Life exercise as it is typically taught and used, but to suggest a way to make it even more powerful.  In both cases, the goal of the exercise is the same: to promote awareness, appreciation of balance, and positive change in our lives.

Let me introduce this alternative view by pointing out that, so far in our discussion of the Wheel of Life tool, we have talked almost entirely about spokes.  Each spoke or category in the wheel points to a key aspect of our lives and so this focus is quite natural.  But spokes, when they come together to form a wheel in this world, are normally connected to a hub at the wheel’s center.  Discussion of the hub at the center of our life wheel is often not part of the Wheel of Life exercise, no doubt due to a desire to focus on examining our personal spokes.  But the topic is one where our curiosity might lead us and questions about our hub do arise in practice.

When asked about this unspoken hub, I assume many counselors using the Wheel of Life tool say they take the hub to be each of us individually.  They might describe the wheel’s hub as representing the unity of our self and our preferences, creating an image of our individuality radiating out through the spokes of our wheel.  This idea, that our individuality and personal preferences are at our center, may not seem especially controversial to you or even worth reconsidering.  After all, “self-as-center” thinking is pervasive today and integral to the common sense of our time.  But this perspective is also a decidedly modern point of view and in some respects, as I will explain, can be a simplistic and, ironically, a self-limiting outlook too. 

Though approaching life with the idea that the self is our hub and center reflects the general viewpoint of our time, this outlook has not always been as widespread.  It represents a particular bias of modern people and an opportunity too.  Our modern approach so often takes our individuality as it is and assumes that fulfillment of our personal wishes and preferences is the correct, even inevitable, focus of individuals and society.  Embedded in this self-as-center view, however, is the now increasing tendency we see in modern-day people toward modern-day superficiality and emotional turbidity, each reinforced by our industrial culture and mass media.

This trend of our modern times is especially pronounced when we live amidst affluence and submit to external symbols of affluence as the prime source of our identity and motivation, leading predictably to feelings of emptiness and even despair.  In the Wheel of Life tool, counselors can see this contemporary pattern of superficiality and extrinsic orientation in the types of assumptions people bring to the exercise and counseling relationship more generally, in a frequent lack of consideration of our individual potential to be deeper or even other than ourselves (overly accepting of the self as given), and in the degree of awareness of what we each most need to be fulfilled in different life circumstances. 

At the same time, our modern sensibility also abhors value judgments, unless we make them quietly and for ourselves alone.  As a result, a general approach in counseling today is to focus entirely on process and technique, enabling active self-determination but stopping at proposals for alternative values and judgments (in the extreme interceding only as required by statute).   This process-intensive approach to counseling, explicitly accepting and enabling our individualistic and insular view of the individual, does guard against errors in counselor judgment.  But it at least equally limits the potential impact of the counseling relationship, by limiting candor and imbuing the relationship with its own and now often derided form of superficiality and distance (rationalized as “professionalism”).  

Our modern views of both the self and the counseling of the self are distinct in our time, as I said, and in great contrast to earlier ideas about the nature of our individuality and the correct methods to advance its fulfillment.  Our self-as-center, self-as-hub thinking is largely a reaction to the dogma and less questioning attitudes of our earlier religious and pre-scientific past, a reaction that began in earnest with the European Enlightenment and the beginning of scientific method.  Before that time, with some exceptions, the self was generally viewed as a part of something larger, whether society, nature, fate, or the divine.  In this older way of thinking, an extrapersonal essence was conceived as existing within or underlying the self.  Our fulfillment, in turn, was linked to alignment with specific forces at work in the world, especially with idealized attitudes and patterns of conduct.

Because our modern outlook and view of the self is a reaction to these earlier perspectives, though revolutionary in many respects, it can also be seen as an incomplete worldview too.  From certain perspectives, our modern and now post-modern sensibility can be shown to be an inadequate outlook, one requiring additional refinement and synthesis.  By this, I mean a movement past reactivity to the past and toward a new, positive, and more rigorous view that fully reflects the totality of human knowledge today.  Our modern worldview awaits development to be made more complete and even truly contemporary, a process that no doubt is underway already.  Strict self-as-hub thinking, in particular, can be shown to form a markedly myopic and limiting outlook, however widespread it may be today, with important and observable consequences for us all. 

To better appreciate this problem, consider the idea that we are each at the very center of our lives, consciously responding to the environment and generally controlling our life path.  Though a common view of the self today, this is an incomplete idea that cannot be substantiated by science.  It implies a level of personal autonomy and individual independence that does not exist in fact, as many studies of human cognition and behavior have shown.  Self-as-hub thinking overlooks the role of the larger world – enormous, extrapersonal, and generally subconscious systems of nature and nurture – that are actively at work on and within us at all times.  It thus reflects an immature worldview and begs for change and progression. 

My suggestion before that citizenship might be an additional spoke in our life wheel was an allusion to our modern superficiality and the often narrow focus we find in counseling.  It was intended to hint at the idea that there is more at work within us than simply our the discernable self and its preferences as they are presented.  In truth, we are each inseparable from the human species and our human nature, and I will suggest this is equally so regarding the paths available to us toward personal fulfillment.  In this alternative view, our conscious selves are better seen as resting atop a great mass, one that is not conscious and not the self, instead of seeing our individuality as independent, autonomous, and monolithic.

In fairness to professional counselors, it is true that this simplification of the self makes the Wheel of Life and other personal development techniques easier to initially teach and use, but I will suggest it also robs these exercises in equal measure – of their full potential to open people to new perspectives and higher life possibilities.  And so it is too with our modern sensibility more generally, and the life options it both creates for us and limits us to.  In both cases, simplification allows us to move forward more quickly and pragmatically, but we gloss over and miss much of the richness around us and within us in this modern movement.  Such is the true nature of our modern sensibility and worldview.  We focus on shooting, rather than aiming, as the saying goes.

Contrast this thinking with the idea that, when we are naturally alive and not distorted by unusual conditioning or life experiences (as examples, the experience of extreme hardship or an upbringing without communal love and caring), natural and universal impulses emanate from within us.  These impulses are deeper than us in our individuality and serve to guide us in our lives.  Traditional descriptions of these internal impulses, in the West at least, often centered on the words conscience, spirit, and heart, but also extended to include words such as virtue and strength.  Twentieth century psychologists initially described these impulses variously as instincts and drives, then later as more personalized wants and goals, and finally grasped their progressive quality: seeing them as ranging and expressing themselves from crude imperatives to promote our survival to higher aspirations aimed at growth and more compelling life.

As an alternative to these earlier descriptions of our natural human impulses and perhaps as a thought experiment for you, I would like to propose the idea that these natural impulses can be accurately and rigorously recast as impulses toward our health.  I mean by this that our deeper, extrapersonal impulses serve ultimately to promote the optimization of the individual, the family and community, and the species and greater environment, all of which can be seen as fundamental dimensions of human health. 

These natural impulses are not omniscient of course and can be influenced and even transfigured by experience, culture, and reason.  For our discussion, however, there are only two important points: 1) these natural impulses are fundamentally toward healthy life, whether ensuring survival amidst hardship or the creation of meaning amidst abundance, and 2) such impulses are deeper and more central to us than our conscious and preferring self, which can be seen primarily as an interpreter and not the originator of these impulses.

If you reflect on the ancient evolutionary processes that created human beings and the natural world today, you will perhaps begin to see our potential to move beyond simple, modernist ideas of the independent self and toward creating a place for deeper, universal forces at work within us – in a way that is both like and yet unlike the approach of pre-modern people.   You are free to call our inner dynamics by any name you want, but their purpose and end seems clear and demonstrable: these natural impulses motivate us to survive and proliferate, and then to foster our social groups, and finally to enrich human life and the world broadly.  For these reasons, I call them our natural impulses to heath.

For me, our health is not simply one of many possible spokes in our life wheel, but the central force of human life within us that unites and motivates our individuality.  This suggests a movement of our health to our center, both as a returning and as a step into the future.  Such a move evokes earlier ideas of extrapersonal and divine forces within us, which we can now take as metaphor for the forces of nature and life within us.  This change is a creative and much needed synthesis of how we approach the totality of our lives in our time.

Once we re-ground our individual self in the imperatives of biological life itself, our health naturally moves to become our hub, in place of ancient divinity and modernist ideas of the autonomous and isolated individual.  Health-as-hub thinking offers a new view of our self and the world, one that is contemporary with our science and fully rigorous, and catalyzing new and transformative human life.

Remaking The Wheel Of Life

To conclude our discussion, I would like you to experience, in personal terms, what it means to have the “health” spoke in our Wheel of Life exercise figuratively bent into a hub and placed at our center.  Let me say first that the move is not simply health enhancing, but personally enlarging and life changing as well.  Re-centering ourselves in our natural impulses to health, and exploring these impulses in our lives over time, works to alter our basic orientation as people.  This process, which I call Natural Living, causes a change in our values and priorities – how and why we live each day. 

If you are planning to begin or are in the midst of the Wheel of Life exercise, this turning of our health spoke into a hub will leave you with seven spokes (but perhaps more as we have discussed), each an important measure or dimension of balanced human life in our times.  With the change, however, your life wheel will be altered in a much more important and fundamental way.  Instead of the hub of your wheel left unnamed, you will be joined by a new, old, and perhaps unfamiliar presence at your center. 

No longer will you simply be alone with your preferences amidst the many opportunities and entrapments of modern life.  Instead, you will have a guide with you – whose voice may prove unsteady at first and untimely at times, but who will ultimately offer steady and even timeless perspective on your life and the world.  The voice I speak of is of course our universal imperative of healthy human life, changing and not changing with our circumstances.  In its varying ways, the voice of our health always calls first for our survival and then for our flourishing.

The voice of our health, when attended to over time and informed by the science of our well-being, transforms our individual perspective and choices.  We find ourselves challenged to have much longer and larger views of our lives, and to contend with the possibility of abundant health in all aspects of our life.  Our health can be experienced as a force larger than us and yet containing the potential to reground us in our own unique individuality.  The imperative of health leads to new and even forceful impetus to look into and beyond our modernity, to what new things might be possible in and with our lives each day.

In one life, my own, the change from replacing my self with my health as the center of my life was as profound in practice as I have described here as possible.  I had spent many years with good physical health and fitness, but with other aspects of my life less than ideal.  Perhaps like you, I felt limited despite the unprecedented freedoms of our time, unfocused and unfulfilled, and unable to create the larger life I wanted.  Related to this, I was oddly imbalanced, as the Wheel of Life exercise immediately revealed to me, even with my hub undefined the first time through.  My life wheel had very irregular spokes. 

The Wheel of Life tool opened up for me a means to more consciously assess and organize my life around my values, as I understood them then, and especially to set better and more balanced goals for how I spent my time.  The Wheel of Life exercise revealed what were clear gaps between my goals and behavior, and brought new and welcome change in a short period of time.  In my case, I realized I needed to spend more time with and pay greater attention to my family, friends, and work colleagues.  Over several months, I was able to pull the spokes of my life together into better balance, confronting unexamined and less than ideal ways of thinking and acting in my life.  I continue to benefit from these changes, many years later.

Still, after this initial period of adjustment and re-alignment of my attitudes and behaviors, I found that my underlying values and priorities, as they became more transparent to me, were still not fully expressed in my life.  I had objectives and goals for each of the Wheel of Life categories, but they were not as sharply focused, as clear and powerful, as I began to think possible.  My life was more balanced and improved, and I was more self-conscious than before, but I felt I could further enrich and enlarge my life (which of course is always true while we are alive).  About this time, I began experiments in natural nutrition and this led me to the idea that the imperative of our health underlay our values and could create new energy and focus in all of the spokes of my wheel.

The idea to move my health, metaphorically and practically, from being a spoke in the wheel of my life to becoming the organizing hub of my life led to new and far-reaching changes for me.  Beginning the Wheel of Life exercise again with a commitment to be healthy and well, and to foster health and wellness, in all aspects of my life was a quiet revolution, one that still reverberates in my life today and has now carried me into your life.  Instead of setting personally agreeable but limited goals for each category of my wheel, I was pushed to create more challenging and inspiring goals, to be far truer to my personal potential, and to live with the force of my health in all aspects of my life.

Far from dictating choices, having health as my hub almost immediately made my life much richer and more full of possibilities, with a far greater range of opportunities before me.  But it also changed the way I looked at the world and my priorities in it.  Many side paths in my life were revealed so clearly as side paths and not principal routes to the future I wanted.  The lens of our health pierced a veil for me and let me see the world in new ways.  I was less a modern and less a spectator in the world, more a participant and part of forces larger than me.  The world, in turn, was remade with urgent problems and opportunities I had not seen before and which called on me to act.

Having health as my hub provided sustaining new focus.  My remaining spokes were united in a weightier and more satisfying way.  My choices began to enrich my health, just as my health had begun to enrich my choices.  Examples of this included the way I though about my surroundings (from seeking a pleasant environment to one that was actively health-promoting), my career (from one that provided income to one that served others and a personal mission), my family relationships and friendships (from spending time with others to fostering deeper connection and positive growth in those around me), romance (from agreeable partners to authentic love and intimacy), and even recreation (from pleasant diversions for my free time to new outlets that brought me closer to others sharing my interest in health).

In each of these categories of my life, the spokes of my life wheel were extended and more firmly linked to a deeper value and more compelling commitments within me.  My pleasant but often typical life yielded to a good and more personal one, a life of more heartfelt, enriching, and self-respecting priorities.  I became more balanced as a person, even as my wheel increased in size and speed, thanks to the new weight of my health turning at my center.

I hope ending on a personal story is useful and even inspiring to you, and that it helps to make the Wheel of Life exercise more tangible.  But now you have delayed long enough.  It is time for you to complete the Wheel of Life exercise yourself.  Again or for the first time, and either in the traditional manner or as I have suggested, with health at your center and informing your self-assessment and goals in each of the spokes of your wheel. 

Like me, you too may find not only a more balanced journey with your health at your center, but also a stronger, truer, and more freely turning life wheel over time, one ready to reach into the great heights and depths that lie before and within us at all times. 

Mark Lundegren is the founder of HumanaNatura.

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By Mark Lundegren

Within the HumanaNatura health program, the component of we call natural living is the work of personal empowerment. 

Natural living is empowerment – defined as the attainment of consciously chosen and created life – that is guided and aided by a quest for higher levels of health and well-being in all aspects of our lives.  It is empowerment aimed at reconnecting us with natural human life, and all that is contained in this deceptively simple phrase and its important lessons for healthy, progressive, and fulfilled life today.

Beginning from our modern scientific exploration of nature and new understanding of the essential conditions for our health, natural living takes as its aim the creation of healthier, richer, and more vital lives for ourselves and those in our care.  To be truthful, natural living is real work, principally because the ideas of natural living and even our own empowerment are new human conceptions and often run counter to our existing social norms and conventional thinking. 

After all, our current norms and outlooks, like those of any time (including those in our original natural state), are evolved forms and not the work of conscious choice and deliberate creation.  Creative choice is a new human capacity that came only recently in our evolution and in many ways is just becoming possible now, in our time, with the rise of advanced society and a true scientific understanding of ourselves and the world. 

Like naturally evolved forms and phenomena in the broader environment, our social practices and personal habits may contain great wisdom and learning for us, but must also include aspects that are undesirable or improvable from an objective viewpoint.  All evolved phenomena are always correctly seen as intermediate conditions, conditions that inevitably present opportunities for progression, in our case toward more optimal, intelligent, and empowered human life. 

If natural living is work, requiring new exploration the world and ourselves, and new approaches and thinking that are counter-intuitive at times, it is joyful work too.  Health-oriented exploration, learning, and change naturally energizes us and build on itself to help us achieve the many important and often unappreciated benefits of healthier and more conscious life – especially greater personal fortitude and engagement, new awareness and creativity, and deeper satisfaction and meaning in our lives. 

Natural Health And Empowerment

As I said in my introduction, HumanaNatura starts with a new understanding of our health, both its origins and its limitations in wild nature, and the transformative effects certain natural health techniques and ideas can have in our modern lives. 

This new understanding of our natural health is of course a beginning only.  The real day-to-day realization of our full potential for health and well-being is far more personal and dynamic than this and encompasses the practice of natural living, the quest for health and more optimal conditions in all aspects of our lives.  Natural living is our ongoing pursuit of new personal and collective health in the priorities and structure of our lives, our uncovering of the true scope and potential of our lives and life choices.  This pursuit of health involves a new directness and candor, with oneself especially, and a commitment to continual learning and lifelong progress toward higher and more vital life.

From the perspective of someone just beginning the work of natural living, this prospect may seem interesting but also uncertain and even daunting, especially if we are in a condition of reduced health.  HumanaNatura offers help to improve our basic health through the relatively simple practices of natural diet and natural exercise.  Our experience is that such health improvement techniques create new energy for us, encourage progressive exploration of health in our lives, and thus enable the self-catalyzing practice that is natural living.  New and more natural levels of health provide the strength and commitment to pursue natural life and our own empowerment.  In fact, from the point of view of one experiencing more natural health, the work of natural living feels very different, far more like exploration – exciting, hopeful, and open-ended, as our feelings are at the beginning of any journey we know will change and broaden us, and even if we are not sure exactly how.

In addition to creating new momentum in our lives through natural health practices, there are also a number of important tools we can use to aid us in the iterative process of personal discovery and new growth that is at the heart of natural living.  There is no need for us to work at our health and empowerment in isolation and with our intuition alone.  We all have access to the many methods or aids for furthering our self-empowerment that modern psychological research and counseling practice has brought to the world in recent years.

HumanaNatura offers information on many of these empowerment tools as part of its library of articles.  These articles are, of course, written for use in the context of the practice of natural living, and thus form a new and important linkage between our health and contemporary ideas about empowerment.  HumanaNatura views empowerment efforts apart from the pursuit of greater health in our lives to be a less than ideal approach and less likely to help us achieve our full transformational potential.  That said, many of these modern empowerment tools are important in their own right and the result of commendable efforts of many people.  These psychologists and counselors, like us, seek to promote more conscious human life and self-transformation, even if our orientation toward natural health is new and we believe improves on these earlier efforts.

Before we discuss the process of personal empowerment more deeply, an important point needs to be made.  It concerns the idea of our transformation, which implies radical personal change.  It is true that many HumanaNatura community members and others using empowerment tools have made truly revolutionary changes in how they live and look at the world.  But, critically, such successful change rarely if ever comes overnight and without at least some dead-ends and learnings along the way.  If we return for a moment to the quite apt metaphor of a journey, all personal empowerment is a path of steps and often many of them. 

In our own quest for new empowerment, we are right to pursue and encourage large aims and ideas, but also small, progressive moves toward them at the same time.  In this way, those miscalculations and missteps we inevitably will make in our unique path to more empowered life will be small, and can allow us to learn about both our aims and the best ways to work toward them in our own lives (which are always unique circumstances and rarely yield well to formulaic approaches).  Importantly, since empowerment practices naturally build and compound, it is wise to start with small incremental steps and leave larger steps for later, when they can be better informed and built on successful change, and taken from the standpoint of new and clearer momentum in our lives. 

Continual and continually adjusting change, even if modest at any particular point, can result in the transformative changes we may seek and need in our lives, and likely in a way that leaves us happier, healthier, more confident, and more creative along the way.  This recursive process of gathering information, calculating and choosing, and then evaluating our impacts and gathering new information is roughly how our brain naturally works, how it naturally evolved, and offers us an important learning of how our empowerment efforts can and usually should be structured.

Key Steps In Personal Empowerment

In addition to introducing key ideas about natural living, our goal in this article is to familiarize you with general process of personal empowerment, as a companion topic to a series of HumanaNatura articles on using specific empowerment tools in the context of natural living.  In case you are not familiar with the tools modern psychology has produced to aid our own empowerment, let’s start with a bit of background. 

As outlined already, a number of complementary tools have been created and refined over the last few decades, as psychologists have worked at the complementary goals of empirically understanding the elements of human fulfillment and developing practical methods to aid people in optimizing their own life and enrichment.  Tools such as the wheel of life exercise, time mapping, goal setting, and experience sampling have emerged from this process and are normally fairly straightforward to use.  Most aim at helping us focus our attention on key aspects of our lives, identified by empirical research as critical to unlocking empowerment and fulfillment, and to have deeper conversations with ourselves and others, ideally leading to lasting insights and positive changes in our patterns of feeling, thought, and action. 

Assessment of positive change in our lives is partly objective and partly subjective.  We can look for progress in measurable quality of life indices, for example, as well as to personal satisfaction with our life and the changes we have made.  Importantly, we can also look to increases in our relative ability and willingness to pursue additional positive change, usually evidenced by our ability to articulate new tangible goals and gaps in our lives.  As I mentioned before, since positive change is always possible in the evolving entities that are our lives and circumstances, empowerment is inevitably an ongoing and open-ended process.  For this reason, increased preparedness for new change is a critical dimension of all positive change and the pursuit of higher states of health and personal empowerment.

Most empowerment tools are used with a coach or counselor experienced in their use, either individually or in groups, but many people have success using them on their own.  We need only look at the vast number of self-help books and programs available to us, and the many reports of their successful use, to suggest this is the case.  However we may approach these empowerment tools – on our own or in groups, or with or without assistance – they are normally effective only if we are willing to use them with patience and a genuine willingness to explore ourselves, and if we accept the possibility of unanticipated results and the need for changes not previously considered.  Often, this where a key benefit of using a counselor or working in groups lies: having others in our lives to hold our agenda for positive change and keep us accountable to ourselves in the way that we want to be.

Most empowerment tools help us do one or more of five important activities that together form the full process of personal empowerment and lead to more consciously chosen and created life:

1.      Examine our motivating values – more consciously chosen life begins with new understanding of what we want, of what our motives are or what motivates us in the first place.  Our motivating values are those feelings that underlie us or exist deep within us.  They are the emotions, priorities, and aspirations that are inseparable from us at any point in our lives.  Our values can change over time and inevitably reflect our personal development and spirituality at any time, but are often unchanging and simply seek new expression over time.  Some or all of our values may be innate and exist as deeper descriptions of who we are and what we are about as people in the world.  In seeking out our true values, often they can be separated from more outward ideas and imperatives by the feelings of intense respect, even awe that we can have for our values, and by the fact we cannot intentionally compromise or let go of our values without compromising or letting go of some essential part of ourselves.  Also unlike our ideas or aims, when asked why we hold a motivating value, we usually cannot explain why we value the value – we just do or can only explain the value with reference to a deeper value.  Our personal values are in truth judgments and facts about ourselves.  They are usually what carry us forward in our lives and often what inspire us to grow and be greater than we are today.  Because of the way we may be influenced as children and adults, our true motives or values can be repressed or obscured from full view by social and personal conventions and commitments.  Thus, our deeper motives may be unknown or unclear to us through the force of our circumstances, perhaps throughout our entire life, and yet we are unlikely to live in a fulfilled way if we are not acting on and working to fulfill our values in some way (since our values are us and the alternative is to live neglecting who we are). 

2.      Evaluate our values – if this seems like a circular statement, it is, but it is a circularity that is resolved in practice.  To proceed in the process of empowerment, after we first work to unearth and actively examine our motivating values and what they compel us to do, to be true to ourselves in our lives, it is helpful to decide which values are most important and central to us, even if this order may change over time.  Such deciding or valuing our values helps us better know our values and ourselves, and can lead to new insights into how and how well we are acting on them and their underlying priority in us.  In this process, we may come to understand how some of our deepest personal values can become subordinated to other and perhaps slightly less important values – for example the value of loyalty superseding truthfulness.  This can happen from the immediacy and demands of daily life, or by routinized and habituated living and thinking, or by other constraining forces in our lives and by unexamined life more generally.  Our reaching and then judging our deepest motives is the foundation of greater self-knowledge and empowerment, since the judging of values reveals both their interconnectedness and hierarchy, and the judging and choosing center of our self that is the gateway to higher and more universal forms of living (human life lived consciously from our choosing self and its essential values).  Most of our values are shared by people, but are always organized in an individualized manner and often with different hierarchies.  Our values are of course evolved feelings, ones that make human life possible and our own lives meaningful, even as we may value and re-value our values, and express them in new ways and with new aims, over time.  HumanaNatura of course uses the lens of our health and well-being as a way to help us illuminate and discriminate our innermost values, and to better inform the central, creatively choosing part of our self. 

3.      Clarify our objectives and goals – we all have objectives and goals (objectives defined as our general aims and goals as our planned steps to reach these aims).  It is hard to be alive and not have things we want to do with and in our life.  But we often do not carefully examine our objectives and goals, or develop clear and realistic plans for their realization.  When we do more carefully examine our objectives and goals, often we find they are not linked to and express our deepest values, perhaps simply because we had never clarified our values before.  Often, in fact, we find that our objectives and goals have been given to us by others (whether by school or work, by our family and friends, or by society more broadly) or are simply generalized aims coming from our biological or personal imperatives (to find shelter, to have sex, to gain status).  In both of these cases, our aims and actions may be desirable and may hold up under examination, but we cannot truly say they have been selected by us and align with our values, until we have examined them.  As we uncover and evaluate our deeper motives, we often begin to have new perspectives on the objectives and goals in our lives, however articulated or amorphous they may be.  Similarly, by examining and prioritizing the objectives and goals imbedded in our actions and plans today, we often can gain insights into and have new judgments about our underlying values and how they may contrast with our current plans and actions.  Often, we find we are already acting on some or all of our deeper motivating values, but perhaps not consciously or optimally (in a general sense of both these words).  We may in fact find that we are acting contrary to our values in one or more areas of our lives.  In the end, if we are to become more empowered in our lives, we will have to examine and actively create our objectives and goals, and in a way that is in harmony with our values and their healthy expression.

4.      Consider our beliefs and models – in addition to examining our values, the tools of personal empowerment can also help us examine our personal beliefs and operating models (our often unconscious patterns of feeling, thinking, and acting) and their impacts in the world (our actual versus intended results).  Personal beliefs and models are the inevitable short cuts and semi-automatic processes we use to deal with the complexity of life.  Some beliefs and models may be deeply rooted in our psyche and even in our earlier life in nature, while others developed from learning in our culture and individual lives.  Many beliefs and models and can provide a great deal of value to us, but almost all can limit us too, since they are always generalized responses to specific circumstances.  As an example, we might interpret a low growl in the bushes as a threat and act on it as a threat without deliberation, perhaps saving our life but also perhaps missing an opportunity to aid an injured animal or at least to learn more about the circumstance (a frequent consequence of automatic life in modern times).  By examining our operating models – by subjecting our patterned feelings, beliefs, inferences, and actions to conscious involvement – we see them in new ways.  We often find them lacking and can then actively work to select superior approaches for interpreting and acting in the world around us, especially by living in more conscious ways that are specific to and intentionally re-patterned to better meet the demands of key circumstances.

5.      Act on our plans and optimize our actions – in the end, the tools of personal empowerment can not only deepen our understanding of our values, aims, and cognitive models, they can also help us to improve the way we act relative to these things.  Empowerment tools can make us more attentive and progressive in our attitudes and conduct, specifically allowing us to examine our actions and their impacts, and thus help us to better realize our conscious values and aims.   Examining our behavior and its consequences is a last, sometimes difficult and far-reaching step in self-empowerment, often an extension of analyzing our beliefs and operating models.  While a final step, like full process of conscious empowerment, it is also an ongoing process, one that is essential to empowerment and more optimal and conscious choices in our lives.  Without examining and improving our behavior, looking at our actions from the perspective of both our intent and our impact, the previous steps we have discussed are simply mental activity.  Our actions and behavior can include small nuances of the way we act in different settings or large patterns of conduct in our lives.  By assessing both our specific actions and our patterns of action, we often uncover additional beliefs and operating models, or unconscious objectives and goals, or implicit or unexamined values, which we might not see simply by looking at our feelings and thoughts alone.  We are also very likely to uncover unintended behaviors or consequences we were unaware of, ones that do not help us to realize our underlying values.  This is frequently the case when we assess and examine our behavior against the goal of natural living and continually increasing well-being in our lives.

Together, these five activities and the modern empowerment tools that enable them work to promote self-examination and conscious and creative choice, choice that has been said to make us both more aware and more authentic as people.  Awareness here refers to the process of becoming more conscious of ourselves, our thoughts and emotional processes, our pre-scripted and consciously chosen behaviors, and our opportunity each moment for more conscious and creative choice.  The term authenticity means acting in ways that are more directly aligned to and empowering our innermost and truest personal values, or alternatively, our true and choosing selves (our selves when we are less bounded by undesirable personal, cultural, and biological biases and limitations).

As an example of this process in action, let’s say we determine that we deeply value sensitivity and compassion in our dealings with others, that this value is one of our most important judgments or facts about ourselves.  We might then spend time examining how we both enable and limit sensitivity and compassion, first in our objectives and goals, and then in our relationships with others.  We might examine our ideas about these values and perhaps pick several people and reflect on our recent interactions with them, and what went right and wrong against our value, aims, beliefs, and intended result.  This process might compel us to clarifying what the words sensitivity and compassion mean – a key part of moving to greater awareness, perhaps leading still deeper underlying words and values.  Our goal of empowerment might involve speaking with the people we have chosen and gaining their perspective on our interactions – an example of moving to greater authenticity and candor in our lives.  And it might lead us to examine and then experiment with changes in our beliefs and behaviors that do not seem well aligned with our values or that do not reliably engender the impacts we want to crate in the world.

A life made more aware and more authentic in this way is inevitably a more vital and powerful life, not just one that naturally fosters goodwill in others and creates new opportunities, but one more open to the power of new choices and to choices more connected to heartfelt emotion.  To be empowered by and acting effectively on a clear and deeply felt connection to our true, inner self and our fundamental values is to be alive in a deeper and freer way, in a way that many people are not today, and in a way that makes less reliant on external circumstances for our fulfillment (yet another source or perspective on personal power).  To focus our attention and actions on those that really count – to those that express and fulfill our truest selves and our highest aspirations in the clearest way possible – is to live a more potent and fulfilling life, whatever our circumstances, a life that is self-valuing, self-creating, and thus inherently self-affirming.

Empowerment And Our Health Revisited

As mentioned earlier in our discussion, HumanaNatura believes the process and tools of personal empowerment are greatly enhanced, and even made more naturally optimizing, when pursued in the context of natural living – when the tools and focus of empowerment aids the search for enhanced health and well-being in all aspects of our lives.

HumanaNatura views our health as the optimization of life itself.  By this we mean not just the optimization of our physiological fitness, but also the health of the way we live and what we live for.  Though secular and scientifically-based in approach, the process of uncovering our potential for natural health and new well-being nevertheless connects us to important and often unexpressed or inhibited dimensions of our humanity, and can rightly be called a spiritual practice in outcome.  Natural health leads us to look anew at our deepest and truest self, and in this looking, allows us the chance to re-imagine ourselves today and in more profound ways for the future.

HumanaNatura’s library contains many articles on personal empowerment and the exploration of our natural health as part of the work of natural living.  Included are specific articles on using modern empowerment tools in this context.  In making use of these tools, on our own or with others, you too may find that the challenge of natural living can enrich and inform not only our individual and collective lives, it can have an equally enriching impact on the modern process and tools of our empowerment.

Mark Lundegren is the founder of HumanaNatura.

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