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By Mark Lundegren

Health – we all know we need it and most of us take at least some steps to ensure it. But often, our health efforts are less than effective or ideal.

And in truth, our health efforts are never optimal and can always improve, since health is an open-ended natural phenomenon that exists without obvious limits. This is true in principle, and it is in true in our individual lives and groups.

As my title suggests, I’d like to talk about an alternative way of thinking about natural health promotion, one that seeks to bridge or combine approaches that are overly personalized or excessively focused on the science of progressivity.

If you are familiar with the HumanaNatura natural health system, the idea of excessive progressivity might seem like a strange idea, since our overriding focus is on intentionally re-naturalized and progressive modern living.  But just as our health pursuits can be too personalized and not make use of  scientific principles, they can be inadequately personalized too or not sufficiently grounded in our personalities and the enduring power of our personal motivations.

In both cases, by being excessively consumed with either personalization or progressivity, we can miss important opportunities to advance our health and quality of life. We can fail to achieve what I will call, and explain next, health actualization – a higher category of health advancement based on attentive choices that span purely personal and purely progressive considerations.

Understanding Progressivity

Let me start this important and potentially life and health-liberating discussion with a definition, and then turn to a simple model you can use to think more concretely – and more personally – about progressive life and health for yourself and others you influence.

As you may know, when HumanaNatura talks about progressivity or progressive living, we mean simply – and not so simply – an informed and sustained practice of seeking greater levels of health and well-being in our lives, groups and communities, or in our global society more generally. Key themes in describing the process of progressive Natural Living are that it is continuous, lifelong, compounding or pro-cyclical, and revolutionary.

Continue reading “Personal Or Progressive?”

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By Mark Lundegren

My title may have led you to think I was going to argue for or against Rubenesque body types, or discuss a fitness insight from my work for HumanaNatura. But I actually want to share a strategy insight and talk about the curves of our lives and groups, rather than those of our limbs and torsos.

Though few of us have considered the idea that our lives and social settings can have a distinct underlying curve or shape, these natural patterns do indeed exist and are discoverable by us. What we might call our life-curves are real and tangible reflections of the way we live and, in particular, how we pattern our actions against our progressive potential. In theory and practice, life-curves prove quite powerful, in the results they create for us,  and as a tool of personal and group strategy and aid to higher quality of life and functioning.

The Core Idea

The core idea of natural curves is that elemental patterns can be shown to underlie all of our lives, even as these patterns remain hidden to us. In essence, our personal life-curve is the overall direction that our life or life trajectory takes over time – again, against our progressive or developmental potential. In practice, understanding and seeing our life-curves is a lot like learning about climate. Like the larger conditions that span and influence the weather we encounter each day. life-curves are subtle but ever-present shapes behind the scenes, but ones that are equally accessible and even equally obvious once grasped.

As a model of a critical dynamic underlying our lives – essentially our degree of natural progressivity or tendency to increase the quality of our functioning or health – life-curves describe organic forces or patterns that reflect and ultimately govern our lives in important ways. Because of this, probing these background patterns proves essential to the work of progressive modern living. And, as you will see, life-curves are shapes that reflect processes we can each sense, assess, and ultimately alter ourselves.

To introduce this insight-rich, immediately actionable, and potentially life-changing concept, I’d like to talk about three life-curves in particular. I would also like to again underscore that this simple but powerful model of life applies to groups too. Just as with individual people, organizations and communities, and even whole societies, can be seen as having a distinct and dominating curve or trajectory – one that expresses and predicts its underlying health and progressive potential.

As background, I should add that the idea our lives and the world around us have a tangible and health-impacting shape comes from my workshops and will be discussed in my first full-length book, due out in the second half of the year. As you will see, each of the three curves I will introduce implies a very different mode of modern living or collective functioning.

Continue reading “Examining Our Natural Curves”

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By Mark Lundegren

Behavioral research published this past week in the Journal of The American Medical Association reminds us that money matters in modern life, if we want to advance our personal and community health. Though most of us understand this intuitively, and there is broad research linking quality of life to economic factors, the new study sheds additional light on the link between financial and other modes of modern well-being. In particular, it suggests that even brief economic dislocations can have long-term quality of life impacts for us all.

Early Twentieth Century Children At Work, Instead Of At School

The new study, conducted by researchers at the New York State Medical University, examined almost 9,000 adolescents born in the United States between 1980 and 1984 – a period marked first by economic recession and then subsequent recovery. The research team found a strong correlation with the overall unemployment rate during birth and infancy in this time and later adolescent propensities for a variety of maladaptive and unhealthy behaviors, including drug use, gang affiliation, and arrest.

The research findings do not show or explain causal links but are nevertheless intriguing, in that they demonstrate (and can be used to estimate) the community and societal costs associated with uneven economic conditions and employment security. In our own time of economic dislocation – one that is far deeper and broader than in the study period – the findings remind us we are likely paying enormous immediate and longer-term social costs for past and current economic policies favoring income growth over economic security. At the very least, the new research should compel us all to consider how less stable economics are affecting us and our larger social environment – and how this instability might be better mitigated in the interests of progressive health.

If you would like to learn more about how you and your community can begin to reduce the risk of economic disruptions and avoid the high health and quality of life costs they bring, it may be time to review HumanaNatura’s comprehensive Community Health Program. Our holistic and science-based approach to health-centered community leadership provides the tools to build your community along 12 modern natural health dimensions, including reducing community vulnerability to cyclical boom and bust economics…in favor of sustainable, dependable, and health-enabling economic security.

Mark Lundegren is the founder of HumanaNatura.

Photo courtesy of New Haven Newsboys

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By Mark Lundegren

As I write this, United States central bank head Ben Bernanke has made headlines in the past week for launching his controversial QE3. No, Bernanke’s QE3 is not a new ocean liner, but instead an acronym for “Quantitative Easing Three.” QE3 is a third round of injecting additional money into the U.S. (and ultimately world) economy.

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke

By acting to increase the supply of U.S. dollars through QE3, Bernanke and his fellow central bankers hope to make the currency cheaper and stimulate domestic economic and employment growth. Critics contend that QE3 will either have little effect, lead to similar and thus offsetting moves by other countries, or fuel increased inflation – price increases via the chasing of available goods and services by an oversupply of money.

Interestingly, Bernanke made a proposal last month at a global economic conference that garnered almost no headlines, even as what he proposed may be far more important and consequential than QE3 in the long-term. As covered by some reporters in the financial press – see Happiness Bandwagon and More Philosophy Please for a sample – what Bernanke proposed was that economists and others should begin to measure and define national success differently than we usually do, specifically by recasting success in terms of well-being or happiness rather than wealth.

Continue reading “Stimulating Happiness”