If you have begun to learn about HumanaNatura and our simple but complete system of four natural health techniques, you may be wondering about our special emphasis on seeking new health throughout our lives. The idea is different from the self-help advice we often receive, in both principle and practice. The difference comes in part because of our focus on health-centered life itself and in part due to our advocacy of a naturally open-ended and seeking approach to life and health, instead of one that is principally goal-focused and thus predetermined.
Usually, when either friends or professionals encourage us to improve our health and quality of life, we are advised to set and pursue specific goals, with a clear end in mind. We are told to turn our general desire for better life into concrete and measurable steps – whether to drop ten kilograms, stop smoking, exercise for a set time, or check stress attacks before they become unmanageable.
Growth over goals
Goal-setting in this way is of course important to modern self-mastery and has been show in research to lead to objectively higher states of health, well-being, and quality of life. This is especially true when our goals are 1) set in manageable short-term steps, and 2) placed in the context of a considered and compelling personal mission. But goals and missions alone are not enough.
Why? Because any attainable goal or cause, while perhaps useful to our health and life at a particular time, is always capable of being improved or built upon over time. This is true for individuals, for organizations and communities, and for us collectively as a species. None of us, as individuals and members of the human race, is a set or definable range of future possibilities. We all can and naturally will be improved up, just as we represent an improvement over species and cultures that came before ours.
To embrace this natural potential for growth in all living things is to mirror nature more deeply and broadly, and to become alive in a powerful new way that is at once ancient and eternal and fresh and ever new. It is to live naturally, if in a transformed way through advance human science and understanding.
Progressive health & life
That’s the principled part of HumanaNatura’s special advocacy of new or progressive health and life. In practical terms, our emphasis on new health means an ongoing commitment to growth and progress in our lives, throughout our lives, and in and throughout the groups we participate in, regardless of their size.
In this open-ended and seeking way that can underlie, elevate, and naturalize our goal setting, we create the potential for far more powerful and adaptive growth and progress in our lives and communities (and the transcendence of goal-focused life itself, as useful as goals may be to progressive life at any point in time). Waking up each day to our possibilities to new health, we expressly model our lives and groups on nature and natural evolution, especially its ceaseless forward movement toward ever new health and life.
In the HumanaNatura health technique that we call Natural Living, we use a seven-step process of self-assessment, creative visioning, and practical goal setting aimed at progressive health and life. We use a similar process for enhancing collective life and health in our Natural Communities technique. But both goal-employing HumanaNatura health techniques are intentionally cast as open-ended and set in our larger ethos of progressive health-centered life. In the most practical and important terms possible – our realized health and quality of life potential – the difference between our approach and traditional goal-focused health systems could not be more profound.
Imagine new health
Whatever your state of health and life today – whether you are sedentary and unwell or are brimming with well-being and vitality – new health and life are possible. inevitably, there is a least healthy and vital aspect of our life or shared life that can be replaced, and a most compelling new step we can take to create greater life and health. Often, there are many of each.
Imagine the possibilities of rising to the challenge and opportunity of new health each day, setting short-term goals and achieving new states of life and functioning, and then using this new state of natural life to move ahead to new health, again and again. The net effect is profound and increasing transformation, health-centered change that can far outstrip and alter even our most ambitious quality of life goals today.
We see this approach and astonishing progress in evolving nature and in evolving human science, leading to naturally intelligent life on earth and now profound new human understanding in time. And this is how progressive life can work in our lives and communities too. We can commit to a progressive life of ever new health, intelligently seeking and seizing the possibilities unfolding before us as we grow, and creating open-ended natural life for ourselves and others.
Learn more
Learn more about HumanaNatura and our health-centered life philosophy and techniques at About HumanaNatura. When you are ready, begin our Personal Health Program and Community Health Program, in the spirit of setting and achieving health-seeking goals but always in the spirit of learning and advancing on our present goals toward new and better ones waiting beyond them.
Wishing you new health,
Mark Lundegren
Mark Lundegren is the founder of HumanaNatura.
Photo courtesy of Orange Tulips
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