Why are you alive?
What do you like about life?
Is it the moment-to-moment excitement that your life offers that interests you?
Is it the potentiality of new experiences on the horizon that keeps you moving forward?
Is it the promise of experiencing your life in a new and fulfilling way that motivates you to learn more, see more, and be more?
What is the experience of being alive like for you? Do you enjoy being you? Do you enjoy the experiences that life offers? The ups and the downs?
Life is an experience. The recipient (and author) of these experiences is you. This “you” includes your body and your mind.
If we stop for a moment and examine the nature of life, we could say that the experiences we have occur within our body/mind because of what our body/mind experiences in the outer world.
Our outer experiences trigger within us a variety of inner sensations and feelings. It is in feeling these elements of life that we find either pleasurable or painful experiences. How we meet these experiences determines if we are enriched or diminished.
This leads to the question, why are you on the planet?
Are you here to just survive and get by or are you more interested in really living your life to its fullest?
I mean the kind of life that fulfills you, motivates you and inspires you.
Are you here to contribute your gifts to the human race or are you here for another reason?
Having a fulfilling life in this world requires work. It requires commitment. It is no different from the work or commitment you make towards exercise or attaining any goal in life. The benefits from hard but meaningful work is often fulfilling in itself.
This book has been written to help you not only understand, navigate and harness your inner world but also to help focus your daily thoughts and actions towards healthier behaviors such as exercise and better body awareness.
The major benefit of tying in our physical goals with inner world goals is tremendous!
This multi – level health and life approach incorporates all the benefits from fitness training such as:
Beyond these goals, this approach also provides you:
The road to understanding how to live in this way requires new definitions and new ways of thinking.
To begin let’s define true health.
True health is the acceptance of our physical, mental and emotional natures.
Let me explain – There is no separation between our bodies and our minds.
They are one.
Now to be clear, the mind I am referring to is the part of you that thinks thoughts. It is the constant labeling process you use to describe what happens to you, what does not happen to you, what you want, and so on.
The body is the part of you that experiences emotion, feelings and sensations.
The seeming difference between these two aspects of being human is that the mind uses words to think while the body uses the language of feelings and sensations.
The brain and the body work in concert to produce the experience of your life. Without the body, the brain has no senses to gather information. Without the brain, the body has no way to process this information.
The point is one is not more important than the other.
The problem is we have decided that the body is not as important as the mind and so we tend to ignore or repress the sensations and emotions of our bodies in favor of “rational” thought.
The reason why the body’s “thinking” is deemed “irrational” is because we have not been taught how to evolve this powerful aspect of ourselves and, therefore, its actions or needs seem to make no sense to our ordered rational perception.
The result of this perception is that this “irrational” thinking of our bodies remains repressed and unexpressed. Repression never lasts for very long for rebellion becomes the eventual result of repression.
This rebellion can manifest as behavior problems, depression, pain, and ultimately, disease.
As these problems take hold, we often seek out a health professional to “fix” us.
However, if you take the time to really get to know the language of your body and learn how to navigate within its world you become highly sensitive to your body’s needs.
The Guide to Holistic Fitness is based upon the premise that you are your own best healer.
Since you are the only person living in your body, there is no one better suited to understanding your body’s needs, strengths and challenges.
We believe the real key to optimum health is through accepting that you are an evolution in process. Whether you are conscious of this evolution or not, you are evolving. For example, good posture gets better while poor posture worsens over time.
The focus of this guide is your evolution and development.