Sunday Story...Harmonic Health

Sunday Story…Harmonic Health

As many of you know I am on a mission to find, live, and help you be optimally fit. Unfortunately there is no recipe for this. There is no blueprint, no one right and true way. And it seems that there are so many conflicting opinions, gurus, and information that we should just throw up our hands and sit down to a really bad cheeseburger and fries.

NOOO! Don’t do it. As Winston Churchill is reported to have said…”Never Give Up”. Part of this process is trial and error. What works really well for me may only work partly well for you. And yes there are those anomalies out there that can smoke and drink and eat bad food and live to a healthy 80 years old. That isn’t me and it probably isn’t you and really do you want to risk it?

So let’s step back a bit and focus on a much bigger picture. Is nutrition important? Is exercise important? Absolutely but too often we get so obsessed with one factor that we miss the big picture…in other words you can’t see the forest for the trees.

Let’s divide this harmonic health idea into 3 parts. #1 Recovery---nutrition, sleep, and other practices. # 2 Physical Stress---exercise, disease, injury, and labor. #3 Mental misfiring---losses (job, spouse child), money, trauma, self esteem. If all three of these areas are in harmony life is good. If we get out of balance life can start getting bad in a hurry.

On the Recovery side of things we find nutrition, sleep, and other practices. These are generally on the plus side of the ledger. Some sleep is better than no sleep. 9 hours is optimal. I rarely get 9 but often get 7 or 8. If you think about it this way…9 hours would be a score of 100, 8 might be 90, and on down until you get to maybe 5 and then the number starts going into negative territory. In other words it starts costing you points and might increase your other stressors as well if I end up diabetic and overweight.

The same goes for nutrition. If I am eating very clean and organic and in the perfect portions I get 100 points. And it goes down from there. When I get most of my nutrition from a box or from a fast food joint or worse it will start costing me points. If I drink alcohol I will lose points.
If I am conscientious about getting massages, taking ice baths, meditating daily, doing mobility workouts with lacrosse balls and the like I get positive points. If it is hit and miss the points go down. If I don’t have regular practices the points get a lot less. It is hard to end up with negative points in this category.

The Recovery part of the equation is the easiest place to get positive points. The other two…more difficult but not impossible.

Physical Stress…disease, exercise, injury and labor. Labor is your job, what you do every day to make a living. Do you sit at a desk all day? Negative points. Do you throw cement sacks all day or some other repetitive physical task? Negative points. In a perfect world you would have a mix of sitting, and hard work and a constantly varied routine to alleviate mental boredom and physical wasting. Injury…injury free is neutral points, injured is negative points and the severity of the injury will determine how deep in the hole you are going to be. The same thing with disease. There is a big difference between diseases and their impact on your ability to maintain optimal health and fitness. Exercise is much more difficult. Any exercise causes stress. But no exercise causes worse effects. How intense is your exercise? Are doing long slow repetitive movement? All of these factors increase or decrease the physical stress. There will be times when this will be more out of harmony than others…when training for a specific event for instance. And certain types of training are more stressful than others.

Mental misfiring…trauma, loss, money, self esteem. If you are carrying around abusive events from your childhood that you have never processed and integrated your points are going to be negative. If you just got fired, divorced or lost your 401k your points are going to be negative. If you beat yourself up every day over all the stuff in life that isn’t right (the weather, your parents, etc.) more negative points. If you are all good in this area you probably still don’t get many positive points but the negative points in this neighborhood will add up fast.

Your job is to get as many points as possible. The more points you get the closer you will be to living in harmonic health, to optimal health and fitness. We can look around us and see bad examples all the time…the body builder using steroids, the nutrition guru whose personal life is a mess, the successful business man who is overweight and diabetic, or the relationship coach who can’t get out of bed in the morning because of (pick one) depression, disease, or addiction.

What are you going to do to get more points? I highly recommend you start with the easiest things first…Recovery. How much are you sleeping? How good is your sleep? Start working on that one because the positive points add up very quickly. Do some nice things for yourself…get a massage weekly, meditate daily, get out into nature and just be. Again these things add up very quickly. Start looking into your diet…start eliminating processed foods, soda, and alcohol and increasing your vegetable and organic food intake. More positive points.

Harmonic health takes some work. It takes keeping an eye on the big picture as well as the smaller pieces. It takes doing some internal work on your psyche. It means using your brain and not doing stupid stuff. It means being conscious and integrated. It means using your brain to create the feedback loop to know what works for you in the face of lots of information.

Harmonic Health…pretty simple really, just not easy.

Namaste
John
“Teaching Focus, Inspiring Transformation”
www.martialartsnevada.com

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