Align your ancient body with modern life through movement, rest, nourishment, care, and environment to restore energy and resilience.
Body
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Essential
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Long
Essence
When we arrive in this world, our bodies are our primary way of experiencing reality. We learn to walk, breathe, and sleep all through this marvelous creation. It’s there from the beginning of your life until the end. The realm of our health cannot be overstated in importance, as it provides us with the energy to pursue our dreams. Care for your body and live with vitality; ignore it and watch every other area of your life falter. As a proverb puts it: ”A healthy man wants a thousand things, a sick man only wants one.” ¹
Why It Matters
Your Body is a phenomenal starting point for the journey of self-development. Of all the areas, getting fit increases your energy, thereby creating space for other pursuits. It’s a daily practice that helps us cultivate several qualities such as discipline, patience, and gentleness. However, kinesthetic intelligence (KQ) is underappreciated in our modern world, which often makes this area severely underdeveloped. Your Body contains so much more depth and life to it than just going to the gym three times a week or drinking a green smoothie. You are more like a plant than you are a machine, and caring for one’s body is very simple, but made extremely complicated by modernity.
Knowledge is action, and few humans live in their bodies. It’s a tricky path with many traps and mistakes to be made, such as overuse, following the wrong health trends, or an obsession with longevity. Yet, taking good care of our health results in more self-confidence, awareness, and energy, to name but a few benefits that result from investing in this area. The lack of attention, care, and awareness of our bodies in these modern times is therefore unsettling. Many problems arise from this ignorance. I imagine that in the coming decades or century, more and more emphasis will be placed on the importance of KQ and less on cognitive intelligence (IQ) alone. Simply put, invest in the area of Body, and watch your life transform. But before we become practical, it’s important to get a picture of who we are and why our bodies are suffering so much in the 21st century.
Dysevolution
We are apes from Africa that walked every day, squatted, played in the dirt, climbed trees, fished, and were exposed to a natural environment. It’s in our nature to live in certain ways, and our lifestyle has altered so drastically that “Our bodies are in a shock. Modern living is as bracing to the human body as jumping through a hole in the ice. Our bodies do not know what century they were born into and they are defending and deforming themselves in response” ²
Our 300.000 year old bodies are evolved, which means adapted to live in a natural environment such as a jungle or savanna. Our modern environment—flat surfaces, endless sitting, modern homes, processed food, and a desk job—does not at all reflect our ancient environment. There’s nothing objectively bad about these things; for a sloth, it’s not a bad thing to hang all day, but for a primate, it is. Chairs are neutral pieces of material, but it is not good for a primate to sit on them all day. This modern environment of ours is one of the primary reasons why many humans are unhealthy, and the first step is to become aware of it,
The environment that has been created often does not provide us with what we need and is primarily oriented toward machines rather than human beings. This is not a judgment but an interesting fact to ponder about our civilization: why have we become so obsessed with machines? Unlike natural evolution, which adapts species for survival, dysevolution is the process of altering our environment to become less suited for our species ³. Primates, and you are most likely one of them, are battling modernity on a constant basis because of an environment that doesn’t support us.
It must be stated that modern medicine has done a great job in ruling out various acute diseases and harmful events, like broken bones, deadly infections, and toothaches. But most modern ailments, such as chronic diseases and various musculoskeletal dysfunctions, are the result of our lifestyle (choices). We’ve created a world of convenience, and in return, we’ve become bent, restless, and alienated from nature. Convenience, whether it’s escalators, fast food delivery, or gym machines, is not good for primates.
Should we then move back into the jungle, or to the savanna? This is not a realistic option for most of us, so we need to take our past into account and apply practical steps to care for the needs of our ancient body. Simply put, this comes down to moving more, eating simply, sleeping naturally, spending time in nature, and following a natural rhythm of fasting and feasting rather than comfort and excess.
Core Pillars
These are the five pillars of our body, so we can benefit from everything that this area has to offer. There are, of course, a thousand more things that we can and need to be mindful of regarding our health, and like anything in the Seven Life Areas, we aim first to grasp the essentials and only then become more specific.
Movement
Through it, the body stays alive, strong, and adaptable. We are meant to move because we have a centralized nervous system. Whatever gets you off your couch, do that first before starting to fantasize about the ideal movement training—it doesn’t exist.
Rest & Recovery
Without rest, the body cannot renew and heal itself. It’s vital to give yourself the time and space to restore, so you can replenish your energy and deal with the countless responsibilities of your day-to-day life. For many, it’s harder to truly rest and go into a parasympathetic, restful state than it is to exercise.
Nourishment & Digestion
You exist because of your 37 trillion cells, which are in turn fueled by the food and water you nourish yourself with. Consciously choosing what foods to eat, what to drink, what not to consume, and the timing of ingestion, determines your energy and contributes to homeostasis.
Treatment & Care
Attending to dis-ease and imbalance brings healing, whether it means going to a medical doctor to mend a broken bone, a bodyworker to restore spinal alignment, or going through another type of therapy. We should invest a great deal into prevention and minimize intervention as much as possible.
Environment
The spaces and elements around us directly shape vitality and resilience. Health is not only what you do to your body, but also in what environment you’re immersed in. This is why the most common topic for small talk in the world is about the weather. By designing and influencing our environment and behavior therein, we can benefit immensely.
What does success look like?
In truth, all our bodies are different; we start from various backgrounds, genes, possibilities, but as a principle in the Seven Life Areas, the goal is not to achieve so and so. The aim is always for you to experience what’s possible given what you have, and to develop from where you are. For your Body, this could mean that you feel grounded and at home within yourself. Your proprioception (internal bodily awareness) and exteroception (external sensory awareness) are highly developed. You feel energized, eat healthy, drink well, and have a good self-care routine. You tend and relate deeply to your environment, and it supports you in return.
An underdeveloped body will be different for everybody. We all have weak spots, quite literally, like our lungs, part of the nervous system, or certain muscles, and it’s impossible to go over the whole list here. We do not need to tell a sick man he’s ill. Our Body demands our attention, and if ignored, it will come back to bite us. When we are sick, it becomes harder to work, socialize, pray, and create art. Interestingly enough, many stories show us. that it is possible to keep up one area while our health is collapsing, but the rest will suffer nonetheless. Our Body is the foundation of life: begin with the basics, come back to them, and then come back once more. You’ll enjoy boundless energy, maybe a decade or two extra of life, and the security of knowing you took care of the foundation first.
Relationship to the Other Life Areas
Body is in polarity with the area Relationships, which means that they exist on a spectrum. Practically, this entails that taking care of your health by, e.g., fasting, having a regular bedtime, and avoiding alcohol can easily result in the (perceived) loss of social interactions. This is at least something I’ve found when I started living healthier. My relationships initially didn’t improve, and it took me a few years to strike this balance. I remember when I told one of my ex-partners that I decided I was going to go to bed at 10 pm every day and quit partying. Long story short, I didn’t get quite the reaction I was hoping for.
This polarity is meant to be played with and does not need to be taken too literally, but it is a type of awareness that the 7LA aims to cultivate. It’s easy to see that when one becomes obsessed with their health, it can hurt one’s relationships. Or at least in the sense that it takes away energy that could otherwise be spent on one’s social life. I’ve found that this doesn’t really change over time, even though you can hang out with healthier people. By definition, your body, and this area, is one of solitude, and has more of an introverted or introspective quality to it. It’s therefore important to take care of your health and choose to enjoy life and celebrate when appropriate. Expressed another way, we can fast, and then we can feast.
Besides the polarity of Relationships, your Body stands in alignment with Mind and Matter, which means that these two areas have a greater influence over your Body than Heart and Spirit. Qualities such as a clear and disciplined mind will aid your health, and a higher quality material life will allow you to live with less stress, better food, in a better environment, so it’s important to cultivate those as well. In reverse, Body also has a positive influence on Mind and Matter, because better health will result in a clearer and calmer mind, and is an excellent basis for building your wealth.
A good start
Your Body is one of the most important areas of your life, for your health can support all other areas or drag them down by confiscating all energy in case of severe illness. Realizing that our modern environment and ancient body do not match, and actively taking practical steps that support your health, is to begin living a higher-quality life.
Footnotes
This quote is often attributed to Confucius, but that hasn’t been officially verified.
A masterpiece that will change your vision on health:
Primate change: How the world we made is remaking us by Vybarr Cregan-Reid (2018).The Story of the Human Body: Evolution, Health, and Disease by Lieberman, D. E. (2013).
