The current dominant cultural paradigm holds views that put the body into unnatural positions and situations. Below are some practices to reevaluate.

Linearity and Isolation

Modern exercise routines often focus on isolating a specific muscle group and working it with restrained, linear movements (squats, curls, etc). This practice comes out of the bodybuilding movement, where competitors were working on optimizing the physical appearance of the body to meet certain expectations. It is about appearance, not health.

In natural settings, humans rarely move just one part of the body repeatedly. Instead, the entire body is engaged in moving through three dimensions. Even when just walking — in a natural setting this involves stepping on irregular surfaces at uneven heights, swerving between obstacles, and sometimes ducking under or climbing around obstacles. The entire body is always engaged.

This is why people in indigenous cultures look very athletic but not at all like bodybuilders. Some examples of modern exercise that do engage the whole body (to varying degrees) include dancing, swimming (when non-linear), parkour, gymnastic floor exercises, arial gymnastics on non-linear surfaces like silks or hoops, and wrestling. Tree-climbing and jungle-gym play are also excellent exercises that our society senselessly limits to children.

Climbing

Around seven million years ago, primates started walking on the ground more often. Humans are far more adapted to being bipedal than those early ancestors. However, our bodies are not perfectly adapted to being upright, most notably our lower backs and knees.

Given our origins, our bodies are still very adept at climbing. It appears to be very beneficial to the body to at least hang from a branch or pull-up bar. Actually climbing a tree (with bare feet) engages the entire body in dynamic motion that our bodies revel in.

Shoes

Humans began migrating out of comfortable climates during the last ice age when they developed technologies of clothing and shoes to insulate themselves from the weather. Archaeological evidence of soft materials cannot date back very far, but these technologies seem to have been employed between 40 and 100 thousand years ago, well in the midst of the last glacial period.

Mostly shoes were just clothing for the feet: soft leather that was wrapped around the foot to keep warmth in and to protect against scrapes and jabs. When conditions were warm, people seem to have usually kept their feet bare. It was the Roman empire, just a couple thousand years ago, that made hard-soled shoes an every-day technology.

In other words, humans are not well adapted to hard-soled shoes. Our bodies are more suited to conditions where the foot conforms to the surface it is on, and the toes grab slightly when needed. Likewise, cities have only existed for at most four thousand years. Before that time, there were not many instances of long, flat, hard walking surfaces.

Modern shoes are optimized for comfort or running on perfectly flat surfaces, and act to minimize the amount of work the foot has to do to produce stability and drive. While those are useful benefits; our bodies react poorly to the hard, flat-bottomed, arched, tilted soles as well as to the constricting toe-shape. These features all act to turn off the foot, turning it into a brute surface without any nuance or intelligence. As a result, the rest of our body does not organize properly, and our entire posture suffers.

In modern culture, the best things one can do are:

• Avoid wearing shoes whenever possible.
• Wear “barefoot shoes” with a minimalist sole and a wide toebox.
• Avoid walking/standing/exercising/working on flat, hard surfaces whenever possible.

Note that all of these practices may be more difficult than wearing modern shoes. As noted above, modern shoes are optimized for performance and comfort, but not for health. Engaging the bare foot with an uneven surface takes more effort, causing the foot to dynamically engage and the rest of the body to compensate. This practice is less efficient, but much easier on the overall human body.

Chairs

Humans have very little history with chairs. The earliest records of the technology only date back less than four thousand years; and they were mostly symbols of power for heads of state or religion. It was less than a thousand years ago that they came into common usage in some parts of the world.

There is very little comfort in sitting with legs down and back resting against a surface. Very few surfaces like this exist in nature. Human children have to be forcibly made to sit still in chairs, as their bodies rebel against the feeling. Adults get so used to the feeling that they tend to only sit in chairs, and then complain of back problems.

Try avoiding chairs at all times, preferring stools, sitting cross-legged, or squatting. If a chair must be used, try sitting cross-legged in it, and/or shifting position frequently. These practices may involve discomfort and adaptation if your body has been trained for years to sit unnaturally in a chair.

Food

Connecting with your food inherently is connecting with your body. Connecting with the full food cycle (see the Food section of nature sensitivity training) brings you into the process of sustaining yourself within an ecosystem.

The most accessible points of connection are preparing your own food and then eating consciously. The next best thing after food you have grown yourself is food acquired from a local farmer (often through a farmers’ market or CSA). Prepare that food yourself (or better with your family or housemates), and eat it while paying attention to what you are doing and what you are eating.

In Progress

More sections of this page are forthcoming.

Return to: the Retreat Format section of the Business Plan.