Searching for Utopia – Jan Fabre
As we live and witness the struggle to move into the post-industrial age, more of us are experiencing a new type of stress and anxiety that didn’t exist in prior economies. Some would view this as natural selection and survival of the fittest. From the standpoint of cultural evolution, I completely agree. The important question is how this impacts our health and well-being in the meantime. We are essentially dealing with the consequences of progressively removing the humanity from the work experience. The pressure to sustain ourselves during this turbulent economy is leaving little down time to recover and restore. If all you do is work than where is the time for the human? Individuals are finding themselves accumulating more but still feeling empty and burnt out. Most people give their best energy to their work because we were taught to find our identity through our Job Title.
Yes stress is a normal part of life but it IS meant to come and go. Some stress is obvious: Divorce, Job Loss, Illness. Some stress is less intense but always there. It is when that low grade stress remains constant that our health begins to break down. Technology is breaking barriers in Western medicine. We now see the seamless relationship between the brain/mind and body. You can not achieve Optimal Health if both are not working properly and in unison. The only scale I like to use on a daily basis is a Perceived Scale. On a scale of 1 -10 how do you feel about (insert item)? In other words, we all have our own version of Pain, Love, Wealth, Purpose, Taste, Intensity, Risk. So when I ask my son what he thinks of a recipe that has ground flax seed, black beans and quinoa in it and I get a 7 – I feel pretty good about that. A 3 would let me know the recipe needs more work. In fitness, perceived exertion is our best way of monitoring a client. In Yoga, we refer to it as ‘your edge’.
Sadly when I ask clients to rate their stress level, my most common answer is an 11. I have gotten a 50 and even a 1000 but anything over a 7 on a constant basis is putting you at risk for some major physical or mental issues. This video is to remind you that you have more control of your health than you realize. True Optimal Health is built from the inside out. You probably know more than you realize. Some how you just found your way to the bottom of your priority list. It happens more often than we realize. I found my way there and that is when I knew I had to hit the reset button. Here are some of the resources my team and I created based on our research and experiences.
