The FULLHUMAN Approach
The approach I take in my work is guided by * principles. These are:
- Resource-oriented
- Holistic, inclusive, multidimensional
- Machines are the problem, not humans; what is human is essentially good
Resource-oriented
"What's wrong with the world is that we're not asking what's right." - G.K. Chesterton
We could say the same for the modern state of health, wellness, fitness, medicine, and mindfulness: what's wrong with these industries is that we're not asking what's right with people. Instead, the mainstream of these professions is content to focus on what's wrong. This pathologizing approach emphasizes treatment of symptoms but rarely addresses root causes, leaving people with chronic conditions and only superficial, temporary relief.
At FULLHUMAN Movement+Wellness, I take the opposite approach. I believe that you are inherently capable, competent, resilient, adaptive, and intelligent. If you're suffering from cognitive or kinesthetic challenges (such as depression, anxiety, limited mobility, aches, pains, stiffness, insomnia, irritability, low energy, inability to focus, etc.), the problem isn't reflective of something "wrong" with you. The problem is that we live within a highly unnatural socioeconomic environment that degrades our intrinsic ability to maintain robust health and wellness across a lifetime.
The solution, therefore, is to recover and relearn the innate strengths and capacities we all contain, thereby restoring natural coherence to our integrated mind~body systems. This approach addresses root causes (the disruption of our normal, adaptive functioning by external forces) rather than merely treating symptoms (which are signs from the intelligence of the body that something if "off" needs adjustment). By leveraging the abilities you already have, we restore the integrated, functional wholeness that constitutes health and cultivate adaptive abilities to maintain such wellness across a lifetime.
Holistic, Inclusive, Multidimensional
"Full" human also refers to the fact that health, wellness and fitness involve literally all aspects of our being, not just the physical condition of a supposedly bio-"mechanical" system of levers and pulleys ("the body"). "Health" derives from the Old English term hælþ, meaning "wholeness." But this is no mere linguistic matter. Research in the life and mind sciences, amassed over the past century, has revealed that this is literally true: genuine health reflects a state of inclusive wholeness and integrated, adaptive function of all the dimensions of our being that we name separately, in abstract concept. This means that everything we call mental, emotional, cognitive, physical, somatic, kinesthetic, and mindful is literally and figuratively all wrapped up together. (It is literally wrapped together by the fascia.)
Our lives, our biology, and our conscious experiences do not come neatly divided according to general, simplistic abstractions such as "the mind" and "the body." In fact, there is no good scientific evidence for such a duality. As John Dewey said in his address at the New York Academy of Medicine in 1927,
"Our language is so permeated with consequences of theories which have divided the body and mind from each other, making separate existential realms out of them, that we lack words to designate the actual existential fact."
The "actual existential fact" is the "unity of mind and body in action" as a "unified wholeness of operation." As Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela explain, "Living systems are cognitive systems, and living as a process is a process of cognition. ...cognition and the operation of the living system [are] the same thing." (from their book Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living).
Humans are inherently competent, capable, intelligent, and adaptive. The problem isn't us, the problem is a state of deconditioning by being forced to live in accordance with the mechanical and computational conditions of industrial society. Thus, health and fitness are a matter of recovering and expanding a natural, primordial state of wellness, not fixing something that's broken.
In a world increasingly dominated by machines, computers, and AI, one of our greatest needs is to become more fully human. Many people today have lost touch with -- or never fully experienced for themselves -- the immense strength, abilities and intelligence inherent in life. Marketing has taken advantage of this and we are now bombarded with advertisements telling us that we can cure all our ills, aches, pains, weakness, tiredness, and flaws if only we buy some new, "innovative" product, treatment or program. As a result, multiple generations of people have been conditioned to believe that humans are somehow inherently problematic and in constant need of "fixing." We are sold the lie that we are, supposedly, characteristically flawed, weak, inadequate, fragile or incompetent. Thus, the market is inflated with dramatic proclamations of needing to constantly "optimize" and "biohack" our bodies and minds into some contrived idea of transcendent, blissful wellness.
I completely reject this false narrative. Instead, I believe that humans are already amazingly optimized, inherently competent, resilient, adaptive, capable, and strong. We are, after all, the result of billions of years of evolution of living intelligence on Earth. We have survived the most extreme and demanding conditions for thousands of generations. And, paradoxically, we are now challenged by a whole new set of conditions never before encountered by humans.
It's true: today, hundreds of millions of people in industrialized societies are suffering from a wide range of acute and chronic health conditions and challenges. But this isn't because humans are inherently weak or sickly -- it's because we have been forced to live within a social system dominated by technologies that take us away from ourselves and deny us our innate need to move and think freely and naturally. By chronically depriving people of the vital need to move and exert themselves in practical, functional ways (as humans did for 99% of our existence on Earth), this socioeconomic system has caused widespread disease (literally dis-ease in the sense of a lack of ease experienced as depression, anxiety, insomnia, restlessness, fatigue, inability to focus, etc.) *.....
Americans spend four trillion dollars every year on healthcare, yet we are simultaneously the most chronically ill, metabolically unhealthy, depressed and anxious society in human history. What gives? Doubtless, there are many factors in this situation. I believe -- and a huge body of high-quality evidence from many streams of research demonstrates -- that one of the key issues is that most people are significantly deconditioned. Through the industrial and now high-tech era, for the first time in human history, machines and computers do a lot of our basic tasks (physical and cognitive) for us. This is fine, to a degree. Humans rely on tools and technologies to survive, and always have. But anything taken too far becomes unhealthy. And that's where we are today with physical exertion, movement, and cognition.
Due to such pervasive deconditioning by way of excessive technological offloading of countless tasks and experiences that are necessary for human health and longevity, our mind-body systems are being atrophied at dangerously fast rates. By trying to create the most easy, effortless, convenient and efficient life possible through the relentless acquisition of material comforts and technological gadgets, we have undermined the ability for most people to develop the innate strengths and abilities inherent in the human mind~body. And this has led to the wide range of symptoms that people try to eliminate through pharmaceutical drugs, surgeries, expensive treatments, biohacks, and supplements.
The trouble is, most of these products and services merely treat the symptom without addressing the root cause: we are deconditioned and over-mechanized and computerized. The body is not a machine and the mind is not a computer. These are simply bad metaphors unsupported by our best science.
What we know beyond a shadow of a doubt is that creating and maintaining a robust, adaptive, practical, holistic base of physical and cognitive fitness (supported by good nutrition) is literally the most powerful medicine available to humans. For instance, did you know that muscle loss is the greatest predictor of all-cause mortality, far more salient than other biomarkers such as cholesterol levels? *...
The Method
So, what does all this mean practically?
Real Human Connection
Fitness apps and AI can provide you with an abstract, general workout plan. But you aren't general and abstract: you are unique and have specific needs, goals, injuries, movement patterns, cognitive habits, and all the other stuff that makes us human and alive, such as emotions, doubts, hopes, imagination, frustrations, and the like. Computers know nothing of any of this. Any "advice" or "guidance" they give in relation to these experiences is also abstract and completely lacks any genuine empathy or consideration.
As your personal trainer and holistic health coach, I will walk your health and fitness journey with you. I will move with you, dialogue with you, feel with you, dream with you, and celebrate success with you.
