Stop "fixing" - live fully

We live in an excessively pathologizing health and wellness culture. Everywhere you look, companies, doctors, clinics and spiritual gurus are selling solutions for any number of problems, issues, disorders, or conditions they want you to believe you have. Americans spend four trillion dollars every year on healthcare, and yet we're the most chronically ill and metabolically unhealthy society in history.

What gives?!?

Here's what this means for the three paths:

Mental Health - what I call Mind Medicine

Being mentally well does not equate to being emotionless, like the caricatured image of a blissed-out, perfectly serene, unbothered, smiling "mindful" person with perfect skin and stylish clothing sitting in lotus position on a sunny seaside cliff. Being emotional is not a problem: it is being alive and in touch with our humanity and the sacred drama of life. The aim should be to more adaptively and robustly engage with emotional energies, turning them to our favor, rather than trying to rid them from our experience (which is impossible, and which would make you a machine and therefore unalive, because machines have literally no vital life force energy in them whatsoever).

Becoming fully human means learning how to move with the difficulties, the elations and depressions, and the uncertainties of life, rather than trying to rid ourselves of feeling. Through the Mind Medicine path, you'll develop the skills, knowledge, and capacities necessary to stand within and walk through the inevitable challenges of life, which enables you to engage such challenges as opportunities for growth rather than problems to fix.

Physical health: personal training & holistic, functional fitness - what I call Somatic Strength

For the first time in human history, we live in a socioeconomic system that enables (and even encourages and celebrates) people to be chronically sedentary and keep their physical exertion to a minimum. Indeed, the values built-in to the culture of occupational prestige and social class convince people that they have "made it" if they secure a job that doesn't require them to use their body in a physical manner. But the irony here is that this is actually extremely unhealthy!

We are evolved to move regularly, in a variety of ways, and against resistance. Such load-bearing and tensional movement is actually necessary to keep us healthy: this strengthens our muscles and bones, and maintains the structure and function of our fascia, as well as supports the vitality of all our other life support systems, such as the immune system, cardiovascular system, endocannabinoid system, neurological system, and digestive system. So, like with mental health, the solution is not to avoid or escape the need to move, exert, and challenge ourselves physically - rather, we must embrace our corporeality and leverage our evolutionary, kinetic heritage to maintain our physical health throughout our lifetime.

In fact, maintaining physical strength and kinetic function is literally one of the most important factors in long-term health. Dr. Ben Bikman, leading metabolic health researcher and professor of cell biology, describes it this way:

"Muscle mass and strength are more than just markers of fitness; it's more than looking good in the mirror. They are among the strongest predictors of longevity, actually. For example, large cohort studies...have shown that individuals with sarcopenia [muscle wasting associated with aging and chronic disease] face a 20-30% higher risk of all-cause mortality compared to those with healthy muscle mass. To put that in perspective, that kind of number blows other things, like LDL cholesterol, out of the water.

"Muscle loss is one of the strongest predictors of death, more so even than fat and many chronic diseases. ...But there's hope; resistance training, high-quality protein, and anti-inflammatory nutrients...can reverse this."

Soulcraft™ - synthesizing mind, body, spirit, and soul

Soulcraft™ is the modern approach to the ancient art of growing and maturing holistically, across an entire lifetime. This is for anyone who feels connected to a "spiritual" dimension of life but doesn't want to subscribe to a specific doctrine, system, organization, or institution. The approach was developed by the eco-depth psychologist Bill Plotkin, PhD, who developed a model of human development and maturation that dynamically and practically integrates a "three dimensional" Self comprised of ego, spirit, and soul.

This model allows us to be fully human because it does not view the ego/social self as simplistically "bad" or in need of fixing, transcending, or salvation. Rather, Soulcraft is a strengths-based and competency-based approach that seeks a creative, adaptive, and practically relevant synthesis of the three interdependent dimensions of a holistic human Self: ego, spirit, and soul. Such a synthesis requires not a repudiation, denigration, or transcendence of our embodiment, as is common in many spiritual traditions, but the opposite: our humanness is embraced as an integral means of fully manifesting our soul nature as sacred, cosmic beings inhabiting Earth for a time.

The way that I practice Soulcraft is by understanding the body not as mere "physical stuff" but as a field and expression of consciousness. Indeed, this is what our best sciences, and many ancient wisdom traditions, tell us: consciousness is primary, and physical matter is a creation of that "fundamental awareness," not the other way around. So, rather than trying to gain "enlightenment" by transcending our embodiment, we cultivate a corporeal consciousness by more fully experiencing life through our unique bodily form. This approach avoids the all-too-common spiritual materialism and spiritual bypassing characteristic of many so-called "new age" spiritual practices. Rather than escapist "transcendence" (ultimately, in this form of life, you can transcend yourself insofar as you can jump over yourself), Soulcraft is all about immanence: more thoroughly embracing the complexities and inner magic of the tangible, living world.

"Soulcraft" is a registered trademark of William B. Plotkin, PhD