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Elliott Dacher on Integral Health

I’m still savoring Elliot Dacher‘s excellent new book, Aware, Awake, Alive. Obviously, I’m interested in the whole notion of Integral Health in general, and Dacher has perhaps done more than anyone to articulate just what an integral vision of health means, distinguishing an integral approach from both conventional medicine and complimentary/alternative (CAM) approaches. Here’s how Dacher puts it in Aware Awake Alive:

The word “integral” means unitary or one. It refers to a far-reaching health and well-being that addresses all of the important aspects of our lives. There are four components of an integral health. They correspond to the four central aspects of our life. The first two are highly personal — our physical and mental well-being. The second two relate to our interaction with others — our interpersonal relationships and our relationship to the larger culture and planetary community. […] A concern for each of these [interconnected] aspects of life is essential if we are to resist and recover from disease, optimize well-being and reach towards our full human potential.

Dacher points out that conventional medical science does indeed acknowledge the fact — supported by both research and common sense — that multiple factors impact our health. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard folks who embrace some vision of holistic health crow on about how modern medicine is completely ignorant of the well-established connections between physical, psychological and cultural aspects of health and illness. One need only talk to the medical professionals in one’s local area to be disabused of this simplistic notion. Certainly in my experience at least, the vast majority of healthcare professionals are quite aware of the complexities involved in maintaining health and treating illness. The problem, as Dacher describes it, is not the lack of information supporting a multidimensional view of health, but rather “that our singular focus on biology keeps us from implementing this knowledge.”

The main point that Dacher stresses again and again in the book, and the main thing that distinguishes an integral approach to health from both conventional and CAM approaches, is that inner development is both the basis for and the driving force toward the attainment of integral health. Most CAM approaches promote alternative remedies, treatments and therapies, which is fine as far as it diversifies and optimizes the toolkit that healthcare practitioners have at their disposal. However, what characterizes a truly integral approach is:

the turn inward and reliance on our inner capacities, rather than on remedies and therapies. The reliance is on ourselves rather than on practitioners. So [the important distinction is] between a variation on biological medicine, which merely increases our medical tool kit, and an authentic vision of integral health that results from inner development.

This vision of an integral health resulting from a focus on inner development is precisely what is described in detail in both Aware, Alive, Awake and in Dacher’s previous book, Integral Health. I highly recommend both of these books. Perhaps some day soon I’ll actually finish reading Aware, Alive, Awake in its entirety so that I can write a proper review!

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Elliot Dacher on the process of entanglement with mental activity

I’m savoring an excellent book right now: Aware, Awake, Alive by Elliot Dacher. Dacher’s previous book, Integral Health, outlines and describes one of the main models of Integral Health that has inspired my work on this site. I will do a proper review of Aware, Awake, Alive once I’ve had time to read and process it all. For now I’d just like to share my enthusiasm for the book, and to post a snippet for discussion.

I’ve read many, many books about mindfulness and meditation practices, but Dacher has a way of framing and explaining things that I find to be particularly lucid and helpful. Here’s how he explains the process of becoming entangled with mental activity:

As soon as we are enmeshed in mental activity we further elaborate it by superimposing upon it old perspectives and stories stored in memory. In this way we turn simple, unadorned, and brief mental movements into complex mental events which are largely imaginary, and more old than new. What was once a momentary neurological blip appears to assume a life of its own.

I like how Dacher uses the term “mental movement” to talk generally about all aspects of automatic mental activity (thoughts, feelings, mental images, and sensory impressions). This concept fits very nicely with the general theory of Somatics that Thomas Hanna has articulated in the context of his work in neuromuscular re-education (I’ve been long interested in how somatics, psychology, and spirituality can be integrated in a single model of personal transformation). Dacher goes on to explain how enmeshment in mental activity continues to hijack our attention and cloud our minds:

Once we elaborate a mental movement we then add feelings and emotions […]. That leads to a proliferation of further mental activity which includes fear, anxiety, anger, desire, aversion, and so on. Then, we act out this personalized and imaginary story in the outer world through our speech and actions. A small mental blip, which would naturally come and go, becomes our life, and the life that is actually happening in the moment is lost.

Dacher offers several perspectives and practices that help us to undermine this habit of mental entanglement, and more generally he articulates a vision of optimal health and human flourishing that, while based in ancient wisdom teachings, is also framed in terms that make perfect sense in the context of modern healthcare. For whatever reason, I find Dacher’s vision to be particularly powerful and compelling as I continue to engage with various integral health practices. I’ll dive into all this in much more detail once I finish the book!

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The Embodiment of Freedom: An integral approach to optimal health and personal transformation (Part 4: Repression & socialization)

The habitual, unconscious, hegemonic, “hammer” approach of the dissociated bodymind is reinforced in at least two ways: through fearful repression and through socialization. First, let’s look at how sensual alienation is rooted in the individual’s tendencies to repress and deny certain experiences.

Although fulfilling peak experiences are the fruit of the integrated bodymind, they are not the only variety. Intense experiences of the lived-body can often be of intense fear, hurt, and other “bad stuff.” Human beings, equipped as we are with our fine-tuned conceptual capacities, will understandably draw on those capacities in response to pain or fear that is experienced as threatening or overwhelming in some way. When a fully embodied life gets too frightening, or hurts too much, a person can put some safe distance between themselves and their experience by centering awareness on conceptual processes. In this way, the basic I-it stance of sensual alienation rests partly on a habituated repressive response to pain and fear. It’s interesting to note that, ultimately, bodymind dissociation may be rooted in that most pervasive of fears — the fear of death.

In other words, to fundamentally identify with the body is to confront one’s own mortality. Whereas the biological world of the lived body is one of continual flux and flow, of continual birth, death, decay and renewal, the world of thought gives the illusion of persistence and permanence. The concept “me,” for instance, is persistent and basically stable over time. “Me” today is the same “me” as I was ten years ago, and will presumably be the same “me” ten years from now. Yet the actual me-in-the-flesh is born, continually changes throughout life on all levels, and eventually dies. Thoroughly wrapped up in and identified with the stable self-concept “me,” I can bask in the illusion that I’ve stepped off the train of continual change, the train ride that will eventually reduce “my” body to something along the lines of fertilizer or worm-food. Thus, it’s the sheer gravity of imminent death that may, at least partly, underly people’s tendency to dissociate from the world of the lived body.

Psychologically, a threat to any value that an individual holds essential to his or her existence as a self — be it a threat to physical life, the love of a cherished person, economic status, athletic prowess — can trigger a repressive response. If one identifies with being an active caretaker, for instance, then having kids “leave the nest” can feel overwhelmingly threatening to one’s sense of self. Repression in this scenario might range from an out-right denial that one’s kids are growing up, to an unyielding stance of treating one’s adult children as if they were still little kids. The main point is that human beings, when we feel that our fundamental sense of self is threatened in some way, can turn our attention away from whatever aspects of our immediate situation elicit fear or anxiety. Although the initial response of repression can often be a creative use of one’s capacities to get through the rough times of life, the habitual tendency toward dissociation and self-alienation leaves our bodymind in a continual state of contraction across situations, creating a condition of perpetual distress. We have noted how this distress is rooted in the individual’s own repressive capacities; now we can move to a discussion of how the tendency to be habitually dissociated is reinforced by the processes of socialization.

Although on an individual level, a person may tend to distance oneself from sensual levels of experience in response to a directly perceived threat of some kind, one typically moves toward a habituated stance of sensual alienation in response to a cultural situation that continually encourages and demands dissociation. From the time of Plato right up through the Cartesian foundations of modern science, the notion that the human being is fundamentally divided into mind and body, spirit and flesh, has been so basic to the Western worldview that, like water to a fish, it is largely taken for granted. Of course, few intelligent and sensitive people are likely to profess explicit views and philosophies that support a strict separation of mental and bodily-felt realms of experience. In fact, many are perhaps inclined to claim that their lives are unaffected by such “metaphysical” concerns — “I feel like I’m plenty embodied, thank you very much.” Nonetheless, the doctrine of mind-body dualism shapes people’s experience because it is inexorably tied to our social institutions, which were indeed founded on views of reality that did, explicitly or implicitly, embrace the separation of objective thinking from subjective feeling. Cultural institutions are usually slow to change, so regardless of the current shift in outlook, most Westerners continue to be born into and bred on a world of sharp dualisms. These dualisms can insidiously convince us of the unreliability of our own perceptions, encouraging a dependency on the judgments of publicly designated “experts.” The result is a belief system that encourages conformity and is designed to maintain the status quo. These doctrines are anchored into people’s living bodies via a myriad of implicit teachings — a nonverbal system of indoctrination that trains people to instinctively look outside their directly felt experience for direction. A teacher of mine, Don Hanlon Johnson, calls this entire project — i.e. the many ways in which we learn to integrate these beliefs and techniques of dissociation into our lives — the “technology of alienation.”

In the next installment I’ll explore this “technology of alienation” in more detail, and then point to ways that we can move away from this alienation toward levels of greater conscious connection and deeper self awareness.

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The Embodiment of Freedom: An integral approach to optimal health and personal transformation (Part 3: Bodymind dissociation)

The notion that a typical mature, well-adjusted person in our culture is alienated from or out of touch with their bodies may seem, at first blush, curious if not absurd. Most of us yelp out in pain when we stub our toes, enjoy the pleasure of making love, notice when we’re hungry, and are saddened by tragedy. Obviously, to say that one is relatively disembodied does not mean one is an anesthetized “floating head” bumping into things all the time. The issue is far more subtle and compelling, having to do with the quality of our relationships to self, others, and environment, and how our experience of those relationships is shaped by the processes of development and socialization. Disembodiment simply refers to a diminished capacity to be sensually aware and the subsequent inability to respond to life’s continual challenges from the fullness of such a sensually grounded awareness.

That human beings become increasing able to think as they mature into adulthood obviously endows the developing person with greater potential and possibility in life. Contrary to the popularized personal growth motto of “lose your mind and come back to your senses,” any holistic inquiry into personal health and healing realizes the value of cognitive development. But there is a difference between adding a layer of depth in human awareness (moving from a vibrant, feeling-centered being to a being who also has a well developed capacity to think — a “bodymind” if you will), and losing touch with basic levels of awareness (becoming a thinking-centered being who has lost much of their capacity to express themselves from a sensually-grounded awareness). The latter is a pathological state of affairs that, unfortunately, is built in to the very fabric of modern society, shaping the lives of individuals in ways that distort and deny the fullness of experience.

Phenomenologist Elizabeth Behnke calls the tendency to distance ourselves from our own bodily lives the “I-it structure of experience,” which often manifests in our culture as the unshakable sense that our perceiving selves are situated somewhere “in our heads.” From this I-it perspective, my legs are perceived as “down there” as opposed to me being “up here.” When I feel pain in my back or head I say that “it” hurts. My sense is that I have experiences or that experiences happen to me. An emotion, for instance, might be perceived as if it were some “thing” that was temporarily affecting me in some way.

This mode of bodily experiencing, undoubtedly the norm for most of us most of the time, has to do with our sense of identity or who we take ourselves to be. While bodily impulses and feelings may be perceived, they are experienced as outside of one’s essential identity. Philosopher Ken Wilber (in his book No Boundary) has described this way of experiencing as one in which an artificial boundary is perceived in regard to one’s total organism, such that the entire bodily-felt realm is projected outward as not-self. Thus, a typical Westerner is likely to claim that they are their mind while they simply have a body. In the mature, well-adjusted, normal adult, this bodymind fragmentation doesn’t mean that one would fail to notice being on fire. It does mean, however, that one operates from a “locus of identity” that is situated on the ego side of an ego-flesh perceptual boundary. An individual centered on the mind or egoic side of this boundary may be aware of bodily experience, but only as an object of awareness. As psychologist R.D. Laing (in his book The Divided Self) describes this “unembodied” self: “The body is felt more as one object among other objects in the world than as the core of the individual’s own being.” In this subtle yet telling way, mind and body are dissociated in awareness, and perception of self and world is thereby distorted to fit that dissociation.

It is fairly clear that this level of bodymind dissociation is considered normal and healthy in our culture. Many of us certainly live as if we were essentially minds at the helm of our bodies—keeping them healthy and satisfied for as long as we find ourselves in them. When we experience back pain, the typical response is to go to a specialist to get it fixed or adjusted, just as we do our cars. Anxiety, especially when not consciously linked to obvious circumstances, is often treated as a “thing,” a symptom to be vanquished by medication or positive thinking.

The difference between the dissociated and embodied modes of experience may sound trivial in the abstract, but we’ve all experienced the contrast keenly in our daily lives. It is the difference between merely recognizing you are sad, and feeling that sadness in the full release of crying. It is the difference between merely believing you love someone, and actually being in love with that person, feeling the intensity of connection in the moment. Anyone who’s ever “lost themselves” in a sunset, or in a musical jam-session, or in the tender embrace of a loved one, can recognize this shift toward full-bodied perception. Actually, one’s “self” is not at all lost in this manner of experiencing. What’s lost is only one’s tendency to keep their attention confined to the thought-centered processes of the total psychophysical organism.

In contemporary society, our capacity to deeply enter into the sensual flow of experience is typically utilized less and less as we adapt to an increasingly mind-centered lifestyle, and it becomes atrophied and left poorly developed. This relative disembodiment places unnecessary limits on people’s personal health and growth. Thus, a person may recognize that they’re sad, anxious, or depressed, perceiving these feeling states well enough to talk about them in quite sophisticated ways, yet nonetheless remain stuck in the same familiar patterns. Consciously unable (and unconsciously unwilling) to engage personal issues in their sensual fullness, we necessarily struggle to get through and beyond the inner conflicts and issues that hold us back in life.

The I-it mode of experiencing is certainly not, in-and-of-itself, a bad thing. Problems can and do arise, however, when an I-it mode of perceiving and responding becomes so habituated that, without realizing it, human beings gradually lose their capacity to experience life in any other way. Instead of a mode of perceiving and responding consciously utilized in an appropriate situation, I-it objectivity becomes the unconscious way one approaches nearly all situations. As we shall see, the dis-identification with our sensual existence that characterizes the I-it mode of being, when operating in a habitual and unconscious fashion, can keep people stuck in unhealthy and unfulfilling ruts, distorting people’s experience in ways that interfere with the process of personal transformation. When you approach the world with only a hammer, so to speak, everything starts to look like a nail. And if this illusion becomes too convincing, things start to get all bent out of shape.

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The Embodiment of Freedom: An integral approach to optimal health and personal transformation (Part 2: Defining terms)

"Transformation" by Rick Hocker (Click photo to go to http://rickhocker.com)
As a student of psychology, both academically and in the broadest sense, I have surveyed a number of practices and fields of study that strive to help individuals become more fully themselves. These can generally be described as approaches to personal transformation — endeavors that work to provide a supportive context where individuals can learn to become more fully aware of their personal world of experience, and are encouraged to utilize that expanded awareness as a source of intelligent responsiveness and self-expression. What transforms in this process is the mode from which a person experiences self and world, such that the quality of one’s relations to self, others, and environment changes in enriching ways as one’s depth of awareness and range of responsiveness grows.

This process whereby people move from a relatively unhealthy, inefficient, unfulfilling mode of functioning toward one of increased livelihood, health, and growth potential, has been understood in many different ways. The approaches that have had the greatest impact on my own life are those that understand personal transformation in terms of embodiment. A variety of theorists and practitioners — representing such fields as psychotherapy, somatics, phenomenology, ecology, psychology, and mindfulness meditation — have contributed a wide range of overlapping, interpenetrating perspectives that recognize the transformative potential of developing one’s capacity to be aware of and consciously responsive from embodied modes of experiencing (by which I mean experiences of bodily sensations and feelings — i.e. somatic/kinesthetic/proprioceptive experience in general). These perspectives share a broad understanding of the transformative process, which can be generally stated as follows:

Human beings often remain stuck in relatively unfulfilling, unhealthy patterns or ways of living in large part due to a diminished state of basic self-awareness. Many individuals in this state are considerably diminished in their capacity to be aware of and respond from feelingful, sensual levels of experiencing . In order to move toward health, fullness of living, and actualization of potential, a person in this dissociated state must develop his or her existing self-sensing capacities and learn to authentically express him- or herself from this deeper, fuller sense of self.

This general view of personal transformation has been understood in at least the following ways: in terms of psychological processes (i.e. dissociation and integration), interpersonal dynamics, socio-cultural/political factors, people’s relations with the earthly environment, sensorimotor functioning, and spiritual realization. The following inquiry is offered as one of many possible integral approaches to optimal health and personal transformation. I use the term integral in a broad sense, understanding an integral approach to be any that brings multiple perspectives together in an effort to address the multiple dimensions of human life. In this sense, integral is more or less interchangeable with terms like integrative and holistic or any other term meant to convey “whole person” approaches to health and personal growth. Although integral is perhaps less familiar than the other terms mentioned, I use it simply as a matter of personal preference, no doubt owing to the influence of both Haridas Chaudhuri’s model of Integral Psychology (Chaudhuri was the founder of the California Institute of Integral Studies, where I studied for several years) and to Ken Wilber’s “four quadrant” integral theory, which I find to be quite useful in framing “big-picture” multidimensional perspectives.

In my next post I will explore this inquiry’s primary assumption: that life (at least in the modern West) is indeed plagued with a tendency toward alienation and dissociation, an attitude that drives a wedge between the thinking and feeling dimensions of being human. This fragmentation of consciousness not only renders us strangers to ourselves in a deep sense, but it also distorts and deadens the quality of relationship that is possible interpersonally, and between people and the earthly environment. Then I’ll look at some ways of facilitating personal transformation that arose in response to this alienated psycho-social situation, focusing on a select few approaches within the fields of somatics and psychotherapy.

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The Embodiment of Freedom: An integral approach to optimal health and personal transformation (Part 1: Introduction to the inquiry)

A view of the Organ Mountains from my neighborhood in Las Cruces, NM
We’ve all had moments when we feel particularly full of life, especially present to whatever we’re engaged in — times when we’re simply more on, more there, more tuned in to life than usual. I was in my mid-twenties when I started to realize that these experiences of wakeful presence and intense vitality were becoming few and far between in my life, scattered here and there amidst the languid grind of everyday existence. The more I inquired, the more it became increasingly clear that I was also progressively losing touch with the sense of wonder and possibility that I had come to know as the deepest, most precious part of myself. As the prize of maturity stood waiting for me to grasp hold, I was paralyzed by the fear that somehow this growing sense of disconnection and diminished vitality was simply the terrible and inevitable cost to be paid, the price of admission into the world of adulthood. Before too long, however, I’d be graced with another wide-awake moment and, for a time anyway, I would feel certain that there was a better way forward, a way of becoming more connected and more fully alive instead of less so as we get older.

Abraham Maslow used the term “peak experiences” to describe these windows of full-living, and my initial question regarding them was three-fold: What is the nature of such experiences; why are they becoming so few and far between in my life; and can I learn to live in such a way as to have more of them?

Over the years this initial inquiry has become a sustained, passionate pursuit of personal truth that has always been, at heart, toward a deceptively simple end: to be as fully myself as often as I can be. Along the way I have discovered a few things that I hope others will find to be interesting and useful. I also hope that writing my way through the process — of where I’ve been, where I am, and what may lie ahead — might open new avenues of inquiry and new territory to explore as I continue on this journey.

My intention is to update this series of posts regularly — at least once a week. In the next installment I’ll define in detail what I mean by the terms “integral” and “personal transformation”, and I’ll also lay out a broad outline of some of the territory I hope to explore.

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Book Review: The Sustainable You, by John Loupos

The Sustainable You

It’s been over twenty years since Somatics pioneer Thomas Hanna published his seminal article titled Clinical Somatic Education—a concise outline of what he hoped would become “A new discipline in the field of health care”. A brilliant philosopher and gifted writer, Hanna applied his considerable genius toward improving the lives of others, not only through writing many books and articles, but also through developing a system of hands-on “bodywork” techniques (administered by a practitioner) and self-care exercises (done by the client at home) designed to improve a client’s sensory awareness and motor control. After fifteen years or so of working with clients, Hanna found that his system of Clinical Somatic Education (also called Hanna Somatic Education or HSE) was remarkably effective in resolving many of the aches, pains, and restrictions of movement people came to him with.

I’m not sure about the timeline exactly, but right around the time Hanna published his vision of HSE in 1990, he also (for the first time) began to train others to become HSE practitioners. During the course of this inaugural training, Hanna was tragically killed in an automobile accident. As with any school of thought stemming from a single, charismatic founder or leader, the Somatics movement lost a great deal of steam after Hanna’s death. In the two decades since, Hanna’s bold vision for a somatics-based mainstream health care discipline has not yet come to pass. There have, however, been heroic efforts put forward over the years by Hanna’s widow, Eleanor Criswell (through The Novato Institute for Somatic Research and Training), and several HSE students to preserve and carry forward Hanna’s work and legacy. Lawrence Gold, who trained with Hanna in 1990, has created Somatics.com, a site chock full of resources and fresh perspectives. Steve Aronstein, another certified HSE practitioner trained by Hanna’s “Wave One” students, went on to found Somatic Systems Institute in Northampton MA, the first organization to offer practitioner training outside of Novato, CA. And now we have John Loupos, trained in HSE at Somatic Systems Institute, who has just published The Sustainable You, a fantastic new book updating and expanding upon Hanna’s Clinical Somatic theory in light of recent research findings and the many scientific advances, particularly in neuroscience, we’ve seen in the years since Hanna’s death.

Loupos takes the reader through all the fundamentals of Hanna’s general theory of Somatics, making a compelling case that HSE is needed now more than ever, given the swelling numbers of aging baby boomers taxing an already overburdened and expensive health care system. Loupos situates Somatics within a modern health care context that has seen a growing acceptance of complimentary and alternative (CAM) approaches as well as numerous advances in neuroscience that lend support to Hanna’s approach in particular. Loupos also contributes some new and quite useful wrinkles to a general somatic theory, most notably his concept of an “archeology of insults”—i.e. the accumulation of stresses and their effects on the body over the course of a lifetime—and his perspective on how the effects of these insults can be reversed or minimized to improve neuromuscular functioning through the process of somatic education. Loupos also clearly lays out for us how improvements in sensory awareness and motor control (the fruits of HSE) can do what conventional approaches like drugs and surgery often cannot: directly and non-invasively address the root cause of many of the most common problems that people typically suffer from by the time they reach middle age. These problems (like aches, pains, restrictions of movement, decreased vitality, etc.) are often wrongly considered to be the result of structural degeneration or else part of a presumably inevitable decline that comes with getting older. This “myth of aging” has been keenly deconstructed by Hanna, and Loupos nicely expands upon the analysis here.

Loupos not only gives us information, fresh perspectives and reasons for hope as we get older, but he also invites us to experience the fruits of HSE for ourselves, leading the reader through a series of somatic movement patterns designed to refine awareness and control in some commonly restricted areas of the body. He also offers us his years of experience as both a martial arts instructor and a Somatics practitioner. I especially appreciate how Loupos weaves in personal reflections, philosophical speculations, and observations about life in general, always being careful and clear to distinguish between these lively flourishes of creative thinking and the more technical and research-based aspects of neurophysiology, kinesiology and anatomy that support the use of HSE as a uniquely efficacious system of health maintenance.

I highly recommend this book to anyone with an interest in integral approaches to health, and I can’t imagine anyone who couldn’t benefit from experiencing Hanna Somatic Education first-hand. Enjoy!

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Q & A with Sam Harris

As I continue to explore questions of human potential with an eye toward balancing open-minded inquiry and rigorous, evidence-based critical thinking, no one has been more inspiring to me in recent years than Sam Harris. Especially considering his recent focus on well-being in general and the value of transpersonal (i.e. “spiritual”) experience in particular, Harris has much to contribute to any discussion about Integral Health. While many deride Sam and his fellow “New Atheists” (like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens) for being basically arrogant dicks, few haters seem to appreciate the degree to which Harris has engaged both his critics and fans in thoughtful dialogue. I am continually amazed at how articulate and nuanced this guy can be when responding extemporaneously to questions and criticism. Case in point, check out this new video of Harris answering questions submitted by users on Reddit.com:

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When Stress Becomes Stressed Out – 5 Ways to Outsmart the Invisible Killer: Presented by Dr. Neha Sangwan

Dr. Neha Sangwan
Dr. Neha Sangwan

[Thanks to William Harryman at Integral Options Café for posting about this talk.]

I’m impressed with Dr. Sangwan, and her new venture called Intuitive Intelligence strikes me as a fine example of an approach to Integral Health. Here’s a bit about the philosophy behind their approach:

• i Think: How I Think impacts how I feel, what I eat, and what I say. All of these affect whether I’m inspired to do the right things for my health.
• i Say: What I Say is related to my stress level and how I think and feel at any given time. The conversation I’ve been avoiding can affect how healthy I eat, and what I do (exercise or sleep).
• i Feel: How I Feel is a direct result of what I think and say in relationships. My feelings are set in motion by how I eat (habits), and what I do (exercise).
• i Eat: What I Eat affects everything from how I think , my moods and how I feel, to what I say. Chances are if my eating is erratic, my motivation to do (action, productivity & results) will be also!
• i Do: What I Do, ranging from exercise to pursuing my goals, are motivated by what I think, feel and say. My choices are greatly influenced by how healthy (or unhealthy) I eat.

Sounds pretty integral to me. Now onto her recent talk at Google. Enjoy!:

When Stress Becomes Stressed Out – 5 Ways to Outsmart the Invisible Killer

Presented by Dr. Neha Sangwan.

ABSTRACT [From GoogleTechTalks]

You love your job. You also feel stressed by the constant pressure to perform. Sometimes short-term stress is helpful. It can motivate you to meet a deadline or even prompt a rapid response that can save your life. However, 95% of all illness is caused or worsened by ongoing stress. When you’re stressed-out, your body releases a powerful set of hormones that raise your blood pressure, hinder your critical thinking and keep you up at night. And the more you’re exposed to stress, the greater your capacity to numb out your body’s warning signals that you’re headed for disaster. So the question is; When you think you’re being productive, how do you know if you’re actually on the slippery slope to burnout? In this experiential talk, learn to outsmart the invisible killer by discovering 5 ways you can respond to internal and external stress.

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Dennis Kucinich: The for-profit health care system is the problem

I like Dennis Kucinich. The guy has guts, and he’s persistent in arguing for universal, not-for-profit healthcare, despite being ignored by his colleagues in Congress and by the majority of Americans. He’s long been one of the very few truly progressive voices in Washington. Incidentally, an effort is underway to eliminate Kucinich’s congressional district.

Whether or not one agrees with Kucinich’s perspective on healthcare, it’s important to note that our economic and social systems have a huge impact on health. In terms of the four-quadrant, cover-all-the-bases, integral approach to health that I’m exploring on this website, Kucinich is offering an inter-objective, lower-right quadrant perspective. Health is not just a matter of how our physical organism is functioning; not just about our state of mind; not just about our cultural norms. All three of these dimensions must be taken into account, in addition to the social systems dimension, which Kucinich addresses here from his own perspective [Congressman Kucinich delivered the following statement on the Floor of the House of Representatives on January 19, 2011]:

“We have a for-profit health care system, where $800,000,000,000 every year is spent on corporate profits, stock options, executive salaries, advertising, marketing and the cost of paperwork.

“In the for-profit system that we have, nearly one out of every three health care dollars goes for things not related to health care. If we took that $800,000,000,000 and spent it on care for people, we’d have enough money to cover all medically necessary needs in addition to dental care, vision care, mental health care, prescription drugs and long-term care.

“We would not have a situation where 50 million Americans don’t have any health insurance. Americans would not have to worry about losing everything they have worked a lifetime for because they have an illness in the family.

“This debate is the wrong debate. A for-profit model is the wrong model. We should be talking about universal health care, single-payer not-for-profit health care, Medicare for All, quality health care for all Americans.”