The Art is Long: Big Health and the New Warrior Activist

Many of us have heard the new findings: A heavy clipboard causes job interviewers to rate candidates as more “substantial.” A hard-backed chair causes subjects to drive a harder bargain in a negotiation. Using your non-dominant hand for a few minutes can reverse right-hander’s judgments of good and bad. Sitting up straight causes subjects to expres

Our extreme social sensitivity is even reflected in our sensitivity to pain. In a study reported in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior, researchers asked people to dance together in different conditions, some with synchronous movements, some without. They found that “Those who danced in synchrony experienced elevated pain thresholds, whereas

Albrecht studied the experiences of persistent drought and large-scale open-cut coal mining on individuals in Australia. In both cases, people exposed to environmental change experienced negative emotions, exacerbated by a sense of powerlessness and a lack of control.

In fact, our bodies are canaries in the coal mine of the modern world. They are screaming out, calling us to change. In this sense, we are our own “sentinel species.”

Always-on technologies keep us constantly hooked in. As a consequence, our lives have now become flat-line efforts of partial engagement; we’re never fully focused, but never truly relaxing either. Over time, we pay the price in the form of mediocre performance and a lingering sense of unhappiness.

Of course our bodies are massively connected with habitat. How could it be otherwise? Evolution favors the forms that are most intimately connected to their world. Any species that was even slightly insensitive to the world around it would be in grave danger.

In the same vein, we’re reminded of author Richard Louv’s description of “nature deficit disorder.” Louv recognizes our alienation from nature, but his choice of language is weak and conventional. His “nature deficit” and “Vitamin N” suggests that nature is something akin to a dietary supplement, something that we can purchase in a health food stor

No matter one’s culture, race, or place of birth, most of us have some sense of mother, father, hunter, warrior, healer, earth, and sky. These are the archetypes, the raw material of our cognition and in turn, our culture.

Carl Jung: “My self is not confined to my body. It extends into all the things I have made and all the things around me…Everything surrounding me is part of me.”