The other day Austin and I were listening to a Joe Rogan Experience podcast with Wim Hof. At one point they mentioned the need to balance our mental strain with our physical strain in order to become “happy, healthy & strong”. This phrase is one of Wim Hoff’s favorite it seemed, and is a good round phrase regarding the natural existence of a human truly in touch with their mental + physical selves.
If you don’t know about Wim Hoff, he is a regular fellow from the Netherlands who learned to gain control over his nervous system through simple deep breathing exercises and cold. Since then he has gained the rep of Ice Man and broken many world records relating to cold + physical ability, including intentionally shutting down an injected endotoxin. Pretty cool. I definitely recommend checking out his work, as it’s quite universally accessible, and now scientifically backed up. Check out this Vice documentary, or perhaps the afore mentioned podcast.
While listening to the podcast, I thought about humankind through history. I realized that in all the cultures I have experienced so far, we do not rely upon on our bodies’ physical strength + stamina as much as we have historically. It seems like physical labor was pushed into lower class workers, while upper class individuals focused on mental ability and social relations. Needy creatures, we humans tend to strive for more or want better for ourselves and those we love.
This stratification of labor definitely shows up in how our society interacts with and values different skills. Farming knowledge, for example, was of lower value at my school than athleticism, good looks, or even literary knowledge. Although many families depended on the local farmers for fresh produce and local meats + dairy products, it appeared that many people wanted for themselves or their children to have ’loftier’ goals than the physically laborious task of food management.
I reflected upon how much we strain our minds with incessant noise, communication, notifications, alarm clocks, structured or constrained thought etc. We very rarely see meditation or intentional journaling as positively reinforced classroom subjects, instead preferring critical thinking and exhaustive problem-solving techniques.
There are cases of divine intelligent illumination through meditation and similar practices, and historically spiritual connection was revered as a respected manner of acquiring knowledge. Many societies had/have spiritual workers, priests or priestesses, oracles, shamans etcetera that brought/bring wisdom to their people through esoteric manners. This connection seems to have fallen from grace with the uprising of science and analytical fact.
I recognized that our modern day amenities don’t always relieve stress, they simple transfer it. This goes back to simple comprehension of energy: that energy is constant and ever-changing mediums. As a species we work to make conveniences, but often overlook the stress created in order to sustain this convenience.
Not only does our health suffer from insufficient diet, pollution, unnatural electromagnetic energy, and the overstimulation from modern electronics—our muscular agility is no longer needed. Many people rarely go out to garden, forage or hunt for food, sometimes biking but usually driving to the store instead. We have driven ourselves away from our ability as strong competent humans to physically engage with our environment as we did in our ‘wilder’ days.
While my family did nod to the importance of natural skills and understanding how to work with our environment, it was clear that the society around me had bigger plans. As a young girl with a bright mind I was constantly encouraged to pursue math and science, since “we need to show the world girls are smart too” (quote credit, 7th grade math teacher).
The idea that my mental ability was more valued than my physical ability was regularly reinforced in my required P.E. (‘physical education’-- which never actually educated me about my body, just required some casual non-formative exercise, or dodging kick-balls hurled at you from upperclassmen in the name of hand-eye coordination). If I wasn’t going to be an athlete then I needed to hone my social skills to work in service, or my mental skills to get a good paying job in an accomplished field of study. When my physical ability finally did get recognition, it wasn’t because I was strong, flexible, a great sprinter or able to climb trees well, the praise was focused on the physical essence
deemed valuable by society, sexuality.
Why have we moved so far from teaching sustainable lifestyles, instead revering socially competitive ‘life-skills’ that often have little to do with personal life outside of societal constructs? If we put a kid through the US public school system and then toss them into the world aka planet Earth, they would likely have relatively few sustainable life skills that would be essential to ‘wild’ humans.
Austin and I love the history channel show Alone, it drops ten people into the wilderness each entirely alone. Whoever lasts the longest wins. The people that tend to last the longest don’t focus their efforts on survival, they focus their efforts on natural living. Working with the locale around them to sustain themselves, utilizing natural materials to make their homes and tools, gathering and storing local food while educating themselves on the cycles and patterns of the environment around them. However, not all these wilderness survival experts have what it takes to win. Remember, the name of the game is Alone, and often it’s the lack of social interaction that really knocks people off the board.
When we look at the world around us, we can see that many animals learn their behaviors and adaptable life skills from their parents or close social units before they leave home. Structured education has transferred this intergenerational knowledge-sharing away from the basic family unit to an exterior entity. Often a structure lacking in the familiarity, care and emotional accessibility that a close-knit social group would provide.
Instead of giving children time to be emotionally proximal creatures learning from their elders, we bring them to schools and have them learn from strangers who cannot give as much individual attention to the many students as a smaller familial structure might allow. Even students with logical, mathematical or solitary learning styles can benefit from the apprenticeship-style learning through trade masters and intergenerational knowledge sharing. When we take away the ability of the parents to teach their own children due to long work hours or perhaps lack of access to the knowledge they seek, we also remove the child from their own natural learning methods, standardizing their methodology from an early age.
This in a sense takes away a lot of the personal power of a parent’s ability to teach, insinuating that perhaps if someone does not have the required paperwork to prove their knowledge that perhaps they do not have the ability or even the right to share this knowledge or to be considered a teacher. This transfers respect from accomplishment-based knowledge gained from physically working through tasks to book-based knowledge, entirely mental in capacity and comprehension.
Give a man a fish, he’s got dinner for a day, teach a man to fish he’s got dinner for life, right?
Let’s say we hand someone a book on fishing, teach them the wide human history of fishing methods and toss them a couple pages of homework to work on alone. Another person, we take fishing for one day, showing them simple tools and local methods hands-on, giving them some basic materials to fish on their own. We give both students a week to live beside a quaint local fishing spot.
Who’s going to be a better fisher? Or perhaps, who will have a deeper recognition of the risks and benefits of fishing? Who will be more self-confident in their personal ability to accomplish this task?
Is it more costly on our environment and ourselves to provide each student in a classroom with a book to learn on their own, or to provide a local teacher with a comprehensive and individualized book, allowing this knowledge to be passed down through personal skill-sharing instead of standardized lesson planning?
When we standardize information, we lose sight of the small-scale individual aspects of our environment that are highlighted when working with local and native crafters or knowledge-keepers or tradesfolk. We depend so much upon exterior solutions and imports instead of searching for the answers close to home.
I have put a lot of mental strain on myself through my years in education, rarely ever pushing my body to the extreme. (Unless testing my edges of social anxiety and fear of public speaking could be considered exertion 🤪🥇).
Resorting to book-smarts over street-smarts, a lot of the knowledge I acquired through state-structured mass indoctrination centers has little to no physical use in the world I am living in now. In fact, a lot of it wasn’t interesting when I was learning it, wasn’t helpful to spend time working on, and hasn’t been useful since the homework was finished.
Recently, I have been working on learning about things I am interested in. I had a great opportunity in public university to study subjects I was curious about, but a lot of it still tended towards ‘busywork’. I was rarely able to engage this knowledge in the community around me, because everyone around me had such different focal points and life interests, each totally caught up in their own world with many differing factors from my own. I wasn’t able to engage with the material personally because I was working with a very tightly structured schedule, carrying boat-loads of stress on top of that.
The learning was interesting, but it didn’t give me skills outside of general comprehension and perhaps a wider range of ability to dissect information and label phenomena with smooth sounding vocabulary.
The skills I am attempting to learn in my free time these days encircle abilities and knowledge I have a daily use for and a general interest in.
This week, I have self-taught some basic skills through a combination of book-based knowledge, videos of people explaining their skills and hands-on work. I’ve worked on bread-making, paper-making, sewing, basketry, weaving, carving, astrology, plant-identification and energy associations of herbs + stones. I find value in these skills, and as such feel much more accomplished and engaged in the process of learning them than I did in the process of learning many required school subjects.
I recognize that I need to balance my own physical work with my mental work, as I still ask so much more of my mind than of my body.
Strengthening my body is just as important as strengthening my mind. Learning to embody restfulness, tranquility and calm in order to ease my physical self is just as important as seeking a meditative or a spiritual practice for my mental self.
Our nervous system stretches throughout our body, it is not solely located in the brain. Regarding this, it seems that if our physical body is stagnant or lacking energy, our nerves might relay this information back to the subconscious mental self. If our physical body is not in pristine condition, how can we expect to experience mental clarity when our mind is part of this physical being? Without working to enhance and balance the literal physical + energetic connections between body and mind, we might be unable to flourish into ‘happy, healthy, and strong’ human beings.
Do you work yourself too hard mentally or physically? Perhaps you are on the opposite scale, rarely having time for mental play while exerting your body daily… How can you work to bring more balance to your own life?
Wishing you all a lovely day.
Till next time,
