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There will be no lectures about New Year’s Resolutions. If you are reading this article it means you are interested in your own personal Health, Fitness and Personal Energy. It means that you understand that your personal health and fitness are your own responsibility and that it is the choices you make that will keep you healthy as you get older. Most likely you already doing the things you need to do, or know what you need to do and just need the motivation to keep doing it. So all I will do in this article is reinforce what you already know about your own health and fitness and the things you need to keep doing to build and maintain your Personal Energy and Vitality.

There are five basic elements that affect your health, fitness and personal energy. Here’s the list. Simple. No lectures.

What and How you think.

 “It all starts with the way you’re thinking!”
– Steve Vai, Heavy Metal/Classical Guitarist

The way you see and think about yourself, the way you look, and the way you feel, will determine what you do for your health and fitness. A positive attitude toward, and about, yourself and your life will go a long way in determining how well and how long you live a happy life. A negative attitude will do almost as much for damaging your health as lack of exercise and eating poorly.

How You Move 

If you move your body the way nature intended, you will be active, your muscles will be strong and supple, your hinges will work smoothly, and your body will stay flexible. Your blood will circulate freely, and your posture should remain tall and upright.

How and What You Eat and Drink

 It’s simple. Don’t eat junk. Stay away from processed foods, refined sugars and white flour. Drink plenty of water. There are many different viewpoints as to what constitutes healthful eating. All seem to be backed up by studies and some even by real science. What’s the right choice? Who knows! Personally, I have cut back on meat and upped the veggies and lost 30 pounds over about a six month period several years ago. Do what works for you.

How You Breathe

 Breathing deeply will improve your life dramatically. You will increase your endurance, power your muscles, improve your circulation and increase your energy. Your respiratory system includes a lot of filters so for the most part, deep breathing is beneficial no matter where you are. However, I don’t suggest you do your deep breathing in the middle of an Interstate Highway with lots of truck traffic and pollution.

How Well You Rest, Sleep and Recover

There has been a lot of recent research into the value of sleep and recovery. It seems to show that a good night’s sleep is much more important than originally thought. And recent studies reinforce the value of true darkness in maximizing the benefits of sleep. Artificial light from bedside clocks and even the blue light from “devices” seem to be a no-no for restful sleep.

Recovery from exercise and the stresses of daily life seem to be getting far more attention than in the past, and studies show that meditation and mindfulness can go a long way in that recovery process.

No Lecture

See, no lecture. You already knew all that, didn’t you? Opinions may vary as to the type and amount of exercise, the best dietary patterns and the amount of rest and sleep one really needs, but the categories are pretty much cut in stone and we recognize the need for “all of the above”.

I hope everyone has solid resolutions for your own Health, Fitness and Personal Energy for 2016 and beyond. So, I’ll wish a Happy New Year to all with the admonition to live it in Good Health and High Energy.

Thank you for reading.

Why do we have an appendix? What use are our tonsils? Why did we start to walk upright? Hmm, good questions. The topic for today’s article, Bodily Structures, is the last in the series about the 12 Attributes of Human Functioning, from Michael Murphy’s book, The Future of the Body, about the physical and mental attributes essential to living our lives as human beings.

We needed our appendix once. We needed our tonsils once. But we don’t need them anymore. In fact when they become inflamed they become painful and in the case of an untreated inflamed appendix, fatal. Both organs are vestiges of the past that haven’t disappeared from our bodies yet.

Our bodies are always evolving. We have been taught that we have evolved from the sea and our body structures have evolved from “fins to feet”. One has only to look at the textbook pictures of the transition of mankind to two legged humans, to understand the adaptation of our bodily structure. We can assume our bodies will continue to evolve with time. What will we look like in the future? Will will be large headed, small bodied ETs in the millennia to come?

Our food sources will continue to change and evolve. As food became more agriculturally oriented thousands of years ago, we became smarter, developed cultures beyond the tribe, and evolved as today’s “humans”. I doubt that what we consider to be “natural food” today, would have been considered natural when cultivation of plants began. One has only to look at the many varieties of tomatoes and apples to see the positive direction that “nutritional genetics” (my term) has brought us. GMOs are nothing new. And our tubular digestive system is likely to change dramatically as we learn to process our foods more, possibly condensing our nutrients into “power bar” size, or even packaging our nutrients as pills. Will we even need a digestive system 5000 years from now?

Chances are our respiratory system will adapt as our physical environment becomes cleaner or dirtier through the way we treat our air supply and the quality of air we breathe.

I would suggest that whatever the Universe has in store for us in the future, and no matter how we change our environment, either for better or worse, or just different, our bodies will change and adapt to whatever is to come. We humans are an adaptable bunch. Our bodies have changed over time and will continue to change. What is The Future of the Body? Who knows? But I bet it will adapt to whatever is thrown at it in the millennia to come and the great questions of the environment and the body will simply be different as we move through the centuries.

As for the present, if we move our bodies the way nature intended, take in good nutrients, sleep well  and breathe deeply of the air we have, we will manage to live our lives just fine.  But it’s nice to know that our bodies have adapted to whatever has been thrown at us over the years, and will continue to do so, well into the Star Wars future.

Thank you for reading. I hope you and yours have a Merry Christmas, or whatever holiday, if any, you choose to celebrate.

How do you define love? Not the romantic love in the form of intense physical and emotional attraction between couples “in love”. But rather as a “Universal Love of Mankind”. That’s the gist of Attribute Number 11 in this series of articles on the 12 Attributes of Human Functioning described in the book The Future of the Body, published in 1992 by Michael Murphy, Co-Founder of the Esalen Institute. The Esalen Institute was one of the first cradles of the Human Potential Movement in the United States, and is located on the Big Sur bluffs of Northern California south of San Francisco. The Subtitle of the book is Explorations Into the Future Evolution of Human Nature. It is about the evolution of these 12 Attributes from the beginning of humanity, along with a projection of the evolution of these attributes into the future.

So what does love have to do with it. As I wrote above, it’s not solely about romantic love between individuals, but embraces the Universal Love of Mankind. Webster includes as part of it’s definition: “A feeling of Brotherhood and Good Will. It also includes “God’s benevolent concern for mankind, and Man’s devout attachment to God”. Michael Murphy refers to all religions but speaks mostly to the Universal love expressed by Christian and Hindu Religions, and the beliefs of the Buddhists.

Murphy says that “love” has gone through a long, evolving process beginning with the love animals have for their young which developed at the beginning of the living evolutionary process, and that we are still only at the beginning of a “transformative evolution”, with humans loving society as a whole being a goal still ahead of us. The concept of Universal Love seems to be continuing to evolve, even though there seems to be a “pause” in that evolutionary process right now.

On a “local” level I would suggest that “love” refers to “a strong or intense compassion for all things, for life and what life is all about”. That is a quote from me. And that is how I would apply it to active older adults: “We will get the most out of our older adult years if we can maintain a strong compassion, or love, for life and the people, places and things that are all a part of that life.” And you can quote me on that too.

On that note, I will end this post in the hopes that we all absorb something positive from it. It’s our life to live and I trust we will all live it with love and compassion for those people, places and things that make up our own lives, and that somewhere down the line, Universal Love for all Mankind and Mankind’s living environment, will become a reality for all.

Thank you for reading.