essays
on health and the human predicament by frank forencich
Featured
According to the standard self-help narrative, stress is an individual problem with individual solutions…
Are you irate? Pissed off? Furious? Think carefully before you answer, because this is a trick question...
Just in case you haven’t had enough bad news in recent months, there’s yet another downside of the modern age you need to hear about. Specifically, I’m speaking of the decay of human vitality, resilience and power that’s been unfolding across the planet in recent decades. We’ve seen this trend in lifestyle diseases such as obesity, diabetes and all the rest, but what’s happening today is something deeper, more fundamental and more disturbing: an increasing weakness of the human organism and erosion of the human spirit. Virus or no virus, the body is in decline and people are in trouble…
Imagine that you’re watching a really, really bad movie. Not just your average junk flick, but one that’s completely deranged.
For some reason, the writer, producer, director and editor all hate each other and could never agree on what the film is supposed to be about. In the end, they decide to release it anyway, even thought it’s nothing more than a patchwork of disconnected, disjointed ideas. It’s called Mixed Message…
What the hell has happened to us?
It wasn’t so long ago that we were wild animals, fully as healthy as any other animal living in natural habitat. We were just as robust as the chimpanzees in Africa, just as physically vital as the bears and wolves of North America, just as intelligent and healthy as any of our pre-modern ancestors...
Ideal for yoga classes or other group settings. Simply read the prompts in a relaxed manner, taking plenty of time for the experience to sink in.
Most of us know Carl Jung as a famous psychologist who probed the human mind and developed powerful ideas about archetypes and the collective unconscious…
Everyone likes a good time travel story. Whether it be H. G. Wells' 1895 The Time Machine, Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure, Back to the Future or even the Terminator, we’re fascinated by the possibilities. Forward or backwards in time doesn’t matter much; either direction gives us a chance to compare and contrast the cultures, values and ideas of various ages.
“Your self does not end where your flesh ends, but suffuses and blends with the world, including other beings.”
Sandra Blakeslee and Matthew Blakeslee The Body Has a Mind of Its Own
Back and forth, over and over. Pacing, turning, pacing. Raw animal wildness took a few athletic steps, reached the bars and made a graceful turn. Over and over, for as long as I watched, and presumably, for every waking hour thereafter…
As if you didn’t have enough to worry about, I’m going to add yet another conundrum to your list. It’s got a strange name and it sure isn’t getting much attention in the world of health and medicine, but it’s profoundly important, maybe even more important than the familiar elements of diet and exercise. The problem is our vanishing vagility, the ability of an organism to move about freely in habitat.
You’ve been there. Year after year, after soul-crushing year.
Your professional organization requires that you keep your certificate current, so you’ve got to show up and get your credits. So you book your flight, swipe your card and make the journey. And then, most likely, you sit and suffer.
As 2018 draws to a close, you might be looking for some clarity and understanding. The last few months have delivered an onslaught of bad news and the coming year seems poised to bring us more of the same. In fact, you might well feel like you’re living on the cusp of the hockey stick, the exponential curve of radical acceleration that describes so much of our modern predicament.
It’s just three little words. Well-intentioned, professional, conservative words. A news story about health presents the pros and cons of some kind of body-related treatment and concludes with the advice to “See your doctor.” Variations include: “See your health care provider” or “See your health care professional.”
If you’ve been involved in natural training in the last few years, you’ve probably heard the advice “Be strong to be useful.” According to legend, the phrase was coined by French physical educator Georges Hébert (1875-1957) and has become a popular inspiration for Parkour, MovNat and other natural training systems...
If you’ve ever seen my photograph, you might be surprised to learn that I was born indigenous...
By now, everyone on the planet has some awareness, however dim, of our epidemic of lifestyle disease. The list is familiar...
Rumor has it that things aren’t looking good for the biosphere, which of course means that things aren’t looking good for us...
It seems like a stupid question: What could be healthier than health and fitness? Likewise, What could be healthier than the health and fitness industry?
In popular conversations about climate change and ecological disaster, many of us are inclined to fall back on the conventional, modern explanation. That is, we frame the entire situation as a technological problem. If we could just re-work our machines to burn some kind of planet-friendly fuel, our problems would be solved…