There’s Something About Push-Ups

I live and work with a group of people who are very conscious of their effect upon others. They work at being nonjudgmental, refraining from gossip, and accepting others’ thoughts and feelings. Yet there is one odd little item that stretches their tolerance. It started to show itself couple of weeks ago: so-and-so has poor…

Formula for Health

I encourage anyone who wants to turn his/her life around and get super healthy—physically and emotionally—to read Born to Run by Christopher McDougall and Why We Run by Bernd Heinrich. Along with a new take on human evolution, you’ll learn why there is no substitute for running. Humans evolved as nomadic foragers, always moving, and…

Beauty Is

Every day a woman elder followed the path down to the stream to get water, which she brought back in two rawhide buckets on the ends of a pole she carried across her shoulders. One of the buckets had a tear in it, while the other was perfect. By the time the woman made it…

Do We Really Want More of the Same?

Popular forms of toning exercises, such as yoga and qigong, along with modern martial arts, are based on repetition and memorization of forms. The approach fits well with our civilized training to be mind-centered and lead repetitive task-based lives. We are designed to function differently, as we evolved in the natural world, where nearly every…

Wolves Made Me Do It

I just did something dishonest—I helped organize a Wolf tracking class and got people from all over the country and Europe to register for it, only I didn’t tell them that all along, I had an ulterior motive. It all started when I was in my 20s. I lived with a pack of Wolves, and…

How to Win the Pain Game

Do you suffer from chronic pain? So do I, along with one out of three US citizens, but only one out of eight Japanese. Why the difference? Most chronic pain is self-made, and the way we deal with it is culturally dictated. When pain persists beyond an injury’s healing phase, it no longer has a…

Cold Turkey: No Longer Just for Sandwiches

I’m a passionate man—a doer. At the same time, I like to approach change gradually. Too fast and I don’t have time to adjust, which usually results in my efforts backfiring. Or so I thought. Yesterday I read an article in a health report that claimed 90% of those who were successful at quitting smoking…

When Depression Is Not

Why do so many of us of us feel helpless when someone close to us sinks into a state of depression? And why do those of us who experience depression often feel helpless ourselves? I know many people who just want to withdraw and be left alone, or else they turn to medications and therapists….

How the Ancestors Live On

It is common knowledge that in long-standing traditional cultures, ancestor worship is practiced. Many of us have heard the phrase “Honor the ancestors” spoken by American Indians. However, what we hear may not be exactly what they intend to say. We who record our history and have noun-based languages tend to view our ancestors as…

A Heart-to-Heart with Mythical Alaska

At the Alaska Bioneers conference in October, I attended Jaime Van Lanen’s workshop on regional wild food procurement. Jaime, an anthropologist studying Alaskan subsistence patterns, has a passion for indigenous ways of procuring food. Last year, he successfully hunted a Moose with a primitive bow. Jaime started the workshop with some myth busting: rather than…