We Can Make Him Better, Faster, Stronger.... We Have the Technology

 So, we've covered the foundations of what self-improvement looks like in Me, Myself, and I.  But there are specific things I want to improve about myself.  The first one is my overall wellness.  This has both physical and mental components.  The physical components are fitness and nutrition.  I've spent a lot of time studying nutrition.  There are many books that you can look at, from Forks Over Knives, to The China Study, The McDougall Program, How Not to Die, How Not to Diet, The Longevity Diet, The Complete Guide to Fasting. There is so much genuine scientific information out there right now, about how whole-food, plant-based diets and caloric restriction are the keys to very long, healthy lives.  For those that don't like books, there are a ton of documentaries that cover the same principles.  In fact, my first exposure to Forks Over Knives was as a documentary on Netflix.  I'd recommend What the Health? as well as The Science of Fasting, which was on Amazon Prime for a while, but isn't anymore.  

For me, this is incredibly easy to reconcile with biblical views.  I mean, when God made Adam and Eve, he told them all that was green was food.  Animals, though they never quite measured up to Eve as far as companionship was concerned, that's what Adam did when he was naming them, he was being companionable with them.  Animals were not even on the menu until hundreds if not thousands of years later, when Noah and his family survived the Flood.  Who knows how much devastation that Flood caused to the ecosystem he was in? For there to be enough food at all for humans to survive, they needed animal calories to supplement what they were used to eating.  Take a look at this, too: it was around this time that God decided to limit the human lifespan to around 120 years.  Knowing now that animal products cause serious chronic diseases that can kill in a few decades, this makes sense to me.  If I could potentially live to 120 now, then having a diet that reduces my lifespan to around 80 doesn't seem like a huge deal (to many, it still does to me), but if my potential lifespan is over 600 years, then dying in about 40 years of eating this garbage seems like a huge reduction of lifespan.  Dying before you're 100 back then must have been like dying before you're 25 today: possible, but always extra tragic because of the potential they could have had.  Also, think about Daniel during the Babylonian exile.  This is where we get the Daniel Fast, which is about eating plant-based whole foods.  He showed how much healthier it made him over the other members of the court that had all the decadent foods that Americans today would consider to be preferable.  We were never designed to eat animals.  We were allowed to eat them during an emergency situation, but our original diets were plant based.  This makes sense to me.  

The next stage is fitness.  This aspect to wellness has just as much literature on it nowadays, even if the biblical background on this is a little sparse.  To be honest, in biblical times, people's lives involved a lot more physical activity than today's world does, so I doubt it was an issue that really needed talking about.  What really stands out nowadays is HIIT, or High Intensity Interval Training.  This is about pushing your body to its utter limits, both strength training-wise and cardiovascularly.  It's also a long accepted paradigm of fitness, stretched out to its logical limits: use it or lose it.  We all know that if you push your body's muscles to their limits, they heal stronger afterwards.  But this is true of the cardiovascular system as well.  That's why HIIT is so effective: it really tests your strength, but doesn't give the kind of "room to breathe" that normal strength training does, it pushes you to keep going, and going, and going, until your heart has to really push itself to keep up.  This is as far as my understanding of things goes, so I'll leave this alone until I'm more familiar with it.  In the body there are three different kinds of muscles: there's skeletal muscle, cardiac muscle, and what's called smooth muscle.  Smooth muscle is the muscular lining that controls the thickness of your blood vessels.  Blood pressure is a measure of the combined strength of how hard your heart is beating, but also how narrow your blood vessels are.  When your heart is beating really hard because your vessels are really clogged up, the pressure goes up.  Your body can tighten the tubes or loosen them, based on external stimulus.  Also, when your heart is beating pretty hard, or pretty fast, your body will often tighten the tubes when the amount of oxygen your brain is getting is too low.  

There is a guy who figured out how to exercise the body's ability to handle low amounts of oxygen and exercise your body's smooth muscle.  His name is Wim Hof, he's Dutch, and he's been preaching for years about the benefits of tapping into your autonomic nervous system to improve health.  The way you exercise your smooth muscle is bathing in very cold water.  This can include showers, as well as actual baths.  He's been known to bathe for up to an hour in water filled with actual ice.  The other piece of his puzzle is a breathing technique he worked out from studying yoga and the breathing techniques tied to it, called pranayama.  He first has you hyperventilate, in a controlled manner, so as to seriously lower the levels of CO² in your bloodstream, because it's heightened levels of CO² that make us want to inhale when we're holding our breath, not lower levels of O².  You'll know you hit the right levels of low CO² because you'll feel pretty weird.  Then you exhale all your breath and wait.  You wait, without inhaling, until you really feel the need to breathe in.  During that time when you exhale and hold it, your O² levels will drop significantly.  Just like exercise, this is a way you can train your body to get used to lower levels of O² in your system.  If nothing else, scientific studies of his techniques have shown that shocking your system like this over and over again can actually highly improve your immune system.  It also basically re-balances your hormonal levels, which can have positive effects on your metabolism, as well as any emotional issues you might have, such as anxiety or depression.  Which moves towards my next step.

For me, the next step is mental health.  As many people who know me know, I struggle with clinical depression.  All the above, taking care of your body, putting the right stuff into it and then using it the right way, that makes for a hormonal foundation for the brain that's pretty solid.  There's so much that goes into trying to deal with depression, even before you get to medication.  A good sleeping pattern, good eating habits, a workout regime, those are all pretty accepted methods that help.  So does the Wim Hof method, as it helps energize you with adrenaline and other hormones in a way that is controlled and healthy.  There are other things that have been shown to help with that, too, though, such as meditation and journaling.  I have made a practice of journaling whenever my life calls for it.  I'm not a daily journaler, and I don't even do it every week.  I've gone months without journaling before.  But when I'm unhappy, I am usually ready to take pen to paper and write it out.  I have journals that I've filled up with unhappy thoughts and slight obsessions.  There's a good amount of material out there supporting the therapeutic effects of journaling.  Meditation is the same.  That's a skill.  Learning how to focus, pay attention to one thing, at the expense of other things.  Understanding that focus means you can't get caught up in beating yourself up over being distracted, because that only makes it worse.  You have to let it go, so you can get back to focusing.  If you're going to get any good at focusing, you have to let it go.  There is a ton of material about the positive effects a good meditative practice has on both a person's mental wellbeing, as well as their physical wellbeing.  There is also a good amount of Christian practice throughout history here, which makes me happy.  

Brother Lawrence comes to mind.  Paul the Apostle comes to mind.  Jesus comes to mind, as does Moses, even King David.  I mean, the practice of taking time and spending it quietly is prevalent throughout the Bible, and throughout Church history.  The practice of centering prayer was pretty well established throughout the Middle Ages, and the book by that name, The Practice of Centering Prayer gave me  a pretty good idea behind the philosophy of it.  There are three primary practices, the Sacred Breath, the Sacred Word, and the Sacred Glance.  The sacred breath starts with the reminder that God breathed life into Adam in the Beginning.  In that breath, he deposited something "of God," something divine, into Adam, something that made us "in His image," so to speak.  Then, you choose to spend time quietly in God's presence, focusing on your breath, having that reminder as the prime in the back of your mind as you just pay attention to your breathing.  Every time your mind wanders, you apologize to God, and simply bring yourself back to paying attention to your breathing again.  The Sacred Word goes further.  It posits that God spoke reality into existence, that Jesus was the embodiment of God's Word, and thus there is something sacred about words in general, there is a power in them.  Then it suggests you come up with a word, or a short phrase, that reminds you of God's presence, and while sitting in God's presence, you sit in stillness, as in the phrase "be still and know that I am God," and when your mind begins to wander, you use the word to bring your attention back to the stillness.  You can easily just say the word over and over again, paying attention to it to exclude those distracting thoughts, mindful of the feel of it in your throat, in your chest, on your lips, in your ears.  

Finally, the Sacred Glance goes a step further, still.  This is where you have an idea, an image, or sensation, a feeling, like maybe the sensation of a hug, or the breeze against your skin, or the smell of the ocean or the forest, or the image of the sunset or sunrise, or some quality you imagine God would have physically, like a strong stature, or a musky smell, or any kind of sensory image, visual or otherwise, that reminds you of God.  This practice reminds you that God incarnates or steps into his roles.  "The heavens declare his handiwork," the "stones themselves sing his praises." He uses his creation to be know by us.  So, as long as we use these images as a pointing finger that reminds us of Him, then they are of use.  And again, you sit in his presence, using these images in your mind to remind yourself of his presence when your attention wanders.  

The book talks about a fourth practice, what I might call a meta-practice.  It calls it the Sacred Silence.  This is where the skill comes in.  The longer you sit in God's presence without having to say your word, or summon your image, or focus on your breathing, the closer you are to attaining the highest form of this practice.  "Before Abraham was, I AM," so to speak.  We use all these practices to remind ourselves of his presence, but he is not in the things, really, he is under them, above them, beyond them.  If we can practice going beyond them, using these techniques to point us in the right direction, then we're good.  

I could have written a whole post on Centering Prayer versus tradition meditation.  Why it feels better to me to frame it this way.  There are practices in all the meditative practices that mimic these things.  Traditional Zen Buddhism talks about focusing on the breathing.  Other Buddhists chant.  These are reflective of the Breath and the Word, respectively.  But something typical transcendental meditation, Buddhist and otherwise, does is try to strip down a person's perspective away from the self.  Of course, there is insight to be had when you realize that part of you that is observing your thoughts isn't your thoughts, or your feelings, or your sensations.  But the transcendentalists would have you believe that means there is no such thing as you.  Sure, we may often equate ourselves with all that stuff, and stripping it away might feel like we're losing identity.  They go a step further, encouraging compassion by asserting that, since there is no real self, then there is no difference between ourselves and others, and thus we must love them as we love ourselves.  This doesn't quite cover it, in my opinion.  When we use prayer to center ourselves, we acknowledge the Otherness and pervasiveness of God and his presence.  We also find that even though we aren't that stuff, we're still here, and so is He.  We exist in relation to Him, separate and subordinate to Him.  But in that, we find identity that is unshakable, undeniable, and deeply comforting.  We are a reflection of Him when we are present with Him as He is with us.  It's in that reflection that we have our value.  

That's it for now.  This post has been about self-improvement.  Body, mind, soul.  We have the technology, we have the techniques.  We can make him faster, better, stronger.  So let's have at it.