"Turn your face to the sun and the shadows fall behind you."
-Maori proverb
This is both a sunset on the Indigenous Strength brand and blog as well as an announcement of an exciting new beginning. I started this blog because I felt called to offer a perspective about how we can untrain conventional cultural limitations by making certain mindset shifts and challenging ourselves in the natural world. However, writing essays just wasn’t for me. I also wrote a full book but I want to make the guidance a bit clearer and more practical and I have yet to publish it. My priority right now is on launching the new business.
Together with some new friends, I started a tribe of coaches and we are launching a new venture named Eye of the Storm (https://www.eotswellness.com/). Working as a writer and trying to innovate as a solo entrepreneur was just too lonely for me. From now on I will be creating new content and sharing my coaching offerings under our new platform. The decision was also driven by a desire to provide the highest value and quality that I can, and I simply cannot do that alone. I came to the realization that it takes a healthy tribe to really support a healthy human being. So that is exactly what we plan to do at Eye of the Storm.
Human health and training has many related dimensions. I can only deal skillfully with certain aspects of the whole. I was not alone in feeling limited, and a few of us decided to join forces to create more integrated offerings to serve people more comprehensively. We also wish to connect offerings to working teams as well as to individual clients. I find that we benefit greatly both from gaining strength in solitude as well as upgrading wisdom and strength practices together in teams. The way I see it, tribes that “get it” and know how to simultaneously support authentic development while also supporting all tribe members to gain strength are the ones that really thrive. It seems to me that this is one of the oldest tricks in the human playbook, consistent with our primal nature as a species of group survivors. I would love to connect with anyone who might be interested in how we can support your team in becoming healthier and stronger. Please reach out to me if you are interested in discussing this.
A lot has changed for me over the last few years. We live in the Seattle area now and added another dog, Rambo, to our wolfpack. It’s a beautiful area and a great home base for adventure, but the traffic and obsession with computers can be annoying. In case anyone had any doubts about this, radical career change at mid-life is indeed challenging. I have focused mostly on learning how to serve as a personal trainer (which I have been learning to do in gyms), teaching group exercise classes (which I find extremely fun), and working to craft new ways to deliver embodied teachings. I have also developed basic strength and conditioning methods that I consider to be healthier, more unlimited, and more effective at clearing the mind than what we can do in artificial and controlled gym environments. These days I do all of my own training outside using a combination of bodyweight exercises, heavy sandbag training, and varied endurance activity. This more natural approach to training seems to have helped me heal from a number of back alignment, hip, and knee issues. A life spent behind a desk and becoming too specialized and linear in my movement patterns caught up with me in my 40s. It has been rather painful to face a host of injuries and misalignments that came to surface to be addressed. I feel that putting in the work to understand what was going on and how to heal has helped me learn valuable lessons about realignment and healthier ways of strengthening the body. I am excited to share this with others.
Working as a personal trainer opened a disturbing window into where we are in our state of humanity today. The reality of how we fall short of our full embodied potential is actually far worse than I ever realized. It’s not just that we don’t get enough activity which causes us to gain weight and stay weak. We are in fact almost completely disembodied as a culture. I held certain assumptions about basic body awareness that started quickly falling away when I started working with people to try to unblock stronger movement. As a population we simply don’t know how to engage and coordinate our muscles to produce force in a balanced and stable way. As a basic example, I have been discovering that relatively few people seem to be able to do a pushup in a way where the shoulder joint will stay healthy. Without knowing how to move, not only do we frequently get injured but our bodies seem to naturally apply the brakes. We often can’t effectively challenge physical limits and truly progress. In addition, we have forgotten how to preserve and maintain agility. When we can’t move well we spiral into ruts, breakdowns, and unhealthy dependencies. Our movements are often weak and confused; we tend to not generate aligned motion from a healthy engaged core. A scary eye opener for me has been that even very active and “fit” seeming people do not typically fare well in basic movement and posture assessments.
The experiences of the last few years really reinforced for me one of the main messages that I was trying to articulate with this blog. I believe that learning directly from the body and from nature is far more limitless and empowering than learning from school, books, stories, or trying to gain information from behind screens. Over the years I have grown tried of talking heads, uninspired commentators, and manipulative people trying to tell me how to think. I try hard not to be this way myself now. I prefer to focus my energy on teaching tools to help people become strong and explore the world for themselves. I believe that if we are willing to keep looking, the mirror of the human world will keep showing us how we are still afraid and limited in our thinking. In my experience, when we turn to the natural world and really learn to tune into our own body, it generally helps us remember healthier, more balanced, and more inspired paths.
I have found that the most powerful learning in my own life has come from two basic strategies: (1) facing fears and discomforts (and even proactively seeking such things out) and allowing myself to patiently engage with them and (2) focusing as much energy as I could on exploring my highest inspirations. It seems that we really never can put enough work into improving our ability to regulate and balance the nervous system. Gaining practice in balancing our nerves and retraining how we relate to its sensations can have powerful effects on how we think, how we see the world, how we experience the moment, and how we bring our creative energy to life.
Although it took me pretty far beyond my old ways of thinking and sometimes forced me to face some awful feelings and realities, I’m happy that I moved beyond the world of law and negotiating power from behind a computer screen. I realized this again in a powerful way a few weeks ago when I was outside exercising in a hailstorm. As my body moved through the mud and the ice pelted down, I felt warm and I started laughing out loud. I clearly did not come here to sit at a desk trying to sustain fantasies, dramas, pointless wargames, unhealthy machines, and false comforts. I came here to be a strength trainer so I was in the right place for it.
Life can be pretty sweet when we remember to love the storm and love the training.
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