ZONE 0:
Harvesting Health & Happiness
in our personal ecosystem.
Abstract
This project is designed to recognize patterns and awarenesses to optimize my own health and share these patterns with others. This project spans many key elements of personal health care from exercise and nutrition to patterns of awareness and happiness. I have spent years of my life harvesting health perspectives engaging in many types of personal practices and living in communities ranging from zen monasteries and ashrams in India to personal transformation centers in the United States. I am collecting this information and making it presentable digitally to enhance my marketability as a healer and a consultant in health related fields. I also love sharing information, be it recipes, resources or beliefs with friends, family and clients in an easeful way. I am thrilled at the material I was able to gather and produce during this process.
Context
I have spent decades of my life in the Professional Health Care services including nutrition, massage and teaching. In addition, I am a human born into a life of suffering discovering methods to mitigate the challenges present in this physical world.
Who is doing What, with Whom, When, Where and Why
Who: Me and some friends -- Herbalists, Reiki masters, Massage therapists, Permaculture consultants
What: Creating pattern level awareness and effective tools regarding ways to impact our personal health
Why: For Health & Happiness
When: This year I am working with other healers and notes from the past two decades of my life to create patterns to inspire healthy living.
Goals Articulation
Write a refined article on the many fundamentals of health with which I have experience.
Create useful personal practices in my life.
Create the home page for my website entitled Health and link to many fundamental aspects of what I see as creating a healthy body.
Create videos to support the articles
⁃ 10 minute exercise routines.
⁃ Favorite/ most often requested recipes: Pate, Kale Salad
⁃ Breathing
⁃ Baby Massage
⁃ Morning Routine
⁃ Dolphin
ARTICLES on relevant topics:
• Touch -- How to receive a massage
• Stress & stress management
• Nutritional advice. Emphasize Whole Foods. Eliminate processed foods. Highlight information regarding fats, processed foods, and a few videos of me doing kale salad and pate. This will be linked into my entire Catering website sections. Include Superfoods include link to OP 2 Chocolate
• Community. This includes how communities interact and any studies regarding benefits of living in community (or caring for others)
• Touch including but not limited to massage and other healing modalities.
• Love/Relationship - Share the importance of touch and love in our lives
• Compassion. Explore themes of compassion through NVC, metta meditation, and the root of self acceptance.
• Lifestyle
• Cleansing & Nourishing: Offer words on cleansing vs nourishing — water cleanse, fat cleanse, radiation cleanse, ayurvedic/yoga cleanse
• Babies and Healthy Birthing. I hope to organize my experiences massaging babies and feeding breastfeeding mothers and first solid foods for infants :The Story of Birth, Midwifery, Natural Childcare.
• Meditation - Offer practical instruction and reflection and links to retreats and guided experiences and scientific studies for meditation
• Archetypes Patterns of Humanity: Diagnostic lenses from enneagram, meyer briggs, ayurveda, zodiac.
PERSONAL PRACTICES to share from a 1st person point of view
- Daily oil pulling
Daily chakra meditation
Daily touch
Daily ten minute movement routine.
Interventions
I am greatly interested in viewing our zone 0, personal ecology, through the lens of permaculture. There is great opportunity for me in that I much of my professional career involves personal health. The greatest awareness, intervention, while doing this OP was that my burgeoning interest in becoming a life coach involves many abstract aspects of personal health. As I researched the field to examine what great thinkers and healers view as important considerations for personal health, I began to realize that nutrition and exercise and healing modalities are but the tip of an iceberg. I have become more and more sure that attitude, relationships and awareness form the basis of our health and act as a two way street with nutrition and exercise. Practically, this will inform part of how I organize some of the patterns of health upon my website highlighting myself as a healer, a caterer and a life coach.
Design Methodology
SOURCING
Winter 2014 — Observing my life, deciding what I want to birth forth.
INSPIRATION
Spring 2014, Laying out the major themes that I want to express in my OP Health &
Healing. Setting goals. As this encompasses much of my life and ultimately will become the base of my website, determining what material I feel inspired to expound upon and see as important to the welfare of humanity was paramount. This birthing included many themes: nutrition, exercise, babies, yoga, meditation, breathing, cleansing, nourishing, archetypes, ayurveda, chakras, energy, touch, community, herbalism.
Sunrise/Morning — Morning is a great time for me to brainstorm new ideas and discover new potentials
PRODUCTION
Summer 2014 — Implementing actionable items to complete my inspiration. Names for the articles began to emerge. I did not do any writing as I was busy with other “work” productions. Hands on work at the herbalism workshop.
Noon -- Midday is my best time to actually do the writing or creating content. Create the content. Implement the plan of what I want done.
REFLECTION
Autumn 2014 — I reviewed the general themes and the articles titles refining what I truly wanted to express during the fall. It’s nice to use the fading light of the fall to reflect upon how I will source in the winter and burst forth in the spring.
Review/ Edit Articles
Sunset — Evening is a good time for me to review what I have written and refine/edit it. I am in a reflective space that suits editing much more than creation or inspiration. I also like to make a practical to do list for the next day (to utilize a burst of energy in the morning that is great when I can harvest creatively.) I believe I am thoughtful at sunset but the force is gone. It’s good to use the reflection time at sunset to create frameworks that will be useful for tomorrow.
SOURCING
Winter 2015 lots of time to pull material. Lots of research and reading. Also lots of writing (which perhaps is more energetically connected to summer, but I need to acknowledge the reality that this is when I actually have the TIME.
Midnight — I often sleep in the night to recharge. Late night is good for me to research as my brain can still receive information and scan for key patterns. I am not good at creating content at night.
INSPIRATION
Spring 2015 — Birthing the OP itself.
Design Reflections
While reading an NVC book during this OP, I was struck by how much the 4 phases that Marshall Rosenberg articulates parallel the GaSADIE design process. The idea of sitting back and surveying or observing as a crucial starting point to dive into our own personal zone 0. Next, creating clear goals parallels recognizing our personal needs. Going deeper into Analysis and Assessment leads us into the feelings connected to these needs. Lastly, implementation is most effective with Specific, clear request.
Creating my own design methodology with key archetypes of day, season, moon, nature and energy cycles was inspired by Eight Shields and Dragon Dreaming while becoming something uniquely my own. Using the chart greatly assists my understanding by correlating themes and other aspects of my path. I do not think I will use this as a specific design methodology in the future; and, I am quite grateful for the understanding of my own process as supported and paralleled by many other natural processes.
I am enjoying playing with many different design methodologies during my Capstone year and it continually allows me to reflect on the why, how, when and where to optimize my design function.
The Field
Define the field
Personal Ecology entails how we live our lives. It encompasses our daily practices, our jobs, our passions, our relationships, fundamentally our entire pathway/journey walking on this earth. Many religious, philosophical, and medical systems have articulated patterns and themes to maximize "Being in harmony" with nature and the universe. Our modern western approach uses reductionistic causality to primarily isolate drugs, neurotransmitters and vitamins that are correlated with health and happiness. I aim to strike a balance between some of the rigorous science that discovers key links between cause and effect on our personal health while holding it loosely within the synchronicity of the web of life.
From snake charmers of antiquity to Big Pharma in our modern industrialized society, health and happiness has been fodder for spiritual leaders, educators and the medical community alike. Ages ago, shamans represented a unique blend of offering life guidance through energetic, spiritual, physical and philosophical perspectives. In today's world, on average, industrialized western countries spend 10% of their GDP on healthcare. Sadly for the U.S., WHO survey tells that we spend more than any other nation, 17.7 %, while ranking 38th in satisfaction. In the US, average health care cost is $7000 per person per year. 70% of our population is on a prescription drug and half of our population are on 2 or more. Clearly, we are primed for a change.
This field is vast -- potentially all inclusive of human behavior. Humans for millennia have been writing and theorizing on ways to maximize/facilitate human health and happiness.
- Aristotle Eudaemonia
- In China, the Taoists offer the Tao, the "Way" or Path to good living
- In India, Ayurveda studies the science of life
- Eightfold Path of Buddhism offers eight key themes to bring "Right" awareness toward.
- Eight limbs of yoga -- again offers eight areas where we can apply effort toward union with the oneness.
- Sivananda posits Proper Exercise, Diet, Breathing, Relaxation, Positive Thinking
- Happy Planet Index -- Relationships, Physical Activity, Awareness, Learning (Growth, Curiosity), Service
- Andrew Weil -- Five Pillars of Health
- Roger Walsh — Exercise, Nutrition, Nature, Service, Relationship, Recreation, Relaxation, Spiritual
Studying the many approaches offered through many traditions gives me a unique perspective on my own health and simultaneously has created major themes for me to work with as a healer and life coach.
The field within context of permaculture
My awareness of personal health is very closely aligned to many of the key aspects of the petal of "Health & Spiritual Well Being" on Holmgren's Permaculture Flower: preventative health, holistic medicine, healthy parenting/breastfeeding, yoga & other body/mind/spirit disciplines. In conjunction, the emphasis of Nature and Community/Relationship within Permaculture is forefront to my perspective on well rounded health.
Contributions
I aim to contribute my years of experience from traveling the world and observing healers and energy workers from a host of different perspectives. My lens is clearly holistic and in favor of preventative awareness rather than reactive measures. More than anything, I feel that I represent yet another foot soldier in the revolution against industrialized health care in our modern day consumer-driven society of magic pills fixing our health and happiness.
Much of this has been said before by many; simultaneously, it is extremely valuable to have scores of grass roots activists speaking out for true health and happiness compared to the mass marketing of Big Pharma. Indeed, Michael Moore reports in Sicko, that nine out of ten Big Pharma companies spend more money on marketing than R&D. We need more people speaking for natural means toward improved health.
My website on health is a contribution of pattern level awareness of the fundamentals we may consider in our personal ecology of healthcare. I challenge anyone to examine these pattern level attributes and authentically attempt to see where their area for greatest growth lay. My contention is that many people become myopically obsessed with one theme (such as nutrition and take 50 different herbal or pharmaceutical supplements) rather than examining some of the other patterns and perhaps create a daily practice in nature to go out for a walk or invest time/volunteer with community activities or relationships.
Dissemination
The creation of these articles and getting them on my website feels like my primary dissemination effort. Through the creation of this OP, I realize that I would like to operate as a life coach as an extension to my role as advisor and therapist.
Several of the videos have already gone up on my youtube channel:
MoY
All the articles/videos/outcomes will be available on my website.
I will send the "How to Receive a Massage" to any client prior to a house call.
I have already shared some of the recipes and exotic spice chart with others within natural foods catering community.