Check out Frank Forencich’s most recent entry on the Exuberant Animal blog.
In it, he describes the ways in which contact with dirt can positively affect (and effect) your mood and health.
As I said in my comment to his post – since we ARE dirt, dirt is good for us. As we used to say when we’d drop our ice cream cone on the playground back in the day – “God made dirt, so dirt don’t hurt.”
Yesterday I posted a review of the book “Anticancer,” in which the author talks about the Tibetan traditional medical approach to the body as “terrain.” That’s a perfect description.
Our terrain comes from our parents’ terrain to begin with (what Traditional Chinese Medicine practitioners call our “original chi“), and then, once we’re off the breast, from the food we eat, the air we breathe, the fluids we drink, the thoughts we think (what the sociologist/philosopher Pierre Bourdieu called “habitus“), the movement we do (or don’t do), and the company we keep.
The larger terrain, our unique, individual habitat, at that point becomes our full “terrain.”
If any parts of our terrain are polluted, it comes into our terrain. If our air, food, water, thoughts, movement, or social lives are toxic, it leaches into us, and causes trouble.
Can you see your environment in these terms? Can you see yourself as continuous with your environment? With your:
- air
- food
- drink
- thoughts
- actions, and
- social interactions?
It’s a good daily meditation, to look at your unique habitat, your full terrain, and to try to see how it’s affecting you on the smallest, middle, and largest scales.
Focus on honing in on these things. How pure is your air? If you work in an office, you might want to try to get outside for some deep breathing exercises.
What about your food? Try to buy organic foods, and eat foods that have been as little tampered with as possible – that is, in their natural state, not processed.
Drink water. Pure water. The author of anticancer also recommends green tea and red wine (one glass per day : ( ) for their antioxidant power.
Keep your thoughts free from anger and fear. If there’s something you’re angry about, or fearful of (worry is a form of fear), resolve it! Life is too short to hold those thoughts, and by doing so, you only make your life shorter!
Try to get good healthy movement into your life. Walking is fantastic. Try to go for a walk after dinner every night!
Make sure your social circle isn’t polluting your life. That’s all I’ll say about that one!
Try it out…let me know what you think!