It has been said that none of us is an island, that we are all part of a continent or our planet. This adage turns out to be an important truth of the science of natural living, underscoring the ultimately interdependent and cooperative nature of progressively healthier human life.
Place, and our individual and collective placement in the world, matters a great deal in health-centered life. Inevitably, we are of a particular place and community, and actively contribute to its character and health, whether we mean to or not. And each of us must find a place to uniquely call ours – to both nurture and be nurtured by – if we are to reliably and naturally flourish.
Modern health science strongly emphasizes this essential idea regarding our natural well-being, even as it proves counter-intuitive to people raised in individualistic settings isolated from natural life by technology and culture. But, as long evolved and highly social animals, humans naturally need to live with others in supportive, reciprocating, and health-promoting relationships.
Natural Communities
Healthy communities are always how we have maintained ourselves at our individual and collective best. Today, many scientists believe that greater care with place is perhaps what we now most need to take our personal and collective health and happiness to new levels – in this age of unnatural, unsatisfying, and potentially unsustainable individualism, and as the world’s most cooperative and objectively healthiest and happiest nations remind us.
In exploring your potential for progressive natural health, we would encourage you to consider your need for community, and for more than just healthy food, space to exercise, and freedom to act. Considerable and growing research underscores that we naturally need others in more fundamental ways, even as our personal focus. This science suggests that we are most likely to personally flourish in networks of reciprocating relationships, especially ones emphasizing learning and growth, a long fact of human life and natural adaptiveness that is as old as our species.
As you can learn through HumanaNatura’s Personal Health Program, life that is more cooperative is naturally healthier and more intelligent. This essential evolutionary principle can seen in the interdependent and progressive forms of life that preceded and led to ours, and in our progression in nature and eventual creation of modern interconnected life.
Our Fourth Technique
Through our use of HumanaNatura’s first three natural health techniques – Natural Eating, Natural Exercise, and Natural Living – our personal health and life can be made to progress to remarkable new levels. This opportunity reflects the new science and extraordinary power of our natural health, as well as the security and freedom that come with life in advanced civilization and supportive communities. These important aspects of modern life, and the science of progressive health itself, thus suggest a fourth step from us – life that is naturally engaged in support of the people around us and ultimately, of all people. This added step is the focus of the final and most forward and outward-looking of HumanaNatura’s natural health science technique, Natural Communities.
As the last technique of HumanaNatura’s four-part Natural Health System, Natural Communities makes our approach to health and quality of life both scientifically complete and naturally open-ended in an important and liberating new way. The technique of Natural Communities asks us each to consider quality of place and our own place in the world, and not simply quality of life for ourselves alone. Natural Communities encourages us to examine how our immediate social setting and larger environment influences our health and quality of life, and how we might progressively improve and contribute to our setting, and circularly increase both its health and our own.
Assessing Community Health
In the HumanaNatura natural health system, we have used modern health science to identify over 100 essential community health factors that contribute to progressive natural health and adaptiveness in individuals and groups. As we have suggested, these health factors require and in turn reward our personal attention, and combine to form a comprehensive model for personal health advocacy efforts and the progressive advancement of collective life.
HumanaNatura’s community health factors cluster into twelve critical community health focus areas:
- Security – freedom from oppression, aggression, and injustice
- Infrastructure – environmental quality and sustainable systems
- Medical care – access to primary and secondary treatment for injury and illness
- Safety – well-planned and protective public and private living areas
- Nutrition –dietary conditions promoting optimal personal health
- Exercise – adequate movement to ensure lifelong natural conditioning
- Governance – transparent, effective, and health-promoting public leadership
- Cohesion – social conditions fostering strong community bonds
- Development – health and growth-encouraging community support
- Economics –diversified and sustainable work and career opportunities
- Families – conditions assuring healthy children and parents
- Intimacy – environments fostering attentiveness and discover
For you, the HumanaNatura health technique of Natural Communities may mean investing in and asking more of the place and community where you live now. It may mean learning about new places, through study or travel, and the important health and life lessons other places offer us. Or it may mean finding a fresh setting for yourself and others, one that you truly can call and make your natural home.
New Quality Of Place
Whatever your situation, ensuing quality of place and a contributing life in service of healthy communities prove essential to progressive natural health and achieving advanced states of personal and general well-being. For these important reasons, as you progress in the HumanaNatura system, we would encourage you to make your health efforts an increasingly socially engaged and community focused endeavor.
Learn more about the importance of externally focused, cooperative, and health-promoting “beta-cycle” life in the Natural Living and Our Future sections of HumanaNatura’s Personal Health Program. Or explore the steps to find or create a healthier setting and new shared quality of life HumanaNatura’s Community Health Program.
If you would like to assess the health status and quality of life opportunities of the place you call home now, check out HumanaNatura’s comprehensive and easy-to-use Community Assessment Form.
We encourage your questions and comments about the science and essential practice of finding and creating healthier places and naturally progressive community via our Ask Us page.
