[Excerpted from Integral Life Practice by Ken Wilber, Terry Patten, Adam Leonard & Marco Morelli (2008)

New research continues to expand and underline the already firmly established importance of physical exercise.  There is no question that physical exercise has profound positive effects on health, mood, cognitive clarity, longevity, and overall well-being.

Strength Training

Building muscular strength is one of the most important results of physical exercise. A strength training practice that can be maintained with as little as one or two twenty-minute sessions a week can produce significant results.

Benefits of strength training include positive changes in:

• Lean muscle mass
  

• Muscular strength
  

• Strength of tendons and ligaments
  

• Hormone levels (improving levels of both “good” and “bad” hormones)
  

• Glucose tolerance
  

• Insulin sensitivity
  

• Body fat percentage
  

• Blood cholesterol and triglyceride levels and ratios
  

• Blood pressure
  

No other type of exercise has such impressive impacts on overall health as strength training.  Metabolism changes as muscle mass increases, making it easier to lose weight and maintain health.  Muscles can indeed be regarded as “the engine of youth.” Strength training is the closest practice we have to time travel.

Aerobic sports and activities

Regular aerobic exercise can increase your lung capacity, so that it can process more oxygen with less effort.  It can strengthen your heart so that it pumps more blood and

carries more oxygen with fewer beats and less effort.  It can increase the blood supply to your muscles and organs, lower your blood pressure, improve your cholesterol and triglyceride profiles, reduce body fat, and improve glucose tolerance and insulin resistance.  It also helps your body release endorphins, producing the mood elevation often called “runner’s high.”  All these benefits result in higher endurance and greater metabolic efficiency.

Stretching

Virtually all fitness experts agree that stretching is the best way to prevent injury and increase your kinesthetic flexibility.  In addition to feeling good, decreasing the chance of injury, and enhancing flexibility, stretching has a number of other benefits:

• Reduces muscle tension
  

• Improves circulation
  

• Reduces anxiety, stress, and fatigue
  

• Improves posture
  

• Enhances muscular coordination
  

• Increases range of movement in joints
  

• Enhances kinesthetic intelligence
  

• Reduces muscular soreness
  

Integral Nutrition

Nutrition is a very important health practice with profound effects on our levels of fitness and energy.  Our ability to practice depends on eating a diet that supports that intention. Eating wisely is a practice that can have an especially dramatic positive impact on all other aspects of our life.

We consume the food we do for psychological, biological, cultural, and social reasons.

Eat Mindfully

This interior perspective focuses on the why behind eating.  What motivates us to consume the way we do?  Why do we have certain nutritional patterns?

The practice of mindful eating cultivates the ability to tune in to the present moment while choosing foods, preparing them, and eating and drinking.  The act of eating involves a number of interior experiences—from deciding what to eat, to preparing or

ordering it, to smelling the food, to first tasting it, to savoring it as we chew it, to feeling it slide down the hatch and into our stomach.  You will also notice food’s impact on your subtle energetic states.  This means being honest with our responses to various food and acknowledging the felt-experience of how foods interact with our body (for example, indigestion, tiredness, enhanced vitality).

Fresh, living foods are full of life-energy.  Processed and refined foods have less.  As you continue to develop a more conscious relationship to food, you’ll be able to make discriminating choices that take into account both the gross and subtle dimensions of what you eat.

Copyright, Integral Connections 2011

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